The Exchanges

Q Okay, so you guys are, are, are at business school, and you're thinking, okay, let's do this. So, I mean, at that point, what did you do? Like, did you, like, write a business plan? Did you start looking for money?

A Yeah, so, you know, I think all of us, we talked about how excited we were about this idea, and we said, well, we're at business school to learn how to run a business. What better way than to actually build one ourselves? So we all decided to take the same class, um, an entrepreneurship class, um, Where the output of that class is a full business plan. And, uh, so we spent the next several weeks really researching every element of our idea, getting, um, a bunch of great insights from professors, running a bunch of surveys, standing for hours in different optical shops, and, and then that culminated in essentially a 40 page business plan. We entered the Wharton Business Plan Competition. And we got eliminated in the semifinal round. I think just kind of put a chip on our shoulder where we said, okay, well, now we got something to prove. And at that point, we felt really passionate that this was going to work.

AI assessment note: “So we all decided to take the same class... Where the output of that class is a full business plan.”

Q This from NPR. I'm Guy Raz, and today on the show, we've got Neil Blumenthal and Dave Gilboa, two of the founders of Warby Parker. So when we left off, they had come up with this idea, and they had thought it through, and now the only thing left was to execute. How much money did you guys raise initially to launch this company, and how did you do it?

A So the nice thing about business school is that most people work for a few years before going back to school, and so Collectively, the four of us took our life savings from when we were working before school and invested into the business. We invested a 120,000 dollars between the four of us to get the business off the ground, and, you know, we worked for a year and a half with Outpaying ourselves a salary. We didn't have an office. We did win a couple of grants from Wharton, so that, that helped as well, but we were very scrappy and very much bootstrapped for quite a while, and we ended up launching the business and then went another 15 months before we raised our first round of funding.

AI assessment note: “We invested a 120,000 dollars between the four of us to get the business”

Q Okay, so you guys are in business school, and you're thinking, okay, let's do this. So, I mean, at that point, what did you do? Like, did you, like, write a business plan? Did you start looking for money?

A Yeah, so, you know, I think all of us, we talked about how excited we were about this idea, and we said, well, we're at business school to learn how to run a business. What better way than to actually build one ourselves? So we all decided to take the same class, an entrepreneurship class, where the output of that class is Is a full business plan, and so we spent the next several weeks really researching every element of our idea, getting a bunch of great insights from professors, running a bunch of surveys, standing for hours in different optical shops, and, and then that culminated in essentially a 40 page business plan. We entered the Wharton business plan competition And we got eliminated in the semifinal round. I think just kind of put a chip on our shoulder where we said, okay, well, now we got something to prove. And at that point, we felt really passionate that this was going to work.

AI assessment note: “we all decided to take the same class... culminated in essentially a 40 page business plan”

Q So, so even before you launched the company, you had a publicist going out trying to, to drum up publicity for it?

A Yeah, so, um, we had meetings with almost 50 PR firms, and part of it was us evaluating them, but, um, at the same time, we had to sell ourselves to those PR firms, and, right, there's, Nothing less sexy in the fashion world than four MBAs from Wharton. Um, we knew we were gonna launch sometime in the spring of 2010, and we really wanted to be in these premier magazines as a stamp of approval, so what we were targeting was GQ and Vogue, and so we had some production samples, uh, we didn't have a website up, but we were really pitching, uh, these magazines as exclusive launch partners. And we were thrilled to hear that GQ and Vogue were gonna run stories. We had no idea what those stories were gonna look like, what the content was gonna look like.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, so, um, we had meetings with almost 50 PR firms”

Q It's awesome. So is there a part of the team that's only focused on this part of what you guys do?

A So we do have a social innovation team that's focused on figuring out how we can have as much impact as possible across stakeholders. Uh, and then we've actually found that it's incredibly motivating to our core team members in functional areas of the business to be able to spend part of their week On these efforts around getting glasses to students in need in schools and in low income areas across the US. And so our eyewear design team, they actually design these frames for, for kids. Our merchandising team goes through kind of a full merchandising process like we would for any collection that we'd be selling to, to customers. Our supply chain team in our optical labs, they're cutting lenses, inserting frames and shipping them off to schools. And incorporating that into kind of part of their actual functional job duties, they're able to connect the work that they're doing to the impact that, that we're having, and again, really motivates and attracts talent that wants to feel like their work means something.

AI assessment note: “we do have a social innovation team that's focused on figuring out”

Q Was that the primary motivation for going public?

A Um, yeah, there were several reasons that caused us to go public, and, and I think, um, the advent of the direct listing made it more appealing to us. We didn't need capital. Uh, we had plenty of capital on our balance sheet, and so, uh, the concept of a traditional IPO where you end up taking on a lot of dilution, that didn't really make sense to us, but when this new avenue where you could become public, uh, without raising any capital emerged, and it became much more interesting to us, and it, Did give us the opportunity to provide liquidity to some of our longest tenured employees. So this was an opportunity where our earliest employees could buy a condo for themselves or their, for their families. And that was a big motivation. Uh, we also recognize that as a private company, you're limited in, in the number of shareholders that you're able to have. And we would often hear from our customers that email me and Neil directly, uh, some of our, our biggest fans and, They'd tell us how much they loved Warby Parker, and they asked if there was a way that they could become a shareholder. And when we were private, we couldn't enable that to happen. But as a public company, the cap table is much more democratic. And so that was another motivating factor. And then third is that our mission is to create vision for all. And we think of that both literally and figuratively, where we li…

AI assessment note: “yeah, there were several reasons that caused us to go public”

Q So, so even before you launched the company, you had a publicist going out trying to To drum up publicity for it?

A Yeah, so, um, we had meetings with almost 50 PR firms, and part of it was us evaluating them, but, um, at the same time, we had to sell ourselves to those PR firms, and, right, there's nothing less sexy in the fashion world than four MBAs from Wharton. Um, we knew we were gonna launch sometime in the spring of 2010, and we really wanted to be in these premier magazines as a stamp of approval So what we were targeting was GQ and Vogue, and so we had some production samples. We didn't have a website up, but we were really pitching these magazines as exclusive launch partners, and we were thrilled to hear that GQ and Vogue were gonna run stories. We had no idea what those stories were gonna look like, what the content was gonna look like.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, so, um, we had meetings with almost 50 PR firms”