Opinion
VCs are 'hitchhikers with credit cards' focused purely on exits
“I call the VCs I call them hitchhikers with credit cards, and, but what I mean by that is that they're getting into your car, And as long as you take them where they want to get to, which is an exit which either has to be a sale or an IPO... They're not there …”
Insight
Mackey: VCs push high burn rates to force cram-down rounds
“They're gonna tell you to try to, don't worry about your burn rate, just grow, grow, grow, and I said, that's not in your best interest. They say that because you, they're the ones supplying the money, and eventually, if they need to, they'll do a cram down ro…”
Opinion
Mackey: Professional managers view roles at Whole Foods as stepping stones
“In my experience, they're very, they're not usually mission driven. They've gotten their MBA from Harvard or Wharton or Stanford. They're very intelligent. They work hard, but working at Whole Foods or Amazon, it's just a, it's just part of their career path. …”
Opinion
Mackey proposes 0% capital gains tax on 10-year holdings, 50-60% on short-term
“What I'd love to see is that if you held something for, say, 10 years, maybe your taxes, capital gains taxes went down to close to zero, and if you sold it in less than a year, maybe they'd be much higher. Maybe they'd be 50 or 60%, so that you'd create these …”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Mackey: Defeated four internal coup attempts across Whole Foods history
“I count four different coup attempts that occurred over the history of the company that I was able to beat back.”
Insight
Mackey: The best capital is self-generated profit to retain business control
“The best capital you'll ever have is the capital you make yourself, and if you don't want to lose control of your business, then make sure you're very profitable, don't scale too quickly, grow your business thoughtfully and painfully patiently, keep your costs…”
Disclosure
Repeated disagreements with Amazon ultimately led to Mackey's retirement
“I had my share of disagreements with Amazon. I fought with them many times, and ultimately that led to me to retire.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Mackey: Clear grocery health ratings will drive away shoppers or get diluted
“What they would do is they'd dumb it down so that a lot of stuff that you think is red now would all of a sudden be green. And the, It's like, because most of the food that we're selling in supermarkets is not good for people. And if you start telling the trut…”
Insight
Mackey: Whole Foods' Optimal Annual Growth Rate Was 15% to 25%
“So there is an optimum level of growth, and it's not too little that you'll lose people, and not so high that your culture gets diluted down and changes negatively. So at Whole Foods, that sweet spot for us was between about 15 and 25%.”
Disclosure
Mackey: Love.Life will offer psychedelic therapy once legal in California
“When psychedelic therapy is legal in in California, like it is in Colorado and Oregon, we'll be doing that under therapeutic sessions.”
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
Mackey: Whole Foods Lamar location achieved highest US sales volume within six months
“In fact, within six months, it became the highest volume natural food store in the entire United States, based on everything I know about the world back then.”
Assertion Partly supported
Mackey: Approximately 0.5% of Americans are vegan and 2% vegetarian
“The problem in that instance is that about half of one percent of Americans are vegan, and two percent are vegetarian.”
Insight
Mackey: Idealism without catering to customer demand leads to business failure
“If you just want to have your ideals, you can have them, but you may not have a business. So you have to engage with the market. You can try to influence the market. You can try to educate the market. But at the end of the day, they vote every day with their p…”
Assertion Supported
Mackey: Whole Foods held under 1% of grocery share during FTC case
“We got less than one percent of the grocery business, and they sort of made up this category that we were the, we had a monopoly of premium natural and organic food supermarkets, but my point is, of course, we weren't a monopoly of anything”
What-if
Mackey would aggressively compete with Erewhon if still Whole Foods CEO
“I would love to be competing more aggressively with Erewhon if I was still the CEO.”
Insight
Mackey: Digital Businesses Can Scale Rapidly Without Cultural Dilution
“But I see other businesses, particularly digital businesses, that can scale at enormous rates without cultural problems because it's, they're doing it with so few people.”
Disclosure
Mackey: Whole Foods left Mrs. Gooch's unintegrated for years after acquisition
“We pretty much just left them alone for the first few years and didn't try to integrate them into our company or culture. Just let them operate independently. That was the solution, and it worked.”
Insight
Mackey: Project leaders rarely admit failure and instead lobby for resources
“Generally, when something is failing, the people that Are responsible for it. Don't want to admit it's failing, and what they do is that we need more resources. I can make this trick, but you need to give more resources.”
Insight
Mackey: Professional managers optimize for career risk while entrepreneurs optimize for experimentation
“That's the job of the entrepreneur is to see things the professionals would not see, or the professionals are making a more calculated decision on is this good for my career or not? Or if this succeeds, will it really help my career? But if it fails, will I en…”
Assertion Supported
Mackey: Whole Foods had highest sales per square foot among public food retailers
“We had, at the time, the activist investors invested in Whole Foods. We had the highest sales per square foot of any public food retailer. We'd had the same store sales growth of eight percent over a thirty-plus year period.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Mackey: Warren Buffett declined buying Whole Foods due to Dairy Queen ownership
“Warren Buffett's like the best example, and we actually contacted Warren and asked him if he'd be interested, and he has a good sense of humor, and he said that ah, you know, I own Dairy Queen. I don't think Holfe is a good brand fit for me. And so, nothing ca…”
Assertion Partly supported
Mackey: Whole Foods signed Amazon merger agreement six weeks after first meeting
“They came down just three days later, and six weeks after that first meeting, we had signed an agreement to get married, to merge”
Disclosure
Mackey: Love.Life implemented dual-class shares to protect founder control
“It may not surprise you that Love Life has that in our structure there. That didn't really exist when Whole Foods got founded back in 1978, but no, we have two classes of shares. I've learned that lesson.”
Insight
Mackey: Never make poor business decisions just to hit an outdated plan
“But the tool shouldn't become the master. Some businesses become slaves to their business plan, and it's like, we're behind the plan now, so what are we going to do differently to get us back on plan? It's like, well, don't do something stupid to try to get yo…”
John Mackey