The Exchanges

Q Well, and beyond that, I mean, let's go back to Hindu Kush, which, I mean, I think most people know you for MTV, such an iconic stretch of your career. Um, but you, you started by building an apparel brand out of India, right? And Afghanistan. I mean, Um, where it's not even clear what the rules were at times, right?

A I wanted to live there. I, I had been traveling, and I had developed this fascination with that part of the world. I figured, how can I afford to live here? I need to start a business, because I couldn't get a job, so I started this business in the garment business, knowing nothing, never wanting to be in the garment business, but it took off like a rocket, and then at the end, there was an embargo That Jimmy Carter put down that ultimately put my company out of business. Yeah. No more imports from India. And I sent three tons of clothes to, to, to Montreal and we smuggled them over the St. Lawrence Seaway, which was insane. I don't know what I was thinking, but, uh, I was kind of just looking for a little justice.

AI assessment note: “I wanted to live there... I need to start a business... in the garment business”

Q Guy gets pitched 20 times a day. What, what broke through? How, how did you get Chris to pay attention?

A I actually think the product and package did the work for me. In a big way. Cause he saw it. And then I painted the vision and the vision a little bit was to get 50 in the room and how fifth could be the face of the brand. And he before had never done that. He'd been like with sports and Reebok and this and that music, but actually the face of a beverage brand was first time. Here's a problem though. I couldn't afford 50. I mean, he was getting a million dollars to go perform in Libya for a night. You know, this is in 2004 now who knows, but I'm like, I said to Fifa, I can't afford you, but I have an idea. I said, we can do an equity game. I'll give you skin in the game if you wanted to do this. And he's like, I'm in.

AI assessment note: “I actually think the product and package did the work for me.”

Q What specifically were you criticizing Gladwell about? What, what, what was the substance of what you were saying he was wrong about?

A Yeah. In my first book, I was criticizing the research underlying the so-called 10,000 hours rule, and then his popularization of it. The idea that the only route to exceptional performance is through 10,000 hours, so-called deliberate practice, highly technical, effortful practice. Um, and we, that brought us together for a debate with specifically about sports development at this thing called the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. And there I said, you know, The data that actually track, yes, elite athletes spend more time in deliberate practice than lower level athletes, but the studies that track them over the course of their development show that early on they spent less time In deliberate practice in that activity than peers who plateau at lower levels. They have what scientists call a sampling period. Broad variety of activities where you learn general skills, now called physical literacy. You learn about your own interests and abilities, and delay specializing until later than peers who plateau at lower levels. And so, he acknowledged when we were coming off stage, he said, that does not fit. With, with what I thought, why don't we run together? We were in Boston when we're back in New York tomorrow, because we'd both been national level middle distance runners, and we'll talk about it on our own time. And so we started running together every weekend, and we came to…

AI assessment note: “I was criticizing the research underlying the so-called 10,000 hours rule”

Q I mean, I can only imagine the scale of operation required for this. Um, uh, how, how does it work?

A So we work mostly with pharmaceutical and biotech companies where we either procure the medications or they are donated to us. And then we handle all of the logistics through to a network of partners that we have all over the world and in the United States. So we are kind of that middle process, the supply chain between those. And they're really different programs. First, we have some structured programs where we work with organizations. For example, Eli Lilly has a wonderful program called Life for a Child, and they are providing insulin, working with us in countries around the world, serving 60,000 children with juvenile diabetes, with plans to scale that to 150,000 by 2030. Another great pro, Um, project is, ah, Global Hope out of Texas Children's Hospital that brings together Direct Relief and Teva Pharmaceuticals to fight childhood cancer in Africa. So very structured programs. We also take excess inventory. So in situations where a pharmaceutical, pharmaceutical company may have overproduced or for some other reason have, ah, medicine that would otherwise not be used, they will donate it to us. We will find the right place in the world to get that to as quickly as possible. We also respond to emergencies. So whether that is a tornado or a war. Uh, in fact, Ukraine has been a huge focus for the last three years, and we just passed 1.8 billion dollars in medical aid over th…

AI assessment note: “we either procure the medications or they are donated to us. And then we handle”

Q What does it mean to have raised money from the wrong person? What, what happened there?

A So, okay, so this guy had no experience in CPG in general. He really had, um, unrealistic expectations, let's put it that way. He thought he was gonna cut a check and get a quick return. Which is, is not how it works. We were supposed to give about 250,000 dollars to buy into the company. Uh, he gave me about 80, 60 of that went into frozen meals, so it was an inventory, and then the rest of it was to be for marketing, building a website, and all that. And, um, and yeah, so we, we were, I was, I spent the money, I was ready to go, um, ready to start, you know, I need to get another check now, because it's really to get to a launch, and, um, he cut me off. So he said, no, I need that money back, because this, this was actually when the real estate market was melting down.

AI assessment note: “this guy had no experience in CPG in general. He really had unrealistic expectations”

Q Spencer, you, you, you referenced Hotwire, Zillow, Picasso, by the way, you're also CEO of Match Group now. I'm not quite, and, and you run an investment fund. And you teach at Harvard. I mean, it's a little mind boggling what all that you do, but like going way back, where, where did this entrepreneurial drive this, this zeal come from?

A Um, I, I mean, I grew up, I think, sort of like Austin, always tinkering and starting businesses. I would bake cookies and sell them to my parents' friends. I would trace drawings and sell them to my parents' friends, and I was always trying to make money, sell arbitraging comic books and, you know, doing whatever I can to start companies and try to build things. Um, my dad was an entrepreneur in the music industry, and that was very inspiring to me. I watched his career as a early Producer and tour producer and business manager of rock groups and watched him pivot his career over many decades as the music industry changed. And that was an inspiration for me. And then my sense of drive and, um, ambition, I think came from the fact that I lost my brother in high school and he was the eve of his high school graduation and he was going to Princeton and he was going to have a, I'm sure a very successful life, which was cut short. And that motivated me to try to kick ass. And I'm still, still trying.

AI assessment note: “my dad was an entrepreneur... lost my brother in high school”

Q And, and, and part of your story and part of the story of the book is, is about Sierra Leone. How did Sierra Leone become a country where you started spending time? And, and can you tell us how, how tuberculosis really came to be personal for you in that journey?

A Yeah, absolutely. So my wife and I visited Sierra Leone in 2019 with Partners in Health, the great nonprofit organization, to learn about maternal health there. And then on the last day of our trip, The folks we were traveling with asked if we could visit a tuberculosis hospital because they had some cases they wanted to consult on. We went to this TB hospital, and the moment we arrived, uh, I was just grabbed by this kid named Henry, which is also my son's name, and he seemed to be about the same age as my son. He looked to be about nine years old. That's how old my kid was at the time. And Henry just started walking me all around the hospital. He was like the mayor of that place. Everywhere we went, people were shaking his hand and rubbing his head and picking him up and Giving him hugs, and, ah, he was, he was just an incredibly charismatic person, and then we made our way back to the doctors and nurses who were meeting, and they kind of lovingly shooed him away, and I said, whose kid is that? Is that one of your kids? And they said, no, he's a patient, and he's actually one of the patients we're really concerned about, because it turned out Henry was responding to antibiotics, that's why he looked relatively well, but they knew he wasn't responding to them well enough, and that eventually his infection would roar back, and when it did, they just didn't have any tools to hel…

AI assessment note: “it was really, uh, following Henry's story that, that helped make, as you say, make this personal for me”

Q What, what, what, what, what was that initial vision is you sat in that classroom and you're tuning out the class and you're feverishly scribbling out the, what, what it could be. What, what did you see exactly?

A So the vision there was, um, for a platform that would sell day passes to consumers. So it was a direct to consumer Uh, business. Not what we have today. We're full B to B today. The name was Gym Pass, not Well Hub. And, uh, the last component of it was that there was always this focus of bringing back to the industry people that were frustrated by something, uh, with either gyms or studios or apps, whatever it was. And our idea was to find a more efficient way for people to pay less and still have access. Uh, to gyms and studios. We learned a lot. We pivoted the business several times, but that was the original concept.

AI assessment note: “the vision there was, um, for a platform that would sell day passes to consumers”

Q It's a profound mission. Um, how big is WellHub today?

A We now work in 11 countries. We partner with more than 22,000 different companies offering WellHub to their employees, and we have about four million subscribers. Employees of those companies that are visiting our different partners in all these different countries. Um, We have 60,000 gyms and studios partnering with us. That's roughly 30 to 50% of all the locations in every single country where we operate, including here in the U.S., and we partner with the 100 best digital apps for wellness, um, available on Apple Store or Google Play. We normally have three of the top five in every single category, and they're all included in the same membership. The company has, Well Hub has about 2000 employees, um, and we've been growing really fast year over year, following this trend that everyone's talking about, wellness for everyone.

AI assessment note: “We now work in 11 countries. We partner with more than 22,000 different companies”

Q Wow. Um, and, you know, um, climate change is, is a political thing right now. Um, how do you think about running a business that is Um, both obviously clearly meant to make money and you're a capitalist, um, and also serving a profound social mission. Does it change how you talk about it? Does it change how you pitch it? Um, what's different in the current world for you?

A What's different in the current world is I do think we have to be more careful about positioning and really being willing to use the words and phrases that create a big tent. You and I can sit here and say, we don't believe climate change is a political issue. And I really believe that. But for many, it does feel that way. And I have customers across the country. I have customers in many, many pockets of the world, and I am totally willing to adjust my language so that I'm speaking in a way that feels resonant for them. I don't have to talk about decarbonizing consumer products. I can talk about building healthy soil. I don't have to talk about fighting climate change bite by bite. I can talk about building more resilient supply chains. I don't have to talk about sustainability being the new ethos. I can talk about improving efficiency. Because what's beautiful for my business is that's actually true. Using less resources is a great way to save costs.

AI assessment note: “I do think we have to be more careful about positioning”

Q Can you say more about that? I mean, so I've got a venue booked, I've got a honeymoon planned, I've got guests coming in, all of it, and all of a sudden the world is shut down, so what even, what are the tools you're giving people to manage that?

A So we started talking about, you might, you might want to change your date. You might want to change that booking. And what are the ways we can support you to do that? Well, you know, here's exactly how you do it via your wedding website and other Zola products. Um, here's how you message that to your guests in a way that, you know, hopefully people can really hear. And then for those that have bought, save the dates or wedding invitations with us, Let us help you send out free change the date cards, and so that was the kind of one, one example. The other example was, okay, maybe you, you just really want to get married on that same day, so, um, here's a virtual weddings feature that we put up very quickly, and, and then here's, you know, some other vendor recommendations of things that, that might be more supportive of the type of wedding that you might want to have now or later on, Um, you know, potentially with less people.

AI assessment note: “Let us help you send out free change the date cards”

Q And is that because you, you knew instinctively or you were looking at data? How, how did you assess what was a good location for Whole Foods that, that a realtor might have thought was, was a disaster or what a realtor thought was a great location that you knew was going to be wrong?

A Well, first it starts with demographics. And what we did was we studied our successful stores to see what the demographics they had in common, and obviously population density is very important. In our case, the biggest indicator was college degrees. Who has a college degree? And the places that had the most college degrees, not surprisingly, also had the highest income. Not perfect correlation, because a university town might Not have the highest income, but they have the highest education levels. And we would do well there even if the income wasn't quite as high. We always did well in university towns. But when you get the combination of high incomes and high education levels, that would always be a slam dunk for us. And then, then it was just the basic retail. Does it have good parking? Does it have visibility from the street? Is it at an intersection? You don't want to be mid block. We had to learn that the hard way. Mid blocks where people can't easily make left or right hand turns in depending on which direction they're coming can be a real handicap because people are ultimately about convenience. If you make it easy for them to shop, easy for them to pull in, get their stuff and be out on their way 10 minutes later, if that's what they want to be, that's going to give you a competitive advantage.

AI assessment note: “what we did was we studied our successful stores to see what the demographics they had in common”

Q the, and the marketing and the branding, and you, you really had both, right? You had a product that looked different, but also functioned differently. So I'm curious, were you also doing, when you, when you were going around trying to, to, to get buyers to, to place an order, were you demonstrating the product? Were you splashing the floor with debris and, and demoing the Dyson against other brands?

A Yes, I mean, I couldn't demonstrate it against other brands, but I, of course, I showed the performance graph. I showed how other vacuums dropped off as you used them because of clogging the dust, and how ours didn't. Um, and I was able to demonstrate it. And in fact, the, the very first person who stocked it, we, we sell a dry powder carpet shampoo that you can use with it, as opposed to wet shampooing carpets. And he said, that won't work. So I went off to the local petrol station, gas filling station, and got some Ribeno. It's black, a black currant juice, concentrated black currant juice drink. I came back and threw it on his office carpet, and then put the powder down, and vacuumed it up, and it worked. So I demonstrated that. Yes, I mean, you have to demonstrate everything, and prove everything. And sometimes buyers want to take the product home, And use it themselves in order to come back and be a champion of it.

AI assessment note: “I came back and threw it on his office carpet, and then put the powder down”

Q Then Senator Obama becomes president-elect Obama, and Do you immediately get a job in the administration? Do you, do you, do you know what you're gonna go do?

A I wish. I managed to get a job on the transition, and then we're approaching inauguration day, and I don't have a job in the administration yet, and I knew I wanted to work in the White House Counsel's Office, which was an incredibly difficult role to get, and, uh, January 1718, I think, rolls around of 2009, we're about two or three days before inauguration, I still don't have a job. Um, And so about, I think it was probably like two, three in the morning, I decided to throw a Hail Mary. You know, I wrote this long thing, it was sort of desperate, it was a plea, it was all the reasons why I wanted to do it, everything that I'd done to get there, and I just hit send at three in the morning and went to sleep. First thing was I go, oh my god, what did I do? What on earth did I write and send last night? And I opened my, my email, probably on like a Blackberry back then or something, and uh, there's an email from Greg Craig's assistant saying he wants to see you for an interview today. And, ah, I got the offer, I think it was probably that night, um, and I went in to the building on January 20th, 2009 with the, the new administration.

AI assessment note: “I wish. I managed to get a job on the transition”

Q to trust him. I asked Daniel about his strategy when he set out to build Spotify and bring both musicians and fans to the table. What was your theory about that inclusion? Was that like, oh God, this is going to be really hard, or actually, in fact, no, no, we should be able to do this because this helps all of them get to the internet age as well.

A I was just really naive, to be honest, and, and like many other entrepreneurs, I didn't understand nearly enough what it would take to get this to work. So it really started with this, just, you know, being your own customer in the sense that I had this idea of the kind of product that I wanted to see in the world. And the way I articulated that to my team was what if we can build something that makes it feel like you had all the world's music on your hard drive. If we can create that feeling, we would have built something that's much better than piracy. So we're going to get People to consume it. Now the second part of that equation in order to not get shut down is obviously it has to work for artists.

AI assessment note: “I was just really naive, to be honest, and, and like many other entrepreneurs”

Q Notice, this is exactly according to the plan President Obama described. To move fast, field organizers like Ryan were entrusted to make decisions on the fly. Decisions like, what do you do if you run out of something important?

A So when you're running a campaign office, you're trying to get people to come in and volunteer their time to knock on doors, make phone calls, and help get as many people registered to vote. But for a while, it felt like every other person that was calling wanted one thing, a yard sign. We had so many people looking for yard signs and don't get me wrong. The enthusiasm was great, but yard signs don't vote. And we'd gone through the only stack that we had like weeks ago. One day, one of my star volunteers comes in with her two kids and she's like, okay, let's make these yard signs. So for the afternoon, she and her kids just made these handmade, slightly off-brand Obama yard signs. So after that, when someone would call and say, do you have yard signs? I'd say, yep, come and get it. We have a whole stack of them. And then they'd come in and, you know, it was this Crayola looking yard sign, but who's going to get mad at a six-year-old kid's artwork? And then you'd say, while you're here, do you want to make a few phone calls?

AI assessment note: “she and her kids just made these handmade, slightly off-brand Obama yard signs”

Q What was that like being, you know, fired on the front page of the Wall Street Journal?

A I think sometimes it depends on do you feel like you got sent home for the right reason or the wrong reason? And, and a sort of tough reason to get sent home would be you missed your plans and you were terrible at your job. Happily, the reason that I was fired from Citi during the financial crisis, and now a decade plus ago, was because I had advocated for returning client money. So we had missold products to our clients, which the team had very reasonably, but incorrectly, sold as low risk, that ended up being high risk, that were supposed to go down cents on the dollar in a bad market, that went down all their cents on the dollar in a bad market. And I advocated to first the CEO and then the board, look guys, we're just wrong. Instead of fighting, getting sued, being the bad guys, losing our financial advisors, let's just say, look, you know what, we messed this up, let's partially reimburse you. My CEO violently disagreed with me, showing a real streak of stubbornness I wouldn't give in. It eventually went to the board and the board sided with me. For all your listeners, here's a pro tip. If you ever take the CEO onto the board, you will be fired. It's just going to happen. You may win, you may lose. Whatever happens in the battle, you will be fired.

AI assessment note: “it depends on do you feel like you got sent home for the right reason”

Q eBooks at the time. Um, and obviously eBooks are meaningful category now, not suggesting otherwise. Um, uh, Barnes and Noble, which you now lead, but didn't at the time launched a competitor. Um, uh, there, uh, I, I have to imagine where arguments to lean into that and try to ride that wave and to run entirely counter to it. How did you handle that in that moment at Waterson's?

A I did it perhaps a little bit counterintuitively. Yes, we sold the Kindle. Uh, and the reason I did that was I think as a, uh, you, you should always do whatever your customer is in the best interests of your customer. But my main motivation is I wanted my booksellers to stop fearing Kindle, to stop. There was this sort of obsession that people were coming into our stores and photographing books and then ordering them Amazon and, or, Uh, coming in and choosing books and then downloading them on their Kindles. And it was, which, which just simply doesn't happen except in the most vanishingly small percentage of things. So I wanted them not to fear the Kindle and to realize that their store was where people should come to discover books. So if we could put the Kindle in the middle of it, then you could demystify this thing. So we put the Kindles in the middle of it, sold an improbable number of them as it happened. So that, that was sort of helpful. For from, from a financial perspective, but it also demystified it.

AI assessment note: “Yes, we sold the Kindle. Uh, and the reason I did that was”

Q What happens to, to end your time at custom it?

A We ended up, um, doing a, um, A transaction with Wayfair, which was another business in Boston. Uh, all of our employees were able to get a job at Wayfair, which was nice. Um, except for me. Uh, and yeah, we, we had a party and, uh, closed the gate. It was this big iron gate and put the lock on it. And that was it. That was the end of it. And, uh, that was right before Memorial Day weekend of 2015. Okay. And I had been, um, Buying a lot of grass-fed beef, uh, because my wife and I were trying to clean up our diets. And so then I just started asking the question, like, how would you deliver meat to someone's house? And Omaha steaks have been doing it for a long time. So I knew there was like a way to do it. Just couldn't figure it out. When custom made closed, I took the weekend off and then decided that I was going to start. I was going to spend the summer trying to spin up this concept of delivering meat to your door.

AI assessment note: “We ended up, um, doing a, um, A transaction with Wayfair”

Q If the ButcherBox story were starting today, would a Bobby GPT be as valuable for you as Bobby the Babson student was?

A One of Bobby's, um, biggest ahas for the business was, um, so as I said, we were gonna ship grass-fed beef in the mail. Um, and I was like, why don't you stand outside of Whole Foods, pretend you're a student, and just ask people would they ever get this delivered to their door? And, uh, he, he came back and was like, Yeah, no, like no one's going to spend the, the price was a 129 dollars. No one's going to spend a 129 dollars a month on beef, but if you offer chicken or pork or seafood, they will. And so all of a sudden we went from like, we're doing grass fed beef to actually we're doing everything and we're going to compete against the butcher. Uh, I don't think Bobby GPT would have gotten that. Um, I think you needed a human being to, to figure that one out.

AI assessment note: “I don't think Bobby GPT would have gotten that.”

Q Mike, as you're scaling to six hundred and fifty million dollars in revenue and beyond, how are you ensuring that this, we don't cut corners, these are core values for us, um, stays in an organization? Yeah.

A I think it's easier if I'm in charge still. Um, but if I was to step down or if I was to get hit by a bus, um, that's where I started to get concerned. And so in 2020, we, um, became B Corp certified, which is a rigorous, uh, third party audit of your business, of what you do, of what you stand for, who your partners are, uh, what your impact on the environment and community, like a whole bunch of different, um, questions. Um, and that is the thing that I, um, fall back on now. So, uh, part of the B Corp certification, you can change your corporate bylaws. To specifically state that you are not making decisions just for shareholders. I don't see how a company can be built, a company that wants to do the right thing can be built in the right way if you are just supposed to make decisions to make people more money.

AI assessment note: “in 2020, we, um, became B Corp certified... you can change your corporate bylaws”

Q Do you just want to take 1:02 to explain the hedgehog concept for folks who aren't aware?

A The idea being that, um, uh, that, you know, the, the fox knows many things, the hedgehog knows one big thing, that, uh, basic, simple, um, thing that goes back to a, Uh, an ancient precept. And, uh, Isaiah Berlin then popularized it in his wonderful essay, The Hedgehog on the Fox. And being in a hedgehog means that you've found a big thing to focus your energy on, a really big thing. You might still have some other interest in your life, but it is, I'm acting. I'm flying. I'm solving genetics puzzles. I'm writing novels. I'm singing rock and roll. I'm leading this company. I'm right. It's a big thing. And so you, you commit yourself in kind of hedgehog mode into this big thing that organizes your energy, your time, your life. I'm leading the fight for the 19th Amendment. There's the big thing. And, and it's a big thing that meets all three of those tests we talked about. Earlier, then you have a hedgehog and you are in hedgehog mode, but what became, uh, there's a sentence in the book, uh, that I, I kind of smile when I go back and I look at it because I just keep thinking about my own experience. A happy hedgehog needs a happy hedgehog home. And, uh, and, and so you could be doing hedgehog activities, but not in a happy home. So Barbara McClintock, the geneticists we talked about earlier, she was stayed with her genetics over the course of her life. But she realized, uh, uh, …

AI assessment note: “the fox knows many things, the hedgehog knows one big thing”

Q The, the other question that comes up a lot with consumer brand founders is, do I have to be the influencer? Do I have to be the face of the brand? When you're looking, um, at a brand to invest in for Kavu and partner with founders, is that Part of the inquiry for you.

A It varies in some brands like in, in by, for example, the face of brand became Justin Timberlake, right? Because that was so some, not every founder wants to be the face of the brand. They want to be recognized and get credit for obviously. And as they should for, you know, the brand they create, but like in, in Poppy's case, Alison was front center as well. Right. There were a bunch of influence, but she was, uh, the founding influence of face on the brand. So it works in some circumstances. It doesn't. Uh, in this case it did, like, in Vitacoco, Michael's an incredible operator, Mike Kerbin, but Madonna was a face of the brand, you know, and, and I think he recognized Madonna's probably a better face than he was.

AI assessment note: “It varies in some brands like in, in by, for example”

Q Why did, why did you have lines out the door? What, what happened?

A Well, I had started a catalog business, 18 months earlier, and it was clear based on my early marketing in terms of Speaking with consumers, visiting with consumers, looking in their closets about what bags they carried. How many bags did you have in your closet? What role did coach play? What would encourage you to buy a second bag? It was clear to me that if we were able to put our entire assortment in one place and have seasoned sales people in our store, it's The aroma of leather, natural leather, permeated the space, so people went into a bespoke environment. There was nothing cookie-cutter. Miles and I designed the store ourselves, and we took references from a variety of places, and was uniquely coached. By that time, we had a file of about a 100,000 people through our mail order Business that I had, catalog business, and we invited 20,000 of them to the store. They lived in within a hundred miles. We had special events. We, and they came because they believed in love coach.

AI assessment note: “we had a file of about a 100,000 people... and we invited 20,000 of them”

Q So I'm, I'm just curious because there's, and this really feeds into the, the conceit of inside the box, how constraints make us better. Um, You, you have extraordinary range. You could choose almost anything to write about. How do you decide what your next book is? How did you pick this as a subject?

A Oh, yeah, you're, you're hitting an almost, almost what I would call a sore spot here a little bit, because One of the reasons I did this book is because I, I was terrible at putting constraints on myself and in my own work. And so after range, I, I was able to become independent as a writer. And I said, gosh, books are so much work. Um, I'm not doing it again unless I find the perfect topic. And I have such wide interest that I was like dabbling in all these different topics and never picking. And then I came across this quote by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the researcher who coined the term flow to describe the feeling of immersion in an activity. And he was talking about marriage, but I think you could apply what he was saying to anything. He said, you know, the great thing about being committed by your own choice to something is that you can stop wondering how to live and start spending your energy living instead of wondering what's always around the corner. And I was like, man, that's what I'm doing with book topics right now. I'm just, I have a bunch of stuff I'm fascinated in, but I keep saying, well, what's around the corner? And one of those things I was fascinated in was constraints. And, and then reading that quote, it, it dawned on me that I needed this help myself. And I said, I'm writing a proposal on this tomorrow, and of course, two weeks later, I'm 10 times as int…

AI assessment note: “reading that quote, it dawned on me that I needed this help myself.”

Q Was there a point along the way in researching and writing the book where you, you had a crisis of confidence that this was the right thing to be writing about? Or did, did the, no, yes. That's a yes. That's a big yes.

A Always. Oh my gosh. Adam Grant, you know, the psychologist tells me, I, I was, I, at some point I was talking to him about the, my ideas in the book, and he said, you're a defensive pessimist. You think, which basically, I, I had not heard that before. He said, you think every, every one of your ideas, like, you get excited about it, then you're sure it's going to fail, and then you work really hard to make it not fail. I guess that's what a defensive pessimist is, but no, I absolutely go through this phase where I think something's Fascinating. It's gonna work. I'm so fired up. And then there's a phase where it's just, what did I get myself into? I can't believe I thought this was gonna work. I start taking my own books down from the shelf and looking at them being like, I know this is possible because this thing is in my hands right here.

AI assessment note: “Always. Oh my gosh. Adam Grant, you know, the psychologist tells me”

Q David, you, you, you train to be a scientist. Most of us in business, uh, are not trained that way. What can business leaders learn from scientists to be better at, at leading their teams and, and building their, their organizations?

A Yeah, I think there's a certain kind of adaptability, um, an ability to pivot that they can learn from scientists. And in fact, There's some research I go into in Inside the Box where different founders were trained in different types of market research, evaluating their value proposition. And some of them were randomized to get trained in, in a scientific method version of this, where they make a hypothesis about what do they think is their value add. And then they have to commit to a way to go test it. And some decision rule, you know, ah, they measure, are they right or wrong? And, and the companies that got that kind of training very often found out that some assumption they made about the value they were providing was wrong. They had not read the market right. They had not read their customers right. And they often pivoted and were much more likely to succeed. Whereas the ones that got kind of the standard training were much more likely to basically retrofit Whatever they heard to their story and, and pivoted much more rarely. So I think prospectively making a hypothesis about what you're trying to do, that scientists need to be better about this too, right? This is one of the reasons so much scientific work hasn't replicated because scientists haven't been as good about prospectively making their prediction and sticking to it. Prospectively making a prediction, even if th…

AI assessment note: “there's a certain kind of adaptability, um, an ability to pivot that they can learn”

Q um, uh, constraints imposed on me when I was a public defender, for sure. Um, I had a lot fewer constraints imposed on me when I worked at MySpace and MySpace's heyday or at the National Football League. Um, is there a difference in, in leading teams where the constraints are imposed from the outside? Um, they're real, they're, they're unavoidable versus the ones that you create for your team?

A Yeah, I mean, I think yes and no, because I think in either case, um, constraints can do two of the great things they do, which is force you to clarify priorities or launch you into productive exploration, or both at the same time. So to give an example, one of the early readers of, of this book was a guy named Ed Hoffman, who was NASA's chief knowledge officer, sort of like a Uh, psychologist who's supposed to ensure there's institutional memory, basically, uh, for, it was created when NASA had some mistakes and, and a position that they had to have. And Ed said, oh, let me tell you about this mission called LCROSS, where engineers ended up with half the time and half the money that they expected. And so what did they do? Well, they whined and complained a little, and then they said, if we were going to get this done anyway, how would we do it? And they couldn't build from scratch, so they had to borrow technology, so they took imaging equipment from army tanks and engine temperature sensors from NASCAR and built a probe that confirmed water on the moon. And so it was really successful, and they never would have thought that way otherwise. Now, if it had been a quarter of the time and money, instead of a half, would they have been able to do it? I don't know where exactly that line is. I mean, I think if you get to a line and you're so constrained Whether by outside forces or …

AI assessment note: “I think yes and no, because I think in either case, um, constraints can”

Q And so, what was the inflection point at which you said, maybe I've got a product here that's worth taking out to, to, to market?

A I, I just was still just so obsessed with this idea. Almost so obsessed, I just wanted people to, to try it. So, we signed up for the local farmer's market to do it as a hobby on the weekends. I think a lot of people start at the farmer's market, and we just started selling it. And after, week after week after week, we kept selling out. And then we would spend the week bottling it and making it in our kitchen and then selling it on the weekends. Well, he's working a job to support the mortgage of the house that we just bought. And really quickly, and a Whole Foods buyer came by our booth and she gave us her card. And that moment was just like a really reassuring moment of being like, you guys need to be in Whole Foods. And I think that was the first time we realized we maybe had a business and it wasn't a hobby. And I told Stephen, I was like, we're gonna do this. We're going all inward and put our life savings into this.

AI assessment note: “a Whole Foods buyer came by our booth and she gave us her card.”

Q And so, Stephen, when Allison is sort of a mad scientist in the kitchen trying to figure out, are you like, I love you, but what are we doing here, or did you see the vision?

A Yes, I definitely thought she was a little crazy. Uh, I would say that, like, for the first little bit, I begrudgingly sort of went along with this idea as a supporting husband at this point. I was really into health and fitness at this, at this point, but The things that I did surrounding health and fitness and the food that I ate, like largely tasted pretty good. Uh, it was just more portion control and choosing the right things. This was sort of too far out in left field for me. Um, and so I think as Alison said, when she started making it taste a little bit better, that's when I started to get more excited about it. I was like taking a shot of apple cider vinegar, not for me, but if it's something that I can drink and enjoy, that's also healthy, then I'm down.

AI assessment note: “Yes, I definitely thought she was a little crazy.”