Welcome to How Leaders Lead, where every week you get to listen in while I interview some of the very best leaders in the world. I break down the key learning so that by the end of the episode, you'll have something simple you can apply as you develop into a better leader. That's what this podcast is all about. When information doesn't get to the right people at the right time, I'm telling you, it's a recipe for disaster in any organization. You get bad decisions, unnecessary conflict, and teams who just aren't on the same page. Information needs to travel quickly. And if you want to hear how it's done, you're in the right place. Because today I'm joined by Neil Blumenthal and Dave Gilboa, the co-CEOs of War by Parker. Now if you're not familiar with Warby Parker, they're an eyeglass and vision company that was a true pioneer in the direct consumer space. These days they've got about 4,000 employees, 240 stores, and a valuation of over a billion dollars. And I'm convinced a big reason for that success is the incredible partnership and communication that these two guys have. And I can't wait for you to hear it for yourself. So let's get started. Here's my conversation with my good friends, and soon to be yours, Neil Blumenthal and Dave Gilboa. This is only the second time I've interviewed two co-founders at once. And as I understand it, you guys wanted to do it together. Why? Well, we do everything together and we have since we founded the business now almost 14 years ago. And since that time we've led Warby Parker as co-CEOs, which we know is somewhat of an unusual structure. But we really just think of ourselves as partners. Entrepreneurship can be a lonely journey sometimes and having your best friend and a trusted advisor and someone that each of us can rely on as it has made us more effective organization has led to stronger leadership and has made the journey more fun for us. Yeah, that's great. I'd like each of you to tell me a story about the single biggest thing you've learned from each other as leaders. That's a good question because we're often in the room. We look at each other, we can read each other's minds. And at this point, we've learned so much from each other that we're like mind readers. I'd say one of the most important things I've learned from Dave is to pause and digest and reflect because sometimes my first instinct is to immediately respond to something and sometimes it makes a lot more sense to take a minute, even take a day before responding to something to make sure that you're optimizing in that response so that way you get the intended outcome that you seek. Dave, what's the biggest thing you've learned? Yeah, something I've learned from Neil is just the power of optimism in any journey in life or in business, even when things look really smooth on the outside. It's a constant roller coaster every day, every week, every month. There's lots of ups and downs and you can let those setbacks get you down and it relates to frustration or you can approach every situation when things are going well. You can celebrate those things when things are not going well. You can think of those as opportunities and constantly leading with optimism, results in better outcomes and makes the process more fun for yourself and everyone involved. I certainly agree with that. As I understand that there are actually four of you who co-founded the business back in 2010 and you were all friends at Wharton. You two are the co-CEOs. Did that cause a rub with the other two? How did you work that out? Jeff and Andy are still our close friends. We just all celebrated new years together and we have a tradition every holiday season. We go to this restaurant called Rolfs. It's a German restaurant on Third Avenue and it's beautifully decorated for Christmas with ornaments everywhere. Food's not so great but we've got a tradition for the four of us to always go. It kind of harkens back to the first few days that we were even coming up with the idea. One of the things that we did was to commit to each other that we were going to work really hard on this. Starting a business we recognized was going to be very challenging but we were going to do it in a way where we put our friendships first. We also recognized that there's probably a lot of founders that have said the same thing but eventually became sort of enemies because of an inability to resolve conflicts. So we thought, "Well, we have this desire. How do we actually operationalize that?" What we did when we were working on the business was every week we would go to a bar and we'd sit around, order a beer and provide each other feedback. This sort of weekly meeting became like a release valve. If there was any tension we were able to tackle it and resolve it. It enabled us to be really effective partners and maintain what has been now over decades long super close friendship between the four of us. That's great. You guys you built this business in business school. I found that really intriguing. I know that companies have done that as well but you guys basically put Wharton to work to help you really create this business. You had the idea obviously. Tell us what your big idea was. Yes, we started Warby Parker really to solve our own problem as frustrated consumers. We couldn't understand why glasses were so expensive and why the process to buy them was so frustrating. But we were also in parallel really motivated to build an organization that did good in the world and helped people. We were really intrigued by the idea that you could use for profit business to do good and improve the world. When we met the first week of business school we were all four of us were frustrated. I were consumers. I just been backpacking around the world and I lost my only pair of glasses and I started school. I had to buy two things, a new phone and a new pair of glasses. I went to the Apple store, bought a new iPhone for $200 which was this magical device, super computer in my pocket and then I realized my glasses were going to cost $700. It's technology that's been around for 800 years. Just something didn't make sense. As we talked to all of our friends and family members and colleagues realized that no one was really that satisfied when they bought a pair of glasses. At the time e-commerce was starting to sprout up in a bunch of other categories . You could buy shoes from Zappos, you could buy engagement rings online from Blue Nile, you could buy diapers from diapers.com. No one was effectively selling glasses online and we thought, "Here's a really interesting idea. We could cut out all the unnecessary middlemen, all the unnecessary markups and build a brand and engage directly with consumers, basically pass on the savings from cutting out all those middlemen and offer products that we would want to wear for a fraction of the price by leveraging the power of the internet. We got together, got more and more excited by this idea, ended up launching the business while we're full-time students in school. The business immediately took off. We hit our first-year sales targets in three weeks and it was off to the races. That was now almost 14 years ago and it's been a wild journey since then. Everybody always talks about disrupting the category. You definitely disrupted the category with your big idea. Want to get more into how you did that as we go along with this. Give us a snapshot today of Warby Parker and the business that you lead. It's a heck of a story. We have about 4,000 employees, 240 stores across the US and Canada, robust e- commerce and web and app experience. We sell prescription glasses for roughly a fourth of what they would cost elsewhere. Sunglasses, contact lenses, eye exams and eye care. We're trying to be the one-stop shop for somebody's vision care needs. Of course, for every pair of glasses we sell, we distribute one to someone in need. We've now provided over 15 million pairs of glasses to people in need around the world, including here in the US where we often go into schools and provide glasses to students in need. That's fantastic. How big is the business today in terms of revenue? We're a little over 600 million top line. We took the company public a couple of years ago and still growing quickly and still feel like we're in the top of the first inning in terms of the opportunity that's in front of us. It's a great feeling to have to know that you've got all that upside. As you guys go about growing the business, I understand that you both have your own direct reports, but you also have a process to ensure that you remain on a unified front. Tell us about that. Sure. We have direct reports that we usually have one-on-one meetings with on a weekly basis. At least once a month, we'll join the others one-on-one meeting to ensure that there's that close connectivity. Similarly, we have a weekly executive team meeting, which we're both in. We found that to be successful and to grow quickly, information has to flow quickly within the organization. Similarly, it's got to flow quickly between the two of us. We need to model the behavior that we want to take place throughout the organization. We also, our office is an open layout. We sit right next to each other in between meetings. We're often sharing notes with one another. Sometimes we're the first people that we talk to in the morning. The last person we talk to at night, I don't know how much our wives love that. But again, to be a high growth company, you've got to make quick decisions. If those are going to be good decisions, they have to be informed decisions, which means information needs to travel quickly. We think that our competitive advantage is having the best data, having the best information, and having that flow throughout the company across functional groups that are in other companies often don't talk to each other or don't even exist within the same company. That's our competitive advantage. We have direct relationships with our customers because we sell direct to our customers, through our stores and our website and our apps. We're able to get all this customer feedback and data. Then we disseminate it quickly across the company, whether it's to eyewear design or our merchants or to the technology team or to the CX team or to the marketing team. Then we're able to move nimbly and quickly. We're talking about decision making here. You guys mentioned earlier, you're best friends. But I have to ask you, can you tell us a story where you guys actually disagreed on something and how you dealt with it? Yes, it's pretty frequent that we might have a different perspective on a topic . I think where we've always found that we've had extremely tight alignment is on the values in which we want the organization to live by. Our strategic vision there, we make sure that there's really no deviation in terms of our perspectives and that we're jointly creating that vision. Sometimes we'll have access to different information depending on which parts of the business we're spending more time on or a meeting that one of us was in that the other wasn't in. That will cause us to maybe have a different perspective on a tactical decision . We may have a different point of view and feel comfortable, very comfortable being very open about how we feel, whether it's a tactical business decision or an org decision. When those things do happen, we find that the best way is just to quickly hop in a room and just talk about it and share the information that is causing us to believe certain things. So, not just state the conclusion, but also the assumptions and the data that's causing us to reach that conclusion. I don't think we've ever had a situation where after talking through it and laying out all the facts and all the evidence that we fundamentally can't agree on something. There are times when there might be slight differences in point of view. We make sure we nip those in the bud and address them quickly so that when we 're speaking to other team members and other folks, we're speaking with one voice and so people continue to hear the same message and the same direction from us. I'm curious, Neil. Do you guys ever have that conflict publicly or do you go offline? So, I think our demeanor is our note. We're not like yellers, right? And we generally don't get angry. And we also think that it's an important attribute within the company to be questioning. So we have no problem asking each other questions in front of others. And we, again, we want to model that behavior. Like, what's the point of a meeting if people can't speak their mind and be direct? They have to be respectful, but part of being respectful is also actually being direct and getting to the heart of the issue. So we want to encourage that debate and model it. So we'll do that ourselves. And again, if it's just the two of us, we also have no problem sort of having that conversation in our open office sort of layout. I think if you ask people at Warby, like, have you ever seen Neil and Dave get into an argument? They'd say, definitely not. But I don't think that means that we haven't disagreed and sort of discussed something and then resolved it. I want to get more into how both of you guys lead and some things that you've got going on at Warby. But I want to take you back. What's a story from each of your childhoods that shaped the kind of leader that you are today? I grew up in New York City, sort of downtown. Was a little more crime, sort of back then, in sort of Lower Manhattan Grange Village. And I was at my little league game. I was up to bat, so my team sort of was sort of sitting on kind of, we didn't have dug out because this was like a field that literally had a fence and then was right onto the sidewalk. The baseball fields in Manhattan aren't that nice. My dad was like an assistant coach of the team. And my mom was sort of on the sort of sidelines, but on the sidewalk. And there were a bunch of parents sort of standing on the sidewalk, sort of pe ering through the fence to watch the game. And we started to hear what I thought were fireworks. And all the parents said, "Get down, get down." And so we all started lying down on the ground. It turns out they were gunshots. And somebody sort of ran by the group of parents and was running on the sidewalk, shot five shots into the group of parents, and then kept running. And I looked up and I saw my mother sort of running kind of like the opposite direction of the guy with the gun. And her instinct, she was a nurse for 40 years. Her instinct was, "Well, if a child is shot, she needs to jump into action and help. They don't have that much time." And then my dad turned to me and said, "Hey, I've got to get the police and get an ambulance." So he ran off to try and flag down a bus because this was pre-cell phones and hailed down a bus in order to call, have the bus sort of radio in for the police. Turns out a guy was shot three times. My mom and another parent helped stop the bleeding, saved this person's life. And it was a drug deal that had gone bad. But to me, to see my parents jump into action, be very action oriented to help people. I think had a profound impact. And my mom is one of those people who, and anybody who has a family member who 's a nurse or a doctor like knows, right, you're a nurse or a doctor 24/7. And you're always the first to help whether it's a family member or a friend that's sick or someone's going into the hospital. She always goes with them. And I think that always inspired sort of me to do stuff that had positive impact in the world. Dave, it sounds like you got a pretty good partner there. How about you? What's about a story from your childhood? Yeah, maybe I'll tell a sillier story and one that I'm pretty sure the statute of limitations has passed here. It's probably safe for me to talk about this. But when I was 12 years old, I called into a radio show and I won a CD-ROM burner, just showing my age. But that was kind of a novel technology at the time that you could actually not just play CDs, but you could burn your own data into them. And I would go, this was in the era of AOL dial-up days where you get five hours a month to be on the internet at extremely slow speeds. And I would go in these chat rooms and you could trade MP3 songs. You basically upload a song to this chat room. And if you did that, then you kind of built up Goodwill and people would send you their songs. It would take 30 minutes to download one MP3 file that was like five megabytes. And at the time, Dawson's Creek was like the hottest show on TV, at least for like teenagers. And so I traded for all the songs that were kind of the Dawson's Creek soundtrack, which had not been released, then started burning Dawson's Creek albums. I created album art that I printed out on our dot matrix printer. I bought a bunch of CD blank covers and bought shrink wrap. And I shrink wrapped these CDs with my mom's hair dryer. And I would then put them on eBay and sell them as the Dawson's Creek unofficial soundtrack. They generally sell for like 100 to 200 bucks. And I made like $10,000 or something, which was a lot for a 12 year old. And I was feeling pretty good about myself until one day I came home from soccer practice. And my mom sat me down because we'd gotten a cease and desist letter from the Warner Brothers IP lawyers who made it clear that I was violating their IP. And she quickly shut down my first burgeoning business. But I think it was just an example of just thinking out of the box, especially when new technologies and new platforms emerge, that that creates new opportunities. And similar thinking to us realizing that there was a really interesting opportunity to build a brand online for the first time. And that you could use the power of the internet in new and unique ways and similar to how we're thinking these days about innovations in AI and wearable technology and how that applies to our business and kind of constantly pushing ourselves and pushing our team to think about new opportunities that no one else is capitalizing on. Hey, everyone. It's Kula here from Three More Questions. And if you haven't downloaded the new How Leaders Lead app, you are missing out . If you're leading a team, I know it's hard to find time to consume leadership development content and continue investing in yourself. That's the whole reason we launched this app. If you just take two minutes each morning to watch the daily leadership insight in the How Leaders Lead app, you'll stay inspired with practical leadership lessons from the world's greatest leaders. Imagine starting your day with inspiration from Condoleezza Rice, Tom Brady and Jamie Jackson, just to name a few. I've started using the app and I love how the daily leadership insight gets my mindset right before the busyness of my day starts. Download the How Leaders Lead app today in the app store and stay inspired with amazing leadership wisdom in just two minutes a day. As I understand it, you know, when you were at Wharton and you were putting this idea together, you had a lot of doubters early on. What advice would you give to leaders or entrepreneurs facing, you know, all those people that say it can't be done? What do you tell them? We usually sort of encourage people to ask why, right? There are definitely lots of doubters and naysayers out there. We do think that it would be wrong to just ignore them, but you need to understand why are they saying this? If it's just a character flaw, then you can ignore them. But maybe they have a legitimate reason why your idea is not a sound as you think it is. So when we started to tell our classmates, "Hey, we're going to disrupt the optical industry. We're going to sell $500 glasses for $95 in general. They love that idea." But when we told them, "Oh, we're going to sell glasses online," then they were like, "Ooh, everybody was actually pretty nice at business school." So they didn't tell us, "Hey, that's a dumb idea," but you could see it in their face. And we would ask them, "Well, why wouldn't you buy glasses online?" And it was a novel concept back when we were, right, we launched the business in 2010. This was around the time period where for the first time people were selling shoes online, right? Zappos was quite popular. People were selling engagement rings through blue Nile, right? These were two categories that people thought couldn't be sold online. Nobody was really selling glasses. Our friends would tell us, "Listen, I obviously don't want to pay a lot for glasses, but I can't imagine buying a pair of glasses without trying them on first." And we heard that enough times that we actually went back to the drawing board and we were like, "Okay, well, how can we solve this? Is there technology where people could virtually try on glasses?" And at the time, there really wasn't. Then again, getting enough of these hearing from these doubters enough really pushed us to figure out, "How do we solve this?" And we were like, "Oh, I'm not going to solve this problem." And we were like, "Oh, I'm not going to solve this problem." And we were like, "Oh, I'm not going to solve this problem." And we were like, "Oh, I'm not going to solve this problem." And we were like, "Oh, I'm not going to solve this problem." And we were like, "Oh, I'm not going to solve this problem." And we were like, "Oh, I'm not going to solve this problem." And we were like, "Oh, I'm not going to solve this problem." And we were like, "Oh, I'm not going to solve this problem." And we were like, "Oh, I'm not going to solve this problem." And we were like, "Oh, I'm not going to solve this problem." And we were like, "Oh, I'm not going to solve this problem." And we were like, "Oh, I'm not going to solve this problem." And we were like, "Oh, I'm not going to solve this problem." And we were like, "Oh, I'm not going to solve this problem." And we were like, "Oh, I'm not going to solve this problem." And we were like, "Oh, I'm not going to solve this problem." And we were like, "Oh, I'm not going to solve this problem." And we were like, "Oh, I'm not going to solve this problem." And we were like, "Oh, I'm not going to solve this problem." And we were like, "Oh, I'm not going to solve this problem." And we were like, "Oh, I'm not going to solve this problem." And we were like, "Oh, I'm not going to solve this problem." And we were like, "Oh, I'm not going to solve this problem." And we were like, "Oh, I'm not going to solve this problem." And we were like, "Oh, I'm not going to solve this problem." And we didn't ignore all of it. We used some of that feedback to help make different decisions and rethink certain elements, but the fact that we had that kind of emotional support from the rest of our founding group. And it was massively beneficial to absorb that early criticism and critiquing. You guys were known for being fantastic brand builders. And I came up with marketing myself, and I admire so much of what you've done. But I got a head scratcher for me is, "How in the hell did you come up with a name Warby Parker?" Tell me about that, because I know you had some major league thinking on that. That was one of the hardest things in building the company was coming up with a brand name. We had spent a lot of time thinking through a brand architecture. So what our mission and vision was, what some of our core values. One of the things that we kept coming back to was that the brand stood for fun, creativity, doing good in the world, right, having impact. And we thought writers generally exemplified that. Similarly, we kept coming back to this idea of glasses, right? They're tools that help you see. They help you read and write. When you think about an author, for example, you often picture them with glasses on. And in particular, we thought a lot about our parents who came of age in the '60s, where it was a period of disruption, but a period of change. And these were changemakers. And we thought about, well, who were some of the writers and the books that influenced that generation? And it was folks like Alan Ginsburg and Jack Carowak. And there happened to be an exhibit on Jack Carowak at the New York Public Library, at the main branch on 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue. And Dave walked into it and saw a bunch of unpublished journals from Carowak. And there were these two characters, Warby Pepper and Zag Parker. And I remember when he sort of shared that with Jeff, Andy, and me. And he was super excited and we were like, this is like Jackpot. This is it. And we had gone through 2,000 different names at this point. Like, you know, we've been working on this for months. It was incredibly challenging. And then being the business school folks, we were like, all right, well, let's get some market research here. We literally did a survey with our friends of Warby Parker. And we asked folks, you have a positive, negative, or neutral reaction to this name. And overwhelmingly, it was either neutral or positive, which is exactly what you want to hear. We then asked, like, are there any associations? Like, what do you think of when you hear Warby Parker? And most people said, you know, I don't know, but it does sound familiar. So it was like, oh my God, this is like the perfect name. There's like built in credibility, but it's a blank canvas that we can sort of build upon. So that gave us the confidence to go with Warby Parker. And the URL is available for $9. You like me. That's great. I love that. It's a name that breaks through the clutter. I mean, you know, it's one that stands out. It makes you, you know, neutral and positive. I think that's terrific. You know, and I understand that you guys were really going to go crazy on pricing. You were going to offer $500 glasses for $45 and you ended up charging $95. What was your thinking that took you from $45 to $95? And I was, it's interesting. It wasn't like $99.99. It was $95. Tell me about that. How'd you think about it? Yeah. So we knew we wanted to change behavior and that, yeah, at the time only about one to two percent of glasses in the US were being sold online and the types of customers that we were going after, basically, you know, ourselves and people like us had never considered buying glasses online before. And so we felt like we had to really blow them away with an unbeatable value proposition. And that had to start with the designs and the quality of the glasses. But if it was glasses that they could buy elsewhere in a store, probably wouldn 't be compelled to think about purchasing them online. But if they were a fraction of the price, then that might be compelling. And so we thought, okay, what is going to blow people away? Can we offer these for a tenth of the price? And we kind of did the math on the cost of goods and we thought we could get there with a really dramatic value proposition. And one of the benefits of being at a place like Wharton is that not only could we get great feedback from our classmates and professors on things like potential random names that popped into our heads, but we were able to sit down with some of the leading experts on basically every aspect of our business. And I think we ended up meeting with every professor at Wharton to kind of get their input on what we should be thinking about from a supply chain standpoint and from an accounting standpoint. And we were fortunate that one of our professors was a pricing expert and paid lots of money by some of the largest corporations in the world to help them make pricing decisions. And when we kind of told him in the idea, he stopped us a couple sentences in and said, "You guys are crazy. This is never going to work." He knew nothing about glasses. He knew nothing about our cost of goods. But he said, you know, there are two things that you need to consider. One is that that price is too low. It's not believable. Even if the quality is as good as those $500 glasses, no one's going to believe you. The pricing delta is too great. And second, no matter what you think your costs are today, they're only going to go up and you're going to want to be able to market this product and you need to leave yourself enough room to hire a team to spend marketing dollars. So you need to allocate much more room in your margin line than you are today. And of course he was right. So we kind of reflected and did a bunch of survey work and focus groups and found that actually the willingness to purchase and willingness to buy this product from a new brand actually went up as the price increased, which was counterintuitive to us starting at $45. But then it dropped off a cliff after we went over $100. And so there was kind of this natural mental barrier around $100. And this was back in 2010 before inflation kicked in. We didn't want our brand or our product to feel like a discount brand. We didn't want it to be $99.99 and we thought $95 just felt more intentional, felt like it was a higher quality product and launched with that. And now 14 years later, our core product is still $95. We now have introduced a bunch of other products at different price points, but we've been very focused on continuing to deliver as much value to our customers as possible. And so the glasses that we're both wearing today, you can get for $95, including prescription lenses. That's incredible. You've had to attack the business and costs and every aspect of that. I know that is not that easy. One of the things that you guys have said, which I really like, scarcity leads to cool. Where did you learn that lesson? I think we just as growing up, you'd see what people would covet, right, wasn't widely available. So scarcity makes often creates desire for a product. You don't want something that everybody else has. And the challenge is if you want to have impact, right, and we want to optimize for impact, then you need to create scale. And how do you scale a brand with integrity that could be ubiquitous and could be wildly available, but is still perceived as cool? You could have something that's niche and people perceive it as cool, but if it 's not at scale, you're not having the impact. You're not changing the world. So what we think a lot about is how do we add dimensionality to the brand so it 's authentic, right? And authenticity is king, especially in the age of the internet, where everybody has access to information and they can rip something apart really quickly and they can see if something is not authentic, if there's not details and layers behind it. So we think that helps contribute to the strength of the brand, knowing who you are, and that can help also lead to sort of creativity and how you present yourself in the world. So as an example, in the early days of Warby Parker, we had the Warby Parker class trip. You know, again, glasses, right, there's that tie between reading and writing and learning. So we bought an old, yellow school bus. We ripped out the seats. We put oak shelves in there. We created this mobile store and we went to 25 different cities across the country. And in each city, we'd be in like three different neighborhoods. And we would open up shop for a few days. And suddenly we had a bunch of sales information on like, where did we perform best? And it's like, oh, maybe we should open up permanent stores, right? Where, you know, the class trip and the bus had the greatest sales, right? That was an authentic representation of the brand versus just, you know, maybe like a more boring pop up or what have you. What would you say is the biggest thing that you've learned about brand building that every leader should know? I know you could list a host of things, but if you could just give me one thing that, you know, if you're going to build a brand, you better keep this top of mind. I think details matter. You can't have details unless you spend time defining who you are. And again, that creativity can be catalyzed by constraints. So, right, the tighter definition you have of a brand and who you are actually doesn't constrain you as much as you think. It actually can help lead to other ideas that enable you to represent your brand in authentic way in a way that has, again, these details and nuances that contribute to authenticity. In the early days, we also did an activation where we celebrated Buddy Holly's birthday. And we released an album of sort of some of his greatest hits and an LP. And I was like, well, you know, of course, Buddy Holly makes sense for Warby Parker, right? He's an iconic glasses wearer. He wears sort of chunky acetate frames just like that. We're part of our first collection, right? There was a bazillion reasons why we could say, like, this made sense for us to do. You know, Neil, you harken back to the early days and you tell that story, you know, but here you are now. You're in 2024. How do you think about creating new memories for your people and your customers ? One thing is how do we continue some of these rituals and traditions? Like, what is culture? Culture shared values and shared rituals. So the values have pretty much stayed the same. I mean, every few years we might tweak them a little bit, kind of like, you know, the Constitution can be amended. And the rituals can evolve but should be somewhat sort of similar, right? And, you know, in the early days, instead of having a holiday party, for example, we celebrated Halloween. And that was because one of our core values centers around taking our work seriously, but not taking ourselves seriously. So we would all dress up in costume and come into work. We take the subway into the office wearing a costume on Halloween in New York. Nobody thinks twice about that. Every year, right, the costumes got better and better. And then we start to evolve the ritual a little bit where we introduce the Halloweenys, which are the Oscars, the Academy Awards for Halloween and for costumes. So we now, you know, at the end of the day, right before we have sort of a big party, we have the Halloweenys. So there's the best individual costume, best duo, best warby-inspired costume, right? There's all these different categories that are true to Warby Parker. And again, this is a tradition, but it's evolved over the years. And everybody gets a little trophy. Hopefully they have a great acceptance speech. You know, we haven't had any controversies yet, but rest assured, we may, so we'll be careful who we choose to host the Halloweenys each year. You have KPMG monitoring the results. You know, exactly. We'll be back with the rest of my conversation with Neil and Dave in just a moment. It's not often we have two guests in one episode, but when we do, it sure is a lot of fun, especially when those two guests are the co-founders of the wildly successful YouTube channel, Dude Perfect. When Ty and Kobe joined the show, I loved hearing how they prioritize quality over quantity, all while having a ton of fun. We made a decision early on that we were going to put out content basically every other week. So that was a little bit different from the norm that other people were doing on YouTube, but we felt like people were having a hard time kind of keeping up the quality that they first became known for. And that every other week thing allowed us to still have free time, still do the things that we want to do, but put a lot of emphasis on the products that we come out with. And that's one thing that's carried over into other avenues of our business as well, whether that's merchandise, whether that's our tour. We're not going to be out on the road doing 100 stops a year like an artist does. We'll do a lot fewer numbers of shows, but when you go to that show, our biggest goal is that every person walks out of that thing and man, that was so worth it. My family had an awesome time. That was a blast. I would 100% go to another one. And so I think the quality over quantity has been another common theme throughout Dude Perfect in the last 13 years that we've tried to keep up. Go back and listen to my entire conversation with Ty and Kobe from Dude Perfect , including my rendition of their legendary catchphrase, Pound It, Noggin, See Ya, it's episode 116 here on How Leaders Lead. Dave, you launched the business online, obviously, and now you have over 200 retail stores. Walk us through the thinking behind going to the brick and mortar strategy because most people would think, at least on the surface, much lower cost structure, very challenging. Why do you need to do brick and mortar when you've done so well on the Internet? We're still super excited about our e-commerce business and I think that there's still lots of potential to sell glasses online and we're excited to lead the category in that direction. But our stores have been massively successful both in terms of delivering the best customer experience that we want and also from a financial standpoint. And our journey into retail really started from the get-go from listening to our customers where we launched our business online and we had our home try-on program where anyone could come to our website and order five frames for free. We'd send them for free. You could keep them for five days, include a free return shipping label, send them back to us so you could physically touch and feel the product, see which frames you like, then send them back to us along with your prescription, and we'd go ahead and make you pair of prescription glasses. And we launched with features in GQ and Vogue that immediately put us on the map and we were full-time students working out of our apartments, had really tempered our expectations because we had talked to a bunch of other entrepreneurs who said, "You know, just because you think you have a great idea, does it mean that anyone is going to know who you are, does it mean anyone's going to buy anything?" And we kind of joked, "Well, yeah, if nothing else, like our parents will probably buy a few glasses from us and make us feel good about all this time we've invested." We bootstrapped the business with our life savings between the four of us and we'd only spent that money on three things. One was someone to help us build a website since an iMOS or technical. Second was our initial set of inventory that we had to prepay for before any suppliers would ship it to us. And then the third was we hired a fashion PR publicist because we recognized you only have one opportunity, launch a brand, and we wanted really to kind of establish ourselves with a stamp of credibility from the fashion and design world. And we got a call from our PR firm and they said, "Hey guys, GQ is hitting mailboxes in Newstance tomorrow. I just went to your website. It says, "Coming soon. What's going on here?" And this was in the middle of February. We knew that we were going to be in the March edition of GQ, but we didn't realize that that actually hits before March. We called our one developer who stayed up to like 4 a.m. trying to squash as many bugs as we could. The website still had a bunch of issues with it, but we pushed it live. We didn't even tell our parents or our best friends that the site was live, but we needed something for people to go to when they got that magazine. And then we were sitting in class the next day and I had my phone set up to be notified any time we got an order. And my phone buzzed and I got super excited and I opened up my laptop. We weren't supposed to be using computers in class, but I emailed Neil and Jeff and Andy. And then 10 minutes later we got another order and then another order and then another order. And at the end of the hour-long class, realized that we had taken more orders than we had inventory for and we had no sold out functionality, no waitlist functionality. We had never considered that that was going to be something that we needed on the website. And so we called an emergency meeting and we talked about the options that we had. One of them was just taking down the website and another was just keep taking orders and figure out how to deal with the inventory issues later. Our developer was able to put up some waitlist functionality pretty quickly. All of a sudden we had a wait list of over 20,000 customers. Then we started getting calls from people saying, "Hey, there's this massive waitlist. I want to try on the glasses. Can I come to your store or your office?" And we said, "Our store and office is Neil's apartment." But come on over and all of a sudden we had strangers coming into Neil's apartment. We laid out glasses on his dining room table, mirror on the wall. We had our laptop open that people could check out just through the full e- commerce checkout. And we found that people loved the experience. They loved getting to meet the people behind the brand. They loved being able to try on the entire collection of frames. And we joked that that was kind of our first foray into retail. And then when we graduated and moved to New York, we got our first office, which was on the sixth floor of a commercial building. And we said, "Let's dedicate a couple hundreds of core feet to what we call the customer showroom." And the customer showroom was really a couple of west down tables with some computers set up on them and some glasses laid out. All of a sudden we had hundreds of people a week coming to try on glasses, to buy glasses. We were doing several million dollars out of the sixth floor of our showroom. And then that gave us the confidence to then open up some pop-up shops. We bought this old Yale school bus that we had some of our team members drive around the country, setting up pop-up shops wherever they parked. And every time we had a physical environment that customers could walk into, we found that they loved that experience. It drove a lot of sales, it drove awareness, it drove our online business. And we learned so much from those interactions that gave us the confidence to sign our first lease. And we opened our first door a little over 10 years ago. Now we have over 240 stores, see a path to opening hundreds more, and find that having a physical space allows us to bring the brand to life in new and unique ways. We hire local artists to create custom artwork. We're able to hire doctors in every one of our stores that can offer comprehensive eye exams. We have opticians that can make adjustments. And so we're finding just tremendous benefit of having both scaled online offering, but also stores that are conveniently located for most of our US and Canadian customers. You know, you guys obviously are visionaries. I mean, you literally created this brand from scratch. You saw the opportunity. What process do you use today to envision the future? You know, I think we use a few things. One is really just listening to customers. What you find is that there's certain themes that are very consistent, whether it's around quality, speed, price. Right? And these are cross categories, experiences that are unique that people want to talk about at the dinner table. So if those are kind of like some truths, then what are emerging technologies that we can leverage to help us sort of achieve those things? So Dave and I also on the side do a lot of early stage investing in companies, often some of the first money into them. And it helps keep us fresh because we see new business models. We see new products and services that help us have a sense of where the puck is . Going right pushes us to constantly do more and more and innovate at warby. You know, I got to tell you guys, this has been so much fun and I want to have some more. I have a lightning round of questions that I always ask. So are you ready for this? Ready. Let's do it. All right. Here we go. Okay, Neil, what three words best describe you? Fun, happy, caring? Dave, who would play you in a movie? I get Bradley Cooper most often. That's good. I agree with that one. Neil, if you could be one person for a day beside yourself, who would it be? Oh, that man? Dave, what's your biggest pet peeve? Miss deadlines or missed commitments, something that, yeah, if I'm expecting something, it doesn't happen tends to drive me nuts. Neil, what's a fun fact about Warby Parker that no one else knows except the co -founders? One of the names that we were considering was logum, which is a Swedish word. I don't think I'm even pronouncing it properly, but Dave would be able to pronounce it properly and explain what it means. Logum, Dave, what's your go-to Warby Parker frame? The Murphy somewhere right now. Neil, describe your last "I can't believe this is happening to me" moment. It's funny, if you come to mind, one actually was a while ago, and it's the first time that I saw a pair of Warby Parker glasses in the wild. It was right by our first office in Union Square in Manhattan, and it was on the subway platform, and I saw somebody wearing our glasses, and the person kind of looked at me, because I was staring at them, and then started to walk away, and I started to follow them. The one thing you don't do in New York is follow somebody on a subway platform. It was a little bit awkward, but I was just so excited. The person kept looking back at me, and I'd be like this grin from ear to ear, they just thought it was crazy. But I would probably say the more recent one was when we went public, and we went public at the New York Stock Exchange, and we got to ring the bell, and I don't think I realized how much pomp and circumstance that moment was, and how meaningful it was to our team, to our families, to our investors, and everybody that had partnered with us for the 10 years leading up for it, and it was pretty cool, to be honest, to ring that bell and to see a lot of people that were so important in our lives there. Dave, what's one of your daily rituals, something that you never miss? Now I have a nine-month-old daughter, and makes sure that it's been, I have like a one-on-one, 15-minute, daddy-daughter date, no devices, no distractions, and just makes sure that happens every day. Neil, if I turned on the radio in your car, what would I hear? Probably hauling oats. Dave, what's something about you that few people would know? I was born in Sweden, and I still speak Swedish with my mom. All right, you guys were terrific at the lightning round, and we're about to wrap this up, just a few more questions for you. You know, you talked a bit about this already, but I love how Warby Parker is giving back. Tell us a story of what you're doing in schools. So one of the things that we would find walking into, whether it's a rural area in Bangladesh, or even a school here in New York City, is that we wouldn't see many glasses, and we thought, this is odd. You know, roughly half the population wears glasses. So we start to think, well, how do we check this? There's no way that all these kids in school just magically don't need glasses. So we thought, okay, what's the best way to serve them? Well, one was that actually providing eye exams in school, right, where you have sort of a captive audience, is the sort of best place to intervene. And then could we actually design a collection that the kids can choose from? Because while glasses are a health product, they're a fashion accessory, and if they don't look good on someone's face, they're not going to wear them. So we created this process where we have optometrists go into school, provide eye exams to kids to every kindergartener and every first grader in the public school system in New York City. And it's 1.1 million students in New York City's public school system. It's the largest in the country. Everybody gets screened if they need a comprehensive eye exam, they get one, and then the kids get to choose a pair of Warby Parker glasses, and then we make them and deliver them a couple weeks later. And we've seen this have impact on reading scores. Our hope is that these glasses can enable sort of and catalyze lifelong learners because we know that you can't succeed if you can't see the blackboard . And what we also found from talking to teachers is how many students get mis diagnosed as special needs because they disengage and become disruptive in class , not because of any underlying issue other than they can't see the blackboard. So without this intervention, you know, cities and states are misallocating money and having worse educational outcomes. So we're working and we're expanding to over 40 cities in the U.S. to make sure that kids have the glasses they need to be successful. That is awesome. You know, congratulations on doing that. And you are making a difference in the world that way. You know, a lot of times entrepreneurs are serial entrepreneurs. Now you guys mentioned that you invest in startups, you know, in their embryonic stages. But I got to ask you, do you guys have another big idea up your repertoire? What's been fun is that we've been able to introduce lots of big ideas within the world of Warby Parker. And so, you know, the business today looks dramatically different than it did 10 years ago and 5 years ago and even 2 years ago. And so, launching our bricks and mortar stores and being able to scale that was , you know, one big shift in the business. And so recently we launched a contact lens business that's been growing really quickly. We're hiring hundreds of eye doctors, investing heavily in telemedicine, in vision insurance. And so there is kind of enough innovation and enough, you know, new chapters within the world of Warby Parker that keeps us engaged and excited. And yeah, we're still having as much fun as ever and see as much opportunity to continue to scale Warby Parker as ever. So, not thinking about doing anything else. But I love that idea. I love the thought of being a serial entrepreneur in your core business and keeping that entrepreneurial spirit going. You know, you guys obviously are very close. You see each other every day. It'd be easy to grow apart. How do you keep your personal relationship flourishing and how, as leaders, do you guys get better as leaders? You know, I think if it was hard to maintain a personal relationship that maybe we would still be such good friends, but this guy makes it quite easy. I think in terms of how we grow as leaders, one is that we want to get better. You know, one of the core values that Warby Parker has learned, grow, repeat. We think that we should be better at everything that we're doing tomorrow than we are today, whether that is processes, the technologies that we use, the way we run meetings, right? And that has to start from us. We have to model the behavior. So we need to seek feedback from our teams. We need to talk to great leaders and learn from them. We need to solicit feedback from each other and push each other. That's another advantage of being co-CEOs. But yeah, it all just starts with a desire and ambition to get better and better. Hey, Dave, how about you? How are you sharpening your ex? Our role continues to evolve every year. It's a different job depending on the new scale of the business. And in the early days, it was kind of easy to get signal and feedback on what was going well and what wasn't when we were directly responsible for everything from designing glasses to building spreadsheets and putting together investor decks. And you got a pretty immediate signal, whether the thing that you were leading was working or not. And now that we're leading a company of thousands of people, some of those feedback cycles are longer. It's sometimes harder to understand how effective are we at making our entire team more effective and moving faster and having more impact than they would if someone else was kind of in this role. And so we go out of our way to try to solicit as much feedback from our team members as possible. We look at metrics and data to get some objective measures, but then really rely on each other. And I think that is a really unique advantage of having a co-CEO structure where you do have someone that is equally accountable and responsible, but they also need you to step up and they need you to perform. And so we're both really motivated to improve ourselves, but also help each other improve as well. I understand one of your professors at Wharton was Adam Grant. He kind of questioned whether you guys would be successful because he wondered if you were going to be all in enough. You know, and I think obviously you're all in and you're passionate about your business. But I wonder how you manage that all in aspect of your life now at home and with your partners and your family. It's funny. You were just asking about like who do we learn from and, you know, Whole Foods, for example, had co-CEOs. And we were recently talking with one of those co-CEOs, Walter Rob. And we were with him and somebody asked him a question about work-life balance. He kind of looked at them and said, "I don't really optimize for balance. I optimize for impact." And that sort of stuck with us. I think we're like, we go 24/7 and we're not in a position where we can turn off work when we're at home. At the same token, we're still fathers, right, when we're in the office and we 're husbands and we're sons. And so, right, we've gotten accustomed to wearing those hats all the time, trying to sort of optimize every second of the day, right, across a bunch of different priorities. Dave, what's the best piece of advice you would give to aspiring leaders? I think what we found is that, you know, regardless of how a big company gets, regardless of how many employees and how much capital is available, that focus is so critical to success. And so, we heard early on that strategies, what you say no to, that's something that we've really taken to heart and often counsel other entrepreneurs, other founders, that, you know, it can become so tempting to chase shiny objects and pursue kind of new ideas, new partnerships, new geographies, new product lines, when that generally results in spreading your resources too thin, losing focus. And in a world as competitive as the one that we're operating in, every company to be successful has to be significantly better than any other organization that is focused on the same problem. And the only way that you can do that is by being obsessed over your areas of focus. Yeah, I think the advice would be to really define who you are and maintain ruthless focus just on that and say no to everything else. How about you, Neil? How would you answer that question? Probably build on that and say focus on your customer and the narrower you focus, the better job that you can do. And then you can always expand. It's a lot easier to expand than it is to cut. So solve a problem, take a step forward, and then you can move on to the next one. Well, David, Neil, I want to thank you very much for taking so much time with me. You guys are incredible brand builders. You're obviously really nice people . That's what really impresses me here. You guys are smiling the whole time you 're answering the questions. I know that your organization knows that you're passionate, but I also know that they're working for very kind people as well. And thank you so much for making the difference in the world because you're definitely doing it. Thanks so much. Thanks for having us. Thank you. [silence] Talking to Neil and Dave, it's easy to see why Warby Parker has been such a tremendous success. Sure, they had a great idea, but you and I both know that not every good idea becomes a great business. To do that, you need strong leadership and a heck of a lot of communication, especially in a unique CoCO partnership like Neil and Dave have. I just love how they share information constantly, both with each other and with their teams. They know it's key to resolving conflict, making smart decisions, and ultimately staying ahead of the competition. When information moves slowly, companies struggle. And this week, I want you to apply that principle in your own life. So I got to ask you, where are the information bottlenecks in your organization ? If you're not sure, here's a tip. Look for areas where drama or poor decisions just keep cropping up again and again. Those are almost always symptoms of a larger breakdown in communication, where people aren't getting the right information at the right time. Find those issues. Fix them. And I know it'll help you stay on top of your game . So do you want to know how leaders lead? What we learned today is that great leaders know that information has to travel quickly. Coming up next on How leaders lead, just in time for the Masters, I'm sitting down with professional golfer and defending Masters champion, John Romp. I think it's the biggest decision I've had to make golf wise. What I would tell people is I think the set of circumstances had changed. And one of the biggest things was facing that negative backlash of contradict ing what I had said. But I tried to be as honest as I can. And I think I accepted the fact that there's going to be some people that are going to decide to hate me no matter what I do. So I decided to do what I thought it was best for me and made the best decision I could and I could live with it. That's that simple. So be sure to come back again next week to hear our entire conversation. Thanks again for tuning in to another episode of How leaders lead, where every Thursday you get to listen in, while I interview some of the very best leaders in the world. I make it a point to give you something simple on each episode that you can apply to your business so that you will become the best leader you can be. [BLANK_AUDIO] [ Silence ]