David Novak 0:04 

Welcome to How leaders lead where every week you get to listen. And 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 Warby 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 4000 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 hence 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 that you guys wanted to do it together. Why?

Dave Gilboa 1:44 

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, and having your best friend and a trusted adviser and, and someone that each of us can rely on, as Nick has made us more effective organization has led to stronger leadership and has made the journey more fun for us. Yeah, that's

David Novak 2:21 

great. You don't I'd like each of you to tell me a story about the single biggest thing you've learned from each other as leaders?

Neil Blumenthal 2:29 

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, you know, I'd say one of the most important things I've learned from Dave is to sort of 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 sort of responding to something to make sure that you're sort of optimizing in that response. So that way you get the intended outcome that you seek.

David Novak 3:06 

Dave, what's the biggest thing you've learned? Yeah,

Dave Gilboa 3:09 

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, every day, every week, every month, there's lots of ups and downs, and you can kind of let the setbacks get you down or lead 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 and makes the process more fun for yourself and everyone involved.

David Novak 3:48 

I certainly agree with that. And 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. Now you two are the CO CEOs. Did that cause a rub with the other two? Or how did you work that out?

Neil Blumenthal 4:06 

So Jeff and Andy are still our close friends. We just all celebrated sort of New Year's together and how we have a tradition every holiday season, we go to this restaurant called Rolf so it's a German restaurant on Third Avenue and it's sure, beautifully decorated for Christmas with ornaments everywhere, foods, not so great, but become a tradition for the four of us to always go. But 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, like 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 recognize that there's probably a lot of founders that have said the same thing but eventually became sort of have enemies because of an inability to resolve conflicts. So we thought, well, we have this desire, how do we actually operationalize that. And 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 beer and provide each other feedback. And this sort of weekly meeting became like a release valve. So 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, you know, now over a decade's long, super close friendship between the four of us. That's

David Novak 5:42 

great. And you guys, you built this business in business school, I found that really intriguing. You know, I know other companies have done that as well. But you know, 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. Yeah. So

Dave Gilboa 6:00 

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. And 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 all four of us were frustrated, eyewear, 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, supercomputer in my pocket, and then I realized my glasses were gonna cost $700. It's technology that's been around for 800 years, just something didn't make sense. And 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. And at the time, ecommerce was starting to spread 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, but no one was effectively selling glasses online. And we thought, well, 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. So we got together got more and more excited by this idea ended up launching the business while we're full time students in school, that business immediately took off, we hit our first year sales targets and three weeks and, and it was off to the races and, and that was now almost 14 years ago. And it's been a wild journey. Since then,

David Novak 8:10 

you know, everybody always talks about disrupting the category, you definitely disrupted the category with your with your big idea. And I want to get more into how you did that as we go along with this. But give us a snapshot today of Warby Parker in the business that you lead. It's a heck of a story. So

Neil Blumenthal 8:28 

we have about 4000 employees 240 stores across the US and Canada, robust ecommerce and web app experience. We sell prescription glasses for roughly a fourth of what they would cost elsewhere sunglasses, contact lenses, eye exams and eye care. So we're trying to be sort of 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.

David Novak 9:09 

That's fantastic. And how big is the business today in terms of revenue?

Dave Gilboa 9:14 

We're a little over 600 million top line. We took the company public a couple years ago. And yeah, we're 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.

David Novak 9:29 

Oh, that's a great feeling to have to know that you've got all that upside. And you know, 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.

Neil Blumenthal 9:46 

So we chats are direct reports that we usually have one on one meetings with on a weekly basis. And then at least once a month. We'll join the others one on one meeting to ensure that there's sort of that close connectivity. And similarly, we have a weekly executive team meeting, which we're both in, you know, we found that to be successful and to grow quickly, right information has to flow quickly within the organization. And similarly, it's got to flow quickly between the two of us, right, we need to model the behavior that we want to take place throughout the organization. So we also, our office is an open layout, we sit right next to each other in between meetings were often you know, sharing notes with one another. Sometimes we're the first people that we talked to in the morning, and the last person we talked to at night, I don't know how much our wives love that. But again, to be a high growth company, right, you got to make quick decisions. And if those are going to be good decisions, they have to be informed decisions, which means information needs to travel quickly. And 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. Right. And 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. And so we're able to get all this customer feedback and data, and 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, right. And then we're able to sort of move nimbly and quickly, you

David Novak 11:37 

know, we're talking about decision making here, and you guys bitching earlier, your 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,

Dave Gilboa 11:49 

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 and in terms of our perspectives, and that we're kind of jointly creating that vision, sometimes we'll have access to different information. depending on you know, which parts of the business we're spending more time on, or kind of a meeting that one of us was in that the other wasn't in, and that will cause us to maybe have a different perspective on a tactical decision. And so we may have a different point of view and feel comfortable, very comfortable, being very open, about how we feel, whether it's tactical business decision or an org decision. And when we 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. And so kind of not just state the conclusion, but also the assumptions and the data that's causing us to reach that conclusion. And I don't think we've ever had a situation where after talking through it, and kind of laying out all the facts and all the evidence that we fundamentally can't agree on something. And so, yeah, there are times when, yeah, there might be kind of 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, you know, continue to hear the same message and the same direction from us.

David Novak 13:36 

I'm curious, Neil, Do you guys ever have that conflict publicly? Or do you go offline?

Neil Blumenthal 13:42 

So you know, I think our demeanors are not we're not like yellers. Right. And we, you know, generally don't get sort of angry. And we also think that it's an important sort of 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, right? 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 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. You know, I think if you ask people at Warby like, Have you ever seen Neil and Dave, like get into an argument? They'd say? Definitely not. But I don't think that means that we haven't like disagreed and sort of discuss something and then resolved it.

David Novak 14:45 

You know, I want to get more into how both of you guys lead and some things that you got going on at Warby but, but I want to take you back, you know, what's a story from each of your childhoods that shaped the kind of leader that you are A day,

Neil Blumenthal 15:00 

I grew up in New York City sort of downtown, the was a little more crime sort of back then, and sort of lower Manhattan Greenwich Village. And I was had my little league game, I was up to bat. So my, my team sort of was sort of sitting on, kind of, we didn't have dugouts because this was like a field that literally had a fence and then like, 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 sidelines, but on the sidewalk, and they were a bunch of parents sort of standing on the sidewalk, sort of peering 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 laying down and ground. Turns out, they weren't gunshots. And somebody sort of ran by the group of parents and was running on the sidewalk, shot five shots into the roof 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 cellphones, and held 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, save 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, right 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 friend that's sick, or someone's going into the hospital. She's always goes with them. And I think that always inspired sort of me to do stuff that had positive impact in the world.

David Novak 17:09 

David sounds like you got a pretty good partner there. How about you tell us about a story from your childhood?

Dave Gilboa 17:14 

Yeah, maybe I'll tell a sillier story. And one that I I'm pretty sure the statute of limitations has passed here, to probably say for me to talk about this. But when I was 12 years old, I called into a radio show. And I want 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 to them. And, 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 and 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 a Dawson's Creek albums, I created album art that I printed out on our dot matrix printer, bought a bunch of CD blank covers, and bought shrink wrap that I shrink wrap 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 had gotten a cease and desist letter from the Warner Brothers IP lawyers who made it clear that I was violating their, their IP and she quickly shut down my my first burgeoning business, but I think it was just an example of, you know, 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 and that the we 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.

Koula Callahan 20:00 

Hey everyone, it's cooler here from three more questions. And if you haven't downloaded the new how leaders lead app who 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. 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 Dimon, 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 and just two minutes a day.

David Novak 20:56 

As I understand that, 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? Or what do you tell them?

Neil Blumenthal 21:11 

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 like, why are they saying this? If it's just you know, a character flaw, then you can ignore them. But maybe they have a legitimate reason why, like your idea is not as sound as you think it is. So when we started to, you know, tell our classmates, hey, we're going to disrupt the optical industry, we're going to sell, you know, $500 glasses for $95. In general, they love that idea. But when we told them, oh, we're gonna 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, you know, around the time period, where for the first time, people were selling shoes online, right? Zappos was quite popular, people are selling engagement rings through Blue Nile, right? These were two categories that people thought couldn't be sold online. And nobody was really selling glasses. You know, our friends would tell us listen, like, 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're like, Okay, well, how can we solve this? Like, is there a technology where people could virtually try on glasses, and at the time, there really wasn't? Then, you know, again, getting enough of these hearing from these routers enough really pushed us to figure out how do we solve for this Tryon issue. And that's where we came up with the idea for a home tryon, where you send people five pairs of glasses, they have five days to try it out at home. And then if there's a pair they like at that point, we put in the prescription lenses and send it to them. And this was a major sort of milestone in the company coming up with this idea. It gave us a competence to continue to go move forward. So there times where you want to dismiss naysayers, but you want to understand sort of what are their doubts? And you know, Can you are you being intellectually honest? And do you have a strategy that will overcome these issues?

Dave Gilboa 23:33 

This is also an area where having partners I think, was especially helpful where, you know, we would enter we thought we had a really good business plan. We entered the Wharton Business Plan Competition. And we didn't even make the finals and got a bunch of feedback from the judges about like why this business would never work. And it would have been easy to take that feedback from established business people Wharton graduates that are, you know, all very credible and have seen businesses succeed and fail, and kind of take that and say out there, they're probably right. But the fact that there were four of us that we really believed in each other, we believed in this idea, we were able to parse apart some of that, that feedback, put a bigger chip on our shoulder to prove them wrong. To Neil's point, we didn't ignore all of it. We use 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, I think was massively beneficial to absorb that early criticism and critiquing. You

David Novak 24:36 

guys are known for being fantastic brand builders. And, you know, I came up with marketing myself, and you know, I admire so much of what you've done, but I got to a head scratcher for me is how the hell did you come up with a name Warby Parker, tell me about that because I know you had some major league banking on that.

Neil Blumenthal 24:55 

And that was one of the hardest things in building the company. He 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, you know, similarly, we kept coming back to this idea of glasses, right? There are 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, you know, 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, you know, folks like Alan Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, and there happened to be an exhibit on Jack Kerouac 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 Kerouac and there were these two characters, Warby pepper and zag Parker. And I remember when he sort of share that with Jeff, Andy, and me, and he was super excited. And we're like, this is like, jackpot. This is it. And we'd gone through 2000 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, alright, well, let's get some market research here. We literally did a survey with our friends of Warby Parker. And we asked, folks, do 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 I 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,

Dave Gilboa 27:21 

and the URL was available for $9. You

David Novak 27:25 

liked it? 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 and 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 9999? It was $95. Tell me about that. How did you think about it?

Dave Gilboa 27:56 

Yeah, so we knew we wanted to change behavior and, and that, at the time, only about one to 2% of glasses in the US are being sold online, and the types of customers that we were going after, basically, you know, ourselves and, 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 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 10th 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, you know, 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 gonna work. He knew nothing about glasses, okay. 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 and no one's gonna 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, 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's 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

David Novak 31:34 

a credible and you know, you've had to attack the business and costs on every aspect of that. No, that is not that easy. And, you know, one of the things that you guys have said, which I really like, scarcity leads the cool. You know, where did you learn that lesson?

Neil Blumenthal 31:51 

I think we just as growing up you you'd see what people 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, and you need to create scale, and how do you scale a brand with integrity, that could be ubiquitous and could be wildly available, but it's 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 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, and then 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 this? And was like, oh, maybe we should open up a tournament in 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

David Novak 33:57 

you say is the biggest thing that you've learned about brand building that every leader should know? I know that 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.

Neil Blumenthal 34:10 

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 have 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 where he wears sort of chunky acetate frames, just like that were part of our first collection, right? There was a bazillion reasons why we could say like, this made sense for us to do.

David Novak 35:21 

You know, Neil, you you harken back to the early days you tell that story, you know, but here you are. Now you're 2024? How do you think about creating new memories for your people and your customers?

Neil Blumenthal 35:34 

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 introduced the Halloween ease, which are the Oscars, the Academy Awards for Halloween and for costume. So we now you know, at the end of the day, right before we have sort of a big party, we have the Halloween II 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. We haven't had any controversies yet. But rest assured, we may. So we'll be careful who we choose to host the Halloween each year,

David Novak 37:15 

you have KPMG monitoring the results, you

Dave Gilboa 37:18 

know exactly.

David Novak 37:26 

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 time Kobe joined the show, I loved hearing how they prioritize quality over quantity, all while having a ton of fun.

Tyler Toney 37:52 

We made a decision early on that we were going to put out content basically every other week. And 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

David Novak 38:52 

back and listen to my entire conversation with Ty and Kobe from Dude Perfect, including my rendition of their legendary catchphrase, pounded noggin Sia, it's episode 116 here on how leaders lead.

Dave, you launched the business online, obviously. And now you have over 200 retail stores, you know, walk us through the thinking behind going to the brick and mortar strategy because most people would think at least on the surface, you know, much lower cost structure very challenging. You know, why do you need to do brick and mortar when you've done so well on the internet? Yeah, so

Dave Gilboa 39:37 

we're still super excited about our E commerce business and like that there's still lots of potential to sell glasses online and we're excited to kind of 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 tryon 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 a 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 doesn't mean that anyone is going to know who you are doesn't mean anyone's going to buy anything. And we kind of joked, well, 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 none of us are 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 recognize you only have one opportunity to launch a brand. And we wanted really to kind of establish ourselves with a stamp of credibility from the fashion and design world and, and we got a call from our PR firm, and they said, Hey, guys, GQ is hitting mailboxes, newsstands tomorrow, I just went to your website, it says coming soon, like 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 we are stayed up to like for a try to squash as many bugs as we could, you know, that website still had a bunch of issues with it. But we pushed it live, we didn't even tell like our parents or our best friends that the site was live, but we need something to, you know, for people to go to. And they got that magazine. And then we were sitting in class the next day, and I had my phone set up to be notified anytime 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, realize that we had taken more orders than we had inventory for and we had no sold out functionality, no weightless 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 inventory issues. Later, our developer was able to put up some waitlist functionality pretty quickly. All of a sudden, we had a waitlist 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 or your office and we said, well that our store and office is Neil's apartment, but come on over. And all of a sudden we had strangers coming in to 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 ecommerce checkout. And we found that people love the experience. They love getting to meet the people behind the brand. They love being able to try on the entire collection of frames. And we joke that that was kind of our first foray into to 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 100 square feet to what we call the customer showroom is really a couple of West Elm tables with some computer setup on them and some glasses laid out. All of a sudden, we had hundreds of people a week coming to try eyeglasses to buy glasses. We were doing several million dollars out of the sixth floor showroom. And then that gave us the confidence to then open up some pop up shops. We bought this old yellow 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 that 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 store 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 a doctor In every one of our stores that can offer comprehensive eye exams, we have opticians that can make adjustments. And, and so we're finding just a tremendous benefit of having both scaled, online offering, but also stores that are conveniently located for most of our US and Canadian customers.

David Novak 45:19 

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?

Neil Blumenthal 45:31 

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, right, that are very consistent, whether it's around qualities speed, price, right. And these are across 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

David Novak 46:38 

know, I gotta 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?

Dave Gilboa 46:47 

Ready? Let's do it.

David Novak 46:48 

Hi, here we go. Okay, Neil. What three words best describe you

Neil Blumenthal 46:53 

fun, happy, caring. Dave,

David Novak 46:57 

who would play you in a movie?

Dave Gilboa 46:59 

I get Bradley Cooper most often.

David Novak 47:03 

That's good. I agree with that. Neil, if you could be one person for a day besides yourself. Who would it be?

Neil Blumenthal 47:10 

Ooh, that man.

David Novak 47:14 

Dave, what's your biggest pet peeve?

Dave Gilboa 47:17 

miss deadlines or miss commitments? Something that yeah, if I'm expecting something it doesn't happen. tends to drive me nuts.

David Novak 47:25 

Meal. What's a fun fact about Warby Parker that no one else knows. Except the co founders.

Neil Blumenthal 47:32 

One of the names that we were considering was lagom, 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. laga

David Novak 47:47 

Dave, what's your go to Warby Parker frame? The

Dave Gilboa 47:52 

Murphy Semmering right now.

David Novak 47:56 

Neil, describe your last I can't believe this is happening to me moment.

Neil Blumenthal 48:01 

It's funny a few come to mind. One actually was a while ago, 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 in Union Square in Manhattan. And that was the subway platform and I saw somebody wearing AR glasses. And the person kind of like looked at me. And you know, because I was staring at them. And they started to walk away and I start to follow them and like the what that you don't do a New York, right. It's like, follow somebody on a subway platform. It was a little bit awkward. But I was just so excited. Like the person was kept looking back at me. And I'd be like this grin from ear to ear. They just thought I 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, 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 like partnered with us for you know, the the 10 years leading up for it. And it was pretty cool, to be honest, to ring that bell and to see, you know, a lot of people that were so important in our lives there.

David Novak 49:12 

They what's one of your daily rituals, something that you never miss.

Dave Gilboa 49:17 

Now I have a nine month old daughter and make sure that it's fed and I have like a one on 115 minute daddy daughter date, no devices, no distractions. And just make sure that happens every day. Neil,

David Novak 49:32 

if I turned on the radio in your car, what would I hear?

Neil Blumenthal 49:35 

Probably holla notes.

David Novak 49:39 

Dave, what's something about you that few people would know?

Dave Gilboa 49:42 

I was born in Sweden, and I still speak Swedish with my mom.

David Novak 49:47 

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 Back, tell us a story of what you're doing in schools.

Neil Blumenthal 50:03 

So one of the things that we would find walking into whether it's a rural area in Bangladesh, or even a school here and 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 and school just, you know, magically, like don't need glasses. So we thought, okay, like, 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 and the public school system in New York City, and it's 1.1 million students and 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 kids get to choose a pair of Warby Parker glasses, and then we make them and deliver them a couple of weeks later. And we've seen this have impact on reading scores. Our hope is that, right? 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 misdiagnosed 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 Miss allocating money and having worse educational outcomes. So we're working and we're expanding to over 40 cities in the US to make sure that kids have the glasses, they need to be successful.

David Novak 52:20 

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, you guys mentioned that you you invest in startups, you know, they're embryonic stages. And but I got to ask you, do you guys have another big idea up your repertoire?

Dave Gilboa 52:40 

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, five years ago, and even two years ago, and and so launching our bricks and mortar stores and being able to scale that was one big shift in the business. More 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 new chapters within the world of Warby Parker, that 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, and so not thinking about doing anything else. But

David Novak 53:34 

I love that idea. I love the thought of being a serial entrepreneur and your core business, in 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?

Neil Blumenthal 53:58 

You know, I think if it was hard to maintain a personal relationship, that maybe we would still be such good good friends. But this guy makes it quite easy. I think in terms of how we grow as as leaders. One is that we want to get better. You know, one of the core values that Warby Parker's learn, 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. And by the end it all just starts with like a desire and ambition to get better and better. Hey,

David Novak 54:59 

Dave, how about you What do you How are you sharpening your AX,

Dave Gilboa 55:02 

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 1000s of people, some of those feedback cycles or are longer, you know, it's sometimes harder to understand, like, 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 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 on each other. And I think that is a really unique advantage of having a CO CO structure where you do have someone that, you know, 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.

David Novak 56:31 

I understand one of your professors that 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 don't. I think obviously you're all in and you're passionate about your business. And and but I wonder how you manage that all in aspect of your life now, at home, and with your partners and your family?

Neil Blumenthal 56:54 

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 Robin, 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 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.

David Novak 57:46 

Dave, what's the best piece of advice you would give to aspiring leaders?

Dave Gilboa 57:51 

I think what we found is that, 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, you know, we've really taken to heart and often counsel other entrepreneurs, other founders that 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.

David Novak 59:03 

How about you, Neil, how would you answer that question,

Neil Blumenthal 59:05 

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 Novak 59:26 

David Neela, I want to thank you very much for taking so much time with me. You guys are incredible. brandbuilders You're obviously really nice people. You know, that's what really impresses me here. You guys are smiling the whole time you're answering the questions. And you know, 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

Neil Blumenthal 59:55 

so much. Thanks for having us. Thank you.

David Novak 1:00:10 

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 Co Co 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 and 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? Well, we learned today is the 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 in defending masters champion, John ROM, I think is

Jon Rahm 1:01:44 

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 was facing that negative backlash of contradicting what I had said, but I tried to be as honest as I can. And I think I accepted the fact that there's gonna 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 can live with it. Is that simple. So

David Novak 1:02:15 

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