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Course: Entrepreneurship > Unit 1
Lesson 15: Dave Gilboa & Neil Blumenthal - Co-founders & Co-CEOs of Warby ParkerStarting and staying in business with friends
Created by Kauffman Foundation.
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- How does one know when one has a winning idea?(6 votes)
- It is one thing to have an idea, but putting the effort into developing that idea into an actionable plan and then evaluating that plan for likelihood of success is a primary key. Then of course it is all about action.(3 votes)
- But if something goes wrong in the business, wouldn't your friendship break apart?(2 votes)
- It could, but you had a very strong friendship, or if the problem was not one of your friends (or yours) fault, I would assume that you could make up and forgive each other, especially if you take the blame. This might fail, and you could lose your friends, but true friends would either forgive you, even if it takes awhile, or not get mad at you in the first place. You really have to evaluate the risk of losing your friends if the business goes bad, the profit you might get, and the what would happen if you refused to join the business with them. I would trust my friends to forgive me, and I would forgive them. If you act professional about a 'fail', then your friends might, too.(4 votes)
- What are specific thing you can make a business out of?(2 votes)
- What's the percentage of online sales versus the percentage of store sales of this company?(1 vote)
- Hard to tell. That's a data that they may want to keep in secret.(0 votes)
- I wish ideas are made in Juice spots or yoghurt parlour. Does loyalty to friends mean anything these days?(2 votes)
- Yes, because your loyalty starts from your friend. When loyal to friends it means you are loyal to customers in terms of business.(1 vote)
Video transcript
- My name's Dave Gilboa. I'm Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Warby Parker. - I'm Neil Blumenthal. The Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Warby Parker. - [Dave] We started
talking about this idea in the computer lab when we were at school with our other two
co-founders, Jeff and Andy. And I think all four of us, we couldn't stop thinking about this idea. We each were emailing back and
forth at 3, 4 in the morning. We were so excited by the potential to do something different and special. - The next day at school I was like, hey this was a really
interesting discussion yesterday. I think this is a really powerful idea. Later that night, we all went to a bar and around the table we
committed to each other that, hey, we're gonna bust our
butts and work really hard. We didn't know if we were
going to be successful, but at least we sorta said
we were going to do it. - The more we learned,
the more excited we got. And then the next step was, okay, this is a good idea, we were spending time on it, are we willing to put our
money where our mouth is. - [Neil] We actually all put in the same amount of money and
we're all equal partners. We thought it was going
to be really difficult at the beginning to say, "Hey, you're worth 'X'
and you're worth 'Y'." So we just figured, hey,
if this thing works out, it's gonna change all of our lives. - [Dave] The next step was
let's set up a vesting schedule that gets us to graduation
and if for any reason one or more of us wants
to do something else, they'll get credit for time served but the people that continue
building the business will be compensated proportionally
for spending more time. Turns out all four of us
were incredibly excited and so none of us dropped
out of the process, but we wanted to be thoughtful about setting up those mechanisms ahead of time. - We knew that it was risky sort of starting a business with friends and there were people far smarter than us that had started businesses
as friends and then quickly sort of become bitter enemies. So, one of the things
that we started doing was going back to the bar
that we decided to launch the business out of. And on a monthly basis, we would just sit around
the table and talk. We'd put people in the hot seat. We'd have those honest conversations. If there were any issues, they would bubble up
and we would discuss it and we would resolve
it before it exploded. - We really made this firm
commitment to each other that our friendship and treating
each other fairly and well was more important than the
success of the business. And that's been something that I think was absolutely
fundamental to the success of the founding of the company
and something that we've really tried to infuse
through an entire organization now that we have over 300 employees and create a culture where feedback is the norm. - [Neil] And I think that
really set the tone for a healthy working dynamic
and ultimately for a very collaborative company culture. - We've tried to stay pretty
close to Penn's campus and the students there. And every time we're there, we'll go grab a drink
at the bar Roosevelt and actually one of our first frames, and one of our most
popular selling styles, is called the Roosevelt. Because of that bar.