Interview Replay: Million Dollar Mastermind

Kara Goldin 0:00
I am unwilling to give up that I will start over from scratch as many times as it takes to get where I want to be. I want to be you. Just want to make sure you will get knocked down. But just make sure you don’t get knocked out, knocked out. So your only choice should be go focus on what you can control. Control. Hi everyone, and welcome to the Kara Goldin show. Join me each week for inspiring conversations with some of the world’s greatest leaders. We’ll talk with founders, entrepreneurs, CEOs and really, some of the most interesting people of our time. Can’t wait to get started. Let’s go. Let’s go. Today’s episode is a bonus episode. I hope you enjoy it, and please make sure to tune in for a brand new episode of the Kara Goldin show. Enjoy.

Larry Weidel 0:54
Welcome to this edition of the million dollar mastermind podcast. This is where we pick the brains of high achievers from all walks of life and get their hard earned, real world insights on winning. I’m your host, Harry weidel, I’m here with the pleasure of talking with Kara Goldin, hello, Kara,

Kara Goldin 1:22
hello. Thanks for having me and

Larry Weidel 1:25
and you’re in San Francisco. Is that correct?

Kara Goldin 1:28
Just outside in Marin County, about 20 minutes, over the bridge, over the bridge, over the bridge, bridge,

Larry Weidel 1:36
I have done the helicopter thing, where you fly underneath the bridge and around

Kara Goldin 1:42
i You’re, you’re a bigger person than I am, because I I’m, I’ve been driving on the bridge when that happens, and I’m always, I’ve always been curious who actually does that, because it seems a little scary. It,

Larry Weidel 1:54
it’s more scary in retrospect, you know. But then when you’re there, you know you you know, you’re, you’re, you’re, it’s a surreal experience every time you get into helicopter, as far as I’m concerned. So

Kara Goldin 2:09
thank you much about it, but it’s I agree.

Larry Weidel 2:13
I do photography out in Aspen, and you have to have the doors open in the helicopter so you’re looking down 14,000 feet, you know, and you’re saying, What am I doing? Why did I think this was a good idea, but

Kara Goldin 2:30
another pretty part of the country too. So I bet your those photos are beautiful. And

Larry Weidel 2:37
so Kara, congratulations for to get everybody up to scale. You started, you know, you’ve done many things in business. You’re doing many things, and it’s always fun when I see somebody with this crazy schedule like you’ve got, and all the plates spinning, because I can, I can relate to it. It’s like, how did this, you know, how did I get myself into this, you know, but there, it’s fun and, you know, you get ideas, you try things, and you learn things, and you have a lot of fun. Meet a lot of people. And here’s somebody who has accumulated a wealth of knowledge about how to navigate life successfully, and the proof is in the pudding. The started your company will hear about that called hint, yeah, unflavored water and 2005 now, 200 it says to the statistics we’ve got is 262 employees, roughly, and revenue north of 110 million. That sound roughly about right,

Kara Goldin 3:55
much higher than that, actually, but yeah, so we’re, you know, just, just about 200 million net so, wow. Yeah, so it’s hint is now, 17 years in, we are the largest unsweetened flavored water in the US, only available in the US at this point. And, yeah, yeah. I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s crazy. I mean, I didn’t know that. I call myself an accidental entrepreneur. I had no idea. I, of course, knew that I was starting a company and launching a new product, but I had no idea that I was starting an entirely new category in the industry, which is called unsweetened flavored water. And why that’s important is that you can’t get shelf space. You have to educate the consumer as to why they need it. You know the points, like when we were trying to actually get it into stores, the. Buyers would say to us, well, if it was such a great category and such an important category, then why isn’t Coke or Pepsi doing it right? And, you know, and I’m like, I don’t know, but I’m here, and you know, that’s you get a lot of no’s along the way, right, when you don’t have, when the established players aren’t doing what you’re doing and so so that, that, in and of itself, I think, is a when I look at entrepreneurs that have disrupted industries, I’m always so curious, who were the name what were the names that they heard? What were the roadblocks that they heard? And, you know, how did they keep going? Right? Because you do hear a lot of nos. You have a lot of people. You probably have your own doubts, but when people are actually telling you why you can’t. Often people are actually projecting their own thoughts and securities on you, right? But, but that was, you know, the early days, the early days,

Larry Weidel 6:14
it’s great to be first in, you know, like Bear Aspen, you know? Yeah, yeah. Mayor aspirin, you got a Coca Cola, you know, the first into the coke category. You know that it’s great to be the first one to create the category. Unfortunately, it’s almost impossible to get going like that. And because people will say, what you ran into, you know, what? What is it? You have to do so much education. But you do, if you pull it off, you got an insane advantage, because the other people have to fall following your footsteps, you know, like, so when you start like, what’s fascinating you talked about disrupt drivers, looking for this comment while you were talking like the hunt, The Huffington Post listed you as one of the six disruptors in business, alongside Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg. Pretty heady colleagues in the disruptor world there Did that surprise you when you you saw that it

Kara Goldin 7:21
did actually, you know, I’ve been interviewed for a ton of different pieces over over the years, but I actually no one called me for that. So it just sort of showed up on a on a Google Alert one day. So I thought it was, I’ll take it, yeah, it was, you know, a lot of fun. And, you know, I think that that’s, it’s, yeah, I mean, more than anything, I think I looked at the other people that were on that list as disruptors, right? And, you know, I mean, even Facebook, when Facebook was first coming out. You know, there were a lot of people that didn’t believe that Mark Zuckerberg could actually get this to market. I mean, he was still in college, right? There’s a lot of people who think so much today, but that if you don’t go to college, you can’t actually develop a company. Well, yeah, actually, there’s a lot of people jobs and as well as Marcy Bill Gates. I mean, there’s a lot that didn’t go so, you know, that’s a wrong statement based on what we know today. Yet, I think, and again, I’m not, you know, bashing going to college. I think that there’s other reasons why you’d want to go to university, but I think it’s it really speaks to people are going to have opinions, and how do you keep staying focused and moving forward? Because that is what disruptors do. And how do you get through and how do you keep doing? Well, it

Larry Weidel 9:06
just shows like you started with an eye, you got an idea and you wanted to make that a reality. And as a result, you became a disrupter. You weren’t, you know, they say, I want to be a disrupter. You wanted to bring an idea forward, it seemed like, yeah,

Kara Goldin 9:22
and I think it’s, it’s, I think it really boils down to having the right habits that you’re, you know, moving forward and and getting up every day and continuing to work on trying to make Something happen. I knew that in order to actually launch a beverage, I needed to actually get it on the shelf. Well before I can get a product on the shelf, I had to figure out how to make it I had to figure out how to get a UPC code. I mean, I didn’t come from the beverage industry, and. And I think, frankly, I thought that this process was a lot of fun too. I was ready. I was at a stage in my life where I wouldn’t have said this then, but looking back, I was at a stage in my life where I’d kind of risen in the ranks. I was managing a lot of people, and I just wasn’t having that much fun, and I wasn’t that interested in what I was doing. I had accomplished quite a bit at a pretty young age, and I had worked just to back up. I had worked in tech, and I had started at a little startup that was doing CD ROM shopping back in 1994 which was the early stages of what is now known today as direct to consumer. One of our investors. Well, first of all, that CD ROM shopping company caught my eye when Walt Mossberg, who at the time wrote for The Wall Street Journal, talked about this was an idea that started it was a Steve Jobs idea inside of apple that you put all of the graphics on a disk until modem speeds would catch up, and then just tell the consumer just keep upgrading, upgrading. So we kept, you know, discs were everywhere. People were using discs as as coasters, right for at home. I mean, that was, that was the 90s. So I cold called when I just moved to San Francisco from New York. I cold called the person that was quoted in the article, who was the head of marketing, and I said, this seems like a really interesting idea. I had come from media. I’d worked at a kind of a later stage startup called CNN, which is only in about 40% of the country. That’s a whole other story. But I knew nothing about technology. I knew nothing about how this worked. I thought it was really interesting, because it was going to make the internet potentially, it was the future. It was the vision of what the internet would eventually become once the, you know, the we call the bond modem speed would ultimately catch up. But anyway, so after cold calling, the person, convinced him that I he should have coffee with me. And I didn’t know anybody in San Francisco, so I just thought, if nothing else, maybe I get to meet one person I don’t know. And it’s funny, because as we were having lunch, I said, so what was it like to work for Steve Jobs? I had been obsessed with Steve Jobs. Had an early Macintosh computer when I was in college. And he said, Well, I’ll tell you what. I’ll tell you what it’s like, what it’s been like to work for Steve Jobs, if you tell me what it’s been like to work for Ted Turner, and I, and I thought it was fascinating, you know, again, like, I didn’t work directly for Ted Turner, I was many written down, but I spoke about sort of something that today we call culture and like the feeling, and like you always knew Ted was in the building, even if he didn’t announce it, you could just feel it, and you could hear him. And it’s sort of, you know, this other piece that I learned early on that when you have founders around, there’s a vision, there’s an energy that is contagious, right? And people want to follow that anyway. So I love the idea for this company. I really didn’t go there to go and get a job. It was called to market. And after he had heard that I had helped work on something at CNN that was kind of the early stages of something called the airport channel, which was putting monitors inside of airports, he said you should come and help us at to market. And I said, What would I do? And he said, well, we need somebody to cold call catalogers and retailers and see if they’ll put their catalog on our disc. And I knew nothing about shopping other than the fact that I like to do it, and I knew which ones would be interesting and and so I figured, what’s the worst that can happen? I mean, if I take the job, I don’t know anybody in San Francisco anyway. I mean, I can just forget about this job if it doesn’t work out. But that. Because it ends up that that was a really good decision. Because shortly after taking the job and doing things like calling Mickey Drexler, who was the head of the gap at the time, they didn’t have a catalog, trying to convince him that they should be on this disc and step into the internet, step into the future. That’s when one of our investors, America Online said, we’re going to acquire you, and we would like this team to come and help us build out shopping on America Online. So I was running the partnerships on America Online for all e commerce and nobody really. I was the youngest vice president. I was one of the few women at that ring. And again, it was from cold call, from just calling somebody because I was curious about this, this company that was sort of solving a problem that I saw as well for what the internet or how do we get to what the internet should be, I guess is the best way to say it. Well,

Larry Weidel 16:16
so far, I’m picking up that you’ve right from the beginning, you’ve been interested in companies that were headed into the future and were going to be important, doing important things in the future, in terms of CNN. And you know, for some reason you wound up with CNN, you know. And so CNN was a nothing company back then, you know, it was basically a vehicle to show Atlanta Braves baseball games around the country. You know,

Kara Goldin 16:53
totally well. And you know, it’s, it’s, it’s a funny story, because I was, I started my career in New York at Time Magazine, and I was there for a few years. I very quickly realized that, and again, I think that kind of changed over time, maybe at time, but that the culture that I was in. I had gone to Arizona State University. I hadn’t gone to an Ivy League school, and time they hired me and but there were limits that as to where I could go in this company, unless I went and got my MBA, and then one day, I got a call from a headhunter who said, there’s this company, CNN, that is interested and interviewing you. Would you be interested? I’ve loved being in media, but for me, the goal was really ABC, or maybe NBC, a major network, right, right? If I was going to go anywhere outside of magazines, I wanted to go to one of those, but they weren’t hire me. They weren’t even going to interview me because I didn’t have the right experience. Yeah, and so I viewed getting a job at CNN twofold, one I wasn’t going to be heading up within time unless I decided to go to business school. And so it got me out of there to go to something that would be a stepping stone to eventually get me to ABC. But what I realized really quickly, and this is where, you know, I mentioned earlier about having a founder around, I really tasted, you know, the excitement of having a founder around. And you know, there were days when Ted would walk in the building and speak to us. He generally was in Atlanta, but he was in New York a lot, and he would speak to us about his vision. And he’s like, you know, the world needs 24 hour news, and there’s one feed, and it doesn’t matter what their government looks like, what language they speak, and it will happen at the time CNN was in 40% of US households, you know, less than 5% internationally. And here’s this guy so confident in his cowboy boots and a suit on that that this is the way the world is going to work. Hey, Kara, here we are thrilled. You are listening with us, and I hope you’re enjoying this episode. I’ve had the pleasure. Interviewing so many amazing guests over the past few years, and there are so many more to come. I cannot wait, and my focus is on entrepreneurs and CEOs, real innovators and leaders who are making a difference. That’s what I’m looking forward to bringing you. One of the reasons I enjoy interviewing many of my guests is that I get to learn. We all need to hear stories that teach us to be better, inspire us and help us get through those challenging moments. I can’t remember the last time I had a guess that didn’t leave me feeling like a major hurdle had been overcome. We just don’t hear these stories enough, and when we do, we learn to be smarter and stronger. Don’t you agree? Episodes are concise but packed with amazing info that you will surely be inspired by. Do me a favor and send me a DM and tell me what you think about each interview that you get a chance to be inspired by and if you are so inclined, please leave one of those five star reviews for the Kara Goldin show on one of your favorite podcast platforms as well. Reviews really, really help. Now let’s get back to this episode.

Larry Weidel 21:15
Yeah, when you see something other people don’t see, you know, which is what the visionaries do, what you saw with your water, it gives you a, you know, a clarity and a strength that other people, you know, that the status quo. You know, the thing is to you didn’t realize right from the beginning you were going to be fighting the status quo, because you didn’t want limitations. You know, you were smart enough coming up to recognize about, you know, limitations. You said the limitation word. A lot of people don’t think about that. You know, the deal is like, do the job you are today, but raise your eyes and look down the road. Is the company you’re in, the industry you’re in, what you’re doing? Are there limitations there? What? How do you feel about those limitations? Do you are you going to accept those things? Are you going to do things that allow you to where you will have unlimited potential, you know? And that’s what the you know, the big companies, the things that people listening this, need to realize, don’t be discouraged if you get out there and get put down by people that are the respected, reputable, you know, established companies, you know, the big behemoths out there, because they are invested in keeping things pretty much The same way. And they, you know, they’re still to, you know, they do things the same way. Now, what happens is they go down because they lose out on talent like you and you know, people who could be creative out think outside the box, highly motivated, don’t want to be put into a, you know, a square and stay there, you know, cubicle and you know they want, you know, they’ve got more energy. And so that’s why, that the young companies have a chance, you know, they give you more opportunity. They’re going to attract people who probably are turned down, you know, by the big, established companies, and that’s probably a good thing. If you got turned down there, raise your sights and think maybe this can be good for me, because maybe I’d be in a slow growth or a limited growth situation if I got what I thought was a dream, dream job, I’ll tell you something which you can relate to. We had conventions in Atlanta, and we would always stay at the Georgia Dome. At the time, it was a Georgia dome Convention Center down there, and one time we were in there, and I met the CNN elevator with Ted Turner and Jane Fonda, uh huh, waiting for the elevator. And this is when they were just starting together, and he was talking to her, you know, I just happened to her overhearing. He said, You know, the thing is, he said, What I he said, I just thought about it today. He said, I’m not actually qualified to get a job, any job that they have here at CNN. He said, I’m not qualified to fill any job there, because, unfortunately, I don’t have to. It doesn’t matter, because, you know, I own the company.

Kara Goldin 24:38
Yeah, no, and that’s the thing. I mean, Ted was just, you know, is very funny. I think that

Larry Weidel 24:46
he said, you know, in the this building, this, you know, the whole building here, he said, I could never afford a building like this, but fortunately, I built it.

Kara Goldin 24:56
No, he’s so funny. I mean, it was, uh. Yeah, so when I left that and moved to San Francisco, I was actually my husband, my fiance at the time, was graduating from law school and wanted to do this thing called technology law. And no one was doing technology law in 1994 so we moved and I thought maybe I I was taking a break, but I thought maybe I go to a regional office and work at CNN and do what I was doing. But instead, I thought maybe I do something else. I mean, you know, I don’t know. I’m not wedded to it. I’ve only been in both of these, you know, types of media for for the last few years. So maybe I go do something else. So anyway, that was when I stumbled upon this CD ROM shopping company, and it was primarily because of this fascination with Steve Jobs I wouldn’t have been able to really articulate it. It was like for me, that was the story, was how I connected, you know, why it was interesting to me, because I had, you know, I could rattle off sort of some of the cool things that he had done for the computer industry, but I didn’t know how it worked. And I think that go ahead.

Larry Weidel 26:21
Do you remember what the guy told you about his experience for what it was like to work with Steve Jobs?

Kara Goldin 26:27
Well, I think you know he’s, he would say that he was, you know very much how I think most founders are that he had, he had strong opinions. He was, he was relentless in actually focusing on, you know, what was kind of the goal and and getting it done. And he, I mean, the interesting thing for me, sort of thinking back on it, is, I think he definitely micromanaged. You know, many people who worked alongside him that I’ve, you know, been fortunate to meet over the years, but I think that, you know, looking at sort of the most successful founders in many different industries, which I’ve been really fascinated and have studied. I think that there’s a consistent threat amongst you know, you’ve got to be able to lead a company. You’ve got to be able to have that vision in order to get people to jump in the boat with me, right? And and I think what Steve was probably doing, while supporters may call it micromanaging, I think Steve was very good at hiring people who knew more than he did. I think primarily because he wanted to learn from them, and he wanted to bet. He wanted to win, right? He had an idea, and he hired people, probably because he was curious about things and he wanted to achieve things. So that was, you know, really smart. But I think, more than anything, you you know, you have to keep pushing the line forward for people and setting goals. But sometimes that’s hard, right? I think that, especially if you’re not articulating the goal and the new goal constantly, it just depends. But I think the other thing about Steve that obvious to anybody listening is, you know that he was about simplicity and about the messaging and that the consumer didn’t need to know how things worked. They just needed to know that they did

Larry Weidel 28:58
right. And you get a product that they want, you know. And I’ve also, I’ve always said about a like dis if people think like Disney World, Disneyland, what do you think of fun, you know, great with smiles, you know, the family and a great experience? And I said, Yeah, that’s what you think of. That’s the veneer, but underneath, behind there, you’ve got the most technologically advanced machinery, software, employee training. This that the other to deliver that ice cream type experience. You know, they hide all that from you. Yeah,

Kara Goldin 29:37
I mean, it’s interesting. I’m going to take a sip of hint right now. Here’s the hint bottle. But a lot of people have said, you know, why don’t more people knock you off and like and do this product like? How have you maintained such a large lead in this category? Yeah?

Larry Weidel 29:59
That’s a good, good question, because, like, how hard could it be, you know?

Kara Goldin 30:05
And it ends up that it’s, it’s pretty tough because you’re using real fruit, you know, people want to cut corners and and make they want to use, you know, flavor houses and things that are, you know, you’re not going to get the right taste. It’s not that he hasn’t had competition over the years. I mean, Coke had tried to knock it off five times in the last 17 years, five times, but they did it with, they did it with a couple different I think mistakes, first of all, they use the Dasani name, right? And they added essence to it. And I think that there is a perception that goes along with Dasani, like it or not, right? The consumers have and and so to actually create that name something new that you want people to have a positive feeling you’re, you’re almost working against yourself. That’s number one. And number two, they used the cherry syrup that they probably use in Cherry coke to actually, you know, create the product. But what was fascinating to me, and it’s something that, you know, I talk about in the book, too, I used to think primarily because people would tell us this, especially when we were early on trying to get shelf space or raise money, they’re like as soon as Coke or Pepsi comes out with a competitive product, you’re toast. I mean, you’re Yeah, you’re done. And so many investors or potential investors would say, we’re not going to invest in you. And it actually ends up that that started to happen. Those were really like bad days for me mentally, because I thought, Okay, this is the beginning of the end now that CO complexity of launch competitive products, but it ends up that competition is actually a really good thing, because they help bring awareness to the category, right? And so it’s not to say that it wasn’t disruptive. We I remember the first time at a major retailer target, we were in Target, and then we got the phone call that we were getting bumped out of target because their category captain, which was at that time, Coca Cola had decided that they wanted to use our space for this competitive product. And I thought, oh, okay, well, so where are we going to go? And they said, bro, so we got kicked out of there. And the irony, actually, few lessons learned from that. First of all, always have options, always have options. Always have options.

Larry Weidel 33:14
You’re the leader. Look down the road, see what’s coming. Yeah, and, and,

Kara Goldin 33:17
you know the and you can be mad, you can be sad. You can, you know, hate target. You can do hate Coca Cola. You can do all these things. But the real problem is you have nowhere to go, right? And so that’s really what you’re most upset about, because you didn’t have options. And you can sort of play that strategy out for lots of different bad situations that could occur along the way. But what ended up happening is they not only got the space that we had in target, but coke also got more space than we got and because they were, you know, important customers to to target. And then about three months later, we got a phone call from Target, and they said, uh, Coke decided that they don’t want to the numbers weren’t good enough for them. They didn’t sell enough product, and they aren’t going to do this category anymore, and we actually like the category. We have consumers that want the category, so we’re inviting you back in, and not only inviting you back in, but you get the additional space that coke had. So we gained space. I mean, never thought that would happen. And so every time a competitor launched, we gained space. Yeah, amazing. They wouldn’t be able to, you know, and that’s the other thing that I learned about if, if you have large, this is the mentality of large companies. So their success measurement is different than my success measurement right there. So they’re sitting there looking at comparing their numbers to Smart Water, coke, or, you know, whatever, and, and, I mean, I’m, I’m just looking at, you know, growth for my brand, and trying to figure out how I keep gaining space, and so the more times that they continued to come into the space, by by the time it happens, you know, the second time I was excited when we have competition. And that, frankly, is, you know, a big business lesson that I share with people over and over again, that if you actually have multiple people in your category, it’s, I’m not saying that it isn’t scary at times, but it’s like, focus on what you can control. Yeah.

Larry Weidel 35:55
How did you you know you’re coming up through there, and somehow you must have, somehow got yourself ready to handle this, this idea. And I’m curious, why you say accidental entrepreneur, were they that was that related to the idea, how the idea came, or that you were gonna that the idea came, and then, hey, we could make this into a product. Or who’s gonna do that? I would do? How is that accidental?

Kara Goldin 36:30
Yeah. So the backstory was, and

Larry Weidel 36:33
you became a founder, they all of a sudden, now you’re a founder. I’m

Kara Goldin 36:36
a founder. And I had worked for founders, yeah, incredible founders, directly or indirectly, you know, between Ted Turner and didn’t work for Steve Case, but work for people who are sorry Steve Jobs, but didn’t work for people or, or, I should say, worked for people who worked for Steve Jobs. And then ultimately, when we were acquired, obviously, Steve Case was running America Online and another incredible entrepreneur, one way to become an entrepreneur or founder is to, you know, go and study these people and say, go work for them, and then I’m going to start my own thing. But I never that was not my plan. My plan was actually focused on cool companies that I was curious about and more exciting. And that was it, and I left America Online in 2001 I was pregnant with my third at that point, and I had my second and third very close to one another, and so I decided to take a little bit of a break. I didn’t know how long that break was going to be, and it wasn’t until I was actually spending more time eating healthy, feeding my young kids healthy stuff, that I started to realize that, or feel like I was a hypocrite, because I was telling my children and feeding my children better for you things, and then I would look down at the ingredients in my diet coke and think I don’t even know what I’m drinking. I mean, it’s sort of ironic, you know, like, and so I decided one day that I was going to just give it up, and because it just wasn’t in line with how I wanted, what I wanted in my house. And I wanted more, you know, healthy things, but also much more understandable things, I guess is the best look at it. And so when I started looking for alternatives to Diet Coke, I thought, you know, I should be drinking water. Water is the healthiest thing that you can do somewhere along the way, people said eight glasses of water. I had been told that many years, but I thought, Well, why don’t I do that? Why don’t I drink water? I don’t drink water because I found it boring, and I could answer that question very honestly. And I thought, well, maybe my maybe while I’m taking a break, what I should do is figure out how to make water more interesting. And so I started slicing up water and put it in the glass, not thinking about calories or anything like that. I’m like, I solved my problem. And then I realized that I had another problem, which was that I had to buy a lot of fruit over and over and over again because it only lasted so long in the refrigerator. Pitchers that I was creating. And another thing happened when I made this. Which I lost a lot of weight that I assumed was just how I was supposed to be, right. So in two and a half weeks, I lost over 20 pounds. Over the course of a year, I lost almost 60 pounds. I mean, I I significant, and I never thought that the the Diet Coke and weight were like tied to one another? I assume that this was just the way my body was wanting to be. And you know, now I look at diet sweeteners, as you know, releasing insulin. I mean, there’s a lot of things that have come out about these diet sweeteners. But again, I was drinking the Kool Aid, so to speak, for many, many years, thinking that diet was better for me. But again, I had time now taking a break from my tech job to sort of think about these things. But when I went to my local store, Whole Foods had just opened, and I went there looking for a product that didn’t have diet sweeteners in it, that just tasted better and was closer to what I was making in my kitchen, that’s when I realized two things, there wasn’t a product like I was making in my kitchen, and also, how many, many people, friends of mine, had been convinced that tricked, I should say, by these healthy perception items like vitamin water was a huge product on the market. I was fooled by, you know, diet drinks, but I thought, how many people are? Could be helped buy a product like I was making in my kitchen that don’t know it’s possible, and there is billions of dollars being spent on, you know, trying to market to these people and the diet industry. But again, I sort of hadn’t, kind of done the business plan and ran all the numbers around it. I My gut told me that if you could actually create something like I was creating in my kitchen, that you could help a lot of people. And so I asked the guy at the local Whole Foods who was stocking the shelves, the beverage in the beverage aisle. I said, so what does it take to get a product into your store? A logical question. And he said, Are you interested in the local producers plan that we have with with different local producers. And I said, Sure, that’s yeah. And he said, So you produce locally? And I said, I do. I’m thinking about it. I didn’t say it out loud, but I make it in my kitchen. Yeah? I thought, well, this will be a lot of fun. I’m gonna but again, the word entrepreneur, the word founder, the word creator, visionary. None of those were even crossing, you know, like none of it was and so, you know, I think often, like, if you think too much about the end, right? You’ll never get past the beginning, right? Yeah, exactly. So that was the early, you know, days of hint. And again, I The

Larry Weidel 43:54
other thing is, the other thing is to get to the point where you think this would be fun, you know, you’ve reached that. You’ve reached that point with a lot of the things that you’ve done up to this point in terms of jobs, whether you know it or not, you know, like with CNN or with that company out there, it’s like, hey, that would be fun. That would be you know, that’d be cool. And so you reach that same point in your mind about this thing, and from there on, you were just kind of screwed. You screwed yourself because now you’re going to follow what was fun,

Kara Goldin 44:28
no? And, you know, I, I think I was doing an interview with somebody the other day. I, I really did prioritize having fun. I was always that person, yeah. And, you know, just a quick example, my dad had one rule in our house, which was, we always had to be in sports. And sometimes the sport that we were best at was it was not that time of year for that sport. So, you know, I would. To figure out what other sports we could do. So, you know, I’d go play softball, and I quickly recognized that I was not a great softball player, but I fascinated by people who were really good at softball, and I would study them and really understand kind of, you know, how they how and why they were good at it. And I realized that very quickly, that, you know, I didn’t have to be the best at everything. What I had to do was be able to go out there and have a good time. And that is, I think, how I’ve how I’ve made decisions about what I want to work on, what job I want to have first, led by curiosity, can I actually be engaged in a spending my time there? Because I have always believed that you have choices right on where you do spend your time, but are the people that are going to be around you kind of helping you to stay curious? Yeah, I think that, you know, I mentioned earlier, when I was at AOL, I got to a level which I think a lot of people get to, is they’re sort of rising through the ranks, where you’ve got people that you are managing and people who are are teaching, and I think that there’s nothing wrong with that, but when You are the most knowledgeable person in the room, you’re in the wrong room, right? Yeah, and that’s what leads to dissatisfaction in you know, your your role within an organization, maybe even in life, right? I think we’re as humans, if we don’t stay curious, if we don’t keep like raising the bar for ourselves, then you’re unhappy. Well, there’s

Larry Weidel 47:12
two things, if you don’t mind me, pointing out track that you’re the track, the winning track that you’re on has been, you know, following intent, and it’s the founders journey, is following the breadcrumbs, you know, following your natural curiosity. I don’t talk about it much, but my cousin is H Edward Roberts. He’s one who invented the personal computer, the Altair, Bill Gates and Bill Gates and Paul Allen left Harvard and went to Albuquerque to do the software. And so that’s where Microsoft came from. Wow. The name of the company was Micro Instrumentation. And so they were Microsoft, the software for the that’s incredible company. But he said, he said, always told me, and this was, you know, I talked to him before I went to Georgia Tech’s, you know, started to, you know, like, how can I get the most out of the experience? And he said, always follow your natural curiosity. Said the schools, the corporations, they want to beat it out of you. But as long as you follow your natural curiosity, you’ll say, fresh. You’ll stay, you know, you’ll stay alive. And so, you know, he was the founder gates, you know, Gates and Steve Jobs and all of these guys, Ted Turner, they’re following their natural curiosity. And then the other thing is, they’re following growth. You said it earlier. We, you know, they wanted profit margins, and this that the other and that’s the established companies. You know, they, they, you know, they want to hold their position. They want to get a certain yield, because, you know, they’re answering to there’s reasons for it. They got stockholders and CEOs that they don’t hit those quarterly numbers. They’re they’re gone, even the CEO is gone. So they’ve got reasons to be rigid and stay, you know, inside those boundaries. But when you’re the up and coming company, the most fun is growing. You know, the figuring out, bigger, faster, quicker, better, more fun. Wouldn’t it be fun to be over here? How about if we go over here, you know? How about if we could expand over there? One, what that would be like, you know? And so like you’re out, you said you’re mainly in the United States right now. It’s like, Would it be fun to be, you know, in 120 countries, you know, what? What would that feel like? You know, you know, step by step, you start probing the future, but that’s how you know. I just want to point that out to people. You know, what’s funneling your drive and keeping you on a really successful course is those kind of two things, and that’s what gets you past that’s a that’s a good thing, because. You have doubt at every step of the way. You know what I wrote your book, undaunted. But you have doubt every time you get a new challenge, which is every day of the year. And so you you figure, what are we going to do now? But that that following your natural curiosity like wonder, if we did it this way, what if we talked? You know, what about we’d find out if we talked to them, you know, if we investigated that market, and then you say, wouldn’t be fun if we could do that? That gets you through, that helps power you through a lot of doubt? Yeah,

Kara Goldin 50:32
definitely. And I think, like, the other thing that happens, you know, with any startup, is that you have, you know, maybe you call it luck, but you also are opportunistic, right? And so 100% no matter what category, what industry you’re in, and so you recognize that you know things are going to happen along the way, that that you know, you just have no idea. You didn’t plan on that. And I think that the more times that happens, you get used to it. So I think, like, what’s hard if you, you know, continue to work inside of a very established company, that is, that is, you know, public, private equity, whatever it is use there, they like predictability. Well, you know, the people who are starting new industries are used to things not being so predictable. And so they end up being the people that you actually want to put into crisis situations. Yeah, that if you look at sort of, you know, the last couple years of the pandemic, the people that could actually not in every industry, but, you know, could weather the storm and think fast and and, you know, keep moving forward, were the ones that had sort of either been in a startup and had been used to that or, or, you know, they had grown up in the kind of environment, maybe, if they’re At a large company, so but, you know, look at Airbnb, for example. I mean, everything was shutting down. It looked like the world. They didn’t, you know, Brian runs the company, was not sitting there staying complacent. He was actually figuring out a question that, you know, I ask myself every every day, like, what can we do? And if you’re not asking yourself that question, when you start to hit those roadblocks in life and business whatever, then you know that that’s a problem.

Larry Weidel 53:01
Yeah, and that feeds the primary thing is, like the hardest job any of us have is to keep ourselves excited about our work and what we’re supposed to be doing, and finding other ways, intriguing ways, better ways of doing that. What that does serves to motivate us. It’s like, Oh, I’ve got an idea. Let’s see how that turns out. You know, it’s just like someone, if you’re a painter, you get an idea for a painting or for a song, you know, if you’re you know, and you can’t wait to kind of try it out. And so that’s what the leader is supposed to be doing, that the end result is a leader stays fired up, and that puts you in the mentality to be able to have that vision or that vibe. When you enter the building or you get in a meeting, you’ve got something. There’s a pulse going on inside of you. But it doesn’t just come. It comes because you’re thinking about, where can we go? How? How quick? Now, when you came in and you got something like, you know, it was an idea, it would be cool. But when you start with a cool idea, a lot, as you get into it, and I imagine this happened for you, there’s a lot of positive unintended consequences and applications that that come to you later, that that gets you even more excited about being on, you know, pushing that, that button. So how did that happen for you as you got into the the business?

Kara Goldin 54:34
Well, first of all, so I had seen for myself how, you know, shifting this, you know, habit that I had of drinking diet soda into water. How much did it help me? But I’ll I’ll never forget it was the first week that we had actually launched in in Whole Foods. I received an email from. A consumer. Nobody, at the time, 17 years ago, was putting emails on bottles of, you know, products that went on in the food category. We had done that in tech. Every any time that you were putting software, there was a customer service number that you could easily reach people, but it was not a common practice amongst food and beverage companies. But again, having come from a different industry, I was like, Okay, well, if we have room, we should put that on the bottle. So that first week, I heard from a consumer, and he wrote me, and of course, he thinks that it’s this big customer service team. It’s me a founder, right? And he said, you know, picked up a bottle of this product. Thank you so much for finally creating hint. I’ve been looking for a product that doesn’t have diet sweeteners in it. I have a disease called type two diabetes, and I I thought, huh, I’ve heard of type one diabetes, but I had never heard of type two diabetes. So I said, Would you mind hopping on a phone call with me. I’m very curious. And so he went on to share with me that he had this thing called type two diabetes, and he doesn’t know how he got it. He wasn’t born with it. And what he figured out that he couldn’t find any doctors to say this, but through his own experience, was that he would actually have insulin spikes every time he had diet sweeteners. And so he was figuring out he was trying to find a product like him because he wanted to solve his, you know, health issue and drink better tasting water. But that wasn’t the reason why I developed the product, but all of a sudden I was seeing that it had a bigger market fit, right what I had imagined for it, and and so here he was saying, Thank you. A total stranger, somebody who you know, didn’t know I was going to create this product. And so that’s something that I think is also really important for anybody thinking about developing a company, and sort of, I think any founder would tell you this is having a connection with the consumer and the consumers. I mean, that’s like, that’s fuel for you. And if you don’t actually understand what your consumer is thinking, then you know you’re like, if you don’t sit I would still get on a customer service call to really understand what consumers are thinking about. You just you have to be able to have that connection. So I would say that that was, you know, kind of the early piece that really kept me going on on, sort of, you know, the other hours in the day, I was dealing with buyers that were saying, No, we’re not interested in bringing in your product because you don’t have the right experience. You It’s not proven that your product and then on a few other hours during the day, I was actually trying to figure out how to create this product to have a longer shelf life. I hadn’t figured that out. Yeah, and I think, like, that’s the other thing that I learned from the tech industry, which, again, was not really something that was practiced in the food industry. You know, when you think about when people launch products in the food and beverage industry, they launch it, and then it’s like, it’s either a success or it’s a failure, right? Tech industry, you launch something and then there’s an update, an upgrade, yeah, right? And and, like, that’s the way that industry works. And so sort of being able to be in an industry like that and bring that learning and that thinking it was, was really, I mean, that’s the way that disruption happens in industries. It’s not typically people who come from the industry that are actually going

Larry Weidel 59:45
to change, and as you look at everything with a different slant, you know, it’s like you do, yeah, that’s why kids are so good, you know, in certain situation, kids come in and say, Why do you do it that way? You know? And, yeah, they come. In with a clear,

Kara Goldin 1:00:00
clear eye, yeah, and, I mean, a part of, you know, even hiring people over, over the years. I mean, I’ve said, like, you know, this, this idea of only hiring people in who have five years experience, or, you know, probably not. I mean, maybe you want some of those people, but you also have to have a team. Teams work best, and teams will be more creative when you don’t have all the same people sitting in a room, right, with the same knowledge base that you know, they bring something else into the room. And so I think, like that kind of startup mentality, I think, is it was something that, again, I go back and look at as as, really, you know, enormously important for for him. Well,

Larry Weidel 1:00:55
I’m a little miffed right now, because I really want to continue and find out about how you took it from your first thing in Whole Foods and got it up to over 200 million in revenue. But we’re going to have to come back, because I want to hear about undaunted, the book, yeah, and what got to the point where you said, I’ve got to write a book on this. So

Kara Goldin 1:01:25
I call myself an accidental entrepreneur. I’m also an accidental author, because that was never on my bucket list to write a book, but I was taking notes along the way. Because when I would take notes on some of these stories that, you know, I had no one else to talk to about it, because most of my friends were not in the beverage industry, and I would run into things. So anyway, my notes were about 600 pages over the years, and I kept going back and reading the notes, thinking that I would be able to solve the problems along the way, right? And as I was doing that, and I think I was speaking at a conference at one point, and I thought there’s so many stories that I have that, even if you’re not in the beverage industry, are really applicable to people and on, you know, getting started on figuring out, you know, what mistakes you made, way moving forward, All these thoughts that I’ve had that I would share with audiences. And I phoned a friend who has written many books, and I said, so how do I take my notes and put them into some format that could help a lot of people? And she said, You mean, write a book? And I said, Yeah, I guess. And so probably the hardest thing was to actually take those 600 pages and whittle them down and easily got a second book.

Larry Weidel 1:03:15
Self Editing is the hardest thing. It’s

Kara Goldin 1:03:17
so, yeah, and I hired, actually, somebody to help me, you know, drill it down, but, but it’s interesting. I think that the thinking in writing this book was that I am a female entrepreneur. I’m a female CEO. And I think many, many publishers that I brought it to felt like the audience would be really small, that it was that, you know, I wasn’t. I was a female executive man.

Larry Weidel 1:03:53
It’s amazing how they just naturally fall into the wrong assumption on everything.

Kara Goldin 1:03:59
Yeah, and again, there’s, there’s your doubters right there. And so I’m like, I don’t think so. Like, you know, I’ve, I mean, they said is that has the tech industry burned you in some way? No, I mean, I don’t know, I guess, like, if I really thought hard about it, but I just kept moving forward, I kept figuring out how to keep moving forward and and stay curious and keep learning along the way, and and, and so it’s the same thing with actually publishing a book. I mean, finally, I ran into Harper leadership, part of Harper Collins, and you know what they realized is they’re like, look, we’re we’re going to give it a try. There aren’t very many at that time when it was published. There aren’t very many women executives who have written books and kind of shared their story, right, that have been successful. And I said, Well, have. A lot of them written books. And now said, Okay, well, also, there aren’t very many of us either, so I mean, maybe it’s time, yeah, and you know, what’s the, what’s the worst that can happen? And so this book is like, I think what, what is most interesting and exciting for me is, is, is, it’s really exactly what I thought was. It wasn’t narrow at all. I have plenty of men, plenty of people outside of the beverage industry that have read this book that it’s inspired them. I’ve had a lot of C suite executives that have are, especially over the last couple of years, started to figure out, why haven’t I gone and done something? I’ve always sort of thought about this idea, but I’ve never found the time. I’ve never wanted to take the risk. And if this book can inspire people to actually go out and live, yeah, I’m done, right? I I’ve done my job, yeah? And if, if we can, I mean, there’s humor in there. Everybody loves my husband, Theo, after reading this book, and there’s a section in there about mold and water in the early days, where we didn’t know how to make the product. And he was educating Whole Foods about the fact that they shouldn’t kick us out of the store because they had blue cheese in the store. And, you know, it was. And so again, like, I think, just being able,

Larry Weidel 1:06:44
but what comes to me from this, and it relates that you can’t hear folks. You’re listening this. You can’t hear this too much. Every new idea is a bad idea, until it’s not, you know, to everybody else about and every idea you come up that won’t work until it does. So don’t be surprised. Like, I’ll give you an example my you know, it’s like when they came up with the fax machine. You know, somebody came up with a fax machine and they they showed it. They said, Well, who will buy something like this? You know, unless he’s got one over there, why would I buy one? And so, you know, 100% and

Kara Goldin 1:07:28
I think it’s like you it just takes, it takes one person to come up with these ideas, and, you know, make them successful, and then they’re a genius. My favorite thing to do today is run into people who were my biggest doubters and and, you know, I love, you know, tons of people in Silicon Valley. You thought it was absolutely crazy that I was jumping off the tech track to go and start my own average company. That was not a very smart thing to do in their mind, and they thought I was going to fail, and I’m like, Wait, just a minute ago, you were telling me how great I was, that I was going to do awesome in tech, and I was hireable, and now I wouldn’t be, because I went and took a risk. And so if this risk doesn’t work out, can I go back to that? And the answer is yes, absolutely right. I mean, the best employees that I’ve hired over the years are the ones that have failed, yeah, something, and the ones that can actually own, I’m sure you’ve got people that you can think of that will actually tell you exactly why it failed, right? That doesn’t mean that they’re a failure. Yeah, right? And I think, like, that’s the thing that you know, it actually ends up that, if you go out and challenge yourself, and it doesn’t work out, that may actually help you to figure out what you really want to be doing, what you’re right,

Larry Weidel 1:09:14
there’s a fail, you know, it. Those failures are usually in areas that you needed to fail in because you needed a wake up call and you needed a change of, change of direction, or to get more serious about something. Or, you know, I know when I got embezzled out of, I don’t know how many millions of dollars. And by my 16 year, closest personal assistant, you know, it was like, Yep, my fault. I shouldn’t have let her anywhere near the money. You know, it’s just like, but for every million, you know, what I said to myself is, for every million I lost, that’s going to be 10 to 20 million that I’m going to save down the road, because I’m not going to let that happen to me again. But that happens to people all the time. You know, I’ve. Him, you know, all the time. I could tell you unbelievable stories. You know, of the my billionaire buddy, who has had his his he got screwed so many times by accountant. Finally got his cousin in there, my cousin, and then he found out his cousin when he went by my friend, a went to Savannah to buy him a gulf stream. He also bought himself a twin engine plane for himself as a bonus. And he, he kept doing things like this. He bought a 2600 acre property for my friend, and then across the street, he bought an 800 acre thing as a bonus for himself. And when he he got so arrogant one year, he gave himself, this is an account gave yourself a million dollar Christmas bonus. And finally, my oblivious billionaire buddy, finally that got his attention. He said, You know, I always wonder why all these corporations, when you want to get a check out of it, and had to go through three or four or five different levels? He said, Now I understand. He said, Now, if you want to get a check out of me, you’ve got to do the same thing. But we all make those mistakes. But you know that that happens? You know that’s life teaching us lessons.

Kara Goldin 1:11:12
No, exactly, and I think that it’s, it’s really, it is life teaching us lessons. But we have to put ourself into those places, especially if we are good at something. Expect, well, if you’re good at something, then you just keep rising right, and then you, like I said earlier, maybe you start managing people or whatever, but the Create, the creation, the sticky stuff, the hard stuff, right? That you have to make conscious decisions to go and that, because everyone else around you, family and friends, are the worst, they don’t want you to take those risks, right, right? And I think that it’s like, it’s up to you, and you’ve got to be really disciplined to, you know, really go and make those things happen. Otherwise they will not happen. You

Larry Weidel 1:12:15
know, next time, Kara, we’re going to talk about your podcast, and that’s one of the things I wish we had time to talk about here, but we’re going to, we’ll do that whenever we we set up next time. I love it. I got the idea that your podcast is pretty darn powerful, and people would get a real not only a kick, but they get a lot of information from it. Tell them the name of your podcast. So

Kara Goldin 1:12:40
it’s called the Kara Goldin show, and it’s funny Patty sellers, who had was the editor in chief of fortune for many, many years, and started the fortune Most Powerful Women. She interviewed me for something last week, and she was asking me about it. She said, How many people say no to coming on your show because you’ve had, like, amazing people, you know, Jeff Van, little from GE and Chip Wilson from Lulu Lemon. And I think when somebody has operated a company, as I have, and is interviewing these people, I ask questions that I’m curious about, right? And it ends up to be a dialog that is more about, you know, operating it’s like your colleagues, that you’re that you’re talking, versus journalists interviewing them. And so it’s a it’s a lot of fun, but it’s also, as I said to Patty, you know, it’s the guests, I think are pretty unique. They’re not going on a lot of other shows, because I think a lot of people don’t ask them, you know, because they think, Oh, they’re too high level, they’re too this, they’re too this and, and I’ve met a lot of them along the way, and I just call them and I say, I just need an hour, you know, have this conversation. But the stuff that you’ll learn about failure, about forming boards, about what they wish they would have done, you know, Jeff, I’ll in particular when I interviewed him, I’ll never forget I didn’t expect. The first thing I said to him is, what like, how do you follow Jack Welch? That must have just been like, Did you walk in the door that morning and thought, you know, I’m ugly, and he’s like, What were you thinking? And I didn’t realize this, but he actually his first official day on the job was 911 wow, I didn’t know that either. So he said he couldn’t even think about following Jack Welsh because he had so many businesses that were affected by 911 and frankly, the. Businesses that he shouldn’t have been in. Like it was just so, anyway, so, so, like, I think

Larry Weidel 1:15:08
my hats off to Jack wealth for picking the right day to get out totally,

Kara Goldin 1:15:14
you know, but, but again, like, you start to really get inside the mind of these people that are creating things that are kind of, you know, against the grain of what people think exactly happens. So thank you for bringing that up. This

Larry Weidel 1:15:34
is, this has been so much fun, and we’re definitely gonna have to do it again.

Kara Goldin 1:15:38
I would love to that sounds terrific.

Larry Weidel 1:15:41
I’m excited about, I’m going to go out and buy some of that hint, you know, because I’ve tried, you know, why I’ve gotten turned off of because I’ve got, I’ve tried the ones that are the bad ones, you know, with the flavored stuff. And it’s like, this is sour, you know? But I, I didn’t know it was out there, so I’m going to go straight to get some hint right now

Kara Goldin 1:16:07
online as well. And it’s, you know, nationwide, Costco and Target and Walmart, and it’s Whole Foods everywhere.

Larry Weidel 1:16:16
Yeah, thank you for coming up with the idea and putting it through and making it available. So I’m gonna look forward over the next few years to see it continue to expand and grow. So thank you so much. I appreciate it.

Kara Goldin 1:16:31
Thank you. Goodbye. Before we sign off, I want to talk to you about fear. People like to talk about fearless leaders, but achieving big goals isn’t about fearlessness. Successful leaders recognize their fears and decide to deal with them head on in order to move forward. This is where my new book undaunted comes in. This book is designed for anyone who wants to succeed in the face of fear, overcome doubts and live a little undaunted. Order your copy today at undaunted the book.com and learn how to look your doubts and doubters in the eye and achieve your dreams for a limited time, you’ll also receive a free case of hint water. Do you have a question for me, or want to nominate an innovator to spotlight. Send me a tweet at Kara Goldin and let me know. And if you like what you heard, please leave me a review on Apple podcasts. You can also follow along with me on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn at Kara Goldin. Goldin, thanks for listening. You.