Carly Zakin & Danielle Weisberg: Co-Founders & Co-CEOs of theSkimm

Episode 702

On this episode of The Kara Goldin Show, I’m joined by Carly Zakin and Danielle Weisberg, Co-Founders and Co-CEOs of theSkimm—the powerhouse digital media brand giving women the tools to navigate life’s most important decisions. What began as a single daily email has evolved into a platform reaching over 16 million people, delivering smart, nonpartisan content on everything from politics to personal finance.
In our conversation, Carly and Danielle share how they’ve grown theSkimm from a newsletter launched from their couch into a trusted media company, how they lead as co-CEOs, and why their mission to empower women through information has never been more important. We dive into the evolution of their business model, how they stay relevant in a constantly shifting media landscape, and the hard lessons learned over a decade of building together.
Whether you're thinking about launching something bold, leading with a mission, or curious about how to build lasting connection with your audience—this episode is full of insights you won’t want to miss. Now on The Kara Goldin Show.

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Transcript

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. 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. Hi everyone, and welcome back to the Kara Goldin show. So excited to have our next pair of guests, very unusual that we do this, but we absolutely had to have Karlie and Danielle, who are the co founders of the skim. And if you have not heard of the skim you’ve been hiding under a rock. It is such an amazing, amazing company that they’ve built the digital media company empowering millions of women to navigate life’s most important decisions with clarity and confidence. And these co founders from breaking down headlines to demystifying policies and paychecks, theSkimm, has reached over 16 million people. Maybe that number has even gone up a little bit, but it continues to grow, and Karlie and Danielle are here with us today to chat a lot more about how the heck they did this, and I love how they’ve dove in together to lead together, create together, lead together, evolve together and stay mission driven in a world that’s constantly changing. So Carly and Danielle, welcome to the show. So excited to have you here. Thank

Danielle Weisberg 1:59
you. Thank you so much.

Carly Zakin 2:01
It’s a real treat. Thank you. Absolutely. Okay,

Kara Goldin 2:03
so take us back to the beginning. What? What inspired you to create this incredible company called the skim?

Danielle Weisberg 2:15
So we, I started the skim in 2012 and I think we were inspired by two things. The first was our friends who are smart, educated and really, really up to date on all things that they needed to know for their own careers or things that interest them. We were both working at NBC News in different parts of the news business, and our friends certainly were not watching anything that that we were producing for a living. We saw a trend towards personalization and towards getting more and more information from all sorts of different sources about the things that you are actually interested in, and that’s great, but there was quickly becoming apparent to us that there are things you just need to know to be able to Talk to a wide swath of people, to be able to have conversations, to learn from another person’s perspective. Um, and just because I may not be interested on a day to day basis about, you know, what’s going on with the markets, what’s going on with tariffs, whatever it is, it’s still going to impact my day to day, and I need to know about it. And so we started thinking about the skim as a way to give you what is going on in the world, outside of just your world, in a way that makes it accessible and fits into the limited time that you have. The second thing that inspired the company is really that we, you know, came of age in a recession. We graduated in 2008 were part of a group generation that saw these kind of social norms no longer exist in the same way that you worked for a company for a long time, and in the end, you’re paid off like there is a kind of social contract that they’re going to take care of you, and you work hard. Everyone was getting laid off when we started. There was so much instability, and we really had no faith that we were going to be able to financially take care of ourselves over the long run, by waiting in line for one job to open up. Maybe so

Kara Goldin 4:53
interesting. So were you working together? Is that how you two connected on this? No.

Carly Zakin 4:59
So we actually met in a study abroad program in college in Italy, in Rome, very special, which is crazy, because you never know where life takes you. We both worked at MVC, but never like together in the same department.

Kara Goldin 5:14
So interesting. So the early days of launching a newsletter from I don’t know if it was really your sofa, but what it really was your sofa getting together. Whose sofa was it? Which ended

Carly Zakin 5:28
up having to the main one was Danielle’s that I think he found on the street. No, no,

Danielle Weisberg 5:33
no, that that is that would be gross. No. I bought it from Housing Works with my my previous head. It was

Carly Zakin 5:39
always from the street, and so I never like to really sit on it. And then, then we had a smaller sofa that was less comfortable. That was mine from IKEA.

Kara Goldin 5:49
That’s the I love it. So what were some of the scrappiest decisions you had to make to actually get it launched? Oh, my

Danielle Weisberg 5:58
God, everything. I think. I mean, we had a couple $1,000 saved up, and that was it. So I think to launch it, and people were always complimenting us on the design, and it was so minimalist and specific, and that’s because we didn’t have any money for designers. So we, you know, designed the template ourselves. We made someone Yeah, we made someone who was super talented, a friend of a friend, like $50 to design our logo. We also our grassroots marketing. Sounds like such a strategy, but it was really just what we had like. We had a budget to print postcards through, like Vistaprint and 800 postcards, yeah, and then down also T shirts. And when we felt flush, we would use, like the whatever the brand that American Apparel used, like those T shirts, and we would get the skim ones. And then when it was a little bit like we had to pair back, then we would, you know, use whatever was on Vistaprint. And we would put those postcards in nail salons, Starbucks coffee shops, gyms like, try to, you know, get into Equinox, use the bathroom, and then leave it there. And we did a college tour, which, you know, at the time we were still young enough where we could somewhat pass on on a college campus, and we would run into, like a dorm and leave it under the doors, or sit in the cafeteria and pass it out.

Kara Goldin 7:42
Kara, what was your first message, I guess, on Do you remember what those cards said? Like, what were you telling people? What was the promise of the brand in those early days, our tagline

Carly Zakin 7:54
was, we read you skim. And there were these turquoise postcards, and just had the skim.com on one side and then that tagline, so just encouraging people just to go on the website, and the website was a landing page and just put your email in to get the daily scam.

Kara Goldin 8:14
I remember hearing about the skim from Alex Wallace. I don’t know if that name, yeah, so Alex and I go way back, and I remember her being in my office in San Francisco, telling me about you guys, and I didn’t remember that. Did you know her from NBC? We

Carly Zakin 8:37
knew her. She didn’t know us. Yeah, she was like, so she was a big deal executive. And actually my first internship at NBC met, and this, like, is dating us a little bit, but like, there was an on call list that had to go out every Friday, and it was like a physical printed paper of, like, everyone’s cell number, email, and then, like, who to go to if x, y, z, happens over the weekend. So I would deliver these, and Alex was one of the people I had to deliver to. And I would like, shake going to, like, be by her office, because I was like, I really want her to know who I am, and I want to talk to her, but I can’t. So I would just like slip the schedule and the on call thing, like, under her door. So

Kara Goldin 9:21
funny. She I remember her just saying, this is going to be the next big thing. And I was like, really, like, tell me more about it. She just loved you guys. And really,

Carly Zakin 9:31
we didn’t know her at NBC, so we met her afterwards, and she’s always been so lovely to us.

Kara Goldin 9:37
I think it really speaks, though, to it’s, you know, in order to grow a business, it’s not just about having a great idea, and it’s also about, you know, maybe people like Alex also watching the hustle, right? That you guys are really showing her that exists out there, and having. You know, a great idea is one thing, and a company that, you know, she thinks can actually make it. But also, she spoke a lot about you, how important do you think that is to be founders who are willing to kind of be out there and talk and show that you’re taking these chances. And I just think that it’s not just about the idea, right, like it really has to be, you have to be willing to get out there and really talk, because you’re going to be your best salespeople for for this idea. I

Danielle Weisberg 10:35
think, as founders, as you said, I think it’s imperative that you are your PR, you are your best PR, right? Like you are going to have to talk about this business, this idea, more than you could ever dream of, and you need to, I think also, you know, so much of of the amazing network that we built has been because we were shameless about going up to people and just striking up a conversation and and you never know where that will lead. I will say one of the things that I do question that has evolved since we started is the need for founders to go on social media and LinkedIn and build their own brand. And, you know, we love our our founder, Instagram account at Kara and Daniel, but it can be, it’s a lot of work at times. And I think especially for women, what I’ve seen more and more is that there’s an expectation that they are going to do that as well. And I wish that that wasn’t seen as so much of the norm that you because those channels aren’t for like, the messy things that content doesn’t do well. And we all know that starting a business, building a business, is lived in a day to day fashion of things going wrong,

Kara Goldin 12:09
yeah, definitely, although I do think over time, I mean, the more authentic you’re seeing. And I think that people want to buy from people who are real, right? And, and I think you both have done such an incredible job of of showing that, and also showing that you have a personal life, right? I think that’s okay to to show that. And that has changed, sort of with, I think, as social media has evolved to what was the moment you knew that the skim had real traction.

Carly Zakin 12:44
We were talking about this earlier today, I think, like there’s like kind of two distinct moments. One is literally day two. We are sitting on our floor in our living room, and slate published two articles. One of why you should skim, and one why you shouldn’t skim. And we were like, how is there a debate about us? Like, we’ve been in business for 24 hours, and I just remember, like, looking at each other and being like, what have we done? Like, in this like, weird, like, what’s happening? Let’s just like, watch this happen, I think then, honestly, because of a lot of the grassroots work that Danielle mentioned, getting recognized, not as like our faces, but getting recognized like with the skim tote or the laptop that had the skim sticker, and people being like, I love the skim and being like, Oh my God, and getting stopped throughout the country, truly, like anytime we traveled, of like people being like, I read you every day. And you know, we kind of made like a pact, basically, when we started like we will, we only bag or purse that we would use or wear would be our skin tote. And truly, I don’t think that we wore, either of us, like, whether it was a fancy occasion, not fancy occasion. I don’t think either of us wore any other purse for the first 10 years, like it was just these skim totes that people would see it. We were, like, living the brand, and I just like getting stopped because people were like, I wake up to you was just like, Oh my God. Like, there’s this is real. So

Kara Goldin 14:25
you started as as an email business, and you’ve evolved far beyond that. So how did you decide when and how to expand beyond email? I

Danielle Weisberg 14:39
think it was easier for us to decide to expand the verticals, and then distribution methods came and went. So, you know, our thought was to start we saw the white space around day to day news, and then cultural trends that were just part of that. And then. Really our audience. We became pen bells with, and that became our skin ambassadors, which are many of our super users, and they were the ones that we were talking to. We were in a huge Facebook group with. We had focus groups and events just for them, and this whole other line of programming and what we would hear from them really dictated how we started to evolve. So the thought of making things in your life more accessible understanding that you have a limited time in your day everyone does, no matter what you do, no matter you know what your responsibilities are, there’s only so many hours in a day. And so everyone has things that they have to do, whether they like it or not. And so we wanted to really start to distill, how do you make the best decision you can with the amount of time that you have? And that started to just be, you know, how do I think about a prenup? How do I find childcare? Here’s a tough situation I’m in, and all of that was heavily influenced by the authentic conversations that were happening in the groups that really our ambassadors had created.

Kara Goldin 16:27
I love how you mentioned in those early days that you dropped off postcards, right? You were still trying to figure out who was going to read this and beyond YouTube, right? And and I think that so often the founding of any business starts with this idea, that often the founder is thinking, I need this type of business. But then, you know you weren’t in college anymore, yet you thought there were this would be really useful to people in college, and then you had this data that you looked at, that you started to look at, how do I target? You know, who are these super users? I’d be so curious to hear. When did you start to really understand who this audience was? And I think the second part of the question is, I’m sure you have people that are still your super users that were in the beginning and their life has changed, as you talked about prenups, kids, all those things, how do you think about the consumer that’s been with you for a long time, versus new audiences in terms like, how do you rank them in terms of importance? Well, we’re

Carly Zakin 17:47
first and foremost so grateful for those who have been with us, like, Truly, this whole journey like, and you know, companies talk about like LTV, and you know, the the lifetime value of a user, and it’s like we have had such loyalty to this brand from the beginning that the fact that we have users that have literally been with us for 10 plus years is is unheard of. I think going back to your first question, we knew who our audience was, instinctually like before we even launched, like it was just a good unspoken thing. I think we were, we knew we were a part of it. We knew our friends were a part of it, like, just demographically, like, when we, you know, it’s, it’s so funny, because this obviously shows, like, how much has changed since we launched. But the word millennial was never like, used like, we did not know we were millennials. So I remember Googling, literally, like women in their 20s and 30s, and it was like, female millennial, here’s all the power that she has, here’s where she’s falling behind. And we were like, Oh, just like we thought. And so we knew early on, like, This is who we are creating products for. Think we were happily surprised to see there was, like an intergenerational aspect to it, where our target audience is mom or aunt or whomever loved the voice, loved what we were doing. And we had a lot of high school who then became college kids who were like, This is how I you know, teachers are like, this is how I teach current events to my class. So we, we definitely started to straddle kind of both ends of the age spectrum. But I think over time, as we got more I wanted to guess we got more sophisticated in, like, the data perspective, but also we’ve been built on zero and first party data since, like, the very beginning. We just didn’t know it was called that. So we literally would get your pen pals, as Danielle said, like with our audience, and we people would just literally write, like, reply to the email, and they’d say, Hey, I love what you’re doing. I work in Marketing. I figured you’d want to know about me. So here you go, and it would be like, here’s my household income, here’s where I. Education. Here’s where I spend, like, discretionary funds on I mean, it’s like everything. And so it was honestly understanding our audience, like our audience told us how to understand them very literally. And then, of course, like they grew up, you grew up. The stakes of all the things in our lives took on more gravity, and that kind of guided the way for us to expand into a lot of the verticals.

Kara Goldin 20:30
I love that so fundraising, when you look at I’m sure you have a million wannabe entrepreneurs, existing entrepreneurs, who have asked you this question over, over the course of building the skim, but what has been your experience with fundraising? It’s brutal.

Danielle Weisberg 20:52
And I think anyone that Well, I think anyone that tells you it’s not is either lying or they have managed to be like just hit gold with big tech or data play at the exact right time. I think it is something that is so heavily dependent on the momentum that you can create, and how do you spin a narrative over the time that it takes you to fundraise that keeps your brand, company executive team like positioned as, like, a hot thing that you want to get into. I think so much of it is marketing.

Kara Goldin 21:50
Yeah, definitely. I think something no one told me before fundraising was that often people will actually meet with you, but they don’t use your service, or they don’t drink your beverage, right? And so you you’re walking into this den of people, and I think you guys can probably relate where, you know they’re like, I don’t get it. Like, why would you what’s the difference? Like, and, and so you’re so excited and so enthused. But you know, if you’ve got an audience that really is is not there, and there’s almost no way they’re going to get there, the likelihood of turning them around is, is very unlikely,

Carly Zakin 22:39
absolutely. I mean, I think looking back on both sides, like if you are, if you’re in venture, let’s it’s just that you’re just talking about venture capital. It’s like part of people’s success in that world is like pattern recognition, like they can, you know, recognize similar steps or similar things that make them think of a company that maybe did incredibly well or maybe didn’t, and like that, expertise and pattern recognition makes an investor really, really strong, and the same way that also for as an entrepreneur, pattern recognition makes the decisions that you make over time much stronger. You start to realize when you’re hiring people, I’ve seen this show before, like, this is going to work, or it’s not, you know, debates, like, you’re like, I’ve seen this before, like, now, just to make a decision when I think back to, like, the early days and how funding, fundraising was just torture, and it was torture before we had anything, and it was torture when we actually had a lot. It just is not a unless you were very lucky. It is not a great experience. And I think what we did it, what we had to learn was, like the pattern recognition of when somebody is kind of just BS in you, and like taking a meeting, because they’re supposed to take meetings and believing what they’re telling you, of like, this could be really interesting. Like, let me take it back to the partnership, and you’re like, Oh, this is like, happening, and then nothing, you never hear from them again. So I think, like understanding, we didn’t have any understanding of that, so we were very, like, naive, in the sense of, like, we’re like, we’re like, that was a good meeting. They seem to really engage versus picking up the cues of, maybe we weren’t talking to the decision maker. Maybe we weren’t talking to somebody whoever invests in consumer. So, you know, when I think about what made it so hard, there’s certainly the biases that we all know about female founded companies, lack of female partners, like all of the things, biases against first time founders, all the things, but also like we were not sophisticated enough to recognize that those patterns and could have saved ourselves a lot of time.

Kara Goldin 24:55
Yeah, definitely. So co founders, you? I. Yeah, you co founded the scam together. Any thoughts on if you were giving maybe somebody launching a company about having a co founder, maybe things that you found along the way were really important in working together to define any of those thoughts on the topic of co founders.

Danielle Weisberg 25:26
I think if you have a co founder, you have it. You need to make sure you have the right one more than having one. I think if you have the right co founder, it is a miracle, and also one of the best, I think, advantages you can have in building a business, because there is someone else that understands inherently, like the stress, the joy, the frustrations, all of it without having to speak. And that comes in handy when you’re exhausted. I think that, you know, there was such a trend when we started where it was like, Oh, I started a business with with my roommate. And it’s funny, we would laugh because, like, we were roommates, but I had a good amount of roommates who I adore, but I wouldn’t have started a business with them. And I think, you know, we’ve, we’ve coached people a lot about the benefits of having co founders and how grateful we are to have had each other, and at the same time, you know, kind of warn them that I think having the wrong partnership can also be the hardest, making the journey to success even harder. Yeah,

Kara Goldin 26:50
definitely. I think, you know, going back to even the raising money topic, I feel like I founded, he co founded it with my husband, and the number of times that we heard like, oh, I don’t know

Carly Zakin 27:05
like that. I don’t know how you

Danielle Weisberg 27:08
what we we don’t understand that. That seems like insane to me. Yeah,

Kara Goldin 27:13
it’s but it, it works for us, but we’re very, very different skill sets. But I will never forget when we were talking to a VC early on, and he’s he actually wanted to talk to my husband. He said, I want to talk privately to you. And I was like, amazing, like, and so he talked to he talked to him, and he said, Listen, we really want to invest in him. We really believe in it, Kara, and you both have amazing experience in tech. We, you know, really want to do this, but, you know, the husband and wife thing doesn’t like. It just never ends well. And he was like, What? What are you talking about? And he said, Well, you know, there’s just a lot of, like, divorces and then the company breaks up. And, you know, he’s just listening and to what this gentleman was saying, and, and he said, I’m just curious, like, what companies have you seen that happen in? And he said, Well, I can’t really think of one right now. And the net of it, I just he got off the phone, he’s, well, I don’t know, but that’s just kind of what our firm thinks. And I add, I add, I just started laughing. I said, you know, there’s, he can’t even name the the example. And I said, it’s probably not really the reason why he’s not investing, but I think people just have these perceptions about why they’re doing something. I mean,

Carly Zakin 28:48
I’m like, in awe that you were able to do that with a spouse. I think that is I cannot imagine how hard that is. In the same way that people are like, I can’t imagine how hard it is for you and Danielle, like, as friends, to have done this for so long. I think, though, like, whether you are actually married or not, like having a co founder is a type of marriage, and what, like, the things that you have to talk about, and where I see a lot of people, we’ve coached a lot of people on this, where I’m like, don’t move forward with this person. Or this scenario is they don’t have the talks before they start. And so it’s like, in the same way, when you get married, like, you have to talk about, like, finances. You have to talk about what happens. How do we disagree? What are our values as a future family? What you know, like, how do we want to fight? Like, what, you know, you people go to, like, couple counseling to figure all of that out, and one of the things, and honestly, like, I there’s some stuff, but I look back, I’m like, Oh, you’re so naive on one thing, but on this part, actually, I’m like, so impressed that we knew to do this at 25 and 26 is, like, we sat down and basically wrote a proof. Enough as if we were getting married, and it was just, we talked about everything. It was, you know, and it was like, what if something happens to you? What it like? What happens to your to your equity? Like, I remember we like living. This was before spouses. We literally had a conversation around, like, how to, like, tap in our siblings. We were like, what happens with you know, one of us needs time off, which has happened, and so I think those types of conversations, and also like the real parity and economic incentives, economic incentive alignment is so important because a lot of times people use the word co founder, but they don’t actually mean co founder. They mean I’m the founder, and I have somebody who’s a Partner in my business, but that’s not a co founder. Different. It’s different, yeah, and that’s where I see a lot of people end up getting really hurt or, like, see the writing on the wall already, and then don’t know what to do.

Kara Goldin 31:00
So what do you think has helped the SCIM remain so culturally relevant for so long,

Danielle Weisberg 31:09
authenticity in that we know where we come from, and I think that’s us as people, which has influenced our team that we’ve been in business for together, the two of us, and this is how we work, this is how we communicate. And that sets, I think, cultural expectations and norms, I think also with authenticity and remembering where we came from. It is the millions of women who opened up to us who were so thankful that they did and that we could be inspired by their stories and what they needed and create, try to create those things, to actually help people make the decisions that are right for them.

Kara Goldin 32:04
Well, you guys have done such an amazing job. I mean, I’m I’m so proud of you both. You guys should be so proud of yourself. And I think so often as founders, we don’t stop and and say that, but it’s you’ve built. I mean, the skim wouldn’t be here today if it weren’t for you two. And I know the sacrifices that you go through, and it’s it’s not easy, and yet people think it’s glamorous. And, you know, you get to have the brand attached to you, but there’s a lot of things that you have to think about. And, you know, climb over those walls, knock down those barriers along the way that you guys have, have done an amazing job in doing that. So thank you for doing that, and thank you so much for sharing the incredible journey and all of your wisdom with us today to learn more about the skim. Head over to the skim.com and follow Karlie and Danielle on their social too. We’ll have all the info in the show notes, but thank you again, and thanks everyone for joining us on today’s episode. Until next time. Thanks.

Danielle Weisberg 33:14
Thank you so much. Great. Thank you very much.

Carly Zakin 33:17
Thanks

Kara Goldin 33:18
again for listening to the Kara Goldin show, if you would please give us a review and feel free to share this podcast with others who would benefit. And of course, feel free to subscribe so you don’t miss a single episode of our podcast. Just a reminder that I can be found on all platforms. At Kara Goldin, I would love to hear from you too. So feel free to DM me, and if you want to hear more about my journey, I hope you will have a listen or pick up a copy of my Wall Street Journal, best selling book, undaunted, where I share more about my journey, including founding and building. Hint, we are here every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Thanks for listening, and goodbye for now you.

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