Dave Gilboa of Warby Parker
Why A Company’s Values, Really Matter.
"FEARLESS CREATIVE LEADERSHIP" PODCAST - TRANSCRIPT
Episode 156: Dave Gilboa
Hi. I’m Charles Day. I work with creative and innovative companies. I coach and advise their leaders to help them maximize their impact and grow their business. To help them succeed where leadership lives - at the intersection of strategy and humanity.
This is Season 3 - “Leading The Future.”
How should leaders lead as we meet a world of new possibilities and expectations?
If you walk into any business that’s powered by creative and innovative thinking and ask any kind of question about how that company works, you will hear - usually within the first five minutes - someone talk about the importance of the organization’s values.
Sometimes there’s real evidence that those values are directly affecting how people behave and how decisions are made. Evidence that in that company it is the principles that drive the creation of profit. And not the other way round.
More often, that kind of evidence of their values is hard to find.
But when decisions are made and money is spent as a direct result of an organization’s commitment to its values, then those companies feel and look different.
The values of a lot of companies have been challenged and threatened by the dual viruses of COVID and racism. Some have been strengthened in their resolve. Some have been washed away.
These next few months are going to be chaotic. The rules are going to be written and rewritten. Industries are being reformed, culture is being redefined. It’s happening already.
Decisions are being made today, literally today, about how to compete for talent and relevance in this new world.
The companies that win those races will do so because they are making decisions based on a clear set of principles. Their values.
The first company that talked about their values in a way that left a lasting impression on me was Warby Parker. They defined their values as a start-up and two years later, when they had grown faster than anyone predicted, they had the entire company re-look at their values to see if they were still guiding people’s behavior and decision making. They discovered that of their eight original values, seven were still relevant and the eighth needed only to be adjusted slightly.
Warby Parker is a twenty first century business. A case study in what purpose driven, values based, agile, innovative and disruptive looks like. At the beginning of 2010, the company didn’t exist. Mid-way through 2020, it was valued at $3 billion dollars. They have given away more than 8 million pairs of eyeglasses, offering the gift of sight and changing the lives of people around the world.
Today’s guest is Dave Gilboa, co-founder and co-CEO of Warby Parker.
Books have been written about the strategic steps they have taken to grow this business. But I wanted to understand the personal journey that led to him starting this company and how he, his co-founder Neil Blumenthal and their senior leadership team are adapting to the challenges of our new world. What guides them today?
Here’s Dave Gilboa.
Charles: (03:00)
Dave, welcome to Fearless. Thanks so much for coming on the show.
Dave Gilboa: (03:03)
Yeah. Thanks for having me on.
Charles: (03:05)
Tell me, when did creativity first show up in your life? What's your first memory of creativity as a concept?
Dave Gilboa: (03:14)
Wow. That's a great question. Yeah. I think it was when I was a young child. One of my first memories was just painting with watercolors. And, I think at that age, there are just no constraints on anything that comes into your mind and no feelings of judgment or boundaries. And so, yeah, just remember just going to town on anything that was coming into my mind and then getting generally positive feedback from my parents and family on things that were largely incoherent, but yeah. Just remember just that sense of wonder and awe and trying to convey whatever was in my mind onto a piece of paper.
Charles: (04:25)
What were your biggest influences as a child?
Dave Gilboa: (04:30)
So, I was born in Sweden and when I was six, moved to San Diego. So, my dad grew up in Los Angeles and my mom's Swedish. And, having such a big change in my life, in every aspect, from language and culture, geography, climate, was, I think, incredibly influential in opening the aperture to my mind around how big the world is and understanding that there are massive differences beyond what you see in your local community. And so, I think that's always been an inspiration for me to travel and explore and try to understand parts of the world that are pretty different from the ones that are in my immediate purview.
And then, my parents had a really massive influence on me, as they do with all children. But in particular, both of my parents are doctors and they're both the first people in their families to have gone to college and really ascribed tremendous value to their education and the opportunities that that afforded them and the opportunity to then take on careers that not only created opportunities for them and us as a family, but also gave them the chance to help people. And so, from an early age, was really inspired and motivated by thinking about education as an avenue for growth and opportunity and then thinking about my career as an opportunity to help people and help make the world better.
Charles: (06:38)
So, it sounds like you developed a sense of empathy pretty early on.
Dave Gilboa: (06:43)
Yeah, absolutely. You know, some of my other early memories as a child are just tagging along with my parents when they would go to the hospital and just understanding what went into helping improve the lives of people and saving the lives of people, and that was really inspirational and motivating as I thought about my own career path.
Charles: (07:15)
Did you take a lot of risks as a kid? Would you describe yourself as a risk-taker back then?
Dave Gilboa: (07:20)
I'd say I played by the rules when needed to, enough to get good grades in school and not be too rambunctious. But also, did take risks and got in trouble from time to time, including some early entrepreneurial adventures as a kid, did things that maybe I didn't appreciate that there were legal consequences around one of the... Probably my first business, if you could call it that, I called into a radio show and won a CD burner back when the world had CDs, and went on my parents' AOL dial up account and went into these chat rooms and started downloading and trading MP3s and I downloaded a bunch of songs.
At the time, Dawson's Creek was the number one show for teens and I created the Dawson's Creek official soundtrack and I bought a bunch of blank CDs and created artwork on my parents' dot matrix printer and used my mom's hair dryer to shrink wrap these CDs and I sold them on eBay for 90 to 100 bucks a pop, which all worked out great until I came home from soccer practice one day and my mom had this really stern look on her face and sat me down at the table and she had in her hand the 20 page legal document from Warner Brothers' legal department as a cease and desist letter that I was violating their IP. So, I guess I was comfortable taking those types of risks.
Charles: (09:09)
Were you afraid of anything back then? Are you conscious, looking back, that there was anything you were really afraid of?
Dave Gilboa: (09:17)
I guess fear of failing and not having an impact and... Yeah. Being inconsequential.
Charles: (09:28)
Yeah. It's such an interesting biography because obviously the story of Warby Parker is so well-told and so well-documented and there are so many people who are trying to learn the lessons of how you guys have done what you've done. And, I'm always fascinated by understanding the human dynamics behind great business leaders and the impact that they're able to have. How do you define success?
Dave Gilboa: (09:55)
For me, it's all about impact, so the number of people that can hopefully help improve their lives and the extent of the impact on those individuals and just want the feeling that my time on this planet mattered and that it helped make the world better and... And so, as we were thinking about the concept for Warby Parker, we were intrigued by the idea of creating business innovation and solving their own problems as frustrated eyewear consumers. But we spent as much time talking about how could we embed a social mission into the fabric of the company so that as the company scaled, so would our impact and thought a lot about the mechanisms that we could measure that and what would be the clearest measure of the impact. It would be the number of people whose lives we touched and recognizing that giving people the gift of sight is a transformational gift in terms of an individual's ability to learn and work and produce income for their family. And, that's where we came up with the concept of our ‘buy a pair, give a pair’ pretty early on.
And, that's really what motivates me and my co-founders and now we have thousands of employees and if you ask them the why they want to work for Warby Parker, always in the top two answers is something around our social mission. And so, it continues to be a really motivating force for me and our team.
Charles: (11:54)
Has the definition of success changed for you over the last 15 months based on what we've all lived through?
Dave Gilboa: (12:00)
I don't think it's changed. I think if anything, it's kind of clarified and reinforced the fact that the what matters is helping people and giving them opportunities and that the opportunities are not evenly distributed across this country or the world or any community, and those in fortunate positions should have an imperative to help those who are less fortunate and that diseases like COVID also just shine a spotlight on that we're all human beings. We're all equal and these types of diseases can impact the richest or the poorest person on earth in the same way and we all need to band together and help each other as one global community.
Charles: (13:15)
I've always been struck reading about how you guys put the company together and the foundations you built it on. Obviously, as you've talked about, mission-driven was fundamental. You also were very public very early on about the fact that you guys have very clearly defined values, that the company is built on the set of values, that you really invested in those as a small group originally and then you re-invested in them when you got larger. I'm sure that those two foundations must have had a massive benefit to you over the last 15 months as the world went crazy. I'm curious whether, given that those are obviously foundations of your leadership, has your leadership changed in any significant way over the last 15 months? Have you found that there were things that have suddenly become more important that you hadn't considered before or hadn't been as relevant before?
Dave Gilboa: (14:00)
I think we've had to be a lot more intentional in how we communicate with our team, just given that everyone's been remote and separated. And so, I think we've always felt that's important, to be transparent around our values, our goals and how we're progressing against those goals. But in a fully remote world, we've thought a lot about the frequency and the medium of communication. And so, we used to have a weekly all hands meeting in our office where everyone could crowd around the atrium and Neil and I and other members of our team would come and talk about the happenings in the business. And, clearly, we can't do that when our office is closed. And so, Neil and I thought it was important not to lose that continuity of messaging and really focus on frequency of communication and ensure that we're conveying the most important things on our mind.
And so, we started recording videos twice a week that are digestible, generally around five minutes, that we send out to everyone on the team and we talk about key business objectives and metrics, but often find ourselves conveying messages that we think are just important to the team around racial equity and how we can use Warby Parker to be a force for good and address the things that we know are on our team's mind around COVID and current events in the U.S. and the world.
And, we've also recognized that we need to be more flexible and we need to move faster to address some of these issues that are on our team's mind. And so, a couple of examples of things that we changed and we sort of pivoted during the pandemic... One is our ‘buy a pair, give a pair’ program, where our nonprofit partners that we work with, in large parts of the world, they were in lockdowns and they were not able to continue with their vision testings and glasses distribution efforts. A lot of our programs here in the U.S. where we go into schools were put on pause because the schools were not open for in-person learning. And, we asked ourselves, "Okay, well, how can we continue to do good?".
And, in particular, as we asked our nonprofit partners in regions like India and Bangladesh and parts of Latin America and Africa, they didn't have access to PPE, personal protective equipment, and so, we quickly worked with them and our supply chain partners to spin up efforts where instead of distributing glasses, we could distribute PPE. And, over the last few months, we've helped source over two and a half million items of PPE that have been distributed through those nonprofit partners.
And so, as we've thought about leading with our values and thinking about just one of our core values is do good. And so, I think that's just an example of us needing to be flexible and adapting to the conditions around the world. And then, also just being responsive to issues that are on our team's mind around racial inequity, for example. And so, we went through an exercise articulating our racial equity strategy over the last few months and we had conversations internally about what we wanted to accomplish and we thought it was important to publish our goals externally as well, and we're transparent around our own diversity statistics and the goals that we have in mind there. Put in place a number of internal trainings around inclusive interview training and bystander training for everyone on the...in the company.
And, also thought about how can we continue to use our influence within the communities that we live in to help make a difference. And so, one example of that is that we only.… Less than 3% of optometrists in the U.S. identify as black and we think it's a great profession and that should change, and so, we partnered with the New England College of Optometry, one of the top optometry schools in the country, to create full scholarships for black optometry students and we partnered with…. Another community that we live in is the entrepreneurial and startup and venture community. We partnered with Black Girl Ventures and helped fund a number of young black women entrepreneurs.
And so, we just.… Those programs were not in place prior to the pandemic, but we've thought about how can we continue to be flexible in our approach while leading with our values.
Charles: (19:59)
You used the word transparent and I think transparency is one of those attributes that seems to sit very comfortably on Warby Parker. You guys have always been, I think, very out front about what you were trying to do and how you did it and as I said earlier, it's been incredibly well documented as a story and as a case study, almost. Given that Warby started working almost immediately, right? I mean, I've read stories where you were sitting in the back of class and trying to figure out how to fulfill orders. And so, you've been in the spotlight for a long time. I think one of the things that I am conscious of is, especially in the last 15 months, is that people sometimes forget that leaders are people, too. And, you guys have had a... You know, you're running this very visible, successful business. You're also dealing with the same dynamics everybody else is dealing with. How do you live under that kind of spotlight? How do you make sure you're finding time for yourself when everyone's looking at you so closely and you want them to?
Dave Gilboa: (20:51)
Yeah. I'd say about a year ago, when we were really in the depths of the pandemic and in a full lockdown and didn't really understand what was happening in the country or how long we were going to be in this state.… I didn't have much time to myself. I was... you know, I found myself working, not 24 hours a day, but pretty close to it, on just Zooms all day and night and there was crisis after crisis that we were dealing with, trying to figure out. We had 125 stores that we shut down and had almost 1,500 employees that we wanted to keep on payroll when we had no visibility into how long we might need to keep those stores closed or how we keep our customers safe.
And then, every day, there was a new curve ball that was thrown at us. And, yeah, after probably a month of doing nothing but working, I realized that I was not able to bring my full energy to these new issues that... And, I probably wasn't as motivating as I should be to our team. And so tried to just be more intentional about how I spend my time and even taking short breaks to go for a jog or jump in the ocean or do something that was away from a computer, moving some of my meetings from Zooms to phone calls and so I could walk around and not just be tied to a laptop. And, then, just spent more time checking in with our team, joining different department meetings, just doing open Q&A and connecting with our team on a personal level, which I just found super energizing and I think made me a more effective leader as well.
Charles: (23:02)
I'd like to talk about innovation for a couple of minutes. Warby Parker has been described as one of the most innovative businesses, certainly over the last 10 years, and arguably a lot longer than that. Innovation's one of those words that I think confuses people. Everyone's always saying it's overused and let's find a different word. And yet, we keep coming back to it. First of all, what does innovation mean to you? How do you define innovation?
Dave Gilboa: (23:27)
I think about it as creating novel solutions to a clearly defined problem. And, for us, that... You know, as we think about innovation, it always has to start with the problem and I think one of our advantages as a vertically integrated direct to consumer company is that we get so much feedback from our customers, both quantitative by being able to measure data to understand where there might be gaps or friction in a funnel, but also qualitative feedback from customers around what they find really easy and delightful and where they become frustrated. And so, we're able to, I think, clearly identify the areas of friction or problems that we want to solve and then think about innovation as creating new solutions to those problems.
Charles: (24:31)
How valuable is innovation? Is it one of those things that you have to have as a business? I mean, should people be paying that kind of attention to it that they are?
Dave Gilboa: (24:41)
Yeah, I think the world is changing faster than ever and that means that businesses and organizations need to change as rapidly as possible. And, it's never been easier to start a business. It's never been easier to attract capital to a new problem. And so, if businesses don't have a continual culture of continual innovation, then someone else is going to come in and solve those problems. And, so we do fundamentally believe that we need to continue to evolve and change and sometimes it's helpful to have competitors that are innovating. For us, we try to be motivated internally by focusing on our stakeholders, our customers, but also the environment, our employee base, the broader community, and continually trying to figure out how we can improve and magnify our impact against those groups.
Charles: (25:51)
You've built a business, as you've just described, that is a fantastic problem solver, right? I mean, you guys are brilliant problem solvers. That involves risks. How do you encourage people to take the kind of risks that are going to actually help you drive the business forward?
Dave Gilboa: (26:09)
Yeah. So, one of our core values is take action, and our…. A theme that we talk about constantly is that even as we scale as a business, we should be terrified of behaving like a big company and within most large organizations, there tends to be a reduction in risk taking over time as there needs to be more approvals for ideas and just a lot more coordination and bureaucracy sets in. And, for us, we want to make sure that if the people on our team that are closest to the data and are closest to the customers and are generating insights as a result are empowered and enabled to act on those insights and ideas.
And, we often use the analogy of software development, which has moved completely from these big waterfall projects that used to take several months and then you flip a switch and hope that everything works the way it's supposed to, to agile software methodology where it's smaller teams breaking big problems into the smallest steps possible and then pushing out code and learning along the way and making sure that there's more flexibility built into the process. We want that line of thinking in every part of our business, including pieces that are traditionally not very flexible, including real estate. So, most retailers would open a store and sign a 10 or 15 year lease. We think we have a decent crystal ball, but we have no idea what the world's going to look like in 15 years and the retail landscape is going to look completely different.
And so, our team has pushed landlords really hard to shorten that initial lease term to as short as two years or generally within around five years. And then, we have multiple options to extend so that we can learn and be flexible. And so, we encourage our team to take risks but take risks in small steps so that if we fail, we can learn from those failures and it's not catastrophic and then we can rebound quickly and make better decisions.
Charles: (28:49)
Are there times when taking action can go too far, can get you into trouble?
Dave Gilboa: (28:55)
It certainly can if there aren't appropriate guard rails in place and if there's not a clear understanding of the problem that's being solved or what impact a certain decision might have on key stakeholders. And so, while we encourage risk taking, we very much believe that things should be piloted and measured. And so, before rolling out a major change to our business, whether it's a new product introduction, a new store construction, the way that we display our products, we'll start small and we'll roll it out to a small number of customers, get feedback, maybe start in one or two stores or to a small percentage of our users online, understand what's working, what's not, iterate, and then have a more informed point of view before pressing go to our entire customer base.
Charles: (30:08)
As you look back over the pandemic and then look forward, what do you think are the good things that are going to come out of this, both for Warby Parker and for the business world in general?
Dave Gilboa: (30:19)
I think it's given us and a lot of other organizations more appreciation for flexibility, from a working style, from a geographic perspective. Prior to the pandemic, we were very much a culture where everyone should be in the office five days a week and that meant that we were only hiring people who were local or willing to move and make some tough life decisions if they already had roots in another part of the country. We still believe that offices play an important role in building culture and creating human connection and sparking creativity, and so, we do plan to have the majority of our team in the office, but we expect to have more flexibility than we had before. So, maybe people are in the office three days a week and the other two days are optional and the expectation is that we don't schedule big meetings on those days and people can choose to come in if they find energy working from the office, but also give more flexibility.
And, there might be certain roles where working remote in a different city or a different part of the world has no negative impact on that individual's ability to connect and create impact, and so, might have certain departments or certain roles that have more remote capabilities and as we talk to other business leaders, certainly there's going to be a spectrum of the way that teams work, from fully remote to fully in the office, and we think that's great, that organizations should innovate the way that they work and teams should innovate the way that they connect and that there are a lot of tools like Zoom and Google Meet and others that make flexibility.... enable a lot more flexibility than even a couple of years ago.
I personally am a strong believer that humans are social animals and that nothing can really replace that in person connectivity, and so, that will continue to be part of the way that we build culture. But it'll be interesting to see how different organizations experiment with ways of working over the next few years.
Charles: (33:01)
How will you go about collecting experiences, stories, data, almost, about what's working for people and what's not? I mean, how are you thinking about figuring out over time what's the... What are the best solutions coming out of here? How do you filter all of that?
Dave Gilboa: (33:15)
Yeah. So, we spend a lot of time talking to our teams, whether it's popping into department meetings and having open Q&A, doing listening tours with different groups of employees that may have different experiences than I've been having in the pandemic and understanding how people are feeling, what's motivating to them, what they like about the remote working environment and what they really miss about the office. And then, you spend a lot of time talking to other peer companies to just see how they're thinking and…. But the primary input is from our own team.
Charles: (34:02)
What have you learned about yourself over the last 15 months?
Dave Gilboa: (34:08)
I've learned that I miss human... that I miss human interaction and I'm…. Every time I do a Myers-Briggs or one of those personality tests, I'm generally right on the border of an introvert or an extrovert, but I certainly have found that I am energized by being surrounded by people and surrounded by our team and so, I miss that. And, I've learned that I need to be intentional about finding balance in my life, that between spending time with family, friends, on health and wellness, are critical to making me a better business leader. And so, have just worked on ways to enable that in my own personal schedule.
Charles: (35:19)
Any regrets about the last year? Anything you wish you'd done differently? Anything you wish you'd known that you know now?
Dave Gilboa: (35:27)
I think there are a lot of learnings in both how the pandemic unfolded and impacted different communities in very different ways. And so, yeah, I wish we had maybe moved faster and gotten out in front of issues that impacted our team and the country faster. I'd say probably nothing else that I truly regret other than, you know, with hindsight and realizing how long this is going to impact us, would have tried to put some of our programs in place that are helping certain communities faster.
And for me personally, probably would have, yeah, tried to find somewhere geographically to escape to that would have enabled me to take more physical and mental health breaks.
Charles: (36:53)
How do you lead?
Dave Gilboa: (36:53)
I believe in servant leadership and that my role is to enable our team to work better and have more impact than if I wasn't at the company, and so, I think that means that I need to have.… Ensure that the team has clarity of purpose and clear objectives and clear prioritization so that everyone's marching in the same direction and that we don't have people that are working on projects that might be in conflict with one another or that there is a lot of cognitive load and stress of understanding what people should be working on and why. And so, I try to make that clear from a vision standpoint and then try to ask questions and try to understand what the obstacles are for other people on the team that get in the way of achieving those objectives and then do whatever I can to remove those obstacles, whether that's providing additional resources, thinking about org structure, thinking about deployment of capital in different parts of our business, and ensure that we're reducing as much friction as possible to meeting those overall objectives.
Charles: (38:32)
What comes next for you guys and for you?
Dave Gilboa: (38:37)
So, we've... Our goal has always been for Warby Parker to be one of the most impactful brands in the world 100 years from now, and so, we're 11 years into this journey and I feel like we're just getting started. There is just so much opportunity within the existing products and services that we sell. Even though we're a lot bigger than we were a few years ago, we still only have that 1% market share in the U.S. We have 130 stores. So, over the next few years, we'll open hundreds of stores in the U.S. We'll continue to scale our online business. We'll make pretty big investments in newer parts of our business like telemedicine and eye exams, contact lenses, using technology to just help improve the customer experience.
And then, on the impact side, we've now distributed over eight million pairs of glasses to people in need. Over the next several years, that'll multiply to tens and hundreds of millions of people that we're impacting. And so, I'm excited for the next leg of this journey. I feel like we're still in the first inning here and over the next few years, we'll hire thousands of people and that's going to mean that my role as a leader continues to evolve and I'm going to be learning. And, every year has felt like I'm in a different role and hopefully that continues and I hope to be able to motivate and inspire our team to achieve really great outcomes.
Charles: (40:22)
And, my very last question for you. What are you afraid of?
Dave Gilboa: (40:27)
I'm afraid of not having the impact that I think is possible, both for Warby Parker as an organization and me as an individual. I feel incredibly fortunate to be in the position that I am and have been given so many opportunities and I want to make sure that I'm capitalizing on those and creating as much impact as possible.
Charles: (40:52)
Dave, thanks for taking the time today. I appreciate that and I appreciate the business you've built. It's rare to find people who have literally made a direct impact on the world and it's so clear that you guys have, and congratulations for all of that.
Dave Gilboa: (41:04)
Great. Thanks so much.
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