Thirty Minute Mentors Podcast Transcript: Thrive Market Co-Founder and CEO Nick Green

I recently interviewed Thrive Market Co-Founder and CEO Nick Green on my podcast, Thirty Minute Mentors. Here is a transcript of our interview:

Adam: Our guest today started and leads a business that disrupted the way consumers can access healthy food. Nick Green is the co-founder and CEO of Thrive Market valued at over a billion dollars with more than a million customers around the country. Nick, thank you for joining us.

Nick: Thanks for having me, Adam.

Adam: You grew up in Edina, Minnesota, and your mom was a health enthusiast, way ahead of the times, way ahead of the curve when it came to nutrition and wellness. You went to college at Harvard and did an internship at McKinsey. But instead of going down the corporate path, you want to be starting a test prep company from your dorm room. Can you take listeners back to your early days, what early experiences and lessons most significantly shaped your worldview and shape the trajectory of your success?

Nick: First of all, I'm very impressed that you pronounced Edina correctly. I can't tell you how often I hear about Edina. So hats off to you. But yes, I grew up in the Midwest, Middle America, suburbs of Minneapolis. And formative experience for me was largely around that community and my family. So my mom was a role model. And obviously a major influence in my life from the very beginning. The two things she cared most about for the family and fought for were health and education. She came from a large Mexican American family, grew up in Denver, was very working class, and did not graduate from college herself. And no one in her family at that point had either. So that was a huge focus in her parenting. And then also saw a lot of family members struggle with obesity, diabetes, with other lifestyle diseases that she self taught herself about health and wellness and learned and understood were lifestyle-related. Whereas a lot of her family members didn't. That insight for her, which to your point, was ahead of her time and not common in that part of the country at that time certainly, put her in a very different shopping trajectory than a typical Midwest mob. And then in the 1980s and 1990s, we were that weird house on the block that had no sugared cereal, basically, no processed food, definitely no soda. And I saw how hard she worked to make those decisions in the face of the financial barriers, the difficulty of sometimes finding healthy and fresh products. And sometimes the kind of weird looks from family members and mumbling and criticisms from others, including our kids at times, not always thrilled to be eating the bland cereal. But those early things made a big difference in our outcomes. As you mentioned, I was fortunate enough to go to Harvard and got there in part because I did well academically, pushed by my parents, who were super supportive there. But also because I did well on the SAT, which is something that in going to public school in Minnesota wasn't something that was prioritized. So there's a lot of kids in my class that were just as smart as I was that didn't do well on the SAT and that closed doors for them. So my first company was, as you said, in test prep. And I didn't want to describe it this way at the time. But it wasn't a mission-driven business to try to make access easier for people who wanted to go to better colleges, and yet didn't have the tools and the consultants and the courses that when I got to Harvard, I found out somebody my peers had had. So we're bringing a Princeton Review-like course taught by Harvard undergrads, to kids at a tiny fraction of the price. We use a micro franchise model all over the country, sending undergrads back to their hometowns in the summer, having about 800 branches at the peak, and using that to seed an online test prep business during the school year. So yeah, if I were to trace the thread, it was my mom's focus in education that both got me to a place like Harvard and then spurred that initial idea to help make that more possible for more people with diverse businesses.

Adam: Your mom sounds like she would fit in a lot better in LA than in Edina. And she sounds like my kind of person.

Nick: It's interesting. So one of the amazing things 30-some years later is that there are a lot of people like her all over the country from all different walks of life. She was very unusual at that time in that place, our socio-economics or whatever. But today, the desire to be healthy and do better for one's family, I think transcends education, social class geography, and financial situation. And that was the thesis, to be honest, around Thrive Market there are all sorts of people today like my mom, who want to make it better for their families, but still don't have that access. And that was the staggering insight for us with Thrive isn't it crazy 30 some years later, that it's still hard to find healthy organic food, and it's still expensive to find that food? And there's still so much misinformation out there. So that was the catalyst for the second business.

Adam: How did the idea for Thrive ultimately emerge? How did it come together? And how did you and your co-founders actualize it?

Nick: Yeah, so the idea for Thrive was there are four co-founders, and one of my co-founders grew up on a communal farm in Ojai, California. He is also a serial entrepreneur. And he had this idea to try to bring the commune to the masses. So he pitched me. This is Gunnar Lovelace, who's not dated with the business anymore but is still on our board and a close friend. And he pitched me back in 2014, actually, as a potential investor, or what he was calling shop tribe. The idea was to do group buying events to buy in bulk and get people better prices on healthy, natural products. So we started talking, and the business model completely changed. But that mission of making healthier, sustainable products, more affordable, more accessible, and easier to get remains the mission to this day and is our North Star in everything that we do. So that was the original genesis of the business idea. And the reason it resonated with me, of course, was that I grew up in middle America. I was in one of those communities that could have been the masses reached by a model like this. And it was really interesting when we originally went out pitching the business to investors, we got rejected by everyone we talked to, in part because a lot of them hadn't grown up with a mom that was focused on health, trying to make those hard decisions in a place that there wasn't a lot of access. And turns out, that is a very, very common experience and our success, our growth. The million-plus members we have today is a testament to the fact that there are so many families out there that want to get healthy, want to vote with their dollars, want to do better, and don't necessarily have a Whole Foods down the street. Or if they do, they can't afford the price premium. And that's over the last now nine years, the mission that we've been on is let's make healthy and sustainable living easy, affordable, and accessible to everybody. And so, I got off to the races early on, and we brought in our third co-founder, Sasha, who's our CTO. Kate Mulling was our Head of Content and brand. Each of us had very different backgrounds, and yet very complementary skills. And it's been a wild and fun adventure.

Adam: You mentioned that when you were trying to raise money, you were rejected by everyone. That's a little bit of an understatement. You were rejected by more than 50 VCs. That's a pretty staggering number. A lot of people who would get rejected by 50 VCs would listen to the music and call it a day. But you didn't, you found another way to capitalize your business, and you've ultimately capitalized your business in the form of more than $330 million to date. How?

Nick: Ironically, those rejections were in many ways, the best things that could have happened to us because they forced us to go a different path. We ended up raising from health and wellness influencers who had missions that resonated with us, who did understand the problem, and whose audiences were the ones in many cases facing these barriers. And those influencers, in turn, promoted the business. So YouTube stars, bloggers, and content creators who were in the health and wellness space became not only our investors but also our advisors, advocates, and promoters. And that model was actually what propelled the initial rocket ship-type trajectory that we had in those early years. Of course, once that trajectory was clear, all the VCs that rejected us came back and wanted to invest, which then enabled us to raise significant capital to do so with the selectivity of bringing in institutional investors that were also mission-aligned. We've had phenomenal investors that continue to sit on our board and are both very savvy from the business standpoint, but also really aligned with the purpose of the business. It was a really interesting, obviously very difficult time when we got rejected, but a real clarifying experience in the sense that, one, it was that classic, one door closes and another door opens in very dramatic fashion. But it was also a moment when we realized the power of the mission. If you're doing something for the wrong reasons, if you're short-sighted, if you don't have conviction in what you're building, you don't have a mission that you believe in. To your point, it is easy to give up. And for us, that was never an option. There were moments when we thought we might fail, even without giving up because sometimes it felt that way. But we knew we would push on as long as we possibly could, because we believe this needed to exist, and auto exists to the world.

Adam: And it's a really important lesson for anyone listening in a key theme that I explore a lot on Thirty Minute Mentors with lots of entrepreneurs, CEOs, athletes, military leaders, and political leaders. The idea that failure isn't terminal, the idea that obstacles aren't the end game, the most successful people, whether you're starting a new business, or whether you're leading a business, are those who look at something in front of them and say, "This is something that I can figure out how to navigate and I could figure out how to learn from." And a couple of lessons that you were able to learn from getting rejected by more than 50 VCs, you were able to figure out, how we get around this. How do we find investors who might be more strategic to our mission, and you were able to do that? You went back and you doubled down on your conviction, doubled down on your resolve. It was a clarifying experience for you.

Nick: It was, there are so many lessons that can be unpacked there. But, grid resilience, and determination. These are lessons that are at this point, a cliche, in part because they're true. And you pull on something also really important, which is this idea that failure is temporary, as long as you decide it will be, when it's permanent, frankly, if you decide it will be too. But that realization that, hey, I can fall, we can make mistakes, we can have failures, we can have setbacks, we can have rejections, and that's all part of the path to success. And it's not a natural, intuitive feeling. Because when you're making mistakes, or you're having those setbacks, it feels like you're moving backward. But the truth is, with entrepreneurship, if you're doing something difficult, it truly is part of the process. And for me, two things I think about as mental models that I use are, one, that it's a building process, it's like building muscle. You got to break it down to build it back up. And it's just highly, highly iterative. And that's part of entrepreneurship. The other is I draw an analogy like a video game, where you have many lives. And it's like the case of entrepreneurship, too. We evolved in an environment where a mistake could be fatal. But in business, they rarely are. And so instead, that isn't sometimes the case. But overwhelmingly, the stakes are not as high as you think on any given decision. And as long as you can persevere and get back up, that itself can be a difference-maker because there are so many people who are willing to keep at it.

Adam: How do you know when to trust your gut in the face of everyone telling you, you're crazy, you're out of your mind, you're gonna fail, this is gonna fail, this is a terrible idea? How to listen to others, accept feedback, to find lines? It's a balancing act. How do you do that?

Nick: It's such a great question. Because as an entrepreneur and as a leader, frankly, as well, in general, you have to be irrational, incompetent, and be able to project that competence in the face of uncertainty. But you also have to be sober and humble, open to feedback, and willing to adjust your strategy or your tactics to get where you want to go. And so for us, there are certain things that we know are non-negotiable. And the first most important one is the mission. So because we believe that the world ought to be this way, we believe that healthy and sustainable living ought to be easy, affordable, and accessible to all. That's a non-negotiable conviction that orients what we do. But the how of how we'll get there is very adaptable. Like I said, that original business model that Gunnar had envisioned, isn't even what we launched with. And since then, we've reinvented ourselves so many times in so many different dimensions of the business. So we are very flexible with our tactics, but I think much, much more high conviction in the long-term strategy, and the vision and initiative.

Adam: I love that. What you shared ties into something that I think is invaluable, not only for entrepreneurs but for all leaders. The most successful leaders have deep convictions deep values, and a deep sense of What's right, and what's wrong. What do I believe in? What is the code that I'm going to follow? Yet, they also have tremendous flexibility, adaptability, and willingness to pivot to shift, to go with the pitch, pitch on the outside part of the plate. I'm going to hit it to the opposite field. And just because you believe so strongly in your core values, doesn't mean that you shouldn't be adaptable, flexible, and able to pivot.

Nick: I would even go a step further that the degree of your conviction on your values, your principles, your mission, actually is what motivates you to be flexible. Because sometimes it's really hard to admit you're wrong. It's hard to change tactics, it's hard to accept information that may be uncomfortable or painful. And as a business at Thrive and for me as a leader, part of what enables us to do that is that we believe so strongly in the mission, that we have to be reality-based, we got to take the negative feedback, we've got to make those tough decisions because we know what's at stake.

Adam: That's great. It speaks to the importance of being open to feedback, being eager to receive feedback, and trying to learn from whatever sources you can to get to the best decision possible. If your initial decision wasn't the right decision, who cares? I'm gonna get to whatever the best move is. Period. What do you believe are the key characteristics of a great leader and what can anyone do to become a better leader?

Nick: One thing that we're getting at here is the ability to hold contradictory things at the same time, with that ability to have conviction and confidence, and maybe even a little overconfidence, because that can be helpful with bringing people on a journey that might be very difficult, while simultaneously being humble, and reality-based and willing to learn from and get leverage from an engaged team. That ability to do things that at first seemed mutually contradictory as a generally important thing and that is a specific example of that dynamic. To me, the most important thing, as a leader in general, is just to boil it down, you have to have a vision. If you don't, then whether you call that a vision, a mission, a purpose, if you don't have something a lot bigger than you, and that is long term and that truly inspires you from an authentic place, it's very hard to lead. You can still manage, you can have the right tactics and you can manage people effectively, but you aren't going to inspire them. So to me, that's step one. The second thing is you have to bring in the right people who can be inspired by your mission. And that's been a lesson we've learned over and over at Thrive. When we get someone who is talented, really skilled at what they do, that's itself a challenging thing. When those people also really believe in what we're trying to do in the world. It's like this exponential equation. And then when you get a lot of those people together, it's multiplicative, and people feed off that energy together. That's what creates great culture. When you have great people who are aligned with that vision as a leader. That's true for a mission-driven business, but also businesses that maybe wouldn't describe themselves as mission-driven. If you unpack the culture, and what's being built in the organization that a leader helms there's always a vision that organizes people who care. So as a leader, you have to have the vision, you have to find the right people, and you have to find a way to get them aligned on that vision.

Adam: I love it. Great list. I love how you started with a couple of the key characteristics that I share with audiences when I share my list of the most important characteristics shared by the most successful leaders on that list, self-confidence and humility, seemingly contradictory qualities. But to your point, they're not at all. You must believe in yourself. If you don't believe in yourself, who's gonna believe in you? And if you are overconfident, if you lack humility, if you walk into a room full of yourself, who's gonna want to follow you? So it's striking that right balance of having belief in yourself, but not at the expense of thinking so highly of yourself that you fly too close to the sun.

Nick: Too close to the sun, fail to learn. The reality is entrepreneurship and leadership done right are both very humbling activities. Because you are consistently confronted with your limitations, you're doing hard things, you're hopefully attracting people who are better at a lot of things than you are. And so yes, you have to have confidence in what you're good at, you gotta have competency, your vision, or your mission. But if you are unwilling to embrace your shortcomings, both to grow and then also to surround yourself with people who maybe offset them or don't have the same weaknesses, that's what building a great team is about. And if you can't do that, you limit yourself. And honestly, when I look at my first company, which was successful, we grew the company, we sold the company in my 20s, and the kind of leader I was there, I underachieved with that business, because I wanted to be the one running everything in the business. I wanted to have my hands and everything. And we hired talented people but I was also intimidated by some of the talented people that we hired. Both hard opening, and effectiveness-driving experience I've had as a leader at Thrive is embracing the humbling aspects of being a leader, bringing in extraordinary people, and empowering those people. And it never gets easy. Your ego doesn't go away. You don't stop wanting to be the best and the smartest in the room every single time. But you learn to get comfortable with that not being the case and remind yourself that, hey, to get where we want to go, that can't be the case.

Adam: Nick, I'm with you 110%. Leadership entails being comfortable in your skin. Leadership entails being eager to surround yourself with people who are smarter than you, who are better than you, who can elevate you, who can elevate your team, who can elevate your mission.

Nick: I don't think that you have to be an explicitly mission-driven business to have a mission and a vision. And in fact, I would argue that if you look at any great company, including ones that never had a mission statement, or would have described themselves as a conscious organization or a mission-driven business, any great company will have a missionary aspect to it. There is a vision that inspires people, there's a direction that they're going. There's something that they're building that is bigger than just building a profitable business. I think that profit and revenue growth in some of these abstract metrics of a business of a capitalist economy are things best achieved when you don't look directly out though. The best businesses would have been the most profitable, growing the longest, and having the staying power over time. They are driven by something more. I think that's the case if you look at very innovative businesses like Tesla or SpaceX and Elon Musk's world. If you look at it, Amazon is a very commercial, business in ecommerce. But yet Bezos talks all the time about having missionaries, not mercenaries. If you look at Apple, every business that can get to a significant scale over a sustained period casts endless things. I would also say what is true for businesses is also true for people. If you want to be a successful individual contributor, let alone a successful leader, there has to be a bigger why than I want to have high status, or I want to make money or I want to do something mundane. You're going to sound like a cliche, people talk about finding your bliss and finding your purpose. But I do believe that as a business, you have to have a purpose. And as an individual, if you want to lead, if you want to achieve something that's going to be meaningful, impactful, you've got to figure out what that purpose is. Ideally, if you want business to be a big part of your life, which for many people, their career is a place where they spend, many if not most of their waking hours, find a place for those two purposes aligned. That's what we've tried to create at Thrive and attract as a result, just incredible leaders and incredible individual contributors that are earlier on in their career, where it's not about, I punch in and punch out from work and then go home and do the things I care about. It's like coming to work and I'm thinking about work all the time because my work is something that is my passion. It is my purpose.

Adam: Do you have any advice for anyone listening on how to get to that place?

Nick: You need to listen to yourself and not just to what you believe others want you to be, not just to what you like others to see you. There's a concept in economics, I studied economics in college, called Revealed Preference. And revealed preferences are what you do. And so there's like a whole study of what people say in surveys versus how they behave. And as a business, you want to make sure you're oriented to what your consumers do, not just what they tell you. It's like if you'd ask people at the turn of the 20th century what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse carriage. And that wouldn't have gotten us to the automobile. So you need to look for yourself at your own revealed preferences, not how you wish you spent your time, but how do you spend your time? What are the times that you feel most inspired, most lit up, most excited? And what is the subject? What is the activity? And find that thing that turns you on, that is not just about, I'm doing it because other people tell me to or because I see other people that I admire do it, but because it means something to you. For me, those have been things that go way back to my childhood, and two values that talked about my family and my mother instilled in me and problems that I saw, or my family or she overcame, and values that were instilled in me at a very young age. So I don't think there's any formula for it. I definitely can't manufacture it, it has to be authentic. But it's not that hard once you just look at what excites me, and where I like to spend my time. And then as I said, to the greatest extent possible, you get to align what you do in your business career with what those deeply held passions are, now you've got a formula to unleash your potential.

Adam: I love it. And so much of what we've talked about in this conversation has been around alignment, aligning what you love doing, what you're passionate about with how you spend your time professionally, something you mentioned earlier was finding investors who were in alignment with your mission. You went out and tried to raise money from 50+ VCs, didn't work, you went back to the drawing board and found investors who personally resonated with your mission. What advice do you have about how anyone listening to this conversation can build successful relationships? Much in the way you were able to build relationships with all of these A-list celebrities who ultimately invested in your company, and more broadly, how can anyone successfully build winning relationships?

Nick: That's a great question. I think there is, one, whether it's fundraising, bringing on partners, or attracting employees, the clarity of your vision, and the ability to communicate a vision that connects with and inspires others, I don't think most of the influencers that worked with us were coming on board, because they found me so personally inspiring. They came on board, because they found, to some degree, my co-founder Gunnar is a much more charismatic person than me. So in his case, maybe a little bit. Generally, with both of us, it was they were attracted to the mission. Because we were the ones that were sharing that mission, by proxy or by osmosis, that developed those relationships. So in a situation where you are recruiting people to an endeavor, or a business, to a project, I do think that that vision is critical, and the ability to communicate effectively. And then once you've done that, like the interesting thing with the influencers is, in many cases, it was influencers telling each other that then brought more and more people in. So we didn't even have to pitch them, people would pitch the business for us because they were so compelled by and excited about what we were doing. The broader question of like, how do you develop relationships effectively as a whole, I mean, that's a whole different thing. In some cases there, it's also being able to connect separately from a purpose, honestly. This is something that I've had to grow a lot as a leader, which is all right, I'm passionate, and we're doing it at Thrive. I want to talk all the time about the business. But part of having a personal relationship, which is also really critical as you engage is just like, on a very personal level. And this is top of mind for me right now, because we just had our company on site. So we're a fully remote business at this point. But we bring the leaders together every quarter of the whole company together on a biannual basis. And I always say the two goals or the Thrive weeks, what we call them, our purpose. So connecting around that mission and people, but then I always circle people, because that's the one thing that doing it in person is so different. And some of that is connecting around the vision and the mission, but a lot of it is just like connecting with people, and it's just FaceTime. And it's frankly one of the challenges, I think a post office culture and in a very digital world where so much of our interaction is mediated by screens, how do you build those authentic relationships? And I believe that a lot of it is just spending time where there isn't necessarily a goal other than to connect.

Adam: Great advice. And to break down a few things you shared, really important to have a vision for your own life, a vision for what you're doing, the ability to communicate your vision, whether it's a vision for the company you have, a vision for the proposal that you're putting forth, a vision for the job that you're trying to recruit someone to be a part of, whatever it is, to have that vision and be able to communicate that. But what goes hand in hand with that is a deep sense of conviction, in whatever it is you're talking about. Something, Nick, that I've observed throughout this conversation, we haven't hit on this theme directly, but it's been an underlying theme through everything we've talked about, which is the importance of authenticity. Being yourself, being true to yourself, there's only one you. Be you. When you're trying to build relationships with someone else, the more you that you are, the more likely you will resonate with that other person. And whatever your vision is, however, you're communicating it, if you authentically believe in it, and you authentically communicate it in your style, you're gonna be a lot more successful than if you communicate it in an inauthentic way or if you communicate a vision that you don't authentically believe in. The last thing you shared, which is important, is spending time, being present, being fully there, and being in the room. There's no substitute for just looking across the room from someone face to face, eye contact. And if you can't do that, then do it across the laptop or the phone. But be there, spend your time. Human relationships are built on people being personally invested in growing and developing that connection.

Nick: You hit the nail on the head on each of those points. It's really interesting because what you're describing reflects my personal beliefs about what will lead to meaningful relationships and success as a leader and success in business. They also had been the keys to success at Thrive Market specifically. So when I said before about often what works for a company also works for an individual and vice versa. And just as evidence of that, three of our four core values, one is to think big, which is basically around vision, and mission, thinking long term, thinking broad stakeholders, thinking back. Two is authenticity. That word is one of our core values. And that has to do with both showing up with your authentic self. It also has to do with what I talked about earlier, which is intellectual honesty, constructive feedback, and being willing to accept and tell tough truths. That's part of authenticity, too. And then another one is tenacity which we got out as well. It's that willingness to be resilient to push through, when you have that big vision to keep your eye on the Northstar even when things are really hard, and even when you face failure.

Adam: Nick, what can anyone listening to this conversation do to become more successful personally and professionally?

Nick: What I just described, those are core values for Thrive Market, they're core values for me. I'm biased. I think those work well. But I would probably encourage people more than anything, like back to that revealed preferences exercise, what's your passion? Do that exercise for your values. What do you think? When are you at your best? When you look back at the successes that you've had, whatever degree it's been over whatever period, what had been the common ingredients? We didn't codify our core values at Thrive Market until about two years in. And literally, the way we did the exercise was we asked ourselves when we've been successful, what was the key to our success? And then conversely, in the spirit of constructive feedback and intellectual honesty, when we have been successful, where do we fall? What do we miss? And I think, again, revealed preference, look at that in your life. Specific examples. Now, what would you like to be your values? How would you like to be at a cocktail party, but when you did your best and the things you care about most, what were the qualities? What were the values, the principles at play? And when you didn't, what was the reason?

Adam: Nick, thank you for all the great advice, and thank you for being a part of Thirty Minute Mentors.

Nick: I really enjoyed it.


Adam Mendler is an entrepreneur, writer, speaker, educator, and nationally recognized authority on leadership. Adam is the creator and host of the business and leadership podcast Thirty Minute Mentors, where he goes one on one with America's most successful people - Fortune 500 CEOs, founders of household name companies, Hall of Fame and Olympic gold medal-winning athletes, political and military leaders - for intimate half-hour conversations each week. A top leadership speaker, Adam draws upon his insights building and leading businesses and interviewing hundreds of America's top leaders as a top keynote speaker to businesses, universities, and non-profit organizations. Adam has written extensively on leadership and related topics, having authored over 70 articles published in major media outlets including Forbes, Inc. and HuffPost, and has conducted more than 500 one on one interviews with America’s top leaders through his collective media projects. Adam teaches graduate-level courses on leadership at UCLA and is an advisor to numerous companies and leaders. A Los Angeles native, Adam is a lifelong Angels fan and an avid backgammon player.

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