Transcript | PULSE Episode 04
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R. Adam Smith:
Hi, I'm R. Adam Smith, founder of Wisdom Board. I am pleased to host this episode of the Pulse Podcast series, a collection of personal conversations with founders, CEOs, entrepreneurs, and board members. Wisdom Board is a fast growing and trusted leadership platform, offering a network of thousands, unique digital content, and vetted corporate resources. Wisdom Board was founded in 2020 and is dedicated to enabling board members and their directors, CEOs, and stakeholders to enhance board success. Today we're joined by Kara Goldin, the founder and CEO of Hint, Inc, a terrific company founded in 2005. Kara, welcome to the Wisdom Board Pulse Podcast.
Kara Goldin:
Thanks for having me.
R. Adam Smith:
Kara, it's so nice to have you on this program. You're inspiring for many entrepreneurs, founders, women, and across the consumer category. You've trailblazed a great deal from the first moment of getting the product on the shelves of Whole Foods and now it's a several hundred million dollar enterprise, all beginning from when you were having your first job at a store at 14 years old. Tell us about your story.
Kara Goldin:
Yeah, the toy story was age 14, primarily because my mom used to go into fabric stores and spend way too much time there. And there just happened to be a toy store next door to the fabric store in Scottsdale, Arizona, where I grew up. So I started going in there just to kill time and all of a sudden they offered me a job to do the cash register. I mean, who wouldn't want a job doing a cash register at age 14 and they were going to pay me to do it? So I did that and learned actually a lot about margins and markups along the way and about what sells and that having more wasn't necessarily better. So lots of really, really early kind of learnings along the way. But I was getting pulled to go to the toy fairs with my first boss, but that soon led to other roles along the way.
Kara Goldin:
I graduated from school and decided that I wanted to get into journalism and moved to New York City and ended up working at Time Magazine. After a few years there, I was recruited out to go and work for sort of a late stage startup, although we didn't call it that back then. That was CNN actually. And it was before cable was sort of part of your package, right? Ted Turner was still running around the office. Then I moved to San Francisco, and that's where I had my first taste of a startup just in general. I had been following this guy, Steve Jobs, who I thought was just super cool and worked at this technology company called Apple. And there was an idea inside of Apple that had been spun out of Apple called [To Market 00:02:51] that was a CD rom shopping company. And I was just curious and wanted to know more about it. And I didn't know anyone in San Francisco.
Kara Goldin:
So I cold called guys that had worked at Apple. They were running this company and they said, "Come on down and we'll go grab lunch." And they were super excited about my background. I don't even think it mattered what I did, but the idea that I had worked for Time and CNN and brands that they knew. So suddenly, I got this offer to run this thing called business development for Five Guys working at to market, and they needed somebody who would go out to retailers and try and build a business model and had no idea what I was doing. But I thought, I mean, I get to go out to retailers like the Gap and J Crew and I mean, what a cool job?
Kara Goldin:
Suddenly they gave me this thing. I remember getting my contract called equity. I didn't even know what equity was, but I thought, okay, I don't really have to worry about it right now. Then America Online came and acquired us and asked me to run all of the business development for this thing called e-commerce and shopping. Nobody really thought it was actually going to be a revenue stream. Very early, '95, '96, I mean, many stories, including helping Jeff Bezos build a bookshelf up at Amazon when it was just a book store. I mean, crazy, crazy journey along the way,
R. Adam Smith:
You were pretty early on in the internet then because back then, AOL still had that silly sound and people were trying to navigate their email waiting minutes or hours for downloads. Not to mention back in the days of Netscape when the browser was really quite pioneering. Those sounds and quite frustrating in the old days, but we didn't know any better. Right?
Kara Goldin:
Right. You've got mail and learning in the days of ICQ, which truly is texting today. Anyway, so that was a really, really exciting time and learned a lot of lessons, including things like ideas can come from anywhere. It didn't matter what your educational background was or what your role was on paper. It really was anybody can contribute and just the creativity and the curiosity was welcomed. After seven years at AOL and I felt really grateful and fortunate that I was able to kind of get this role in the first place. I didn't necessarily feel qualified to do it, but it was a billion dollars in revenue to America Online.
Kara Goldin:
I decided to take a few years off. I had three kids back in San Francisco where I lived and I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do next. I thought naturally, I'm living in the Bay area. I can get a job in tech, but it wasn't necessarily what I wanted to do. I didn't want to do 2.0 of America Online. What I really wanted to do was do something that had kind of purpose and that I was excited about. And I wasn't in a rush to do it either because I had three kids under the age of four. And I thought it's okay to take some time off.
R. Adam Smith:
I saw that your husband or fiance at the time, Theo, was at Netscape back in those days. That was quite a pioneering company in browser, and with founder Andreessen's incredible. So you guys were quite busy at the time, I'm sure.
Kara Goldin:
Yeah. So he was the first intellectual property attorney at Netscape and we both sort of rode this wave. And now I look back on that time as truly a hockey stick for both of our companies. That's when I really started soul searching and trying to decide, okay, do I want to get into tech? Do I want to stay? Do I want to go further into tech? What else do I want to do? And in the meantime, I had gained a bunch of weight. I had developed terrible adult acne, which I didn't even have as a teenager, and my energy levels had gone down, which I was never this person that needed to take a nap in the afternoon.
Kara Goldin:
That's when I really started looking at my own personal health. And it was something that mattered to me. It mattered to me not only as a human, but also as a parent. And I had these young kids. That's when I started looking at everything that I was eating. I tried different diet plans for the first time in my life. And I thought, gosh, it's really hard to get healthy and it's confusing. And all of these things that I was seeing frankly for the first time that I hadn't paid attention to.
R. Adam Smith:
We've been investing in consumer beverages for years. And back then, there weren't that many pioneering beverage concepts after Smartwater, Vitaminwater. And most of them were still sugar and not really in the wellness category, except for maybe Honest Tea and a few others. You were quite early then.
Kara Goldin:
Yeah. And I felt like as a consumer, I was seeing a lot of healthy perception versus healthy reality. But when I would even share this sort of big thought with people, they would say, "What do you mean Vitaminwater isn't healthy?" So I was way ahead of even what... Forget about the industry because I wasn't in the industry. I didn't really know people in the industry, but my friends and my family, they would sort of look at me and they'd say, "Oh, okay, well, what do you think of Google?" It just wasn't the topic that anybody really wanted to have with me. But I was just so curious about it.
Kara Goldin:
So one day I looked down at my counter and I had this diet Coke that I'd been drinking for years, and I started looking at the label that happened to be the ingredients were facing me. And I thought, gosh, everybody focuses on food. And food and exercise are sort of the things that talks about around health. And I thought, I don't know, like drinks, there's a lot of things in there that I don't really understand. So just as a test, I thought I'm going to put my diet Coke to the side and see what will happen. And I started drinking water. I realized that I knew I should drink more water. I grew up in Arizona where it gets hot, you should be drinking water, but I never did because I thought water was boring. So I started slicing up fruit and throwing it in the water just for taste.
Kara Goldin:
What was interesting is in two and a half weeks, I lost over 20 pounds. My skin cleared up and my energy levels were back. And wow, it wasn't the best two weeks of my life, but it wasn't the worst. And I thought, gosh, why aren't more people talking about this? This whole industry, not only the diet industry, but also the soda industry and sort of the healthy perception versus healthy reality industry that exists in food as well.
R. Adam Smith:
And also just for our listeners in case they're not aware, it's not so great for you to have large amounts of diet Pepsi or diet Coke and the saccharin that's in those sodas. These days it's great to have a whole range of choices of Hint and other wellness products instead of carbonated soda.
Kara Goldin:
What I realized is that... I mean, I drank way back when saccharin was kind of out there. I drank that. I drank NutraSweet and all the Splenda and all the various ones. And what I was realizing was that I was drinking diet, and I felt somewhere along the way that I had been tricked into believing that diet was healthier than it was. I didn't even realize back then what I know now that I was kind of an early test case back in the eighties for diet Coke. My mom was a Tab drinker, and of course I wasn't going to drink Tab because that was my mom's drink, but I started drinking diet Coke and thinking I was actually doing better.
Kara Goldin:
I was living this way for like a year and people would notice that I definitely had gotten healthier. I was also interviewing for different tech roles. A lot of these people would ask me what I had been doing. And I sort of naturally brought up that I had really been taking the time to get healthier, and I had these young kids and I would share my story with people and they would be interested just because they thought... Again, they didn't know that much about the industry, but they said, "Wow."
R. Adam Smith:
You were so early and you made them pay attention. Right?
Kara Goldin:
And they were paying attention. So that's when I thought one day when I was shopping at this brand new store, Whole Foods, I walked in and I don't know, it just came out of my mouth. I asked the guy that was stocking the shelves. I said, "How do I get a product on the shelf here?" And he said, "Well, you have to have a bottle and a label or a can." It was at that moment when I just realized that I was just really engaged that I thought-
R. Adam Smith:
You wanted to just go do it, right?
Kara Goldin:
Yeah. That I should just go do it. And I knew nothing about beverages other than the fact that I was a consumer. My dad early on had developed a product inside of a large company, a large company ConAgra, but the product was called Healthy Choice. So I had been around food, but never thought that I would actually go and start a beverage company or a healthy CPG company. But it was my own curiosity and how it affected my life, I think, that allowed me to kind of go maybe back down to the bottom or however you want to think about it. I was just super engaged. I mean, here I had been at AOL, I had risen pretty quickly to the top. I was one of the youngest vice presidents at AOL. I was one of the few females at that level.
R. Adam Smith:
I think Steven Case was there. Right?
Kara Goldin:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it was interesting to me because I just... I don't know. I think about this a lot being in sort of C-suite executives often don't actually... Your job is not to learn. Your job is to manage and teach, which is fine.
R. Adam Smith:
To inspire and coach.
Kara Goldin:
Right. Which is fine. But I also felt that I had a lot to learn, and that was where my head was, but I couldn't articulate it back then. And anyway, when I ran into kind of this problem I had in my own life, that's when I thought, gosh, I have not only identified that there's this problem but I also have an idea on how to solve it because I had solved it for myself. And every day, I felt a little uncomfortable. I had fears that this wouldn't work out so well, but I think people were more stressed out for me saying things to me like, "Why are you doing this? I mean, you could go and get a job at Google or go do a lot of other things."
Kara Goldin:
And I kept thinking to myself, and something that I share with people even today, is that if you actually think that you did great work and something pretty remarkable before actually veering a little bit and going and testing your abilities and where it is not such a bad thing. I thought at the worst case scenario, I'd be a great dinner party guest saying, "I went a little crazy for a couple of years and here's what I went and did." And people would say, "Really? That's really interesting." And you learn not only a lot about an industry potentially, but also yourself.
Kara Goldin:
What I didn't realize until I got the product on the shelf, which I eventually did and got it on the shelf at Whole Foods was that we were not only launching a company and a brand new product, but I realized about two months in that I was actually launching an entirely new category, which I always share with people is a monumental experience that launching a company is like climbing a mountain, but launching a category is equivalent to climbing Everest.
R. Adam Smith:
I think one of the things that I find very inspiring about you is how you came from very humble beginnings and pushed yourself into a professional self discovery and continued to grow yourself and taking risks along the way. As you say, in your book Undaunted, which we can talk about later and people can find on your website and Amazon as well. One of the quotes that you share in your life is that, "Fear is not the enemy. Comfort is." And it's clear that when people are in positions of leadership, that sometimes it's hard to push through that comfort zone to be a leader, to take initiative, to take risk, to really look back to what Steve Jobs did as a great example to look beyond what's feasible and really go the limit to pursue your passion and pursue something that's new and has not been done before. So it's great how Hint has become such a powerful brand, a real go-to for so many millions of people and also a healthy product. So it's inspiring to see your journey, not just as a company, but also as a brand.
Kara Goldin:
Yeah. We all get into this comfort zone, which whether that is kind of encouraged by money or title or habit. I think it's very similar to what large companies do. You get into this process where you just keep doing the same thing over and over and again, and actually if you're successful as a large company, it's even more dangerous because you don't prioritize innovation. I think innovation is quite equivalent to individuals taking risks as well, and trying to figure out what you do. And I think for me, what I've realized and what I try and encourage, not only in the managers within my company, but also just in people that I come across is that it's part of your journey and if you choose not to do it. But I think what I've seen is that being a lifelong learner is something that I think really helps in happiness as well, because you're learning so much about yourself. And sometimes things seem really hard, but the ability to go figure stuff out.
R. Adam Smith:
On the topic of education, it's such a different world today where there's huge platforms of continuing knowledge from LinkedIn to GLG and Coursera, Khan Academy, MasterClass. Really exciting to have access to all that knowledge. But you've also done it over the years with what you were building in the Kara Network and now over other media platforms as well. Tell us about those activities.
Kara Goldin:
Yeah. It's interesting. I don't get to spend as much time on that today. I actually started my own podcast, the Kara Goldin Show, where I try and interview leaders, sometimes founders, sometimes CEOs, sometimes people that just have really interesting stuff to talk about and certain topics. But I feel that so often there are things that are not necessarily written in a textbook or even in a course that people really do want to learn where you're just engaging in conversations and hearing how people think.
Kara Goldin:
I think the one thing that I learned in building my company Hint that I talk about in my book as well is that I initially thought that people who had lots of experience in my industry were the ones that I needed to kind of add to my team or get advice from. And they actually weren't the people that really helped me to solve my problems because I was doing something totally different and I needed to differentiate myself in ways. So I would start to go to conferences that had interesting topics and interesting speakers that were... When I was thinking about direct to consumer, for example, I wasn't looking in the beverage industry because nobody was really doing it. I was showing up at conferences where I would hear people who had just sort of done it and grown their business that way and tried to figure out what I had and what I didn't have in order to try and build those things.
R. Adam Smith:
It's really essential to have advisors and mentors that are varied, that compliment each other, that push you and are not just yes people and those that you trust as well. I'm sure you've done it over the years. I've seen you refer to your own mentors in your interviews with [inaudible 00:20:11] Journal and Maria Shriver. Tell us about that. How do you think about putting mentorship and ideas, knowledge around you?
Kara Goldin:
Yeah, absolutely. They're more specific to people that I've just admired for a specific piece like Porter Gale, for example, who is an incredible marketer who had built a Virgin Americas. She was a CMO for Virgin America, and the purple lights and sort of the feelings of the consumer and surprise and delight and lots of pieces like that. Or Elaine Rubin, who I knew way back when at 1-800-FLOWERS. So just people that are really best of class in kind of what they do as kind of an advisory board that I can call on to say, "Hey, what do you think about this?" Or, "Have you ever encountered somebody who does this type of thing?"
Kara Goldin:
But again, I think going back to really the journey and thinking differently is really the key to kind of growing a brand that sticks. I think it's equivalent in so many industries that are out there that, especially if you're building a new category, it really doesn't make sense to go and find people in an industry that know exactly what they're doing because you're doing something totally different. So you need to find a way to really go out and try and test and encourage people and your team to do the exact same thing.
R. Adam Smith:
Well, moving on to you and your continuous expansion of entrepreneurial success, your new book Undaunted. It's recently out on Amazon, it has terrific reviews. There's been a great deal of inspiration that people have found from your words and from your courage that you're sharing and those pages. Love to hear more about it, and we'd like to be sharing it also with our members and the audience as well as we move forward.
Kara Goldin:
Yeah. I call myself an accidental entrepreneur because I never really thought about even starting my own company. I had the experience and the background, I guess, because I worked for a lot of amazing entrepreneurs, including Steve Case and not Steve Jobs, although I wish I would've, but people who had worked for Steve Jobs and Ted Turner and lots of people. So I didn't even realize I was learning about culture along the way, but I learned a lot about that because those were different environments and things that I learned about that when I ultimately was going to go start my own company.
Kara Goldin:
But I was traveling a ton and building my company Hint. And oftentimes I would go to these towns and cities that were places where I didn't know people. And I got tired, frankly, of turning on the television in my Holiday Inn Express and trying to figure out exactly what I was going to do. So I started journaling about a little over four years ago, and I was doing a ton of public speaking too. The Q and A at the end, when people are asking you these questions, sometimes you never really know what people are going to ask you. So often people would not only ask questions, but make big statements, including you're obviously a fearless risk taker and you've never had failures and you got really lucky. Somewhere along the way I thought, wow, is that what I seem?
R. Adam Smith:
So in a way, the book is a manifestation of your journey and how to put those thoughts together for women and entrepreneurs and friends and many people to understand your own story. Right? So you wanted to share that with them and kind of put it on page as opposed to just through the company.
Kara Goldin:
Yeah. Well, I didn't even think of it though as a book. Like I said, I was doing this journal and kind of almost therapy to myself to sort of answer some of these questions. Then all of a sudden I just started answering it in a way including when people would say, "Oh, you're a fearless risk taker." I said, "No, I've actually had a lot of fears and I've had failures and here's one." And people would respond by shooting me an email afterwards or sending me a direct message on LinkedIn. And they'd say, "I heard you speak at this conference and you really helped me to know that I'm going to be okay. And here's my business." And I thought, wow, there are so many people that actually need help in their own way. Maybe I could actually not only help a lot of entrepreneurs, but maybe I can help college students or people who have thought about maybe going and starting their own thing, but they don't because they have these walls up in front of themselves to think that they have to be a certain way.
Kara Goldin:
So about a year and a half ago, that's when I really started realizing that I could help a lot more people who don't have the opportunity to go to these talks and they're not at the same conferences. And I thought, gosh, I should just bind these notes. My journal was over 600 pages long. Yeah. It was pretty big. So of course, the hardest part, once I got a publisher, the hardest part was actually taking it down to a readable format of 200 pages or so. The best thing that I've gotten out of writing the book, which I didn't know that I would receive was that so many people have written to me and have said exactly what I had thought, or basically what I had been hearing from people who had heard my talks, which was your book has helped me to realize that I could actually go do something and that maybe I should be a lifelong learner and really think about my self and what do I want to do.
Kara Goldin:
And really leading with the word help, which 15 years ago, when I started Hint, it was the exact same thing where people were saying when they tried Hint for the first time, people were writing to me saying, "Gosh, Hint has really helped me drink water. Has helped me control my type two diabetes. Has helped me, helped me." And then book is the same kind of response. And anytime you can actually do something where you're hearing a community say, "You're helping me." That's such a powerful thing. And that is really for me, I think really kind of the biggest plus of writing this that I've gotten so far.
R. Adam Smith:
Well, it's a fantastic book. I've just started reading it and I can't wait to finish it and be even more inspired than I already am. You've done a great job with this story. For our listeners, it's on audible and Amazon and the Hint website, and please go there and buy them for yourself and inspiration for your friends as well. Kara, it was a treat to speak with you today. We look forward to staying in touch with you and watching your continued success.
Kara Goldin:
Thank you so much.
R. Adam Smith:
Also, the digital collection of select personal conversations with respected experts in the private company leadership governance board communities, Wisdom Board Pulse is available on all major podcast channels, including Google, Apple, and Spotify. Wisdom Board's mission is to empower board directors, leaders and owners. We are fortunate to include CEOs and founders and entrepreneurs like yourself and our community. For our listeners, please visit us online at www.wisdomboard.co and on LinkedIn. I'm R. Adam Smith, founder of Wisdom Board. Thank you for joining today for our latest episode of the Pulse Podcast.