How’s this for a recipe for success: Work at McKinsey. Go to film school. Take over a high-level strategy role when your colleague has a mental breakdown. Start your first company in your mid-thirties.
Sound a bit... circuitous? Well it's precisely the path that today’s guest Adam Zbar took - and it seems to be working out.
Adam is the CEO and founder of Sun Basket, a San Francisco-based meal-kit delivery service that makes healthy cooking easy by delivering ready to make recipes and organic and non-GMO ingredients every week.
Since launching in 2015, the company has seen enormous growth and success, scaling from 0-1,000 employees and raising more than $50 million in funding.
In this episode, Adam joins us from his Bay Area home to share Sun Basket’s recipe for success, as well as some top shelf “Zbarisms” - including why it’s usually better to “solve the people, not the problem.”
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Recommended Reading
Introducing SnackNation Market.
For the past few years SnackNation has only been available to businesses, but now it’s available for homes and awesome individuals too.
SnackNation Market brings health- and taste-conscious folks expertly curated boxes of the most delicious, innovative and healthier snacks right to your doorstep. With SnackNation there is no more worrying about having a weak, unhealthy and tasteless snack game.
We’ve secured a special offer for the listeners of this show: you can try SnackNation for FREE.
Just visit SnackNation.com/AO right now, and get your first box free (just cover shipping and handling).
That’s SnackNation.com/AO.
Sometimes being the company that VCs just don’t “get” can actually work to your advantage.
Take MeUndies, the wildly successful direct-to-consumer lifestyle brand on a mission to produce the world’s most comfortable and sustainable underwear. After a seed round in 2011, they found that convincing investors to pour money into their subscription-based underwear business was more challenging than they anticipated. Compared to some of their startup peers, they often felt a little underfunded.
But this turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Being largely bootstrapped taught them an important lesson that they would have never learned any other way - the importance of taking calculated risks. When you’re underfunded, you have to be savvy enough to see an opportunity when it arises, nimble enough to mobilize and take advantage of it, and brave enough to actually pull the trigger.
That’s all according to this week’s guest, MeUndies CEO Bryan Lalezarian.
Bryan is a Wharton educated, former hedge fund analyst who decided to take a leap of faith and get in the underwear game. In this conversation with co-host Sean Spear, Bryan shares his top leadership tips, explains why he believes their focus on brand is a major key to MeUndies' success, and tells us an amazing story about what taking calculated risks really means - and how it can really pay off.
Recommended Reading
Links
Introducing SnackNation Market.
For the past few years SnackNation has only been available to businesses, but now it’s available for homes and awesome individuals too.
SnackNation Market brings health- and taste-conscious folks expertly curated boxes of the most delicious, innovative and healthier snacks right to your doorstep. With SnackNation there is no more worrying about having a weak, unhealthy and tasteless snack game.
We’ve secured a special offer for the listeners of this show: you can try SnackNation for FREE.
Just visit SnackNation.com/AO right now, and get your first box free (just cover shipping and handling).
That’s SnackNation.com/AO.
There’s no one out there who embodies the idea of “enjoying the journey” quite like today’s guest, YAS founder and CEO Kimberly Fowler.
YAS stands for Yoga And Spinning, and is a pioneering hybrid fitness concept that combines yoga for athletes with the high-intensity cardio of spin.
And quite a journey it’s been. Before she launched YAS, Kimberly had already lived everywhere from LA to New Jersey to Monaco, been an attorney, a corporate executive, and a professional endurance athlete.
Kimberly’s story is one of incredible grit, creativity, and constant reinvention. In this conversation, she takes us through several pivotal moments in her life, major forks in the road that forced her to pause and ask “now what do I do with my life?”
Through it all, Kimberly has maintained a fearless attitude and her trademark grit as she faced these challenges - which include a terminal brain tumor diagnosis in law school and a near-fatal free climbing accident that made her lose her job and forced her to start over yet again.
Co-host Sean Spear met up with Kimberly in YAS’ flagship Venice location to talk fundraising, fitness and to hear about this remarkable journey.
This week we’re going back to the archives for one of our very favorite episodes, our conversation with Jason Nazar.
Jason Nazar, is the co-Founder and CEO at Comparably, a company whose mission is to make work better by providing the most accurate and comprehensive compensation and culture data available anywhere. He’s also the the former CEO of Docstoc, an entrepreneur in residence for the city of Los Angeles, and an active investor, writer, and speaker. He definitely knows a thing or two about creating strong teams and inspiring cultures, and he brought his A-game in this classic interview.
In our conversation Jason describes his first foray into entrepreneurship at age seven, explains why he did a 180 on the importance of culture, and reveals the three hiring rules that helped make DocStoc go from a mere idea to a massive online repository of business intelligence with more than 50 million registered users.
Key Takeaways
Links
Recommended Reading
Special Offer for AO Listeners – Try SnackNation Market for FREE
Introducing SnackNation Market.
For the past few years SnackNation has only been available to businesses, but now it’s available for homes and awesome individuals too.
SnackNation Market brings health- and taste-conscious folks expertly curated boxes of the most delicious, innovative and healthier snacks right to your doorstep. With SnackNation there is no more worrying about having a weak, unhealthy and tasteless snack game.
We’ve secured a special offer for the listeners of this show: you can try SnackNation for FREE.
Just visit SnackNation.com/AO right now, and get your first box free (just cover shipping and handling).
That’s SnackNation.com/AO.