The best operators have a relentless focus on leverage, finding ways to multiply their impact rather than just working harder.
But here's what I see happening in finance teams everywhere.
Brilliant people getting buried in expense management busywork.
If you think about it, you become a finance leader because you love strategic work, modeling scenarios, optimizing capital allocation, finding the insights that actually move the business forward.
But instead, you're chasing receipts and categorizing transactions.
It's the opposite of leverage. This is exactly why I'm so bullish on what the team at Ramp has built.
Kareem and Eric understood that every minute spent on manual expense management is a minute stolen from high leverage work.
So they automated all of it. Automatic categorization, receipt matching, spending controls that actually work.
Check out ramp.com slash invest and see what happens when you eliminate the busy work.
Ridgeline is hosting their annual Basecamp conference this September 22nd through the 25th in Deer Valley, Utah.
I will be there and so will over 50 top investment management firms from around the country.
Now in its fourth year, Basecamp has become where the future of investment management is created.
Ridgeline gets the most influential changemakers in the same room learning and sharing ideas about the latest innovations that are drastically altering how this industry operates.
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See it in action at alpha-sense.com. Hello and welcome, everyone.
I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy, and this is Invest Like the Best.
This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, stories, and strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money.
If you enjoy these conversations and want to go deeper, check out Colossus Review, our quarterly publication with in-depth profiles of the people shaping business and investing.
You can find Colossus Review along with all of our podcasts at joincolossus.com.
We'll see you next time. To learn more, visit psum.vc.
My guest today is Jens Gried. Jens is the co-founder and CEO of Skims, the shapewear and clothing brand he co-founded with his wife, Emma, and Kim Kardashian.
Our conversation left my head spinning. This was one of my favorite conversations in years.
Jens has this remarkable ability to be both creative and commercial.
He puts brilliant frameworks into plain terms and knows consumers like the back of his hand.
Jens explains how pop culture is the only remaining hack to the consumer economy in our fragmented media landscape and describes today's cultural shift as clamoring for comfort in uncertain times.
We discuss individual voices trumping institutions, moving at the speed of culture rather than corporate planning cycles, and why big brands will increasingly win.
Please enjoy this absolutely awesome discussion with Jens. i have to start with the name of your holding company which is popular culture which i think is the coolest name for a holding company i've encountered and demands the opening question what trends in popular culture do you think are the most interesting today well first of all thank you i have always wanted to have Mission accomplished.
And you're probably the first person who's commented on it.
So 15 years later, I finally got that recognition I was looking for.
So I appreciate it. You got it. I named my... company popular culture because i'm a real child of the 90s pop culture growing up in sweden you partly grew up in minnesota so you know the feeling what it's like in january to ride your bikes to your friend's house and i will ride my bike to my friend's house to watch beverly hills 90210 and baywatch and We would sit there and eat chips.
Could you imagine yourself living like that?
Could you imagine yourself being at the Peach Pit?
But I was a real child of the 90s. Pop culture and skateboard scene and music I've always been obsessed with it.
As I got older, I would say the red thread in my career has been the ability to work in the intersection of pop culture and commerce.
First, for my first chapter on behalf of my clients and later on in life as an entrepreneur and as an investor, I have believed that pop culture today is really the only hack to the consumer economy that we have.
For me, that was the obvious name because that's what I do.
And when you say hack to the consumer, does that mean the means through which to reach them, build something for them and make sure that they know about it?
It's really hard to reach a critical mass of consumers today.
If someone gave you and me a billion dollars to start a vodka company, we can call it winter warmth.
And we spent that on TV and billboards and on Meta.
We wouldn't have half the brand recognition that Dwayne The Rock Johnson have for his tequila company, Terramona.
You tell me, what's the value of Dwayne Johnson?
It's a billion dollars or is it five? It's really the only way today that you can reach a critical mass of U.S. consumers that Not just building awareness, but building a sense of knowing what the company stands for and what the brand's trying to do is for personality and it is for culture.
And I think today, as we have lived through the fragmentation of media, my social media feed looks entirely different from yours and entirely different from my wife's.
We are consuming different news from each other and often very different opinions from one another.
If I'm into fly fishing, I can live in a fly fishing world where fly fishing is the most important thing in the world.
I can watch fly fishing shows and engage with other fly fishermen.
I truly believe that fly fishing runs the universe.
The only two things that cuts across really is... pop culture and sport.
And I put sport in the culture bracket. Sport and culture is the only two things that generally tend to cross all those boundaries in society today, being political, racial, religious boundaries that society has drawn up.
And I think in many cases, The algorithms have strengthened.
Can you talk about the difference between the role of individuals versus institutions today versus, say, the 90s when you developed your interest in pop culture?
It seems like that change has been seismic and really important for businesses.
I don't know if the consumer makes as much of a distinction today. as we used to.
When we grew up, a singer was a singer, an actor was an actor, a brand was a brand, a soda maker was a soda maker, a clothing company was a clothing company.
Brands and individuals had very little agency to move past The box the consumer had put them in order that they had themselves worked within.
There was just very little room. I think we made a high distinction between a corporation and an individual.
My sense is if you ask a 20-year-old today, they make very few of those distinctions.
Not only can you be a wrestler who becomes the world's biggest movie star and a phenomenal entrepreneur, the lines between these disciplines, they have been entirely blurred out.
Ryan Reynolds is a movie star, is also the founder of a mobile phone network.
I don't think that would have been the case 20 years ago or even 10.
The consumer don't really mind. In fact, I think in a world where we have a distrust generally for authority and where truth is somewhat debatable.
The importance of an individual, the voice of an individual has probably never been higher.
I think we see that from the business I'm in all the way to the Oval Office.
Having a strong voice in culture today translates into a strong voice in consumer, but also a strong voice in politics.
I want to stick with culture for a moment and ask what you think drives the major changes.
You and I have talked before about the change from hip hop to country as like a big theme of changing culture in the US and around the world.
What is behind changes like that? Is it people that drive it?
Is it confluence of forces? What is the input data that you watch to figure out how things are changing and why?
Everything we have around us is a reaction and a counter reaction.
I don't think that just goes for music. I think the current political climate is a clear counter reaction to the previous four years.
That was the reaction to the previous four years.
I think the same thing is true for pop culture.
What I'm seeing, quite interestingly, where pop culture used to be more contrarian to the establishment, The 90s was about being contrarian to the establishment.
It wouldn't matter if it is nirvana or public enemy.
The establishment was somewhat the enemy of the young.
Today, we live in a time where I see pop culture moving more in lockstep with the establishment, and let's say where the wind is blowing, dare I say politically, but just in terms of what we put first.
In a world today that most people really consider quite threatening, scary, uncertain.
I just watched a movie, Mountainhead. I heard about it.
I haven't watched it yet. It's worth a watch.
It's a good satire. It's clear he spent some time with the stereotypical billionaire master of the universe, gods of tech.
I think that movie, however exaggerated it is and how much it preys on our fear about the future, but that's how people feel.
That's nothing new. I go back to Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, which was about the prospect of a nuclear war. which really, if you ask your grandparents, defined their whole life.
These consequential moments that we are now experiencing, they experienced, and I would say they were probably more intense.
The Cuba Missile Crisis. It's a highly intense moment.
And the struggle between the political philosophy of Western Europe and Eastern Europe.
That's a long-winded way to say that today I see culture moving with politics in an America-first agenda and in a time of technological disruption and uncertainty.
We are clamoring to those things that makes us feel good.
Olive Garden, country music, Applebee's is booming.
Banana Republic is having the best year in probably decades.
Abercrombie and Fitch. Abercrombie and Fitch.
Somehow. Back from the dead. Exactly right.
We recently did a diner in LA, called it the Skims Diner.
We took over a classic drive-in diner and We transformed it into a skims experience, but root beer floats and waffles stacks high.
In five minutes, I think we booked this place out for 10 days from morning to three in the morning, from 8 a.m. to...
3 a.m., every table went in four or five minutes.
People were lining up for any spare seats all around the block.
And it's just that feeling of comfort. You ask any 12-year-old or 14-year-old today, what's your favorite TV show?
You'd be surprised how many people say Friends.
You're just clamoring for that less threatening, warm nostalgia that those shows and those experience gives you.
I really think that it's the technological changes and the uncertainty about the future that has driven this pop culture moment.
That's really, if you think about it, has moved more from futurism to nostalgia.
Futurism we haven't really seen for quite some time.
We're not hopeful about the future quite as much as we used to be.
Right now I'm obsessed with diners because I'm a disciple of popular culture, so I'm listening to country myself.
I've had Morgan Wallen in the car on my way here.
But I love diners because diners is one of the few things that now they're retro, but they weren't a restaurant concept before.
That was born out of nostalgia, like Italian food.
Diners were hyper-modern, modernist structures.
They were all about the future. It was in an era where cars were inspired by... the space race.
They were inspired by rockets. And it was all about this promise of what tomorrow had for us.
And we were certain that this generation was going to be so much greater off than the generation that had lived through the Second World War.
And I think today, generally, we are fearful of the future rather than optimistic.
I think we should be optimistic about the future.
Winston Churchill, he once said, I'm an optimist because I see little use to being anything else.
I'm definitely an optimist. If the transition has been from hip-hop to country and music, what else goes in that bundle of related cultural touchstones with hip-hop?
You touched on the comfort and nostalgia being why the new cultural touchstones have worked.
What about the ones we've transitioned away from work less well?
I think it's reflected in sports too. I remember, was it eight years ago, 10 years ago?
But remember when there was a lot of talk about CTE?
I'm not so sure all parents still want their kids to play football.
But it was really a conversation. There was this feeling that the NFL was somewhat in trouble.
Was NFL going to go the way of boxing? Today, that feels laughable because NFL owns sports in this country.
NFL is the biggest sports league in the country, and college football is the second largest sport in viewership numbers in this country, far ahead of basketball, for example.
To me, it seems pretty consistent. Football, Taylor Swift, Morgan Wallen, Olive Garden, Chili's has been in the news recently.
They're killing it. We all want sliders.
And it's a very consistent cultural moment that is lining up with the overarching feeling of society. which is of course more protectionist than it's been in the past.
And it's probably a counter-reaction to globalism, which, much like technology, did not work for everybody.
Speaking of cyclicality, the Abercrombie & Fitch story, for some reason, is just fascinating to me.
That this was this very fallen brand that defined your and my upbringing, but then went the wrong way and somehow has been resurgent.
Tell me about what you think learning about that story or watching that story.
And I'm curious... In general, what other fallen brands might be able to make a comeback and how through learning from a story like that one or Banana Republic or others?
Oh, I love this question because it would lead me into something I really want to talk about.
Big wins in this era. I must have told anybody who wanted to listen five years ago to buy Abercrombie.
I think it was worth $700 or $800 million at the time.
I think there's a big difference between what consumers care about and a consumer story and what is a Wall Street financial press story.
Ironically, they don't seem to impact one another very much.
If you asked consumers about Abercrombie, I think they were going through a very tough time.
Abercrombie, the founder, was in all sorts of hot water.
He was in all sorts of trouble, even more trouble now than he was then.
But if you ask a 20-something consumer, If that would have impacted their purchasing behavior, common sense would say it would, but I never see it do.
Victoria's Secret is right up there too.
They had an Epstein connection because the founder, Les Wexner, had one.
They had totally lost that connectivity with the customer.
Their fashion shows felt outdated. The way that they portrayed women felt outdated.
The whole concept in the early 2020s felt really out of step with our times.
And everybody said, it's over. It's not over.
They're doing just fine. Now, the street are still working on the thesis of that story from 2020.
Nothing has shifted Wall Street's views All Victoria's Secrets.
But the consumers go to any mall in America.
And you see early 20-somethings with a Sephora bag, which is a darling from a financial press point of view, and a Victoria's Secret bag.
They are unaffected. We tend to overanalyze a little bit and think that things really matter to customers that don't really matter to customers.
We know that Coke isn't great for us to drink with every meal, but Coca-Cola seems to be doing just fine too.
Yeah. If you think about this idea of why big wins, what do these brands and these trends teach you?
And what's the core idea? I think big wins and I think big will increasingly win.
This is the time for so many different reasons.
One, going back to what we spoke about, which is popular culture being one of the only hacks in the consumer economy.
So first going back, we have been in an era of brand creation with Shopify and other tools making it incredibly easy to start a business and through Meta and other platforms, very easy to find an audience that cared about what you were doing.
Today, the algorithm is not favoring loyalty, is not favoring necessarily who you followed two years ago or five years ago.
It favors who you recently follow. It favors what you're talking about over breakfast with your partner.
It favors things that you have engaged with, that you clicked on.
Maybe something a friend sent to you and you watched it three times and now you're getting sort of tons of lookalike content.
It does not favor brands making content.
It's not putting that in front of its followers.
I don't know how many people you follow.
Maybe I follow 1,200. Do I see content from more than 200 of those?
I don't. Sometimes I think, oh my God, I haven't seen something for so long.
Did they stop posting? Of course they didn't.
It just moved past me. Just didn't favor it.
So as we went from... a social media to really an interest-based algorithm.
That was pretty devastating for young brands.
It was very, very hard all of a sudden to build a community on social the way that eight, nine years ago was very possible.
Skims were one of the few larger brands that was able to build a community through social and get to a critical scale where we could pay our way.
But today you have to pay to play if you want to be seen.
The other part is distribution. I've seen post-COVID in shopping has really returned to 2019 levels.
In the end of the day, it's 80% a physical store business and 20% an e-commerce business today, generally in America.
So people ask me, why do you want to open so many stores?
And I said, I don't want to be in the 20% business.
I want to be in the 80% business. But opening stores is incredibly expensive.
It consumes a lot of capital to build stores.
If you and I was trying to start a retailer, we would really struggle to find the financing and being able to open a nice store in a good location.
Just unaffordable. Big wins, especially large retailers, large restaurant chains with a big footprint.
It's almost impossible today to recreate.
It's the perfect time to talk about how you broke through.
How Skims, which is what, five years old?
It's not terribly old. Yeah, coming up to six in September.
Yes, almost six. But you're extremely young business.
Kindergarten age. Kindergarten age. Yet you've broken through this difficult landscape.
Just tell us the entire origin story of how and whether or not that's the model for if you were an entrepreneur sitting here today with a blank sheet of paper.
What from the skim story could be borrowed and applied again productively to Breakthrough?
I have a distinct feeling that if I tried to do it again, I wouldn't be successful today.
When it comes to disruption in consumer behavior, and especially retail, is more connected to changes in supply chain and consumer taste than the brand itself.
It's not that a brand comes along and then the world shifts or mobilizes it around the brand.
It's far more common that changes are happening And the brand is in the right place at the right time.
They say luck is when opportunity meets preparation.
And I think that's true. Timing is just one of those things that are beyond our control somewhat.
I ultimately have to believe that the way we make product The strength of what we do, the value proposition that we offer, our way to market would ultimately have had the same result. but I very much doubt it would have been on the same timeline.
Going back through history, and I'll get into why this was the right moment, Les Wexner, who is one of the godfathers of American retail, created Victoria's Secret, Bath & Body, Express, Abercrombie, Hollister, and more.
Was it the brands he created? No, it was the fact that it coincided with malls being built in the 80s all across America.
And all these great malls, the Mall of America, for example.
The very biggest one. There's a lot of storefronts.
These malls needed fresh concepts for their customers.
Les understood this opportunity and created and bought companies and developed these concepts that he could replicate time over time over time with favorable economics. in all of the malls that was built in America.
He's a genius of retail. I'm just saying none of those retailers would be around if it hadn't been for the expansion of the American mall.
If you're into luxury, Ralph Lauren, Donna Karan, Giorgio Armani, Versace, Gucci, Dolce & Gabbana, I can go on.
All happened within the same five years.
Some of them might have been started slightly earlier, but it was a distinct period of time where they expanded.
And that's directly linked to Sax and Neiman Marcus and Barnus.
Because these designers were able to sell their goods and finance their goods for something called factoring, where you get the money before you get your invoice paid, creating a positive cash flow, which is why someone like Giorgio Armani still owns 100% of his business.
That could not be replicated today. It was a unique situation and a unique financing model. that led them to be able to retain the full ownership and scale their companies to a critical size.
2008, in the aftermath of the financial crisis, people wanted designer values. but they wanted to pay less for them.
Enter Michael Kors, Tory Burch, Dragon Bone, the expansion of Coach, and all of these companies that today makes $5 billion, $10 billion, $15 billion businesses.
There was a change in consumer taste. That's kind of well-documented.
What no one talks about is, do you remember all the diffusion lines?
D&G, Harmonic Exchange, all of this diffusion lines.
And there was only a couple of companies behind it, and they went bust.
All of a sudden, all over the world, there was all this floor space for these lower-priced designer goods.
The growth of those businesses and this change in distribution all coincide.
In America, we had the JCPenney's and the Gap, and they were disrupted by the Europeans in the techs that own Zara and H&M.
They had a better supply chain. They were able to get trend at the lower price to the American customer faster.
What is SHEIN? It's an even more efficient model.
It's a supply chain and software company that is masquerading as a retailer.
They found an even more efficient way to make and supply trends at an even lower price.
Technology, disruption in supply chain, distribution, those things is what makes brands happen.
With Skims, it was a combination of a few things.
So one, I saw this very large part in retail, in underwear, in lounge.
I saw that people were changing the way that they dressed, not just on weekends, but life was becoming two distinct wardrobes, one that is very soft.
I'm not sure if you wear Vuori. Of course.
It's a great brand. And I'm sure when you come home tonight, I'm going to change into it.
There you go. So you have two wardrobes and you will have one at home and you had one out or one at work and the one at home started spilling in over your life.
So that's one thing that's happening. Consumer taste is changing.
Incumbents had gotten stale, discount-driven.
They weren't leading with innovation anymore.
It was multi-packs. Even though it was cheap, we were paying a lot for not very much.
So I saw the opportunity to really lead through innovation in the supply chain. and build a business based on fabrication.
Because what you love about Vivori is the way you feel.
It's the feel as you're wearing the product, the way the fabric will feel to skin.
I'm getting a little scientific on this, but I'm getting to a point.
Which is, that is just as powerful as the difference in taste between Coke and Pepsi.
If you buy something that is not Vuori, I promise you, you will feel the difference.
Because you know exactly how Vuori is meant to feel.
Well, that's Coke and Pepsi challenge. It's a distinct sensory experience.
Like the first sip of Starbucks feels a certain way.
The first sip feeling. I saw the opportunity to create that in this category.
In the beginning, primarily for women, and now, of course, for everybody.
And really bring out the company that was a better alternative.
It might be slightly more expensive, but still affordable.
I think about Starbucks a lot when I do these things.
I think Starbucks, to me, is just a phenomenal innovation company.
Many of the things we take for granted, like a frappuccino or pumpkin spice latte are Starbucks inventions.
And they're incredible at building these franchises.
What they've done in the last couple of years with refreshers is incredibly powerful.
And I took that analogy to my company. And I said, I want to be the Starbucks.
And the lesson there is the adaptability, the driving of franchises within the bigger brand.
What specifically? It's about doing something that is worth the extra bit of money it costs.
Because I'm sure you have coffee. If I ask, could I have a cup of coffee?
You might have coffee here. I'll get that for free.
In fact, every office building in America has free coffee.
My office has free coffee. Pretty good ones too.
But I still think the Starbucks is worth my $5.50 or $6.00.
It's at a premium, but it's still available to me.
It's still affordable. And I believe that the quality difference is worth the difference in price.
That's a philosophy that I think runs like a red thread through all of my thinking, which is how do I make just a phenomenal experience for what you're paying and I'm less focused on the price.
I'm more focused on what you get for your money.
Can you talk about this concept of house taste and how it is developed over time and how that relates to the first sip feeling, the feeling on the skin of the voirie, the distinctive sensory experience or whatever that a consumer brand allows for and how that relates to taste?
I'm fascinated by this topic. House taste is a dangerous, dangerous thing.
I collect wine. I love wine. Every winery I go to, they truly believe that their wine is the best in the world.
Why do they believe that? They often have worked there for 10 years, 20 years.
So they drink a lot of their own wine. And safe to say, they've developed a wine that is perfect for their palate.
Therefore, they truly believe their wine is the best in the world because every other wine they try will not taste as good as the one they make.
House taste is therefore a dangerous concept for any company.
You shouldn't get high on your own supply.
You certainly shouldn't get too in love with what you're doing.
It happens pretty easily. And I see it with a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of founders.
They are really in love with their own product and they spend a lot of time convincing or wanting to convince everyone they meet why their product is the best in the world, rather than letting people tell them what they think about what they make.
I was aware of this. So what we did out of the gate was just really creating a very strong feedback loop with our own community, not losing ourselves necessarily in our own house taste.
The customer is always right. What was the mechanism for that?
How did you actually build that feedback loop?
Really for social. Some of it you can do through process.
And that's good, but culture eats process.
Just the culture of a company that is open to outside feedback, I think that has to come from the top.
If I'm open to feedback, you will be open to feedback.
And down the reporting line, it will go.
Assuming that if a customer feels a certain way, it's warranted because they feel a certain way.
And we talked a little bit about the conditions that made Skims possible, the supply chain, the technology.
You mentioned Sheen, which I think has 10 times better unsold inventory performance than the next most relevant.
So the business is much better. And not getting sucked in by house taste is positive feedback.
I'd love to talk about the other side of the equation, which is the brilliant partnership with Kim, how it was established.
The phrase I've heard before is the king that became a kingmaker or queen that became a queenmaker.
I want to talk about the origins of this relationship, maybe even going back to the first conversation you can remember having about this idea and tell us that story to begin.
The whole process was very organic. I've had the pleasure of being part of a few startups for my life.
And when it's at its best, it happens organically.
And when it's too contrived or you're trying to like force a good idea, like what should we do?
It tends not to work out quite so well. She really had an aesthetic point of view on what she wanted to make.
And I had a point of view what was missing from this category, from a price, position, innovation piece.
From her point of view, very much aesthetically driven, certain solutions and things that just wasn't available in the market that she wanted to bring to market.
Through a series of conversation, we just ended up in a place where we were just doing it.
I don't know if there was ever, let's do this thing.
It was more like, oh, we're definitely doing this thing.
When you're an entrepreneur, it's not that you want to do something.
It's that you cannot not do something. You wake up and you just cannot leave it alone.
And once she showed me aesthetically what she wanted to create, I couldn't get that out of my head.
I had finished the previous chapter. I had sold my businesses.
I was in my late 30s. Semi-retired. I had been walking around for maybe a year, two years.
I was still the chairman of a group within Omnicom at the time.
I was really trying to search for it. What am I going to do?
What am I going to do? And then once I saw what she had in mind, there was no question about what I was going to do.
This is what I had to do. Was it a specific feature?
Was it a look? It was a world. It was just stepping into a world that no one else owned aesthetically.
I spent my whole life talking in these terms.
I understand it might seem very clear to me when I say that expression and less clear to others.
What I mean with stepping into a world, when you go into Ralph Lauren, you're in Ralph Lauren's world.
It's very clear where you are. You could take all the signs off the walls and you know where you are.
When I saw aesthetically what she wanted to do, it was just instantly identifiable.
Distinctive. Just the look. It was just so distinctive.
The color world, the architecture, the attitude towards women, how to lift people up.
It was inclusive without ever having to say the word.
It wasn't a decision. It just was naturally.
It was so distinctive. I just had to help bring that to life.
And so what was step one? You step into a world and then you have to go make products and start to distribute them.
What was that first chapter defined by? I think there's two distinct steps to starting a company.
One is a hell of a lot more fun than the second.
Dreaming. First is the visualizing. It's gratifying.
It's fast. You start putting together this mood and design and all that's incredibly gratifying.
It's fast. And then comes the second step where most good ideas goes to die, which is the execution of bringing that to life at the right cost.
I've been in this world for my whole life.
It's what I do. You have interviewed some of the most unbelievable investors and I'm sure founders and entrepreneurs.
If Sam Altman wanted to build another product, he knows how to do it.
This is what he does. He can put together exceptional talent to build an exceptional product.
The world is full of communities and I have mine.
I can build an exceptional team that helped us have an exceptional result.
That's second nature. We're all good at something.
I've been relatively good in my career, starting with a blank piece of paper and I'll figure it out.
In my head, I make sense of the scramble.
I can articulate the mess into a step, a step one and a step two and a step three.
And what is that process? What is literally going on in your head or what are you literally doing in those early days to bring some order to the messy chaos of possibility that hasn't been executed yet?
Part of it is probably intuitive. I'm a very objective person.
I can remove myself emotionally from pretty much any situation and just really look at it very matter of fact, and that's incredibly helpful.
When you start something, you need to have a healthy dose of naivete.
That's important. In my business, experience helps.
It's very physical. For me, it all starts with a product.
I was trained as a marketeer my whole first chapter of my life. was one of a marketeer.
And if you ask me who am I today, I probably still identify as a marketeer, first and foremost.
But I know its role. It's lipstick. In the end of the day, It's only there to accelerate or to accentuate something that is already there.
And I always say that you have to create a product so great that you will still get to the same place with or without marketing.
Just on the strength of the product alone.
Sometimes when I've hired people into marketing functions...
The trick question is for them to tell me the last ad campaign they saw from Tesla.
They struggle with that question because Tesla don't make advertising.
It certainly hasn't stopped them. I think the product is omnipotent.
It's number one, two, and three. And everything else we do is just to aid the awareness and selling of of that product.
But product is everything. So years before we launched the company, we started in product development, really going all the way down to raw material, thinking about how can I bring a product at an exceptional quality and feel at an affordable price.
And that was my whole focus. Because the companies that does solve it, I mean, I'm talking a lot about Vivori today, but that's probably because... It's a very distinctive field.
Well, it's more comfortable sometimes to make an example using others.
And I think they've done a good job. They're kind of the anti-skims because they're not so marketing-led.
They were... really leading through fabrication.
And your experience was probably someone told you about it.
We walked past a store or a friend of you wore it.
They have gotten to a similar place just through the strength of their product.
Been around longer. In the end of the day, product really is omnipotent.
For me, any venture that I'm involved in as a founder or as an investor, I'm just laser focused on the strength of the product.
I don't care about anything else. The product is everything.
What was the biggest breakthrough that you remember in the product development days for the early SKIMS products?
Was it a specific material? Was it something else?
I come back to culture and the whole company was built on product franchises.
You don't really know what people will be gravitating to right out of the box.
I felt incredibly strongly about what we had done.
But when we came to market, there was this moment, maybe a couple of months in or a month in, I think we had 2 million customers on waitlist for product and we had no product left at all.
And no product coming. There was this moment for sure when I realized that it really had hit the nerve.
That our timing had lined up. People genuinely loved the product.
The world that we built. was highly desirable.
And it was one plus one plus one wasn't three, it was a hundred all of a sudden.
It was just asymmetric, the amount of interest that customers had in the brand.
And six years in, I think Skims is a far more important company culturally than it is the size of a business, we're still a small company for what I believe is a very big brand.
I like this phrase that you've told me before, which is that by nature, you're the sort of person that likes to take yards, not inches, which makes me wonder about that you had this incredible opportunity early on to make a huge splash through Kim and others for a lot of people to know about this.
How did you orchestrate that and talk a little bit about her and your idea to not just have it be about her, but have it be a platform for other people like her to spread the brand around the world.
I think that's such a cool idea. Kim is incredibly clever.
She doesn't get enough credit for what a great executive she is.
She's very smart. She's a public person.
She's also a private person, a celebrity, probably one of the most famous people in this world.
She's also a creative director. I think we share some of that objectiveness.
She can very much compartmentalize, I believe, the different roles that she plays and draw lines between the different areas of her life.
We were both very aware that if you want to build something with longevity, if you want to make something that really matters, it has to be a platform.
It can't be about one person. I remember showing her a picture of this kid in an American city wearing a pair of Beats headphones and a pair of Jordans way before we launched.
And I said to her, that kid has never watched Michael Jordan play basketball, nor did they listen to Dr. Dre.
Yet both of those companies would have been impossible without its founders.
So the work to make Skims a pop culture platform really started day one because we knew it took time.
What made Beats, Beats, was LeBron wearing it between the bus...
And the locker room. What made Jordan, people say, oh, Jordan, or they called Skims in the early days a celebrity brand.
And I said, that's fine. Is Jordan a celebrity brand?
It is. It's just 40 years old at this point.
It's the fact that the Jordan platform allowed other athletes that shared his competitive spirit and athletes that were connected to culture.
And you kind of know what the Jordan athlete is about.
The Jordan brand is inspired and built upon Michael Jordan's importance in popular culture in that era and has become a platform in pop culture for 40 years as a result of it.
I'm paraphrasing slightly, but I believe that 20 years ago, about 14, 15% of American teenagers wanted to be a professional athlete.
Today, that number is more like 3%. But almost 20% of American teenagers today wants to be a creator or an influencer.
Well, if you tell me, isn't Kim Kardashian the Michael Jordan of the influencer generation?
I would say she is. She deserves to have a brand that is inspired by that and a brand that will live on in 30, 40, and 50 years as a platform in popular culture, just like Jordan is in sport.
What have you learned about that transference from the original source, Jordan or Dr. Dre or Kim in this case, to others that share some set of common features, the competitive spirit for Jordan?
Teach me about what you've learned about doing that effectively and how to borrow the original source and transfer it to other fantastic sources. athletes and musicians and people that you work with.
I'm going to put that to Kim because she's a participant in popular culture, not an analyst or someone who is trying to figure it out.
She is it naturally. Our disposition is different.
Corporate America looks at What they do and they overanalyze it and they invest time and money in research and decision making and to build consensus about who to endorse and what to do.
They try to create content that everybody can be happy with and sign off.
And then they put it out in this world. No one cares.
No one really cares. But it's also one year later.
It's like if my wife asked me what I want for dinner on Thursday on a Monday.
I don't know what I want for dinner on Thursday.
It's Monday. Popular culture is dairy. It goes off.
The first thing we did was first go at it.
Not everything we do is going to be successful.
Not everything is going to track. We don't optimize for what is going to work and not work.
That sounds simple, maybe counterintuitive.
But if you want to be in the zeitgeist, It's about doing rather than not doing.
It's about action rather than inaction. So you do more rather than do less.
The second thing is just the decision-making process.
You can't operate six months in advance, a year in advance.
It's impossible. But imagine if we operated six weeks in advance. well, six weeks in advance, I know who's going to be nominated for the Oscars.
I know who's likely going to be up at the Grammys.
I know that the next season of White Lotus is coming out.
I know when the season finale is going to be.
So when you're operating much more in the immediacy or popular culture, your chance of being effective increases exponentially.
So if you think about some of the stuff that we've done at Skims, last year for the MBA, the face of Skims was Shajil Alexander.
That was his breakout year. This year was Donovan Mitchell.
Last year, we featured Patrick Mahomes and family over the holidays.
We didn't know he would win the Super Bowl.
He wins the Super Bowl every year. He could do it that year.
Exactly. But when we featured Usher, we knew he was doing the halftime show.
When we had the Italian girls that played a pivotal role in the season before last of White Lotus, it was clear that they were the breakouts.
So what's the decision-making process? It's very simple.
I love White Lotus. Wouldn't it be cool if the two girls that we're all a little bit quietly excited about were our Valentine's couple and we took them out of the show?
I think going by what are we interested in, what do we want to see, what are we excited about?
You can ask me right now, this afternoon, what I want for dinner.
I will have a pretty good idea of what I fancy.
Public culture is the same thing. I know right now what I want to see.
Then the only thing stopping us is our ability to attract the talent or the opportunity to do it for us in that moment.
Then you have to take a lot of chances. Not everything is going to hit.
We had Sabrina Carpenter one week before she went number one with Espresso.
I wish I was one week later. We are really working with, as a team, as a company, as a culture, what do we want to see right now?
And then we try to make it happen. And we're not trying to hit it out the park every single time.
If you like baseball, Shai Ohtani, greatest baseball player probably ever lived, even though I'm sure that's debatable.
He doesn't hit the home run every time he steps up to bat.
That's us. We don't hit the home run every time we step up to bat, but we hit them often enough.
I love the simple device of wouldn't it be cool.
It is as good of a process to determine what to do as anything else.
It's just that our culture, and especially when we are responsible founders and executives ourselves, We love the idea that we can control an unpredictable outcome.
We can't. If we could, every LTV to CAC model that you ever saw over the past 15 years when I worked out, and let me tell you, I haven't seen one.
What does it require on the operational side to be able to deliver against the wouldn't it be cool strategy, whether that's supply chain, marketing, operations, distribution?
It seems like the system needs to be able to accommodate that fast turn.
You build that muscle, you build it over time.
It's not hard in the beginning. Small companies can do remarkable things.
Every founder would tell you that what the first 12, 20 people can accomplish is unbelievable.
And what the next thousand can accomplish is disappointing.
Why? What is it? You've done this a number of times.
What happens in that transition that makes that true?
As a company grows, there needs to be discipline.
There needs to be a sense of structure. It needs to have a sense of process.
They're necessary. But if you're not very, very careful, they'll kill what made you special to begin with.
I think that's true for any sector. What about the pricing of distribution represented by these great partnerships?
You mentioned, what's Dwayne The Rock Johnson worth?
$5 billion? Is this asset well-priced or is there still enough arbitrage for brands?
How does Donovan Mitchell, whom I'm a huge fan of, know his own price?
How do you think about that dynamic and how it evolves?
I have never spent too much time worrying about the ROI of one singular opportunity.
I think if you do, two things can happen.
You can be right and positively surprised and next time you make a mistake.
Or you can be disappointed, leading you to think that you're overspent and therefore pull back and not do the next one.
I come back to a little bit. Wouldn't this be cool to do?
Am I proud of the result? Am I excited about it?
Do we think it represented a brand well?
Think those things are more important? And again, just the pace of output, constantly being in the conversation.
The hard thing with building an e-commerce company is is that we don't own any real estate.
The real estate is the mindshare. Keeping customers' attention is incredibly hard.
We take in an enormous amount of messages in our daily lives.
When we were kids, we took in a fraction, not a percent even, of what we're taking in today.
When I say the Coke-Pepsi Challenge, you know what I'm talking about.
Have you seen the Coke-Pepsi Challenge? They might not have done it for 30 years.
I have no idea when the Coke-Pepsi Challenge even happened.
But it's stuck in my mind. If I say the album cover of Nirvana, you can close your eyes and see it.
I have no idea what an album cover is of any artist in the last five years.
Things can be incredibly important for an hour in our culture today.
I can't change that. The only thing I can do is I can increase the output.
I've heard you use the phrase post-truth media.
What does that mean and what are the implications of it?
They're twofolds. One, you don't necessarily trust what you read, even from a trusted news source.
That could be misguided, but that's how people feel.
I'm not talking about what is fact and what is not fact.
I'm talking about how most Americans feel about what they read.
They're skeptical. We have gravitated to individual voices as a source of information, but also as a source of a singular truth.
You can be a disciple of Elon Musk, or you can be a disciple of AOC.
And you're far more likely to believe either of those two than the Washington Post.
What do you think the implications of AI on that whole trend?
I'm assuming you think maybe it makes that even more true, that we align ourselves with people and a coherent perspective, which whether or not it's correct truth, it's continuous and coherent.
Absolutely. It's the only way to go. The power of the individual is only going to strengthen in this current culture.
There's no doubt about it. However, we probably have to ready ourselves for a time where...
If Elon Musk says it, we will be debating if he actually indeed did say it.
Unfortunately, as a result of deepfakes, we are probably going to be skeptical of everything we see soon enough.
I believe in the power of networks. I believe in closed networks.
We follow individuals and we will make sure that they are saying it and we'll take their words as gospel.
I think it's already there. I've long wanted to invest in a company that made it possible for Elon to digitally sign and verify some piece of content.
So if anyone listening- That makes a lot of sense.
I would love to back something like that.
Of course. It's going to happen. And ironically, the way we watch television now is we watch it over a period of time.
The whole premise of the movie Mountainhead And I'm not going to give away any spoilers.
Don't worry. But it's the premise about four tech founders in a remote hilltop house.
One has just made these AI tools available where we cannot tell what's real and what's not.
And the other person has exactly what you're saying.
He has the technology that can validate or invalidate content.
That is essentially the premise of the movie.
It's a satire, just like Dr. Strangelove was a satire of a dark future.
However, it's hard not to think that... it's incredibly important to validate information that we're getting increasingly so.
Say a little bit more about the power of networks and what you believe is powerful, especially set in today's environment or the near-term future.
I see it in chat groups. WhatsApp has emerged as a much more powerful tool of information sharing.
One chat group that Sondheim has, D1. The famous one.
It's the famous one. I would think it's one of my more trusted sources of information of what's going on in our economy today.
When there's critical events happening, I turn to that chat group.
I find it highly informative. I respect the voices, ultimately the individuals in that group.
That's a power of a micro network, but it's incredibly important.
Obviously, we always had micro networks, our community, our church, our basketball team, friend group networks have always existed.
But these larger closed networks with a thousand members or a million members, but it's closed, they have a lot of power.
I think Reddit is emerging as a platform with a tremendous amount of power today.
Let's say I snap my fingers and Skims disappeared and you had to go build another company in a vertical where you could apply some of these same ideas and models that needs it, a place that's stale or has gotten stagnant.
Where would your instinct pull you today?
I'm very excited about the creator economy.
I think we are in the early innings of the creator economy.
I'm an investor in several companies, but one that I have been a little bit more involved with There's one called Passes, which was founded by Lucy Gu, who was co-founder of Scale.ai.
She's built a platform for creators to directly monetize their audience, their fan base.
And I think that's incredibly powerful. I think we're in the beginning of talent building and monetizing their own networks.
It could be a network around fly fishing.
It could be a great chef. It could be an athlete.
It could be a pop star. So it can be a thousand members.
It can be millions of members. But I really believe in the power of that closed, more intimate network where we engage directly with someone we admire, a voice of authority, someone that inspires us.
There's a real need for it today because going back to the social algorithm, they are really not about following as much as they are about entertainment today.
I think talent or creators have realized that on the social platforms that they don't really own their audience anymore.
You don't really own your following. I'll give you a challenge.
You can do it after. Go and look at three different artists.
Let's say one has 5 million followers. One has 20 million, and I'll give you a name of someone that has, let's say, 300 or 400 million.
You'll find the exact same amount of engagement.
How's that statistically possible? Well, it is because engagement is being spread.
The size of the following... doesn't matter so much anymore.
So that audience someone has built, maybe spent 10 years building that size of that following, but now they're actually unable to communicate with that following.
They're not getting through. If you have 400 million followers and you say something, 400 million people is not going to see it.
Only a fraction. I have no opinion if that's good or if it's bad.
It's clearly good. Otherwise, we wouldn't have moved away from it.
It is what it is. And I'm sufficiently entertained.
I'm a very happy customer of Instagram. It's a fantastic product.
I'm excited about it. Having said that, of course, it creates this opportunity for to build these networks where you have your own captive audience and then can monetize that audience.
I'm trying to think of places that had this iconic, the equivalent of the 400 million and are in a hard spot or might be in a hard spot.
If you were The Economist or the Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times.
What would you do against this reality? It was about the brand.
Economist doesn't publish bylines, but I can't name you a Wall Street Journal author anymore.
I used to be able to name lots of them. I think you started in magazines.
In the UK, yeah, several. And so I would love to hear a little bit about that.
What, if anything, is left from that era that might still be applicable today?
And what you would do if you were the economist or something?
I don't have all the answers. This is a tricky question because I believe that news organizations have an incredibly important role within society.
I think it's a shame. Some of it they did to themselves, partly because of what we're talking about.
They had to create journalism that was clickbait.
That's saying, show me the incentive and I'll show you the result.
They had to create incentive structures for the people working there to get eyeballs on what they were doing.
I think that changed things. This is just my personal opinion.
I'm not a highly political person. This is not me making a political statement in any shape, way or form.
I'm just objectively observing that During the first Trump administration, what he often refers to as mainstream media, saw it as an existential threat.
They took action that over time, in many cases, undermined some of their editorial integrity.
Or at least that's what a large part of America believes today, rightfully or wrongfully so.
As we went into COVID... They just were not able to put the genie back in the bottle.
I was listening to the All In podcast and I can't remember which one of the guys that said it, but I thought it was very insightful.
And I'm paraphrasing again. They said that journalism became activism.
And I think maybe it did for a period of time.
It's been pretty hard to put that back in the bottle today.
What do you remember most fondly from your magazine days?
It was just a wonderful thing to do because it's the storytelling.
It's the sense of discovery. And then storytelling.
I used to work with GQ. And the editor of GQ in the UK was a guy called Dylan Jones.
And I think he probably was one of the greatest magazine editors of all time.
Everybody who worked at GQ were frustrated with him at times because he said...
I knew Arctic monkeys were going to blow, and he wouldn't write about it, or I knew this was going to happen, and I was so excited about this, that, and then he said no.
He knew that he was the top 2% of readers, but he was a customer of his own journalism.
So there was a moment in time when he got it, It was never first, but it wasn't supposed to be.
It was supposed to be in GQ when he knew about it.
And he taught me this idea of not to break things.
You didn't have to be first. You needed to be at the forefront of your own customer.
That thinking has really reflected on most things I've been involved with.
I'm not so worried about always being first, a product being first, or first mover advantage.
I think it's sometimes phenomenal to be number two or three.
That can be a much better place to be, in fact.
I'm focused more when I think it's right, where it resonates with me.
And I'm not necessarily on the cutting edge. but I'm probably the tip of the spear of mainstream.
And the other thing, working for a magazine called Wallpaper in the UK, under the guy who founded that magazine called Tyler Brule, I learned two things.
One is that a magazine can be a reflection of your own interest in your own life.
And wallpaper just was a total reflection of what we as a team were living through in that moment in time.
And I think that's what made it so powerful.
It also taught me that you can't hold on to a good idea.
Meaning when you're early on something, when you found a different way to communicate or speak or create product, everybody's going to pile in.
You have to continue to transform on your way up because once you plateau, it's already too late.
A guy that made a big impression on me was a guy called Pierre Yves Roussel.
He was the chairman of Louis Vuitton or LVMH Fashion.
And he said, Jens, the secret to our success is that we always transform on the way up.
And there's a truth to that because you think how we operate is as long as it's good, we don't want to change.
And then when things plateau or trails off, human nature are optimistic.
So we go, it's a moment. We'll be back. We were first.
We did this first. They will remember it.
It's going to come back. And then it doesn't come back.
Then we start thinking about changing. And then by the time we actually have implemented any change, things are already going down.
Who fires a CEO when a company is growing?
Almost nobody. Sometimes maybe we should.
The Knicks just fired Tibbs. an hour ago after going to the Eastern Conference finals.
There you go. Same question. I'm so glad I asked about magazines, about your work in agency, working with brands like H&M and others.
I would love the same set of reflections of what you take from that time of your life.
Well, I was unsatisfied working on behalf of everybody else.
It comes a moment in your life where you want to be the guy, not working for the guy.
I knew that in my early 30s. However much I would build this group, in the end of the day, I was figuring out ways to sell time.
And at the end of it, there's not that much emotional ownership of the work that you create.
You're a hired gun. You go home at the end of the day.
And when something goes wrong, it's your fault.
When it goes well, It wasn't you. It's a pretty thankless place to have a full career.
And I'm very grateful because I had the opportunity to work with some of the greatest to ever do it.
Bernard Arnault at LVMH or Remo Ruffini. at montclair and becoming inspired to the point where i wanted to be like them not work for them so i'm very grateful for that what did those two teach you what was the bar of excellence that they showed you Two different things.
Remo taught me about the power of the role of art in commerce and letting go.
And he took something which was a small company called Montclair.
It was a small ski company. And he attached it to fashion and to popular culture and to sport.
He was able to build just an unbelievable brand and company by borrowing all the cues while staying true to the core of the product, which was performance ski.
If it wasn't for that experience, I wouldn't have started Skims.
I wouldn't have started Frame. The thing with underwear that people don't really think of, and I don't blame them, is that they have a lot more in common with a sneaker than they do with a t-shirt.
They're all performance, highly complicated from a construction fit.
It has to do with job. especially in women's more so than for men's.
It has to offer support and comfort for 12 hours in a row, 14 hours.
That's a performance product. There's a much higher moat, much harder to compete, much harder to innovate product in it.
Once you have a customer's trust, They're very loyal, super high retention.
Underwear and performance wear has a lot in common.
And the same thing, if you think about performance ski, it's highly complex, highly technical, has to do a job for you.
I looked at taking a category like that and attaching it to culture and If I hadn't had the opportunity to observe Redmond Moncler, I don't know if I would have gone about building SKIMS the way that Kim and I went about building SKIMS.
What about Bernard? That in the end of the day, he works to inspire and excite his customer for all of his unbelievable success.
He's just highly in tune with what his customers will give him agency to do or not to do.
I come back to this notion of being objective.
He has that in spades. What do you think is going to fill the role of status in the future when machines are smarter than we are and do a lot of the tasks and...
A lot of the things that might have earned us status in the past might be different in the future.
I don't think status is going anywhere. I'm sure not.
It's actually a basic human want. I don't think our physical lives are going anywhere, but let's assume that it is going somewhere.
What is status to my 11-year-old? Well, he has status in what he has achieved in Roblox.
He feels a great sense of status of what he's built, What he has, I don't think that status is limited to physical objects.
Humankind will always find ways to display status.
If you interact in social gaming, from what I'm seeing, All of our cues of status here in our physical world is in their digital world.
It's a direct transference. There's really no difference.
I don't know what the future looks like in 20 years, but as far as my children goes, they combine physical and digital status.
What teenager or 20-something doesn't have status in the amount of followers they have?
Status exists in so many different ways.
I don't think that's going anywhere. It's right up there with hunger.
It's a very basic human need. I'd love to talk about investing for just a minute.
You're an investor too and have been for a long time.
You also get to work. I talked to Neil and Josh ahead of this, two of the great investors of our era that have been big partners of yours.
I'm curious about what you've learned makes for great investors from working with them.
And also just how you think about your own investing and the broader trends happening in the investing world.
We've talked about private equity before and the implications of that evolving landscape.
Tell us your thinking on the world of investors and investing.
Josh and Neil are both really, really special people.
They are atypical in many ways. They're both guys of really high conviction that take a long-term view and they take a lot fewer bets than many other people that I know in the venture space.
They really do believe in doubling down behind their winners and staying engaged.
And they seem really unfazed by a news cycle, a month, a quarter.
They tend to have really long-term views on everything.
And they invest into that worldview. And I think that's ultimately going to make them, they're already incredibly successful.
I'm scared for how successful those two are going to be.
They're young, too. Given 20 years of compounding into this worldview, most people are overly optimistic, don't have the stomach for the long term.
I find that a lot of investors I come across are very influenced by market trends.
When something is good, there's no end to how good it can get.
When something is bad, there's no end to how bad it can get.
In 21, you can give away retail, real estate.
Now it's the hottest part of the market.
Years ago, you couldn't give away offices.
Now, occupancy in the right places are at capacity.
There's no end to demand. Very few people dare to have their own long-term view, and I think both of them do.
Honestly, I've learned from that. I don't know where the world is going within the next year, but I think we can be relatively confident where the world is going in five years.
I think we can be very confident where the world is going in five or even 10 years.
It shouldn't be impossible to, if you have the stomach for it, If you invest with that perspective, you're going to be right more times than you're wrong.
How would you summarize where you think the world's going in five or ten years?
We touched on some of it today. If you go with my theory, which, by the way, is not my theory, I think it's wildly established that we're living in kind of a post-truth society that's been written endlessly about.
As a result, an individual voice can cut through and control a narrative.
And what they say is taken as a truth. over what you refer to as an anonymous journalist.
Well, let's assume that's the case. An individual is going to be only more important, not less important.
If the algorithm is going towards a place of entertainment, not following, One has to assume that the person that has a higher degree of influence will have the opportunity to forge their own network.
Those are two basic things that I don't think I'm going to be very wrong about.
Which product will work? I couldn't tell you which founder that's going to be successful.
I don't know, but I know where it's going.
If I had their expertise and many others where they have enough of a sample and enough of a nose for great founders, you want to back people that are creating the companies that fits this worldview. hopefully you're going to be right.
Say a bit about the future for Skims, both from the perspective of maybe an IPO on the horizon, maybe new product lines, things that you're doing to transform on the way up, as you said before.
What's next for Skims? What I'm working on is how do I scale at pace the business to meet the global demand for the brand.
Right now, it's a big global brand, but we're yet to do business globally. the way that customers like to do business, which is highly in-person.
I'm very focused on the global physical distribution of SKIMS.
That's important. And I'm now starting to tie some of these things we talked about, I guess, together, which is if social media is a less effective way for me to communicate with my community, what really matters is the community that I'm building through my app community. and loyalty.
Today, about a year after we launched our own app, we do over 20% of our business through it.
But building our app and loyalty, which is a nice way to say trying to expand that direct community in a closed network, where I can have my customers' attention, that's going to be the difference maker, I think, over the next five years or so.
To continue to evolve the way we do business, to continue to be surprising, when we started We did a lot of things that no one else did at the pace no one did it.
I have to really watch it so we don't become a victim of our own success.
So we have to continue to innovate, not just on the product side, but also on our marketing side.
When Luke got traded to Lakers, just to bring it back to basketball again, clearly watched too much basketball.
No such thing, in my opinion. Lucky for me, now it's the Pacers and OKC.
It feels like I can miss the whole series, so I get some time back.
If it was Knicks, I would have to watch it.
When Luka got traded to the Lakers, I was watching, I think it was first take on ESPN, and they said, we're now waiting for Luka to show up in the Skims campaign.
First of all, whenever they talk about Skims on ESPN, I'm excited.
So... I was very happy. However, if there's an expectation, there's also not a surprise.
To me, that's a signal that we have to take a step further and continue to do the unexpected.
And I love Luca. So the door is open if he wants to do it.
Having said that, it's to do what you're not expecting me to do next.
If anything keeps me up at night, it's probably that idea.
We've talked about all the money and assets and companies that are in private markets.
And I'm curious, as an entrepreneur who's thought a lot about investing, how you think about being private versus being public and the trade-offs associated with both.
What are we doing this for? I think it's a fair question.
And I ask other founders that. As a founder of a company that receives a lot of public attention like Skims, I have the opportunity to meet other founders that have created unbelievable businesses that also are in the public eye.
We talk about it. What are we doing it for?
Because money, in my view, is the result of doing something great.
Money by itself is a poor purpose. It shouldn't be the reason we get up in the morning.
It should be the result of us doing something we love and doing a great job and exciting our customers.
And that should be rewarded. But that's me as a founder.
If you're an investor, the money is the purpose in many ways.
Not for everybody. It's not the whole cake.
It's important. It's the biggest part of the cake.
It should be. If not, they weren't doing their jobs.
But as a founder... You don't sit and think, I'm going to start this company because I'm going to make so much money with it.
For my investors. For my investors. That's why I'm going to go through this pain and give up my life to make sure that in five to 10 years time, I'm giving an excellent return to those that invested in my C round.
That's just not how you think. You wake up and you say, I have to do it.
I cannot live with not doing this thing.
And then you've got to love it. And you've got to love it through the great times because there is enough hard times in any entrepreneurial journey. that you need a lot of love to carry you through.
I think Jensen Hong said the other day something along the lines of that he would never be an entrepreneur if he knew how hard it was.
I have to be an entrepreneur to do what I love to do. the way I want to do it.
And I had to be an entrepreneur to realize the creative vision that I think entrepreneurship is.
So I had no choice. This is what I had to do.
With that, as you bring something to life and you bring capital partners on board, you have a duty, you have a responsibility.
I treat everybody's money like your own.
I understand that my motivation and their motivation, there's times where they're not going to be completely aligned.
I'm going to be in this company for a very long time.
I'm probably going to go public one day.
My cap table in five years is going to look nothing like the cap table today.
And that's okay. I know how the game goes.
And my responsibility at this point is actually to deliver an excellent return for my shareholders.
And in the process, hopefully having a good time doing it.
For me, the most important thing is to do a great job and have fun.
And if I'm doing great work and I have a good time doing it, money normally follows.
Public, private, it's really a matter of taste.
You used to have to go public. Today, there's this semi-liquid market that has emerged that gives a lot of early shareholders, at least, a great deal of optionality.
You look at companies like Stripe or SpaceX, there's been a lot of optionality and liquidity for early shareholders and people can trade in and trade out even now.
Maybe it's less important today than it was.
For me, I made a choice to have institutional shareholders.
I've got to respect their timeline and what matters to them.
They have entrusted me with their capital.
I will do everything within my power and I will make sure I give them what they require in return.
That's the deal. And to do that, the most likely outcome is to be a public company.
I do think, though, that it's healthy for a company to have outside shareholders.
At some point, it's healthy for a company to be public.
It fosters good governance. But a company, as it scales and as it grows and matures, it's not just about a founder.
It's about... Everyone is about all the stakeholders, your employees.
You have a greater responsibility. It's easier to take that responsibility as a public company.
So I'm pro the public route personally, but that's not to say it's for everyone.
If I own this company 100% myself, maybe I would have taken a different view.
Josh said something to me earlier today, just as thinking about how to structure our conversation, which was really nice, which was that you're an incredibly unique combination of creative and commercial.
And that actually the fact that you can do both so well probably leads to more interesting outcomes on both sides of the equation, product, marketing, business, et cetera.
Right. And I feel like our conversation today has been so chock full of things.
I'm scribbling down constant notes here that I want to remind myself to go back to and learn from and apply to what I'm trying to do, because that's what I want to do, too.
Everyone wants to do is to be creative and commercial.
They want both sides of the equation. So I'm so thankful for your time and an amazing conversation.
The same question I ask everyone at the end of these is what is the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for you?
I am very grateful that I was able to move to the United States in my late 30s and has had the ability to reinvent myself in this country and having another chapter in in this country.
It's a country and a community that has welcomed me, my wife, my family, and allowed us to be both successful, but also a member of our more direct community in a way That couldn't happen on any other place on earth.
I don't know if it's an act of kindness.
I pay a lot of taxes in return. But I'm incredibly grateful for that opportunity.
And that's why I'm optimistic about the future.
I'm optimistic about this country. I am not fearful, even though I understand why many people are.
Personally, I'm just excited to be part and live for this time in human history, which is arguably the greatest time in history to be alive.
I think you're the first person to say America as your answer ever, which is so cool.
I have to ask one follow-up. Can you describe Emma's superpower?
She has an ability to bring everybody with her.
Me, myself included. I go along with everything she says.
Now, that's not that unique in a marriage.
Most of us go along... with what we're told, but she has this unbelievable ability to inspire people and bring people with her.
It's exciting to be around her. I think everybody who's around her has that feeling.
It's intoxicating. So it's a remarkable quality.
I wish I had a fraction of it, but they say you marry someone that compliments you.
So she's the charm. Yes, this has been amazing.
Such a cool conversation. Thanks so much for your time.
Thank you so much for having me. Appreciate it.
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