SPEAKER_01
And then there's the whole meaning, meaningfulness. What was it? The three schools of V&E psychology. Man's search for pleasure, man's search for happiness, man's search for meaning.
And I think that there's that sort of like, I think about my mom or I'm like, I just want to be like my mom. I want to, I want to be as invested in my grandchildren as she is and my son. I want to work out six out of seven days a week without fail.
I want to get seven hours of sleep. Like I want to have this defining your terms, social wealth, mental wealth, physical wealth. And like if you've got three out of five there, it kind of, it does beg the question of like, what is the goal of financial wealth? And I like your friend's journey, right? Which is that it is the output of having done something meaningful.
What is up, you guys? So excited to share this
SPEAKER_00
amazing conversation with Andy Dunn, the founder of Bonobos and more recently, the author of Burn Rate, launching a startup and losing my mind. It was an incredible, vulnerable conversation, truly unique, one of a kind conversation that I'm just excited for everyone to listen to and hopefully benefit from. I know there are a lot of people out there who have struggled under the surface with different mental illnesses.
A lot of entrepreneurs wrestle with this that I've talked to. And I think this conversation with Andy will be truly eye opening and really benefit a lot of people both on the building journey and afterwards as you try to improve your own life. So without further ado, please enjoy my conversation with Andy Dunn.
Well, Andy, thank you so much for joining the show today. Man, this has been a long time coming. I feel like I have been a big fan of yours from afar for a long time.
And, you know, we're just now getting to connect thanks to our mutual friend, Jim Cunahiro, a big shout out to him who actually brought us together to have this chat. So super excited to have you and excited to dive into all of the cool stuff that you're working on and inspired by right now. So thanks for joining.
Thanks for having me excited to be here. So, you know, I generally like to start these conversations with, you know, this idea that I think of or call the map of reality. And, you know, this is like this general idea that we all have our own set of paths, circumstances, experiences, etc.
that kind of frame our map of the world and how we view things and pursuits that we've gone after, things we're inspired by, etc. So I'd love to start there and just like set the stage a little bit before we get into all of your work and career and some of your recent writing and inspirations by just understanding a little bit about your background and path, like what established your map of reality? You know, where did you kind of come from? Grow up? Were you entrepreneurial as a kid? Would love to just set the stage with that.
SPEAKER_01
Totally. Yeah, I think for me the origin story for me has to tie back to coming from a heterogeneous environment culturally. You know, my mom is a Punjabi Indian immigrant.
My dad's a Scandinavian, Midwestern American white dude. You know, we have this in common. No, I know.
I think this is part
SPEAKER_00
of why Jim connected us. Yeah, I, you know, I, but I don't think I put that together until just now. I mean, my mom is from Bangalore, you know, immigrant from, from Bangalore, India, and my dad is a white Jewish guy from the Bronx.
So we're both part of the half Indian clan here.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, there we go. And to make matters even more fun, I'm now married to a Brazilian Jewish immigrant and converted to Judaism right before I got married. So,
SPEAKER_00
Wow. So you're a, you're a Hindu then. You're like me.
You got that.
SPEAKER_01
I'm a Hindu or I'm half Punjabi, depending on how you want to talk about it.
SPEAKER_00
That's a good one. I've never heard that one before. You know, I am convinced that the, you know, like mixing of gene pools and, you know, like the, the, the like genetic strengthening that comes with that is something that I'm convinced by.
I don't know if there's any research around that, but everyone that I meet that comes from like mixed race backgrounds, I just find have these like, like super good looking or like really smart, interesting. Like I just think that there is some strengthening that happens from the mixing of, uh, from the mixing of gene pools. So you've clearly done a lot of that, which is fantastic.
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SPEAKER_01
endorsement from Wealthfront. Yeah, I mean, maybe there's something to that. I think there's also something for me that I've learned about just communication styles and family traditions around communication.
I like to joke my dad's family, they don't speak about small issues, small issues become big issues. And eventually they don't speak at all. My dad doesn't speak to either of his siblings.
Really my mom's family who are the big Indian family, you say exactly what you think in real time to everyone except the person that you think it about. So it's like a perfect exchange of information through gossip with minimal conflict. This is yet another thing,
SPEAKER_00
by the way, that we have in common. I feel like we have this eerie set of similarities in our lives now. My dad, I haven't shared this really publicly in the past, but my dad was disowned by his family when he wanted to marry my mom.
So my dad has four siblings. I've only met one of them. I have first cousins that I've never met.
Never met my dad's parents. I think his mom actually lives near me somewhere in the general New York area. I've never met her in a similar vein, right? Small issues become big issues when you don't address them.
And then there's too much water under the bridge at some point in life where it becomes really challenging to remedy those big issues. So yet another thing that I feel like we have a common thread in that vein.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, 100%. And I want to hear more about that someday or at some point where we can flip chairs or something. But it did set the stage for me for a lot of transformation when I met my wife, because in her family, you say exactly what you think in real time to the face of the person that you think it about.
So like the first time I had dinner with my now wife and mother-in-law, my Scandinavian side was in the bathroom, dry heaving, being like, I don't think I can be a part of this family. Because they got in a quote unquote fight, which I've turned out, you know, turns out is just a spirited disagreement. But I came out of this heterogeneous context culturally, you know, religiously, it was fascinating because my dad was a Christian, but was lapsed, really became agnostic when the Swedish Lutheran church that he belonged to, basically everyone left when Black people started moving into the Austin area of Chicago.
So he was like, well, this isn't very Christ-like, you know, we have some kind of racial diversity emerging and let's get the hell out of here, right, which mirrors a lot of the challenges we have in modern day religion, which we could talk about. And then my mom's family were, you know, not openly religious, but pretty, my mom feels pretty connected spiritually. So I came out of this environment where it was amazing because I had so many questions.
I had so much stimulation, you know, from, from different places and everyone I was around was homogeneous, right? Like I was, I was the only quote unquote person of color in my school, you know, until, until one, you know, young Black man showed up from Cabrini Green on like an exchange program, which is at the time where we're projects on the New York North side of Chicago. So had this really amazing mixture of identities, you know, to navigate.
SPEAKER_00
Was it amazing growing up or was it a challenge? Like, did you, did you feel, you know, as a kid, it's like fitting in is the most important thing in your own mind. You're like, I want to just fit into a group and it's, you know, you want, like, I remember struggling to just figure out, was I a jock or was I a nerd? Was I, you know, brown or was I white? Like, what, what, what was I? And how did I define myself? Like, was that a challenge for you? Or did you feel like it allowed you to
SPEAKER_01
kind of toe the line and be in many groups? It was both, it was both an asset and a liability, as is the case with so many things in life. I wasn't really that aware of it. Until I got to an age where there, there was this sense of otherness that I began to process around being half Indian or, you know, being singled out as different.
My real wake up call on it was almost getting my ass kicked at a bar in Ohio for being like a quote unquote sand fill in the blank. That was in college. And that was the first time where I like, I actually experienced the threat of physical harm for being brown.
And I just blew my mind. I had never really, I'd never really thought about it as someone that could fall into harm's way, which by the way is like one on one for skin color in so many, so many other stripes, right?
SPEAKER_00
So was that post 9-11 or what was the like? It's just surprising to me that you know.
SPEAKER_01
I know. No, it was pre 9-11. Fascinating.
So, you know, growing up, it was, I think it was both. It was a sense of otherness. And to be honest, I just avoided the Indian side of the equation.
Like I distanced myself from what made me different. And so I had this contrast where my cousins celebrated Hindu holidays. They spoke Hindi.
Maybe they spoke Punjabi. They were really immersed in the culture because both of their parents spoke that language in the home. And my mom was a rebel, right? My mom married a white guy in the late 60s.
And my dad was a rebel because he married an Indian immigrant. And so I was raised by people who didn't subscribe to the importance of cultural norms or homogeneity. And yet I was in an environment where everyone was from one or the other world.
And so it took a long time to kind of re-embrace what made me different. And I probably didn't want to go there even in college because I went to college in an environment at Northwestern. I was in a fraternity where it was mostly white guys, right? And it was, there actually were Jewish guys, you know, what's called Jewish and not Jewish because I don't want to describe the rest of folks as Christian.
But yeah, I was in a fraternity called Sigma Chi. And there were so many Jewish guys in the house that we used to joke at Sigma Chi, which was sort of like bad. We had that at Stanford too.
Yeah. So, you know, that's a bit on my origins. I guess the thing I went out is I have an older sister who I'm really tight with.
And that was a big part of my upbringing was having this protective overlord female presence. And same thing with my mom's family where she has four, you might know that they look for mosses, which is the endearing term for your mother or sister. And so I was just raised by a strong female environment.
And so, you know, at some point it occurred to me, I was building an apparel brand named after a matriarchal great ape. And I was like, okay. And by the way, what makes bonobos the animals different is they have no violent conflict.
And we think part of that is
SPEAKER_00
because the women are in charge. That is interesting. I definitely want to come back to that point.
There are two sort of through lines that you mentioned in talking about your background that I want to, I'm going to keep hammering on. So I want to like call them out here. One is the idea that something is both an asset and a liability.
Because I do want to come back to that. I think it's a common thread for a lot of things that we'll talk about. And the other one is this idea of like early on distancing yourself from your differences, like fearing being different, really wanting to, really wanting to kind of embrace being the same as everyone else, but then learning as you kind of go on your own hero's journey, quote unquote, to embrace what makes you different as the unique attributes that create your edge.
And that make you, you know, the special person that you are. And I want to talk about both of those because I think a lot of the listeners here will, you know, really hear a lot about your journey and what you're working on today and where you've come from. And it'll resonate with a lot of people.
You know, it certainly has with me. So maybe we can transition as, you know, with those two in mind to talking a little bit about your path to entrepreneurship. You got down at Northwestern, I believe in 2000.
And you didn't start Bonobos right away. You kind of had a journey from there to Stanford Business School. What was like, were you an entrepreneurial, did you have an entrepreneurial bent right away? Or did you kind of go down a traditional path first? You know, you have the Indian Indian parents, I know they would have wanted you to do medical school or become a PhD or something.
So what was the path? Yeah, I guess we're continuing your through line,
SPEAKER_01
because my mom's side of the family, the Indian side, it was all doctors, which was, you know, one of the two ways to get a visa to the US. My mom actually worked in ultrasound, because she didn't get a chance to go to med school for reasons of her father being ill and she had to send money home and be a more instant source of income, because it's a little bit delayed as a doctor. She never got to go back to India for her father's passing, which is very tragic.
And then my dad is a US history teacher, but his family, there's lots of physicians as well. So my only role models growing up were doctors. And then I won somehow the high school yearbook was like the most likely to be a millionaire.
I don't know how that happened. Remember being like, this is weird, because I wasn't, I wasn't particularly coin operated. I wasn't one of those people with like a side hustle, you know, whatever mowing lawns or something like that.
And so it, it took a long time to let go of that family sense of success, which in my mind was tied to going to med school. And so I actually went down the whole path in college. I took all the coursework.
I was signed up for the MCAT and I was studying for the MCAT. And I had this moment where I was like, I just don't care. Like I had all these part-time jobs at a hospital.
I worked in the dark room when that was the thing developing x-rays, the front desk of the emergency room, got my EMT degree or whatever you call it. And I just didn't want it as bad as my classmates wanted it. I saw how much harder they were working, particularly three friends of mine who are now all surgeons.
And when you're, when you're bumping up against people who care about something more than you do, that's just a good sign that you, you haven't really found your swim lane yet. You should be swimming in a swim lane where you feel like you can go the fastest and you want to go the fastest. If you don't want to be there, then back to your word edge, you know, you might have the edge and I might have had the edge like intellectually to get there, but I didn't spiritually or will or drive wise.
And so that then invited this crisis of, well, if not this one thing I've been thinking about for 20 years, then what? And so I did what a lot of people do who don't know what they're doing, which is I became a consultant. I became an analyst at a consulting firm, which I feel like is a way to delay, you know, it's kind of like a way to delay a decision.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah. And that's where you met Jim, I assume at Bain, our common friend, yeah. Yeah. Jim, by the way, Jim is, you know, one of the most incredible mentors in my life. I think he was, he was a mentor to you.
He's also one of the most fun people I've ever been around, like his ability to go out and his he has the most infectious and hilarious sounding laugh in the world. But it's just someone that is like a true joy to be around at any point in time. And so I'm glad that glad that he brought us together in this context.
Totally funny story about Jim's laugh, by the way, we were at a bar
SPEAKER_01
night one night at the Sears Towers, like outdoor bar that they had back when it was called that. And Jim was laughing so much, I think mostly because I'm that funny. And we got caught, he got cut off before he had a drink.
Because he was laughing that way. Yeah, like they thought he was like so hammered, because his laugh was so big that they were like, it's hard to describe other
SPEAKER_00
than that, it sort of sounds like a dolphin call. If you actually break it down. I'll leave people with that.
But it is a pretty unique and interesting laugh. But an amazing person, you know, one thing you mentioned that I do want to hit on there was like, you know, this this idea of like how you decided not to be a doctor, because you realized you just didn't you weren't really in it, you didn't really care. I've always had this general framework that I've been sort of like wrestling with recently of sort of the idea that there is like a societal, like max net benefit to finding the right thing for you to do.
And you know, I'm kind of word gaming this a little bit in real time. But basically, the idea is like, you could have been a doctor, and I'm sure you would have made a great doctor. You know, you could have done you like put your head down, grind it out, studied become a you know, perfectly serviceable doctor, and you probably could have impacted a decent number of lives, right? You would have saved some people, you would have helped people, they would have felt good.
You know, you could have changed a few lives that way. But if that is not what you are like best equipped to do, like not you're not you were probably weren't going to be because you didn't care enough about it, the top point zero one percent of doctors in the world. But there was something out there that you were equipped like you have the toolkit to become the point zero one percent in the world at an impact way more people and at scale in a very different way.
You didn't know what that was yet. But you kind of had an inkling that it wasn't being a doctor because you weren't pulled in the direction becoming like that true obsession and nerve. There are people that are and that's amazing for them to go and become doctors because they will impact tons of people and they will be so invested in it.
But you should always my framework for young people has always been that you should find that thing that you are going to have the unique ability to be point zero one percent at. If you're ambitious, don't settle for being a consultant because you can be like a decent consultant and make a good living. Find that thing where your like circles of success or circles of passion come together to make you uniquely qualified to go and
SPEAKER_01
truly win that game on a grand scale. That resonates. And I think what you're saying is even more nuanced, which is you may not know what that is.
But if you know what it isn't, you may have to walk away from what you know it isn't, even though that feels like a safe and comfortable path to create the space to figure out what that what it is. But that might be years later. So for me, it was effectively eight years from when I walked away from the idea of becoming a doctor to the beginning of the entrepreneurial journey.
And there's a lot of confusion in that eight years because you've walked away from something, but you don't know what you're walking towards. And I think that's one of the hardest. It's like breaking up in a relationship that's not working part of what makes it hard.
Isn't the deepening awareness that you might not be with the right person. It's the fear of the unknown on the other side and potentially having to start over.
SPEAKER_00
I mean, I had that hard experience. I mean, Jim, who we talked about, I was working with him at an amazing firm that I had been at for, you know, the first six, seven years of my career. And I knew that I wasn't ever going to be the best at what I was doing there because I wasn't so invested in it the way that others were.
And there was this thing that I had started doing creatively on the side that I started to realize like, Oh, maybe there's something there. And it was the ink. But I didn't know what it was yet.
It wasn't a thing. And, you know, over the course of a year or so, and honestly, with the mentorship of some great people, that transition happened for me. But the fear of that, like, Oh my God, I'm giving up something that is very secure, very certain.
You know, there's a great trajectory to it. There's a path in order to go after this thing that like, I don't even know what to call it. I don't know what it is.
It's terrifying in the moment when you do it. I mean, there's no other way to describe it like the scarcity that we all feel of, Oh my God, I'm going to be broke, which is sort of misguided for 99% of people. You're not going to actually end up broke.
You have skills, you'll figure something out, you'll be okay. But that fear is so primal when you're actually making that change.
SPEAKER_01
Totally. I think it can be paralyzing. And I think I wonder, what is it about someone where they kind of cultivate the conditions or the courage to do that, you know, versus not, because I do think the paradox is that it all makes sense in retrospect.
And some of the happiest and most fulfilled people I know are ones who've taken those kinds of risks and succession. And so I worry about, I worry for the idea that you're taking financial risk when the risk is in fact spiritual, which matters so much more, you know, spiritual, I mean, happiness, fulfillment, like I just,
SPEAKER_00
I would say I have generally, and I'm sure you're in a similar boat, like I've generally shifted what it means to me to be wealthy dramatically over the last year and a half. Like I just define wealth so much more comprehensively than just being about money and financial gain. And that's made all the difference in my life in terms of my happiness on a daily basis, which is a huge.
What have you added into that time? I imagine having time. Yeah, so I mean, I would say I now, you know, and I've written about this, and I might want to write a book about this at some point. And I'm going to need to pick your brain on the book process at some point offline.
You know, I would say today I define wealth in kind of five buckets. I think there's financial wealth. I think there is physical wealth, you know, health, fitness, vitality, mental wealth, which I would kind of bucket, you know, like general mental health, mental fitness, like knowledge, accumulation, you know, ability to learn and retain information.
I would bucket like spirituality and faith into that mindfulness. And then time wealth, you know, just the general, you know, freedom of time. And then I guess the last one, sorry, five would be social wealth relationships, people, family status in that bucket.
And so that's kind of how I would think about it more comprehensively, I would say. And my general mental model for this has been, you know, the blind pursuit of financial wealth often robs you of the other four forms of wealth. And you don't want that to happen.
You know, that's a race to the bottom.
SPEAKER_01
It's such a great point. I know someone who recently has become extremely wealthy through a series of events. And I must admit some envy, you know, that I felt less towards like, just the sheer amount of money, but more what I feel like I could do with it if I had that kind of money.
And then someone I know ran into him and was like, Oh man, he looks rough. And I really hadn't thought about it because I met him recently for a meal. And I was like, it definitely has come with the expensiveest physical health.
There's just no doubt about it. I had dinner recently with a close
SPEAKER_00
friend who I won't name, but who sold his company last year for a billion dollars. And, you know, made probably 300, 400 million dollars in the transaction owned a big chunk of the company. You know, and basically went from like working on a salary on this thing that he was his baby for many, many years to all of a sudden being extraordinarily like mind blowing, wealthy, get anything you want the rest of your life.
Pretty young guy still to he's single. And I asked him, I was having dinner, I was like, so are you much happier? He's like, well, I'm definitely happier because it was a real grind. But I wouldn't say I'm happy, like in an in an absolute sense.
I was like, well, why not? He's like, well, you know, I went on the like big, you know, trip after the sale and you got this boat and you know, we had all my friends come out and everyone was so excited to come and celebrate that we did this. And you know, we're in there and we're getting on the boat. And there's these two much bigger boats right next to mine.
And all the people are going and getting on those. And the whole time I was just wondering like, who the hell is that, you know, who got that boat? Like how is that boat so much bigger than mine? And my friends are all looking at it being like, damn, that boat's sick. My boat's not good enough.
And it just made me think like, wow, there's always going to be a bigger boat, like to use the metaphor, no matter what, like if financial wealth is your scoreboard, there's always going to be a bigger boat. And the reality is like, we glorify it. Like you go to a party and there's 100 people in the room.
Generally speaking, financial wealth is the easiest way to like stack rank people that are there. And so when there's someone that's extraordinarily wealthy there, there's some billionaire in the room, everyone is attracted, they want to learn about what made that person so great and made so much well. Now, if you flip it, and you say like thought experiment, let's imagine that everyone walks around with a happiness meter on top of their head.
And it tells you how happy the person is. If you walked into that same room and you saw the billionaire, and it was like a one on a scale of one to 10, and you saw a, you know, an accountant who has a 10, I probably would go over to the accountant and be like, what is your secret? You because happiness at the end of the day is sort of what I want. Like I want fulfillment, I want happiness.
Money people think is a means to that end, but it's a flawed one for sure. Yeah. And then there's the whole meaning,
SPEAKER_01
meaningfulness. What was it? The three schools of V&E psychology, man search for pleasure, man search for happiness, man search for meaning. Yeah. And I think that there's that sort of like, I think about my mom where I'm like, I just want to be like my mom. I want to, I want to be as invested in my grandchildren as she is in my son.
I want to work out six out of seven days a week without fail. I want to get seven hours of sleep. Like I want to have this defining your terms, social wealth, mental wealth, physical wealth.
And like if you've got three out of five there, it kind of, it does beg the question of like, what is the goal of financial wealth? And I like your friend's journey, right? Which is that it is the output of having done something meaningful. But once it arrives, it can be a very unhelpful, you know, barometer in it. Yeah. I mean, realizing that is a huge step.
SPEAKER_00
And we'll talk about that in the context of your own journey. But before we get to burn rate, which I do want to talk about your new book, super excited about and loved. Can we just talk for a few minutes about the bonobos story? We referenced it in the context of the gorilla.
What was like the foundational insight behind bonobos? I mean, what was it, you know, you were at Stanford Business School, I believe you met a co-founder there. What was like the insight that that sparked it? I think there were two colliding insights. One,
SPEAKER_01
all credit to my co-founder, Brian Spaley, was men's pants don't fit that well. You know, we were coming off of the 90s in the 2000s, where there was a revolution in the fit of men's denim stretch became a thing. Five pocket fit improved.
There were lots of different silhouettes. So people just started wearing denim. And I think people in a certain demographic that could afford it started paying over $100 for jeans.
I remember the first time my dad was like, I was trying to buy a pair of seven, the original seven for all mankind jeans. And he was like 100 dollars. You know, it was just mind blowing.
And so I feel like the fit of denim and the investment that men made in great denim paved the way for someone to do something comparable in pants. And my co-founder was a savant and figured out this whole curved waistband thing that enables you to fit your thighs and your butt in a pair of pants that also fits in the waist. And he was brilliant about fabrication in the right kind of soft pinwheel corduroy that was to where we started the company in Northern California.
It worked for like the 85 degree middle of the day and it worked for like the 60, 55 degree evening. So that was sort of insight one was there's an opportunity to do a better fitting men's pants, non denim, non five pocket. So chinos and corduroys.
And then the other insight was that brands were going to be built on the internet. And back in 07, this was very much not clear yet. This was, it wasn't, it wasn't obvious.
And there was Zappos, which we heard about with selling a lot of shoes, but they were selling other brands. The way they were doing it was category of soft goods was assumed to never go online. Like remember this is before Amazon had a fashion business.
And I can remember when Amazon went into fashion and the New York fashion industry that I was a part of like mocking it, like, oh, they're never going to be able to do that. So we were pre the big e-commerce platforms going into apparel. And here you had this guy, Tony Shea, selling shoes by offering great return policy, great customer service and having this highly energetic customer service team on the front lines.
And so my thought experiment was, well, if you can sell existing soft goods brands online, meaning fashion, footwear, home, why can't you build one? And the more we pitched the idea, the more we heard like, who's done this? And the answer was, we didn't have an answer. And that, that of course became the beginning of the digital direct consumer brand movement, which was very exciting to watch unfold. Because I think we got to be a first mover in that whole movement.
SPEAKER_00
You raised a lot of money, which I don't think I'd appreciated in just being kind of an outside observer of the story. I was a consumer of the product, from my trying to think what year you must have started it. But when I was at Stanford, I was there from 2009 to 13.
And I think I started to first hear aware about maybe in like 2012 or so. And then during my early career years, it was like, the go to pants and product. But I didn't realize you would raise a lot of money along the journey.
Would you have done that in hindsight? Do you think that was necessary? Did it, you know, hurt or help in any material ways that you'd kind of flag for entrepreneurs that are
SPEAKER_01
just starting out today? No, I wouldn't have done it. If I could go back, I think there's so many problems with raising money. I think the first is psychological, which is that entrepreneurs can associate capital raises with success.
And I prefer another construct now, which is think of capital raising as a sign of failure. Like the more money you need, the more open questions there are about the future, you know, business potential. And I think we could get nerdy about it.
But there's only very, there's a very small number of businesses out there that are emerging that require over 100 million of capital. And usually those are companies with asymmetric upside, where the fundamental product is technology or software. And I think that leads the second problem that capital can create and try to solve for us was like, there was no good technology stack for building our brand.
And so we add one of those like classic, I had one of those classic delusional moments that you have as an entrepreneur where you're like, well, let's go build that. Like, let's go build that other thing that actually has nothing to deal with what we're currently doing. And so we put a lot of energy and time and capital against trying to write better e-commerce software.
And it turns out that it's hard to write software inside of a pants company. And it turns out there was a guy doing that in Canada named Toby, and he's now got a company called Shopify. And that's, that's what they do, right? And so there's this fine line between fantasy and reality as an entrepreneur, and that line gets pushed out further when you have access to capital.
And then certainly, yeah. And then thirdly, I would say, you know, most retail brands aren't meant to raise a lot of outside capital, like retail is meant to be done profitably. And I think the direct to consumer world that's been built is a lot of profit losing companies.
And I think the irony is that what could make a lot of those brands great is really opening up their brick and mortar distribution, not through company on brick and mortar, which can work. The NoBos with 60 stores, we made it work, but actually through wholesale, which is the relationship commercially that most DTC entrepreneurs frown on. And if like for my sister's brand and the baby apparel space, we're now live at Target, we're live at Buy Buy Baby, we have a new partnership coming.
That actually is where you can raise money from, from wholesale operating profit. And I think we've been through a decade long delusion that I feel like I helped spearhead, which is that a standalone direct to consumer business is a good business, not look at what's happening in the public markets and soon to be coming in the private markets. And that you have to go it alone pure play when the truth is that 80% plus of retail is still spent in brick and mortar stores.
And if you pick the right allies, that can be a massive win. And that was part of my logic of actually selling a company to one of the probably the best brick and mortar company
SPEAKER_00
ever, which is Walmart. There's a lot of interesting stuff in the bonobos story, you know, as we walk through it there that kind of traces the DTC journey and like what has happened in the DTC space, like the early days of bonobos. I mean, there was a time when you could literally, you know, any keyword in the world on social on Google, you could put it in and like there wasn't anyone competing against you and you could acquire customers so cheaply.
And there was great returns on acquiring customers in the early days on social and on those platforms. Now, you know, if you try to go acquire customers through Instagram, like you Toby actually tweeted something you mentioned Toby tweeted something hilarious recently that was like, I think you could smash your face into the keyboard and have 100 people competing against you at whatever jumble of words, you know, comes out jumble of letters comes out. It's just gotten competitive.
Everyone started flocking to that just like in any market. And so it was interesting to me because bonobos was also early, you know, in addition to being early and thinking about DTC, you were the first ones that I ever saw innovate around what a store looks like. And you had, yeah, I think you called them guide shops, your look shops.
But I remember going into my first one and being like, wait, what do you mean this is like, I can't actually buy the clothing here. It was like to experience it to see it. And then they were sent to me direct.
And now I think you've seen a lot of companies following on to that. You know, there was the whole movement around owned retail where like, you know, the rent became the new, the new cat. And there was like that whole meme around, you know, consumer brands opening up all of their DTC stores and Soho, like, you know, the streets were lined with every single direct consumer mattress brand that decided they needed to open a showroom there or whatever it was.
Where do you think we are today? So do you think, you know, the DTC brands or the consumer brands of the future are going to be built in this, you know, kind of wholesale or at least channel agnostic manner? Like, what do you think the future looks like for the consumer landscape? If you're keeping cash anywhere that isn't paying you a high interest rate, listen up. Wealthfront is a saving and investing app that can help you earn more on your money and build wealth for your future. The Wealthfront cash account gives everyone a 2% APY interest rate, which is 20x what traditional banks pay today.
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SPEAKER_01
consumer part of the company, what you said is perfect, which is that it used to be disruptive to bring in customers digitally. And now it's just another form of middle person. So when we launched in enterprising early employee of ours discovered that Facebook's ad platform was about to launch, and we were one of the first 50 brands on Facebook's ad platform.
And so there was a period of time for a few years where that was interesting as large corporations, which were suspicious of Facebook, weren't on it. And then as you had larger flows of capital in and people started to realize, wait a second, maybe this is going to be a way to spend ad dollars. Because back then it was like, not clear that there was a great digital ad spend outside of Google.
And what was so interesting about Google was, it's hard to advertise the genus Hequah of a pair of pants on Google. It is a more utilitarian thing. Not that many people wake up in the morning and Google pants that make my butt look good, right? But if you're on a Facebook platform and you see a pair of pants that looks attractive, and there's the right copy, you have a more ineffable reaction, which we used to think applied to let's say magazine advertising and fashion or whatever.
And now it turns out like actually you can do that in any medium that has imagery, which is why partly why Facebook became enormous with ads, certainly Instagram as they brought that in. And so you're right, there was a period of time where it was there was arbitrage, and that quickly changed. And yet the venture capital money pouring in to fund digital CPMs basically turned Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Page and Sergey Brin into the landlords of the digital age.
Yeah, collecting rent on everybody. Collecting rent, and by the way, with far more market power than your average real estate landlord, right? At least the real estate landlord world is competitive. Here we have, yeah, duopoly, I would argue.
And I guess Amazon's getting into that game now. So that's a scary player to have moving into that. So you're right.
And I think as we learned that that wasn't going to be the thing. And as I woke up to the fact that I've been imagining that a pants company and a menswear company was actually a technology company. Once I came to grips with the fact that I've been wrong, and I feel like that's one of the strengths of an entrepreneur is being able to say like, I was dead wrong about that.
That thing I was shouting from the rooftops about two years ago is wrong. That thing I raised my last round on turns out not to be true. That freed us up to go after not only our own brick and mortar, but also in critically this relationship with Nordstrom.
And what was cool about that was we got to 100 stores within like 18 months. Yeah, and super cost effectively. And totally.
And you don't you don't own the inventory once they bought it. You've got national reach. And so that's kind of my aha is like, you don't need your direct consumer business to be the majority of your business.
You just need it to be the thing that tells the story. It enables you to have a direct relationship with the customer. And then wholesale actually is an amazing way to monetize that if you pick the right partners.
And I think the narrative even five years ago was, well, all those people are going bankrupt, right? Like brick and mortar is dying, software eats the world. And the truth is, Walmart, Target, Sephora, Costco, you know, in every general, Dick's Sporting Goods, Dollar General, $25 billion market cap company. There is a fundamental reality that the lion's share of retail dollars in the United States are transacted and brick and mortar.
And you have a small cohort of DTC entrepreneurs who think for some reason that they shouldn't engage with that 8%. And I'm seeing that start to evolve. And entrepreneurs who figure that out earlier, by the way, many of them are raising no money or very little money.
And I feel like that's the new playbook in DTC is get the brand to scale in DTC, open up wholesale relationships, thoughtfully, strategically, perhaps some brick and mortar, and raise less than $20 million, certainly at the high end.
SPEAKER_00
I was talking to a entrepreneur friend recently who started a consumer food business, or like spices and foods. And he was actually telling me that they make more money, they make more margin dollars on an Amazon sale than on a website sale through their DTC website. And I just thought that was so interesting because a few years ago, the narrative was the complete opposite.
It was like, man, you got to buy through DTC, that's where I make all my money. And I'm making nothing on Amazon. Amazon's killing me.
And they're actually making more money and having better actual delivery and customer service on the Amazon sales. 100%. I was just writing a note to two founders where
SPEAKER_01
we were talking about the delusion that we have around looking at gross margins rather than margins after marketing. And so I have this nerdy metric now I call C-Pam, contributed profit after marketing, which is like what actually are you making in terms of before your fixed costs? And most people are vaporizing all of their contributed profit on marketing. So if you're spending 30 or 40 or 50% of your total revenue on marketing, you're basically building a fundamentally worse business than anything you could do in brick and mortar.
So yeah, the last realization in awakening there.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah. The last realization I have from what you said is there's this tendency, I think you were at Stanford Business School. You'd gone through Silicon Valley, the tech hub of the world, like techno optimism, everything.
You were in this environment, and I think now the world is sort of in this environment because we've had this 10-year raging bull market of like, this is what I'm supposed to do. I'm a tech founder. And I went to Stanford Business School, I'm going to start a tech company.
And what you do with the tech companies, you go and raise money, you go and raise money, you go and Sandhill Road, and you go raise money from the VCs, and then I'm going to go become a unicorn. And that mantra and that story and narrative has permeated so deeply into the like entrepreneurial roots globally that I think it only will happen in a bear market, like what we're experiencing right now, that we'll be able to break that. And that founders will think from first principles about, does it make sense for me to raise money? What is my use of this capital? Does it make sense to take on the dilution? Should I prove product market fit before I raise money? Because now I know what works and what I can actually deploy it into to grow.
But I think that'll be a great thing. And I actually think some amazing companies are going to be founded and built, and the founders are actually going to own a bigger chunk of the companies when they reach maturity because of that shift. Totally.
And the other question,
SPEAKER_01
can I, can I even raise the money? Right? Because the market will help force that answer on the people. Yeah. Because it's quite hard. And we started Bonobos, right? And right before the Great Recession.
And so 08, 09, 2010, we had to raise our first 8 million from 100 plus investors. And so we had that forced capital constraint. And it wasn't until we had venture capital that I could pursue some of these other ideas.
And anyway, we could, I digress a little bit, but I do think there's to your point, enormous opportunity that gets created by the focus of a bear market in terms of what it means for fundraising. And by the way, the valuations get more realistic too. And I think that's a good thing for entrepreneurs in the long run, although they don't view it as such in real time.
I know I didn't. Sure. So I want to shift gears a little bit
SPEAKER_00
to your book and to really the message and some of what you're sharing and the vulnerability that you've been sharing more recently. You released a book. It's called For People Who Haven't Seen It.
It's called Burn Rate, Launching a Startup and Losing My Mind. You can find it anywhere. Today, I'll post the link when we share this.
And in the show notes, you'll be able to find it. It's fantastic. I read it and I found it to be both deeply emotional, causing me to reflect a lot on the journey, but also really inspirational.
And I want to sort of dig in a little bit to that story if you don't mind, to be able to tease and kind of share for other folks, some of what you shared, you know, by writing it. There's so much about the journey and your personal journey, your spiritual, mental, emotional journey that you cover in the book. You embrace a level of vulnerability in the book that I think is basically unprecedented, I would say, from an entrepreneurship standpoint.
I've never really read a book where I felt like someone shared that much rawness of their journey and of the ups and downs of that journey. Every now and then, you hear it maybe from creatives, from writers, comedians, etc. But I have never seen that from an entrepreneur.
And I think it was a beautiful thing that you shared that. So what inspired you
SPEAKER_01
to write this book? What was it? I was tired of being ashamed. You know, I spent 20 years living in secrecy with this illness. And, you know, we talked back earlier about belonging and difference.
And I think one of the ultimate forms of difference that one wants that I wanted to keep hidden was a severe mental illness. Who would want to present that information to others if they didn't know it? And that's the way our culture determines what's shameful implicitly is what's unspeakable. And so if you can't talk about something, what I internalized from my inability to talk about bipolar disorder was that it must be something to be profoundly ashamed of, that there was something fundamentally broken in who I was, that I was a disorderly person, because if you have a disorder, and then this horrible thing that we do with no illness, which is that we say someone is bipolar rather than has it.
Imagine being told you have cancer versus you are cancer. It's like unimaginable to tell someone that they're cancer. And yet that's what we do with bipolar.
We basically say your identity and this illness are now one and the same. You actually are that illness. And so that was a, that hit me like a sledgehammer when I was diagnosed, when I was 20.
The force of the sledgehammer was met by the same level of energy that I put into denying that it existed. So I spent a decade where it was really a suppressed memory, didn't deal with it, didn't take medication, didn't see a doctor.
SPEAKER_00
Did you have episodes during that period or was it largely not an issue?
SPEAKER_01
It was, it was latent. And that actually was really unhelpful in our diagnosis. The diagnosis psychiatrist had said, you know, if Andy doesn't have another episode for five years, it could be that this wasn't one off event.
And I had, I would say I had about 10 years asymptomatic. And then, and that was after the first episode, which was a manic episode, which for people who weren't aware of it, think about delusions of grandeur, messianic zeal, incoherent speech, rapid cycling of moods, laughing, crying, ranting, raving, and just while you were in college. I was in college.
And so the sheer ingenuity of my family got me to the hospital, came back down to earth over a week, you know, a week of medication, and then got out and everyone basically pretended like it never had happened. And it was unfortunate timing, but I had done mushrooms a few weeks earlier. And so that was kind of the thing that everyone hung their hats on.
And amongst my friends at Northwestern, we met, it was like fight club. You never talk about fight club, right? Like, we all knew it had happened, including me, but we didn't talk about it. And the fact that it wasn't spoken about was to me, a source of shame.
And then it wasn't until a decade later, when I fell into like fearsome depression, as I was navigating co founder divorce and the trials and tribulations of building a company, that I started to experience the other side, which is catastrophic depression, didn't barely get to work, didn't want to live. And you would think at that point that it would start to compute. But it wasn't until, you know, 2016, where I had really the second meaningful manic episode hospitalization, ended up, you know, at Bellevue in New York City for a week and walked out finally ready to deal with this, and walked out straight into handcuffs and was arrested for felony and misdemeanor assault.
And that began, you know, the process of really confronting this and a credit to my wife and a credit to my doctor and credit to a family that rallied around it. I got through it. And so to your question on writing the book, I felt like the normal thing to do having dodged the bullet of almost anyone knowing about this would be to say nothing.
But the thing that I would be condoning if I did that was the fact that this has to be unspeakable. And so I felt it would be a disservice to the community to not share, given that I was lucky enough to get through some of this stuff. And I felt selfishly, like I just wanted to expunge the shame.
And so the way to do that is to say, I'm going to actually put the whole story on the record, because there's this wasn't my fault. And if it wasn't my fault, then this is just a story about something that I've been through. And it's been beautiful.
It's been beautiful how accepted I feel. I feel like a fully known person for the first time. So there's so much you said
SPEAKER_00
there and I appreciate you sharing so openly. You know, there's so much you said that I want to dig into a bit. One of the things that I just have this general feeling or realization around is that the way we treat mental illness in this country really globally, you know, is basically like, if we don't have to talk about it, let's just not talk about it.
We're just going to like, hey, oh, yeah, maybe that happened. But let's just like push that aside. I don't, you know, it's like very difficult for us to confront.
And so our response to that is like, hey, let's just not confront it. It's fine. You know, Andy, you were fine to that, you know, it happened in 2000 or whatever year was one off episode.
And I'm sure your family embraced that, you know, Indian family, I imagine, you know, is challenging for and that is such a negative thing. You know, broadly speaking, that we do that. And I hope that through sharing, you know, your story, other people who have, you know, come forward and shared their experiences, the people that your book inspires to come out and share their experiences, I hope that we can start to kind of shift the narrative
SPEAKER_01
on that more broadly. 100%. Yeah, and it was this Indian side and the Scandinavian side too, my dad's side, it was fascinating that my dad's mother actually had profound mental health issues and was institutionalized twice by her husband, who had become a psychiatrist, we now think, or my dad thinks partly because of his mom's issues. And so here we had this like intergenerational family issue that you would think it opened up the con that would open up the convo, but it served to do the opposite.
It served to prepare us for the silence. And I think this is what we have to invert in all these situations, families at companies, society, we've got to invert it so that we can have a conversation about things that are hard enough without the silence and the shame. And I think we've seen that happen.
Generally entertainment leads the way, right? Like with the gay rights movement, we start with our entertainers, right? Or even with the movement within the black community, there's sort of like entertainment is first, event sports, and I feel like business goes last. And so I felt like if we could pierce the veil of the conversation in the business world, in corporate America, where it's assumed that a steady hand is what's required, shepherding capital, hiring talent, if we could pierce it there, that could start, you know, a snowball, a more meaningful snowball. Do you think, I don't know if you've
SPEAKER_00
ever heard this concept, I think it was Jerry Seinfeld was on an episode with Tim Ferriss and talked about the idea that you come with like a kit in life, you're kind of born with a kit. And for Jerry, he was talking about it in the context of creatives, comedians who have generally, in a population, experience extreme depression alongside this incredible creativity and intelligence that allows them to be exceptional at what they do. And he calls it part of the kit.
He's like, look, I just have this kit, and I experienced these, you know, periods of downness and, and then these incredible periods of flow state and brilliance that I that I work through. You talk about a little bit in the book, you know, this idea of like hypomania, which are kind of the upstates of bipolar disorder, as I understand it, where you have this amazing creativity and flow and energy. Do you think that like to go back to the idea of asset and liability was, was this an asset and the liability for you? Like, did it also uniquely enable you to go and do these things that you accomplished and, you know, create this amazing business and do some of those things?
SPEAKER_01
I think we have to be careful. I remember there was a moment in the process of the book where there were some folks that wanted to call it here's to the crazy ones, after the Steve Jobs commercial from, from I think it was the 80s, early 90s. And I remember thinking, I don't like that title, partly because let's not celebrate or lionize craziness.
We do a disservice to the imminently sane people who are doing very creative and brilliant things. So I wouldn't want to conclude that it's this like necessary requisite ingredient in the creative process. The creative process.
But I would say there's clearly a correlation of it over indexing. And that's in the data. So 3% of the general population has some form of mood disorder, most commonly bipolar disorder.
We think that index is seven to one in entrepreneurs. So we'd be talking about one in five. And that definitely resonates with me.
So for me, was it a was it an asset and a liability? Absolutely. This hypomanic state that is before you're really going off the rails with mania, but that is a highly energetic state where you have elevated speech, more vision, more ideas, more excitable. Everything happens for a reason.
Tremendous energy, often for me anyway, like a lot of extroverted energy, you know, five internal meetings in a day with a group, three, one on ones, two interviews, a press interview, dinner, maybe dinner was with a candidate, then afterwards out. And New York City was perfect for that. And by the way, it was totally fun.
It was dizzyingly fun. And then these massive crashes that would come, it wasn't alternating day by day, it would be like three months of hypomania, and then like three months of depression. And I'd say, look, depression, terrible for building a company.
You have to act when you're around other people. You don't have positivity or ideas. It's hard to get to work.
So I think there's something to aspiring for a more stable place and still allowing, as my doctor calls it, for like peak days. And so I think that becomes the challenge. And you know, I'd love to talk to Jerry Seinfeld about that because here's someone who he's talking about, you know, the downsides, no doubt.
That said, I mean, what, a decade long series or 12 years. So there was like a prodigious amount of positive mood state there as well. And like for my part, I'd rather trade some of those hypomanic days to trade away the depression.
So it's a way of saying yes to your question with an asterisk of like, let's be careful not to celebrate it or assume that it's a prerequisite.
SPEAKER_00
Sure. So we're coming up to the end of our time. And there are a few things I want to ask you to kind of to wrap this wrap this all up.
And you know, one of them is like, we're not investing enough in this as a society. We're not investing enough in mental health, in supporting people who are experiencing these things, in making people feel comfortable sharing in the way that that you did to your point. It was like, it was shame, you know, you wanted to hide it.
You didn't want to be different. It was easy to, to just not talk about it and, you know, and keep it from the limelight rather than embracing that difference to go back to that. What should we, what should companies be doing to invest in this in resources to, you know, to help kind of change the tune around this massive problem that so many people are experiencing under the covers? Yeah, I think, well, here's the good news.
Five years ago,
SPEAKER_01
there was like 100 million of venture capital that went into mental health tech. Last year, I heard that was five and a half billion. Wow. So the money's coming in and that could speak also to the venture capital glut that we've been talking a little bit about, but there's been a lot more investment coming upstream. And so I think what companies need to do now is, is three things.
First, create an environment where disclosure is encouraged. I think that starts with leaders. When leaders go first, disclosing their mental illnesses, their mental health issues.
And by the way, you don't need a diagnosis to have struggled with your mental health. You know, as you know, you don't get to a certain age in life without having had some things that you've really, that have really almost taken you down. Second is community.
So having a neurodiversity community group, ERG, whatever you want to call it, where we can trade those stories internally and find a way to identify our common experience. And if you look at the span of it, bipolar disorders, just a tiny part, anxiety, OCD, grief, addiction, the autism spectrum, high-functioning Asperger's, unipolar depression, which affects one in five people, it's hard not to get a check mark on one of those as a person. And if you assume one degree removed in families, 100% of families have got these stories.
So we got to build community around it and just make it normal to talk about it. And then thirdly, and the hard part is investment, investing in treatment, investing in care. So that means actually having a relationship with modern health, Lyra, one of these mental health providers that becomes a resource to your teams.
And then second, reimbursement. So the reimbursement rates, as we all know, on mental health services are bismol. You know, they're not so great on typical physical medical issues.
And yet we have like dental and vision in part because that's not covered. So let's take care of your teeth and your eyes. But as for your brain, best wishes.
And yet that's like the stuff of how we conjure reality. That's how we understand the world. And so the pitch that I'm making to companies is treat this as one of your best investments, because it's going to improve the productivity of your teams.
And that means when you do things like what my friend Ariel Safira is doing at Real, which is she acknowledges that she's a mental health tech company, the reimbursement rates are too low. And so she provides a $2,000 a year per employee stipend for reimbursement of out-of-pocket expenses related to mental health. And if a company with, you know, 50 employees can do that, then we need to call to action our Fortune 500 companies to make the same investment.
Because we know that psychiatrists and therapists are not going to voluntarily reduce their rates. We know they're not going to voluntarily join and affiliate with insurance companies that takes down their after-tax. And we know that insurance companies aren't going to pay more money than they currently do for reimbursement.
So the only part of the ecosystem that the money can come from are corporations investing more in the productivity of their teams.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, productivity and retention. I mean, I imagine for your friend that drives a lot of affinity with the employee base that the company is investing in them and in their brains in that way. So it's brilliant.
You pointed out last two questions. So one, you know, a lot of entrepreneurs are going to listen to this aspiring builders, investors, etc. Many of whom I imagine will or have struggled with mental illness in some way, shape or form.
What advice would you would you give to someone who is going through this currently and who is struggling?
SPEAKER_01
I think there's a two-step process. The first step is to acknowledge it with yourself, like to be in the conversation with yourself about it. And I think that's such a remarkable thing to do.
Like, to even say the word, I am depressed when you've never said it. It's a big journey because we attach a lot of significance to not being the kind of person that has that issue. And so I think step one is try to cultivate the courage to be honest with yourself about how you're feeling or how you're doing or what's happening to you.
And then once you've done that, and maybe someone else helped you with it, but once you've done that, then the second step is to acknowledge that you're unlikely to be the person that can solve that on your own. Because otherwise you would have. You know what I mean? And that's where the next big step is to go see a mental health professional, and that starts with a simple talk therapist.
Just go talk to one person that isn't your boyfriend or mom or coworker, someone whose sole job is to find a way to get you healthy. And that is the best investment that you can make. And I think that's like, you're in the top 10% tile.
If you've acknowledged a problem and sought help. And I think for most people, you know, remarkably, they haven't taken both of those steps. Yeah, it's a scary thing to take that first step,
SPEAKER_00
because we attach a level of shame to it the way you expressed earlier. Because we, you know, I think especially for people who are high achievers and you've accomplished a lot, you've graduated from some school and you feel like, you know, from an external perspective, your life is supposed to be great. And I'm supposed to be happy.
And why wouldn't I be happy? I have, you know, a wife or whatever it is that you have in your life, and you're supposed to be happy, quote unquote. And yet you're not. And it's very hard to make that mental flip, as you said.
The other thing that I would say to anyone out there is just talk to your friends and ask them how they're doing. Like it's, it's such an easy thing to do to just reach out to someone that you haven't chatted with in a while and just ask, like, Hey, how are you doing, you know, anything I can help with love to chat about, etc. Because one of the things about your story that I find so interesting and compelling is you were on, you know, from an external view on top of the world, like had raised $100 million from Excel, all these amazing venture funds, you had founded this amazing company, you're selling it for all this money.
Reading the news articles, you're like, man, this guy's crushing it. This is the most amazing. He must be so happy.
You know, everything's good. Good looking guy, you know, everything, right? And yet you had, you had this internal struggle, deep, deep struggle that you were wrestling with. And so my whole thing has always been, you never know what's going on behind someone's eyes.
So never judge someone because you don't know what type of struggle they're dealing with internally and always ask, just, you know, reach out to people and say, Hey, how are you doing? Because that small little thing might be the one step that that kind of takes them to get help and to, to improve their lives. So so much to, to take away from this conversation. I, I think it's a great to, to take away from this conversation.
I, I found it an absolute joy. I have to admit, this was one of those conversations where I came away feeling like I can't believe I get to do this for a job. So I really, really appreciate your time and super excited to get to do this in person.
And hopefully over a meal with our, with our common friend, Jim, as well. So Andy Dunne, thank you so much. Where can people find you? And where can people buy your book?
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, thank you. It's awesome to be here. And I would add one small thing to that checking with people is be honest with other people when they check in with you.
We have this beautiful thing in the English language anyway, which is how are you? And the typical answer is like, I'm good, how are you? And I would encourage you to experiment with, I'm not great right now. And you'll be stunned. It stops people in their tracks.
And it leads to some of the best conversations because people are so surprised that you're actually being honest. And so in addition to checking in with others, role model, being honest with them. And sometimes that kind of frees up the convo.
In terms of finding me, yeah, I love, I love to, I love to be in happy places. So email is an unhappy place for me because it's just work. So I like to be in happy places.
My happy places are Twitter DMs, Twitter banter, Instagram DMs banter there, playing around with TikTok, which is addictive and fun. And then I love LinkedIn because LinkedIn, I feel like is a great place to have iterative, you know, it's kind of like slack for strangers. So I love LinkedIn too, by the way, that's like
SPEAKER_00
where I've been growing the most recently. I love LinkedIn. It's really fun.
And then book, yeah,
SPEAKER_01
we'd love you to buy it in an independent bookstore. But if not amazon.com, Walmart.
com,
SPEAKER_00
are great places. Amazing. Well, we will, we'll post everything in the show notes that people can find you.
And until next time, I'm so, so excited to be able to release this and look forward to all the benefit that people will be able to take from it. So thank you for, thank you for writing this book. Thank you for all the vulnerability and congratulations on the entire journey.
I look forward to hopefully being a part of the next phase of it. Amazing. Thanks so much.
Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. If you have any questions that you want featured in a future episode, email us at high at trwh.com. Leave us a review at Apple or Spotify to help us grow the reach of this podcast. Until next time, we will see you soon.