YouSaid · the spoken record

Henry Davis

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24
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2018-01-12
most recent
2018-01-12
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1
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  1. “We really want to be the next global CPG conglomerate. And the next five years will be spent working very, very hard to deliver that. And we are so maniacally focused on that at the moment and so excited about the opportunity to do it because we see such a sea change in the way customers want to engage with brands and this next generation and the generations after that and how they'll want to engage with brands that we really believe we've got an opportunity to do it.”

    2018-01-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Risk Is Misunderstood In Entrepreneurship, Why Acquisitions Are Cheap For Incumbents Today & 3 Strategies To Improve Diversity In Your Team with Henry Davis, President & COO @ Glossier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Well, professionally, I hope the next five years for me and Glossier are very intertwined. So on a personal level, I'm very excited to see my children grow and turn into functioning human beings who can talk and have opinions. The next five years for Glossier with hopefully me at the helm over those five years is to take what we're doing and make it the paradigm for what customers think a brand experience should be. And for us, that means expanding obviously our reach of customers, our reach into different product categories, our reach into different countries. But we want in five years time to be the paradigm for what a good brand experience is. And from that position, we believe that we can build a very meaningful company that touches a lot of people with a lot of different offerings because we will have an understanding of what people are looking for and how we can engage them to find out those things and how we can then create products in conjunction with those customers and create brands in conjunction with them.”

    2018-01-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Risk Is Misunderstood In Entrepreneurship, Why Acquisitions Are Cheap For Incumbents Today & 3 Strategies To Improve Diversity In Your Team with Henry Davis, President & COO @ Glossier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “It's people. It's the best thing about spoke a bit about my transition from venture to operating and the best thing about operating is getting to build a team and work with some really talented, passionate, wonderful people. But the success of our company is so contingent on those people. And so what keeps me awake at night and the thing that I really worry about is how do I hire, retain, incentivize, motivate, build trust with the people of Glossier because they really are what's going to make it a very successful company and that is everything. Everything is people. Our brand is our people and our people are our brand. And that's the one thing that I want to focus on and think about and do better every day. That is a never-ending challenge. There's always things you can do better. And I think about that all the time.”

    2018-01-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Risk Is Misunderstood In Entrepreneurship, Why Acquisitions Are Cheap For Incumbents Today & 3 Strategies To Improve Diversity In Your Team with Henry Davis, President & COO @ Glossier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “It is not a particularly uplifting one all the time, but I read a lot of human rights watch. They do reports on various different topics about human rights abuses. It's an organization I'm a pretty passionate supporter of. And for me, it's really important to understand what's going on in this post-truth world in which we live to really understand what's happening in the darkest corners of the world is really important to me and to understand how then I can help make a difference, even if that difference is as much as sending a tweet or calling the right politician, that's something that matters a lot to me. And I spend a lot of time reading their frankly incredible work. Some of the things they do and some of the bravery of some of their reporters is staggering.”

    2018-01-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Risk Is Misunderstood In Entrepreneurship, Why Acquisitions Are Cheap For Incumbents Today & 3 Strategies To Improve Diversity In Your Team with Henry Davis, President & COO @ Glossier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “I think brick and mortar will serve a purpose to be a touchpoint for brand, but I think that the fundamental tenet of what it means to be a brand in the world will be access and community in a way that only digital can facilitate because you can't brick and mortar will play, as I said, a role and is very important, it's a very important part of the Glossier brand experience, but the community element requires digital to exist. And I think that in 50 years we'll be talking about brands and digital in the way that 20 years ago they were talking about brands in the department store and the symbiosis of them.”

    2018-01-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Risk Is Misunderstood In Entrepreneurship, Why Acquisitions Are Cheap For Incumbents Today & 3 Strategies To Improve Diversity In Your Team with Henry Davis, President & COO @ Glossier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Yeah, I think, I mean, just from a pure literary level, there is few books that you can read over and over and over and still discover something new in it. It's just fascinating to read. What I love about it is it's just a lesson in human nature, passion and fallibility. Just every time I read it and I've read it a handful of times now, I just think about life and just realizes how fallible and prone to our own emotions and how tough life can be, but how it's also wonderful and there's good out there as well.”

    2018-01-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Risk Is Misunderstood In Entrepreneurship, Why Acquisitions Are Cheap For Incumbents Today & 3 Strategies To Improve Diversity In Your Team with Henry Davis, President & COO @ Glossier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “I don't buy that. And I've said a few times either what you're saying is in the entire world, and we often focus specifically on women, but I think that the same is very, very true of race and other minorities. So you can apply it equally across those, but you're either saying in the entire world, there are not minority groups in this industry as clever as we are, which I don't think anyone's intending, or you're saying that you fundamentally have set up your recruiting processes in a way that excludes them. Your definition of what it takes to be successful is exclusionary. And that's, I think people's intentions are good, but that's the trap they fall into. And that's the bit where as a company, we try very hard to lead by example. And I hope the industry is sort of getting there. And there was a fantastic article in the Wall Street Journal about Sephora just a few days ago and what they're doing with female technical talent, technological talent. And I think they're sort of setting the benchmark for how the industry can evolve and they're thinking about things in a really, really smart way. And it was a wonderful thing to.”

    2018-01-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Risk Is Misunderstood In Entrepreneurship, Why Acquisitions Are Cheap For Incumbents Today & 3 Strategies To Improve Diversity In Your Team with Henry Davis, President & COO @ Glossier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “The norms that have been formed in certain industries just by the way you communicate. And I think that that's part of a culture of acceptance as well. So these are things we think about. We will never be done as a company. We can always, always, always do better on all of these things. And we're really trying. And we're really trying to make sure that we are the change we want to see and that we encourage it. So every venture capital firm we meet, and we're fortunate enough now to have access to some really great firms, we ask about their approach to diversity. we call them out when we get an answer about yeah we're trying to hire but you know we just can't find the right candidates and i've said a few times”

    2018-01-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Risk Is Misunderstood In Entrepreneurship, Why Acquisitions Are Cheap For Incumbents Today & 3 Strategies To Improve Diversity In Your Team with Henry Davis, President & COO @ Glossier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “And so we focus very, very much on talent and capability over specific skills and experience. And then finally, I think is a culture of acceptance. So that comes down to having a company where you can talk about how you engage with each other, where you talk about the culture of the company and whether it's one that's open and diverse. I think a lot has been said about happy hours and the culture of startups and all these kinds of things, particularly from a gender point of view. I think that's a conversation that's really starting to happen and that's good. But also we should think about it from an age or a race perspective. So lots of people with different religious backgrounds don't want to go to a happy hour. So do you have other opportunities for people to bond, people with speaking as a father of three, people with kids don't necessarily want to go on overnight off-site. So can you be more creative about the way that you let the team develop and grow so that it is more inclusive? And then ultimately are you as a company communicating in ways that are accepting? I think it's easy to reinforce”

    2018-01-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Risk Is Misunderstood In Entrepreneurship, Why Acquisitions Are Cheap For Incumbents Today & 3 Strategies To Improve Diversity In Your Team with Henry Davis, President & COO @ Glossier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “You can be more creative, and that's when you can be more expansive and get really, really smart, capable people solving problems, whatever their backgrounds and whatever their gender or race, you get the smartest people solving the problems, not the people who have already gone through a system that is maybe set up in a certain way to acquire the skills that you're then using as the justification to reinforce that system.”

    2018-01-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Risk Is Misunderstood In Entrepreneurship, Why Acquisitions Are Cheap For Incumbents Today & 3 Strategies To Improve Diversity In Your Team with Henry Davis, President & COO @ Glossier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “So very specifically, it means know what you're hiring for. So, so much of the hiring process of engineers or finance and venture capital is about specific skills. Have you done venture investing before? Have you done this specific kind of engineering before or worked on this specific kind of tech stack before? But actually, that's not fair because that's just reinforcing whatever biases came before. And so what that leads to is what's known as the pipeline problem. And I think this is something that, again, venture capital is sort of fallen into this trap. And I don't want to tart all of venture capital with the same brush. There are some fantastic firms doing some great things. But in general, once you don't have a pipeline of diverse people, it's very hard to get diverse people into your leadership if you're hiring on the basis of specific skills, right? As in experience, because you're just reinforcing your own workforce and the makeup that you currently have. But if you hire for talent and capability, that's when”

    2018-01-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Risk Is Misunderstood In Entrepreneurship, Why Acquisitions Are Cheap For Incumbents Today & 3 Strategies To Improve Diversity In Your Team with Henry Davis, President & COO @ Glossier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “It's a problem that is endemic in the startup industry, particularly on the more technological side of it. I think venture capitalists, you mentioned engineers, but I think we should talk about venture capitalists. I know that's what this is about. And I think venture capital is as bad as any industry for diversity and should be called out as such. It's something that we think about a lot at Glossier. We always got more work to do and we're far from perfect, but we really want to try. I think there are three things that you should do in general when thinking about having a diverse workforce. Number one is make sure your hiring processes and your assessments are fair. Sounds super simple, but it's something that gets overlooked so often.”

    2018-01-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Risk Is Misunderstood In Entrepreneurship, Why Acquisitions Are Cheap For Incumbents Today & 3 Strategies To Improve Diversity In Your Team with Henry Davis, President & COO @ Glossier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “And we launched in the UK this week. And the reason we did that is we had overwhelming inbound demand from our community. Communities are no longer local. Instagram doesn't stop on the eastern seaboard of the United States. It's global. And we want to listen to people who are asking us, in some cases telling us where we need to be. That is true in product as well. So as we grow as a company, as our customers evolve as they grow, as our customer base expands, we want to make sure we're listening to what people are telling us they want and we want to then work with them to make sure we deliver something that they're missing. And that can be both experience, product, whatever it is.”

    2018-01-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Risk Is Misunderstood In Entrepreneurship, Why Acquisitions Are Cheap For Incumbents Today & 3 Strategies To Improve Diversity In Your Team with Henry Davis, President & COO @ Glossier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “We at Glossier built our following based on our ability and willingness and desire ultimately to engage with our customer. And I explained earlier how I came to join Glossier because Emily's realization that readers were telling her what they wanted and she could make that and then work with those very readers to create a company and a brand out of it. And so our whole following is based on our desire to engage with our customers and to listen to them and to understand what they want and where they're at. That is the basis for how you make decisions or how we make decisions for expansion, be that into new product categories, be that into new geographies, be that into new anything. We just want to understand what people want Glacier to do, what they don't have in their life that we feel we can do, and then set about doing that. So I'm actually speaking to you from London, my hometown where I don't live anymore. I live in New York nowadays, but I'm in London because we just launched here this week.”

    2018-01-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Risk Is Misunderstood In Entrepreneurship, Why Acquisitions Are Cheap For Incumbents Today & 3 Strategies To Improve Diversity In Your Team with Henry Davis, President & COO @ Glossier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “If we believe we can be one built on the new distribution model, we would want to hold on for that. And I think any entrepreneur who really believes that should hold on. Plenty of big checks being thrown around notwithstanding.”

    2018-01-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Risk Is Misunderstood In Entrepreneurship, Why Acquisitions Are Cheap For Incumbents Today & 3 Strategies To Improve Diversity In Your Team with Henry Davis, President & COO @ Glossier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Traditionally bought growth and continue to grow year on year. L'Oreal shows in its annual report a chart of 50 years of consecutive annual growth. And they will pay for that. But we believe that that is very short-sighted of us to even think about that option because actually what we want to do is replace L'Oreal or Este Lauder as the massive conglomerate incumbent. And if you really believe that as a startup, then you should do that. And our view is those companies will built on the back of channel innovation. Essay Lauder is a really good example. went into department stores before any beauty company and they realized that they could use that channel to push other products and other brands because they were so good in that department store channel and that's they built a multi multi billion dollar business on the back of that we believe that we're at the vanguard of the next channel and who knows how big that opportunity is because there are i can list five companies with market caps in the tens of billions of dollars doing what we do that were built on the old distribution models”

    2018-01-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Risk Is Misunderstood In Entrepreneurship, Why Acquisitions Are Cheap For Incumbents Today & 3 Strategies To Improve Diversity In Your Team with Henry Davis, President & COO @ Glossier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “And it will be a question of when interest rates go up, who feels at first. I think the second thing there is about the entrepreneurs themselves. I think it is a very specific personal decision. You get thrown and offer that's for a lot of money. You have to do a lot of soul searching about what you want as a founder, CEO, president, whatever it is, and what you think the upside is versus the risk. And so I think incumbents will always want to buy things they can't create. That is the natural way of the jungle in the business world and that is their competitive advantage is the ability to do that. I think if you believe your competitive advantage as a startup is so great that the price that a corporate would be willing to justify paying for you doesn't compensate you for your opportunity cost. You should keep going. And Aglossier, that's very much how we feel. So we feel that in the beauty industry, there's a tremendous amount of M&A activity. It's a very cash rich sector with companies that have”

    2018-01-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Risk Is Misunderstood In Entrepreneurship, Why Acquisitions Are Cheap For Incumbents Today & 3 Strategies To Improve Diversity In Your Team with Henry Davis, President & COO @ Glossier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Well, just to put to bed any rumors, no one has moved on Glossier just yet, and we have no intention of being moved at them. I think this for me is actually a cost of capital question, really. So cash is basically free right now. If you are an incumbent conglomerate in any space, you can borrow for next to nothing. And then you get tax shields on the interest anyway. And if your startups are running losses, so on and so forth, it's very cheap to buy companies these days, particularly if you have capital. On the flip side, for startups, access to capital is also pretty easy, as easy as arguably as ever been because interest rates are low, more and more money is going into alternative asset classes, venture capital is a huge beneficiary of that. You see bigger and bigger funds getting raised. That money has to go somewhere. So it's really a question of who has more access to capital. At the moment, I think it's pretty equal. So startups can be confident about going all the way. That might change.”

    2018-01-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Risk Is Misunderstood In Entrepreneurship, Why Acquisitions Are Cheap For Incumbents Today & 3 Strategies To Improve Diversity In Your Team with Henry Davis, President & COO @ Glossier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Out of this. Even if the company doesn't work or I don't work within the company, I now have a story that I can use to spin into another journey, be that another startup job or back into the venture world. I should have enough to be able to talk about and enough experience building that I have some value to someone somewhere. So I'd always thought about that risk on the downside and wasn't worried about it and figured that I could find a place to land should this not work out for reasons either my own reasons or non-idiosyncratic ones. And so that's how I dealt with it. There's a lifestyle hit. So I joke about business class and that doesn't matter to me at all. But having dinners with friends who are now, you know, haven't taken a salary cut in the way that I have and things like that was a bit challenging for a while. And I had to think about.”

    2018-01-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Risk Is Misunderstood In Entrepreneurship, Why Acquisitions Are Cheap For Incumbents Today & 3 Strategies To Improve Diversity In Your Team with Henry Davis, President & COO @ Glossier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “It was. I think it's very important to know what your risk tolerance is. So I'd been lucky to have a couple of years behind me where I'd not spent the money that I'd earned. So I had some savings. I also was in a relationship with my now wife who worked and was making money as well. And so we had a very deep conversation about who was going to pay the rent and so on and so forth. And then I think something that often gets forgotten is the nature of risk in entrepreneurship. what you should do as an entrepreneur around risk. It's always considered, oh, entrepreneurship is so risky. I think there are ways that it can be very risky, particularly if you do it as your first job out of university or college. I think then it can be quite risky because you don't have much to fall back on. But actually, some of the best entrepreneurs I know are all about risk mitigation and risk management. And I think the way that I saw it is I'm going to have a go at this for a period of time. If I get a year,”

    2018-01-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Risk Is Misunderstood In Entrepreneurship, Why Acquisitions Are Cheap For Incumbents Today & 3 Strategies To Improve Diversity In Your Team with Henry Davis, President & COO @ Glossier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “We were telling her over and over again what they wanted from beauty brands that they felt they weren't getting, both in terms of the brand and the positioning and also in terms of the product. And that right in front of me was my thesis. And she was going to set off to launch this brand out of this content company that she had. And I just said, you're going to need someone to help you. And long story short, she said, well, why don't you help me? And it was everything I wanted to do with an incredible founder and entrepreneur who had a really visionary idea and there was no other option really at that point. I had to leave the dark side, the very well-paid dark side, I hasten to add, to join a very early stage startup and have never really looked back since.”

    2018-01-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Risk Is Misunderstood In Entrepreneurship, Why Acquisitions Are Cheap For Incumbents Today & 3 Strategies To Improve Diversity In Your Team with Henry Davis, President & COO @ Glossier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Those would be. And in my travels, I met Emily, who had this beauty blog. I was doing a lot of e commerce investing at the time. My thesis around e-commerce investing was that multi-brand e-commerce had already been won by Amazon, which was true then it's even truer today. And if you wanted to play in e-commerce, you had to go the branded route. Branded e-commerce was in its heyday, Wobby Parker and Harry's and Dollar Shave Club and so on and so forth were doing wonderful things. They'd typically been supply chain disruption businesses and they'd been targeting efficiencies in the supply chain to give the customer a cost saving or an efficiency benefit delivery to your doorstep subscription that kind of thing. And I was obsessed with how the digital channel could actually be used in branded e-commerce to change the nature of brand rather than change the relationship with the product, change the relationship with the brand. And I met Emily who had this blog called into the gloss, which was a very successful and still is a very successful beauty blog. And she was saying that her readers”

    2018-01-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Risk Is Misunderstood In Entrepreneurship, Why Acquisitions Are Cheap For Incumbents Today & 3 Strategies To Improve Diversity In Your Team with Henry Davis, President & COO @ Glossier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Yes, so I was at index ventures. I had an even darker side to my career before that where I worked in banking. So I started my career in banking and then went to business school and ended up in venture capital, which is not the dark side you're making it out to be. It's actually a hugely enlightened side and it is a wonderful experience where you have just tremendous access to all the interesting things going on in the entrepreneurial world. You get to travel around the world, typically business class, depending on where you work and meet with some of the most interesting people doing the most fascinating things and they take your calls and then you get to spend your day thinking about those things and what it means for the future of the world. I always had this itch that I wanted to run something and run with something. And so the great thing about venture capital as well is it exposes you to so many different kinds of business and different stages of business. So on my travels, I started to realize that there were companies where I wanted to be the other side of the table. And I started to hone in on what kinds of companies”

    2018-01-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Risk Is Misunderstood In Entrepreneurship, Why Acquisitions Are Cheap For Incumbents Today & 3 Strategies To Improve Diversity In Your Team with Henry Davis, President & COO @ Glossier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Henry, it's such a pleasure to. Thank you so much for joining me today, Henry. Thank you for having me. It's wonderful to talk with a fellow Londoner about all things startup and VC and hugely humbling to be recommended by Roseanne and Kirsten, who are two of the absolute best in the business and nicest in the business as well.”

    2018-01-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Risk Is Misunderstood In Entrepreneurship, Why Acquisitions Are Cheap For Incumbents Today & 3 Strategies To Improve Diversity In Your Team with Henry Davis, President & COO @ Glossier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source