YouSaid · the spoken record

Seth Goldman

lines on the record: 43
first: 2018-06-11
most recent: 2018-06-11
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Well, you have to be resilient. And this is something that's so important to put this under bigger picture just for our economy. People have to be resilient. So one of the best ways I developed resilience growing up was I wrestled in high school. I was the worst wrestler on the team. My first year, I was one in 10, and that was only because somebody didn't show up and I got the forfeit. So I had learned how to fight off my back, you know, and I had experienced rejection. And it's so important to be able to bounce back from something like not just, I mean, all the time, but in life, and especially when you believe in it, it makes it that much easier.”
2018-06-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Honest Tea: Seth Goldman (2017) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I really don't believe in luck. I believe that the reason we're still here is the perseverance. And to the extent there's luck, it's the timing, the way the consumer has evolved. But I've heard someone say, oh, you know, you were in the right place at the right time. I said, well, you know, it took 10 years to get to that right place. So this was not something that just happened overnight. A friend of mine likened it to water. Eventually water finds its way to, you know, comes going downhill and it gets to where it needs to go. And I think we've finally got to a place where we could connect with consumers and do it in a way that was still meaningful.”
2018-06-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Honest Tea: Seth Goldman (2017) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know. Well, to me, what was so exciting was some of our employees were made millionaires as well. And that, to me, was, you know, that was all sweat equity that they earned. So that was especially meaningful.”
2018-06-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Honest Tea: Seth Goldman (2017) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because, and I give Coco a lot of credit, they understood this was a brand that is different than what they sell in market. They couldn't connect with the organic consumer or the natural foods marketplace. And so they gave us this incredible latitude and autonomy. And there were moments where we ran up against them around regulatory language or just marketing approaches. And they respected what we did. So what's so continues to surprise me is this brand is still my brand. And the biggest part was the distribution. We were in 15,000 stores when Coke invested. Now we're in over 100,000 stores. So that's where the difference is.”
2018-06-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Honest Tea: Seth Goldman (2017) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Coca-Cola bought it. He said, you know, the first few weeks they want to know your opinion. And the next few weeks, they want to know your phone number because after that they don't want to know.”
2018-06-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Honest Tea: Seth Goldman (2017) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you know the story so often when a brand is sold the entrepreneur gets really frustrated and they butt heads and the entrepreneur rarely lasts a few months. The friend of mine who was reinvitamin water said he said and he left shortly after.”
2018-06-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Honest Tea: Seth Goldman (2017) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They approached you. They approached us. Well, they approached us in 2007, and they had just created this group of entering and emerging brands. And their goal was to invest in and build the next billion dollar brand for Coca-Cola. And so, you know, going to the headquarters in Atlanta, sitting down where the president of Coke North America and then the chairman, and sort of party was like looking down like, I'm really here. We're really having this conversation. So that was the first moment like this is actually going to work. This is going to be around.”
2018-06-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Honest Tea: Seth Goldman (2017) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm told that he still did. In fact, I had an encounter with him a few years ago, and he brought over the body man, the first test course. It was Barvin, tell him, tell him what I drink. And what do I always have to have with me?”
2018-06-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Honest Tea: Seth Goldman (2017) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We had some funny moments. There was a moment in 2008. President Obama had become an honesty drinker, I guess, with a campaign for 2008. And the McCain campaign had criticized him for being out of touch with the American people.”
2018-06-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Honest Tea: Seth Goldman (2017) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, this was one of the key strategic elements that Barry brought to the company, and he literally is a professor of game theory. And so he said, you know, the problem with so many startups is the entrepreneurs give themselves all these penny stocks in the beginning. And as a result, they start with just much more stock than everybody else. And then everybody else just comes along for the ride. He said, but what if instead you started the founders at the same place as the other investors and only when the company grows in value do the founders get more equity? And that was a reverse structure. And what that did was it helped as we grew and we raised more money, we didn't get diluted. And the other thing was we relied on angel investors. So a lot of entrepreneurs and the venture capital mode is basically they're incentivized to own more of the company. They're incentivized to exit quickly. And we didn't take that kind of money. And I'm very glad we didn't. I think that was a key piece that led us keep control.”
2018-06-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Honest Tea: Seth Goldman (2017) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're going to go right. We're going to do exactly what you're doing and just do it bigger. And we were always, that was another thing I could lose sleep about, which was always competition.”
2018-06-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Honest Tea: Seth Goldman (2017) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we were approached by lots of companies along the way. I mean, it was very partially because we were growing quickly and partially because we were doing something others weren't doing. So really from the first year every year or so we'd be approached by a major food or beverage company that wanted to buy us.”
2018-06-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Honest Tea: Seth Goldman (2017) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My first year salary was at $50,000. Literally, I took that $50,000 check and it was even, it was tax inefficient because I invested in the company and then I paid myself. I don't think I got over $100,000 for probably not for the first five years. And then it grew. But the stock obviously really grew.”
2018-06-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Honest Tea: Seth Goldman (2017) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Destroyed it all. And it was just painful. We weren't profitable until the eighth year or so. I mean, it took a long time. Now we kept things really lean, so it wasn't like we were, you know, went on spending sprees, we were sharing hotel rooms and cutting corners everywhere we could, not on the ingredients, but just trying to. To keep the lights on.”
2018-06-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Honest Tea: Seth Goldman (2017) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, it was. Well, we were doing about $3 million, $4 million in sales, and it totally stopped our sales. So we lost several months of sales. So several hundred thousand dollars. I don't know that it cost a million. But a huge, you know, just momentum stopper. Here you are trying to build. You got your salespeople out trying to sell product instead. Now they're trying to all.”
2018-06-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Honest Tea: Seth Goldman (2017) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Unfortunately, no one got hurt or injured, but we did have bottles with pieces of broken glass in them, and we knew we couldn't afford it as a business to lose our largest customer. So we voluntarily withdrew all product from the market. Every store. Yes. Everywhere. Not just Whole Foods, everywhere.”
2018-06-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Honest Tea: Seth Goldman (2017) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, in 2003, we had a delivery of glass that was faulty. And there were a lot of blisters in the glass. Literally, you could look at it and see little bubbles. And so we ran it on the production line. And the way the line works is that if it ever sees a defect in the bottle, it's supposed to kick it out and reject the bottle. But the line didn't do that. And so we ended up with some... Product in the marketplace that had broken glass inside the bottle. In fact, two different Whole Foods stores. And Whole Foods has a rule, three strikes in a round.”
2018-06-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Honest Tea: Seth Goldman (2017) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, there's no question that would have led to faster growth, but it would have diluted what we were building. This was about building something that we could always believe in, that we would be meaningfully different. And that, you know, to take people in a different direction, you have to. Disrupt where they're going.”
2018-06-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Honest Tea: Seth Goldman (2017) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Things I told you to do. Everything, you know, so we, yeah, we had these fancy investors from Boston. They said, you know, well, you know, you should be an energy drink because that's really growing or you should be a dot-com. If you made the product a cheaper, you could make better margins on it. I sound like you're interested in the opportunity, except everything that we do. But we also knew to really succeed in the long term, we had to be different than all the other big companies out there. And if we, you know, to create a sweet tea, there are tons of companies already doing that”
2018-06-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Honest Tea: Seth Goldman (2017) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Got a ton of no's. The main reason we got so many no's is this was now with sort of 1999 2000. This was during the whole dot-com boom. And we were very old economy. And so people would much rather throw millions of dollars at something.com than put a few, maybe 10 or 20,000 dollars into a beverage company.”
2018-06-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Honest Tea: Seth Goldman (2017) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They were tasting it for their own palates. They weren't thinking that there's a whole population out there that has a different appetite.”
2018-06-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Honest Tea: Seth Goldman (2017) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They returned our calls, they would just say it's not sweet enough, it's too expensive, it tastes like grass, it's not what we're used to, which of course it wasn't. And where they were not effective was they...”
2018-06-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Honest Tea: Seth Goldman (2017) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because this is unlike a tech company No matter how good our product is, we can't ship it through the mail. Beverages are a high turnover product, and so as soon as a shelf empties of beverages, something takes its place. And so you need a distributor to be there to keep the shelf space protected. And so what happened was we were going to all the distributors of Snapple and Arizona. And they were saying.”
2018-06-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Honest Tea: Seth Goldman (2017) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, there were so many because it was still, well, first of all, cash is always a challenge. We were growing quickly, but we were spending money to do it. We had salespeople. We were doing marketing.”
2018-06-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Honest Tea: Seth Goldman (2017) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The average person would be, wow, you're set, you're in Whole Foods. In my mind, it's only 17 stores. So it was just a start. And so, but we had, I guess, proved the concept. And so then we were able to go back out to investors and say, we've proved the concept. Now it's time to expand. So we got more investment money raised. And then we went to the other buyers and the buyers for the West Coast. And we went to buyers from other stores, moms, my organic market here in the Mid-Atlantic was one of our earliest accounts It was working there, and they started to bring it to their other stores.”
2018-06-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Honest Tea: Seth Goldman (2017) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, two things. First of all, just much less sweet than everything else. But the other thing, and the reason the name on his teammate sense is because what we learned is most of the bottled tea in the U.S. at the time and still today is not brewed with, you know, it's not brewed tea. It's a powder or a concentrate. It bears a relationship to the tea leaf like the fish fillet bears a relationship to the fish, somewhere along the way there was a fish. But ARM tea, we bring in the tea leaves to the plant and we brew them there.”
2018-06-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Honest Tea: Seth Goldman (2017) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so what was then happening was that the consumers were starting to ask for the tea, which was really neat. And it was so different. And so what was nice is we have low switching. Some brands, maybe in the cereal category, if one, you know, if raisin brands on sale, someone will go buy post or whatever, you switch back and forth. But with honest tea, if it's not there, you don't go back and buy Snapple or Arizona because the taste is so different. Yeah. And so when we got somebody, and we were clearly not for everybody, they were very loyal.”
2018-06-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Honest Tea: Seth Goldman (2017) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, what happened was, you know, obviously we went to the shelf, nobody knew what it was. And so all that first summer, this was 1998 now, all we did was give out. Like our marketing effort was me and two interns giving out samples in whole food stores. And we gave out more samples than we sold. But by the end of that summer, we were the best-selling tea in the 17 freshfields Whole Foods stores in the mid-Atlantic.”
2018-06-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Honest Tea: Seth Goldman (2017) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, that was what was so funny. You know, when I talked to Barry, he's very good at making things sound simple. And sometimes they are. Sometimes it's a little more complicated. He's like, well, look, you take a tea bag, you dunk that in water. If you multiply times 15,000, no problem. So theoretically that works. What we found is that when you, you know, especially in the beginning, too many tea leaves, you don't get the full infusion”
2018-06-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Honest Tea: Seth Goldman (2017) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was the other scary part. So we got this commitment from the buyer, and the next thing we did is we basically went up and down the East Coast looking at bottling plants. And we went to beer plants and soda plants, apple juice plants. So we ended up at a plant in Buffalo, New York that was making apple juice. Maybe it was a little down on its luck, had some line time available. They said, how are you going to brew the tea leaves? And so we brought in these mesh bags, these large mesh bags that are actually can be used to clean a pool, like a yeah. And so that was what we used. You just filled it with tubes in it and dunked it in boiling water. And every once in a while the bag would break and then the pipes would, you know, clog. It was not pretty.”
2018-06-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Honest Tea: Seth Goldman (2017) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We got an empty snap. Used empty snapple bottles? Yes, we have to think. But what's really funny is that Barry had sent over some thermoses one day in the mail. And when I met with the buyer and we poured out samples from the thermos, showed him my empty snapple bottle with the honesty label on it. And he had said, well, look, this sounds interesting. We'll give it a try. We'll take 15,000 bottles, which of course was both terrifying and thrilling.”
2018-06-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Honest Tea: Seth Goldman (2017) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He had just turned four. Intense. And probably if that had happened a few weeks earlier, I probably wouldn't have left my job at Calvary because whether it's the health insurance benefits or just the risk level, I couldn't do that. But I'd already taken the plunge. I knew you can bet that when I was at the Whole Foods meeting, I was selling with great intensity. I mean, it needed to succeed. And then while Ellie was in the hospital and I stayed with him that whole week, but I would go down it sort of after midnight. We had someone working on formulas, blends, and he would come in and meet me in the lobby of children's hospital and we'd taste tea together and go back up and sleep by Ellie's bed. And I think, you know, life happens. It's part of that experience. It's part of the journey. And I'm so thankful and to have Ellie still with us and such a delight and such a...”
2018-06-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Honest Tea: Seth Goldman (2017) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it was the ultimate test in compartmentalizing because literally the day before the Whole Foods, our first presentation, when we're going to present the, so it's probably the most important day in the company's history where we're going to go present the tea. And Barry and I are in the kitchen, and we've got mugs and bowls that we were brewing the tea, and it was not an official looking lab. So the kitchen's full of all these things. My wife walks in with our middle son, and she's got this ashen look on her face. And I, oh no, she's so upset. We've made the kitchen such a mess. And I said, we'll clean this up. And she says, that's not what I'm worried about. We just came back from the doctor. And Ellie, our middle son, had a co-artation of aorta. It was going to need major surgery within the month. And so, you know, that's a pretty heavy news to get.”
2018-06-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Honest Tea: Seth Goldman (2017) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that was lucky because the marketing director at Whole Foods, or at that time it was called Fresh Fields Whole Foods, was a mid-Atlantic. He was a graduated management as well. So he helped me get an appointment with the buyer.”
2018-06-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Honest Tea: Seth Goldman (2017) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do like, how did you So it was a little bit of the chicken and eggs. So the first thing we did was I did write a business plan. These days people really put together PowerPoints. They don't write business ones. And I wrote about a 20-page business plan that mostly showed the thinking behind the business. I think every potential investor wants to understand. There's actually some thought here about where this goes and how it becomes something. I managed to secure an appointment with Whole Foods.”
2018-06-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Honest Tea: Seth Goldman (2017) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“More importantly, nothing about that terrified her. Yeah, I think it was, I believe in myself, probably a little bit of hubris, right? Like, I think I can do this, even though I don't know anything about it, right? But I'm ready to try.”
2018-06-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Honest Tea: Seth Goldman (2017) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I bet if you went to Calvert and asked to go on a sabbatical, I bet you they'd let you do that. And I said, well, that's not. I was hoping for the booster confidence. You know, I knew I had to take the plunge. You couldn't get investors to invest or employees or buyers to commit without me being committed.”
2018-06-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Honest Tea: Seth Goldman (2017) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“From your dad Oh, yeah, Barry had been on the board of a company they'd got in public. Because he kept his day job as a professor. As a professor at Yale, he's still a professor at Yale. What was funny was that before I went to submit my resignation at Calvary, I kind of called Barry for one last boost of confidence. I said, I'm going to go in there. We just had our third son, but I'm going to step down. And there's this long pause. He says, well.”
2018-06-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Honest Tea: Seth Goldman (2017) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Having zero knowledge of the beverage industry in the beginning was actually a competitive advantage because we went in without any of the assumptions. One of the things that happened literally the same month that I went for that run in New York City was at an investment my dad had made in 1977 so it was more than 18 years ago at the time came to fruition and I was presented with a check for $50,000. That was kind of the risk capital. And it was enough for me to say, okay, well, look, I'm going to put this. If we lose this, we lose it, but this is what I'll bet.”
2018-06-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Honest Tea: Seth Goldman (2017) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sweetness So I reached out to Barry. I said, I think I'm ready to do something about this. You ran a T expert. No, not a T expert. And more importantly, not a beverage industry expert at all. No knowledge of that. And that was where.”
2018-06-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Honest Tea: Seth Goldman (2017) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So when I felt that thirst, I reached out to my professor from business school. And when I had very nailed off, when I had been his student, we had done a case study of the beverage industry and we had agreed there was a gap. There was that space.”
2018-06-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Honest Tea: Seth Goldman (2017) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it was all 100 calories per eight ounces. And so the difference was fizz or no fizz, color, you know, different names, different bottles. They were almost uniform in their taste profile, their sweetness profile, which was, you know, six or seven teaspoons of sugar per eight ounces or none. Why isn't anyone making a drink with one or two teaspoons of just like?”
2018-06-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Honest Tea: Seth Goldman (2017) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So in 2003, we had a delivery of glass that was faulty, and so we ended up with some product in the marketplace that had broken glass inside the bottle. In fact, there were two different Whole Food stores. And Whole Foods has a rule, three strikes in your round. We knew we couldn't afford it as a business to lose our largest customer. So we voluntarily withdrew all product from the market. Every store, everywhere. Not just Whole Foods, everywhere.”
2018-06-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Honest Tea: Seth Goldman (2017) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT