Thrive Market CEO Nick Green explains how he built a healthy food membership grocer (think: Whole Foods meets Costco) that boasts over $700 million in sales.
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00:00It sounds terrible to say this, but the way I described that first entrepreneurial journey
00:03was failing my way to success. I made every mistake in the book from bad hires, to micromanaging,
00:10to operational mistakes. My first ever job was actually starting my first company. After doing
00:15really well on the SAT, I started teaching SAT classes in high school. And that evolved
00:21into my first business when I was an undergrad at Harvard called Ivy Insiders. So I call myself an
00:27accidental entrepreneur. We got bought three years later by another test prep company.
00:32And then in the back half of that year, I started looking at what my next thing was going to be.
00:36And so I met Gunnar, my first co-founder. He pitched me initially as an angel investor,
00:42and he had this big idea to make healthy living accessible to anybody. By the end of the meeting,
00:48I was basically pitching him on like, let's do something together in this space. And that was
00:52when we stumbled into the Costco model. We had some real challenges from the get-go in fundraising.
00:59I talked to 50 plus VCs, all of whom rejected us. But looking back on it, I think the thing
01:04that really kept us going was that strength of the mission.