Pod Insights Aspire with Emma Grede Building a Billion-Dollar Unicorn with Julia Collins About this episode Julia Collins has spent much of her life chasing big goals,first to prove herself and then to save the planet.
The path took her from restaurant kitchens in New York City to Silicon Valley boardrooms, where she became the first Black woman to co-found a unicorn and raised more than $450 million in venture capital. But it also came with heartbreak, burnout, a co-founder fallout, and years spent trying to fit into a version of success that never quite felt like her own.
Today, Julia is building companies focused on the future of food and the future of the planet. But getting there required unlearning some of the biggest lessons she thought she knew about ambition, achievement, and self-worth.
In this conversation, Julia sits down with Emma to talk about what was really happening behind the headlines — the pressure to fit in, the cost of tying your identity to your success, and the belief she carried for years that the more she suffered, the more successful she would become.
Julia shares:
Why showing up as herself changed everything — and what it cost her to try fitting in first
What she learned raising hundreds of millions of dollars
How she navigated a co-founder fallout and life-changing exit
The financial habits that shaped her relationship with money
The lesson that took her the longest to unlearn about success and sacrifice
What's a belief about success you've been carrying that might be costing you more than it's giving you? Drop it in the comments. And subscribe to Aspire with Emma Grede so you don't miss what's next.
We'd love to hear what you think. Please take this survey to help us make the show better for you: emmagrede.com/survey http://emmagrede.com/survey
Transcript 14,935 words · 7 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:09 Emma Grede? My guest today is one of the most successful food tech founders of the last decade, and her name is Julia Collins. Julia co-founded Zoom, a startup with an audacious idea, a fleet of robots that made and cooked pizza. At its height, Zoom reached a $2 billion valuation and raised hundreds of millions of dollars along the way. Julia is Harvard and Stanford educated, and she was the first black woman to co-found a unicorn. But what I find most interesting about her is that every company she has built has been pointed at the same goal: making the more sustainable choice the obvious one. If you've ever wondered what is actually happening behind a founder's highlight reel, the pitch, the raise, the exit, this conversation is the one for you.
0:52 Emma Grede? Because Julia is sharing exactly what you need to do if you're dreaming of this for yourself. She's honest about all of it, including the parts that are hard to say out loud. We talked about what it really takes to land a pitch and the importance of your early-stage team. We talked about her life-changing Zoom exit, the fallouts and the heartbreak that she faced, and why the smartest thing she ever did was to really protect and set herself up for her next chapter. Lastly, we talked about the lesson that took her the longest to unlearn, the relationship between how much she thought she had to suffer in order to succeed. Make sure you like and subscribe.
1:36 Emma Grede? Julia, thank you and welcome to Aspire.
1:39 Speaker 01 Hi, Emma. I'm so happy to be here.
1:41 Emma Grede? I am so happy to have you, and I'm so happy that I've managed to get you here because there's just so much to talk about with you and your entire career and all the things that you've done.
1:51 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:51 Emma Grede? And I feel like you're one of those people that's kind of, in some ways, for someone who's had this much success, you've really flown under the radar. So I want to make sure today that we get your story, that you've got so much amazing, incredible experience to speak from. And I know that that is exactly what the listeners of this podcast... Want to hear. So there's a lot to get, like, I have so many questions, but we're going to get through them. But I think to set it up, you know, you are somebody that has raised an enormous amount of capital in your career across the businesses. Over four hundred and fifty millions throughout your career, but you've been very, very open about when you first, you know, got to Silicon Valley, you really tried to
2:30 Emma Grede? fit the mold, you tried to blend in, do what you saw. So I guess my first question to you is really around when you understood that actually it was your differences that were going to set you apart. What did that look like? And when did you actually understand that for yourself?
2:44 Speaker 01 Oh, my gosh. So like how I'm showing up to you today in this like pink dress and shoes, that is like my authentic presentation. That is like how I am in the world and how I'm meant to show up in the world. But when I got to Silicon Valley, I was like wrapped in a D V F wrap dress with glam and I was such a fish out of water. Immediately I grabbed the like hooded sweatshirt, you know, you zip it up three quarters, not all the way. And it was like ridiculous. It was so clear that I was a fish out of water. It was like I was doing cosplay for founders. And when I knew it wasn't working, first of all, I didn't feel as confident. My jokes weren't hitting, my pitches weren't landing.
3:26 Emma Grede? Because you tried to change yourself.
3:27 Speaker 01 I was costuming myself. I was really trying to pattern match so hard against a pattern that had nothing to do with me. There's nothing I could ever do. There's no costume I could ever wear that was going to maybe look like the next tech pro founder. That's just not going to happen. And so I think there was a crisis point where I just realized like it wasn't landing. I wasn't resonating. You know how you can tell when you pitch? And everyone's leaning in and they can't get enough and it's an hour meeting and it goes to seventy five. That's how you know you're landing and that wasn't happening for me. And I think from that point of realizing like I'm failing at trying to be somebody else. I just had to revert back to who I was and I slipped those little mules back on and wrapped
4:11 Speaker 01 that D V F dress back up and showed up as myself and it just started to land and the deals just started to get done after that.
4:18 Emma Grede? I mean, I honestly love that for you so much that that actually happened and you decided to go back and just to be yourself. So I really want to understand, I mean, for anybody that's sitting here listening today, and again, we're going to track through your journey a lot. Given all of your experience, what do you want other founders to take away from what you've learned?
4:37 Speaker 01 Oof, I mean, the biggest thing that it took me the longest to learn was that you have to first show up for yourself. The way that we're taught to burn the candle from both ends, it's like almost criminal. And I thought in my mind, Emma, I thought there was a relationship between how much I suffered for it and how successful it be. I had this script playing in my head that, you know, it costs something. It costs something. And I thought, okay, well, if it costs a lot, then maybe I'll get even more successful. And it took me really becoming a mom, you know, having a second baby, now being a single mom, to realize that actually my superpower is not in how much I grind and gruel, it is
5:21 Speaker 01 in how well I can treat myself.
5:23 Emma Grede? Absolutely. I mean, listen, I'm the start with yourself girl. So I really completely agree with you, but there is a cost at some level, right? It's like you've got to give something. So what has been the cost for you?
5:35 Speaker 01 For me, the biggest cost has been just like the lack of flexibility and personal time that I have. Just to be very clear, I have this persona, which is like very delightful and joyful, and that is who I am.
5:47 Emma Grede? Yes, it is who you are.
5:49 Speaker 01 It is who I am.
5:50 Emma Grede? That's who I've met on numerous occasions. You're always delightful and joyful and you're there, you're in the moment, you're so gentle. That is who you are.
5:59 Speaker 01 That is who I am.
6:00 Emma Grede? But?
6:00 Speaker 01 But what is happening behind the scenes is like a four dimensional chess match of logistics and timing. In order to be here today, you know, the flight that I Took the tucking in of the kids, the missing of the bedtime, the FaceTime in the morning, the workout, the this. I've already pitched three times before I even got to the set to Duke Liam to have the pleasure of being with you today, including a pitch in Europe. So what I've given up really is the flexibility and spaciousness and the optionality of free time. I don't actually have a tremendous amount of free time.
6:35 Emma Grede? That's the trade off.
6:36 Speaker 01 That's the trade off. And that's where I am right now. This may change in the future, but that is where I am right now.
6:40 Emma Grede? After all the success that you've had, right? Because you really have had. So let's just talk a little bit about your journey because I've known about you for the longest time, the first black woman to co-found a unicorn.
6:50 Speaker 01 Right.
6:51 Emma Grede? And I think the first time you come up in my news feed, it was, you know, sometime around when you got that unbelievable $2 billion plus valuation for Zoom. You'd raised a lot of money. That was like, I was like, oh, my goodness, there is somebody like doing it. She's out there. So just talk us through for those of people that don't know you because you started your career first. Actually, we should start here. You are Stanford and Harvard educated. You then started your career in the restaurant businesses.
7:20 Speaker 01 Yeah.
7:20 Emma Grede? And then you've had all of these incredible startups that you've co-founded, that you've founded, that you've gone out and raised a lot of money for.
7:27 Speaker 01 Yeah.
7:28 Emma Grede? Give me like, give me the 101 for anyone who doesn't know who you are.
7:31 Speaker 01 I mean, the thing that's always been true about me is I am so passionate about food. Like I love food. I bring
7:39 Emma Grede? Me too.
7:40 Speaker 01 Cookbooks on beach vacations. I'm so crazy about food that I will go to the grocery store just to watch how people shop. I'm so fascinated by it. I knew it was my calling. But I come from a family that's super achievement oriented and it was sort of like, what flavor of Dr. Banker lawyer are you going to be, Julia Elizabeth Collins? And so what I thought that I needed to do was go to the best school. And at that time for me, that meant going to Harvard and studying engineering. And I remember going to my grandpa and saying, okay, but when I graduate, I don't actually want to go into engineering. I want to go into food. And you know, he, he actually cried. A little tiny tear rolled down his beautiful face.
8:17 Emma Grede? For a good reason, right?
8:18 Speaker 01 He said, you might as well go pick cotton. Because in his generation growing up, that is what you could do as a black person. Go work in a restaurant or you could work as a sharecropper. And so he didn't see the association with success and food. So what did I do? I said, okay, let me get another degree. Let me try to hedge this bet a little bit. And off I went and he said, you know, if you can get yourself to Stanford, I'll help you. And so I got myself to Stanford, you know, I was very much achievement oriented. And I was sort of like putting my passion to the side. Cause I thought that I had to have a certain level of prowess and prestige in order to earn the right to do the thing that I really loved.
9:00 Emma Grede? Did you know early on that it was food?
9:02 Speaker 01 Always, always, always, always, always. If I had two nickels to rub together, when I was living four to an apartment in New York City, I was getting a reservation at the top restaurant.
9:12 Emma Grede? It was a passion for you?
9:13 Speaker 01 It was a passion, like an all consuming passion. It was all I did with my free time. It was all I talked about. And that's maybe another clue to entrepreneurs is like that wacky crazy thing, that zany thing that you're obsessed with, that's probably what you're meant to be doing. And not what is the textbook thing to do.
9:31 Emma Grede? Hundred percent. So take me into your first venture into food, the first time you were in a business.
9:36 Speaker 01 Okay. So do you know Danny Meyer?
9:39 Emma Grede? A little, but tell everybody else.
9:40 Speaker 01 Danny Meyer is like the Emma Grede of food. He is like the one to watch, you know, he's like the Michael Jordan of the restaurant industry. Can't miss.
9:49 Emma Grede? Golden ticket man.
9:49 Speaker 01 Golden ticket man, Midas touch guy. I made a list of everyone in the world who I want to work for in the industry. Danny was at the top. Got an intro to Danny, got in his office.
9:59 Emma Grede? How'd you get an intro to Danny out of interest?
10:00 Speaker 01 You know, you ask this person who's working for that person and this person interned and this person knows the uncle.
10:04 Emma Grede? Because you weren't connected, right? You had an incredible education, but you didn't have, like you weren't a connected person.
10:10 Speaker 01 No connections in food, because what you're supposed to do as a Collins is supposed to be some flavor. Right, right, right, right. So restaurants, you're gonna have to figure that out on your own. And I did. Somebody who is, was very kind, got me onto his calendar for 15 minutes. And I was in there and I was sitting with him and I was like, Danny, I'd like to work for you. And he's like, that's great. We don't hire MBAs. And I was like, oh, af.
10:33 Speaker 01 No problem. Give me a half an hour. Show me your income statements for three of your restaurants. I'll do a quick analysis and I'm going to tell you a project that's going to be worth you having me here for. And I pitched him and it was Shake Shack and that was it. And Danny really gave me my first shot in the industry. And had not been for that, I don't know that I'd be where I am now.
10:51 Emma Grede? But really important little nugget for people because right then you proved your value.
10:55 Speaker 01 Yeah.
10:55 Emma Grede? He's not somebody that's interested in, you know, traditional education backgrounds. And MBA was not impressive to him, but you proved your value by saying, actually, I'm going to be able to look at your businesses and provide something back to you that maybe you're not seeing internally right now. So as opposed to you saying, I, you know, I just want to work with you. I'd like you to mentor me, me, me, me, me, me. You were like, here's how I can provide value to you and I'm going to prove it if you give me a shot.
11:22 Speaker 01 And that is where I think a lot of young people, when they're looking for mentorship, get it twisted. You need to come in, you need to do your research and you need to understand what is the one thing that I can deliver to this person that is going to make it sticky for them to want to invest in me. Cause it isn't that people aren't kind hearted or don't want to help you.
11:40 Emma Grede? No, absolutely not.
11:40 Speaker 01 People are busy.
11:41 Emma Grede? Yes.
11:41 Speaker 01 So you need to be able to show how you can demonstrate that value quickly.
11:45 Emma Grede? That right there.
11:46 Speaker 01 Yeah.
11:46 Emma Grede? So you did.
11:47 Speaker 01 Yeah.
11:47 Emma Grede? And then you're in business with Danny.
11:49 Speaker 01 Well, I was working for Danny as like a lowly intern at Shake Shack, but it was a foot in the door.
11:54 Emma Grede? Absolutely.
11:55 Speaker 01 And then from there.
11:55 Emma Grede? And also Shake Shack back then was the hot shiny thing in the food space, right? That's where everybody was investing. I know my investors put a lot of money into Shake Shack and everybody got great returns off of that. But it was a business that was, it was kicking. Like everybody was interested.
12:09 Speaker 01 And it was early. This was when there was still just one shack.
12:12 Emma Grede? Right.
12:13 Speaker 01 With the plans for the second. So I had an opportunity to really see how it gets built from the ground up. And then from there, I mean, you know, you just like never underestimate the importance of being delightful to work with. Saying yes a lot. I think we get to a point later in our career, we have to learn the art of no.
12:32 Emma Grede? Absolutely, but it's not early. It's not in your twenties.
12:35 Speaker 01 I think sometimes people are playing that say no script a little too early on.
12:40 Emma Grede? And even with the MBA and the background of education that you had, you still had to start at the bottom. You still had to intern for Shake Shack and say yes a lot.
12:49 Speaker 01 Even more so, because the people who are working with you don't want to hear about your Stanford MBA. How is that going to help them when the restaurant's busy and you've got a line out the door? So I actually sort of like muted that part of my academic success a little bit and just showed up as like the delightful, hardworking person who is going to always get it done.
13:08 Emma Grede? That's amazing. I mean, it's just so amazing. I love that you actually say that. So you went from intern to full time with him?
13:14 Speaker 01 Right.
13:14 Emma Grede? And how do you actually start and becoming a founder?
13:17 Speaker 01 So I think the first thing that you need to do is like work for an early stage team. I think that's a really good first step. So I met these two amazing hipster guys, Thomas and Dave. They'd bought a food truck, painted it bright orange. It was called Mexique. The food was delicious. There were lines out the door. But they didn't have an operating plan. They didn't have a go to market strategy. They didn't have a supply. So they didn't have a lot of the structures that I have learned working for Danny. And then I had kind of refined and toned being at business school. And so I was able to come in and be the first employee on an early stage team. Do that for about a year and a half, and that was what gave me the confidence to say, okay, this time around, I can actually.
13:55 Emma Grede? Because you actually helped somebody else operationalize their ideas before you decided to go out on your own.
14:00 Speaker 01 That's right. And then there's also a money piece of the equation, and I don't think we talk about this enough. So I am not somebody who has like a work back plan for my whole life. But what I have done, because I know I like optionality, I like opportunity, I like to be able to switch it up. If you're going to be able to play in that kind of risk space, the way that you balance it is having a really strong personal wealth strategy. So for me, when I was in high school, I needed, I knew I wanted to save ten thousand dollars before I got to college. And I babysat and I, and I saved my ten thousand dollars. Then when I was in college, I knew that I wanted to save a hundred thousand dollars between college and then eventually going to graduate school. And one way or another, I saved that hundred thousand dollars.
14:45 Emma Grede? How did you do that?
14:46 Speaker 01 I worked a full-time job in New York City. I had an illegal bartending job in Harlem and I taught the SATs on the weekends.
14:52 Emma Grede? And that hundred thousand was because you knew that you needed that as like a safety and a buffer?
14:58 Speaker 01 As a hedge, yes.
14:59 Emma Grede? Interesting.
14:59 Speaker 01 Because then when I went to Tom and Dave to say, hey, listen, this is big. I'm gonna help you build it. I didn't also have huge salary requirements at that time.
15:06 Emma Grede? So you were able to essentially work for them for the pleasure of the learning as opposed to having to get paid like a meaningful salary?
15:14 Speaker 01 Yeah, there was a salary. And you're right, it wasn't meaningful. But I had shored up my own personal cash to the point to be able to do that. And that is how I've thought about my wealth building journey is in these increments. In order to do this incredible, wonderful thing that I wanna do, what can I do to make sure that I have the financial stability in my own life to make that possible?
15:35 Emma Grede? That is a wonderful way to look at it because I think that certainly for me, I had no choice, you know, it's like I left school with zero qual- it's almost like I have the opposite story to you. I left school with zero qualifications, but the same kind of thinking and the principle applied. If I was gonna go and do all of these internships and I knew that I needed to do that to get the foot in the door to go to where I wanted to be, there had to be some responsibility taken for my own, and it's, I wasn't nearly as sophisticated to think about it like a personal wealth plan, but I was like, I have to shore myself up because I need to be able to afford to do all of this work for other people for free. And so it was really about creating the conditions to say, okay, I'm gonna split my week. I'm gonna do four days of paid work over here and three days over there where I'm
16:20 Emma Grede? not paid, but I'm getting the experience. But that actually set the conditions for me throughout my twenties to say, okay, how much do I need to get me from here to here if I'm going to take that opportunity over there? And so I think it's a really good way, specifically for women, to take the ultimate responsibility for your financial situation really early and to plan and look out based on the things that you need to do to get to where you wanna go.
16:45 Speaker 01 Right, and to find yourself some friends who will talk about money with you. My family gave me a lot, almost everything you could imagine, but for some reason, we really didn't talk about money at all.
16:54 Emma Grede? I think a lot of people don't.
16:55 Speaker 01 I think it was considered a little déclassé to talk about money. And so I needed to find the wise people in my life, the uncles, the aunts, the cousins, the friends, who would tell like, what is the salary? How do the taxes work? What are you paying in rent? Where are you investing? You know, where are you banking?
17:11 Emma Grede? But you have to have that level of curiosity for yourself to go and find the people, right? So it's like being interested and not hiding from it. Because I think when you grow up in a situation where that isn't what your family are talking about, you can hide from it.
17:26 Speaker 01 Right.
17:26 Emma Grede? So I think what you have to do is put yourself in the situation and give yourself the exposure so that you are learning. Because those things don't just come to you. Nobody comes and says, here's how, you know, taxes work. Here's how you're going to plan for the next five years. That curiosity is what leads you to having the conversations and then the relationships and then the exposure. And that matters.
17:47 Speaker 01 It matters. So I think there was also maybe something that's in common for you and I. It was, is there was never this expectation that someone was just going to come and save the day.
17:55 Emma Grede? Right.
17:55 Speaker 01 There wasn't this expectation that we were just.
17:57 Emma Grede? You knew you had to do it for yourself.
17:59 Speaker 01 Right, right. And I never thought there's going to be like a job that's going to pay me or a husband that's going to come and fund me. I always fundamentally believed in my like, my own engine.
18:09 Emma Grede? And what did you learn at MexiCube? Like what were the, when you look back on that experience now, how foundational was that to the success that you've had later down the line?
18:18 Speaker 01 Ultimately, what I learned at MexiCube is like it all comes down to the people. I don't care if you're selling tacos or you're selling hamburgers or you're selling anything in the market, technology, software, clothing. It always is about the people at the end of the day. And I learned how to be a really good manager from the folks who were washing the dishes to the folks who were driving the truck, to the folks who were investing us and like really developed my personal brand around people skills. Because that took a little figuring out too. When you're like a femme presenting, kind of like high-voiced curvy girl, people don't always listen, right? And so then you can overreact and then you're trying to like come on so strong.
19:00 Speaker 01 And then that's a no too. So it took me a while of sort of like swinging that pendulum. Between being ultra passive and ultra aggressive, for me to find that middle place where people wanted to give me their best work and wanted to come every day and work really hard for me.
19:15 Emma Grede? And armed with that information, that the people are the most important, what did you do next?
19:20 Speaker 01 I mean, I always think very carefully now about like how I structure that early stage team. Even before I think about raising capital, I think about like, who am I gonna build this with? And I look for people who are complimentary and I'm very honest with myself about what I'm good at versus what I'm not.
19:37 Emma Grede? Well, I think that that is a really good tip. It's far, far better to find the expert and bring them in so that you can do what you're uniquely good at.
19:45 Speaker 01 I think one of the things I didn't understand in my early, early career, I thought I just had to know everything. I thought the only way people would come and work for me is if I was good at everything.
19:55 Emma Grede? I think that a lot of people feel like that.
19:57 Speaker 01 Yeah.
19:57 Emma Grede? They really do. And actually, what I learned the older I got was that that's almost the complete opposite. People love experts. They love people that really know what they know, but even more so, they know what they don't know. And you surround yourself with like the most incredible experts for all of your blind spots.
20:15 Speaker 01 Right, and they're so bought in.
20:16 Emma Grede? Yeah.
20:17 Speaker 01 Right? They wanna come and work because they know that you're, they're not just like valued, they're actually needed. So for me, it was like those early awkward years of trying to figure out my style, of trying to figure out my personal brand, my voice. And like really being comfortable that in this like joyful femme presenting Julia, that I was still gonna make a lot of money and be successful. I think that was a big myth that was taught to me was that. I remember going to a business school class, Emma, and they showed us these statistics. And it was like, most CEOs are six foot two or taller. So like, these ridiculous things, you know.
20:55 Speaker 01 So your brain gets filled with all these ideas about who a CEO is and what a powerful person needs to be. And when you're just archetypically, physically not that, it can create.
21:07 Emma Grede? I see, I never believed it. Like, I remember see, you know, my mum used to work for Morgan Stanley. And so I literally could see. Like, you know, who are all these guys that are so senior and they, you know, they eat in a different spot and they have a very different life. And so I could see the archetype and I was like, I'm gonna be one of them, but just not look like it.
21:26 Speaker 01 Hmm.
21:27 Emma Grede? I never believed it for one second that I couldn't be it because I didn't see myself there.
21:32 Speaker 01 I love that. Okay, I'm gonna be really honest.
21:35 Emma Grede? Please do.
21:35 Speaker 01 I think there's a part of me that did believe it, but it made me so pissed off. That I had like the most massive like middle finger up about it.
21:44 Emma Grede? Damn right.
21:44 Speaker 01 That was like, that may be real and also like F that and also like, we're not gonna do that. So it gave me, I think, a beautiful, healthy chip on my shoulder, which I still have today.
21:54 Emma Grede? I love a beautiful, healthy chip on the shoulder. I think that that is a really useful little thing to have. I want you to fast forward me because for people that don't know the Zoom story, what exactly were you trying to build? And why did it scale so quickly?
22:09 Speaker 01 Oh my goodness. So let's go back to twenty fifteen. You know, this is the time when the earliest stages of Uber Eats was happening. They were still like parking passenger cars in parking lots in different places and like trying to figure out. This is the earliest days of DoorDash. This is the earliest days of Postmates and all the other ones that have merged are no longer in existence.
22:31 Emma Grede? The the timing is really key here.
22:33 Speaker 01 So here I was in New York City. I was running my restaurants. We won best new restaurant in America for this season. We were jamming. But it didn't hit for me like the way that I thought and I was like, oh, this is a problem. If this isn't hitting for you, there's a bigger, there's a bigger thing that you're being called toward. And here I was in New York City, but I'm a California girl. So Silicon Valley is actually my hometown.
22:53 Emma Grede? Round the corner.
22:54 Speaker 01 And that chip on the shoulder came out. It's like, why am I thugging it out here in restaurants in New York City? And these people are getting tens and hundreds of millions of dollars to build companies. I need to get out there and be a part of that. So that's what drew me out. It was knowing that we were in the middle of a revolution in the industry that I cared the most about, food. And, you know, remember I like studied biomedical engineering at Harvard, so I'm like a nerdy tech kind of a person. And I thought, oh, my gosh, food plus tech plus moving back home plus opportunity. Like, I I really have to be there. When we started Zoom, we started with like a very simple premise, which is how can we feed the world without ruining the planet? What kind of technology would you need to deploy to make food safer and healthier?
23:37 Speaker 01 And to make the conditions of the people who are making the food better? So that's where the robots came in.
23:42 Emma Grede? Wow.
23:43 Speaker 01 That's where the compostable packaging came in. That's where we were experimenting with drone delivery and stair climbing robots. This was back in twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen.
23:52 Emma Grede? That's so important because now sustainability just rolls off the tongue like it's part of every business that starts. But actually, when you go back then, that wasn't really what was happening.
24:02 Speaker 01 That wasn't the conversation.
24:04 Emma Grede? At all.
24:04 Speaker 01 Yeah. And at that time, there was also still such an appetite for innovation and experimentation in this space. And so here's how I de-risked it for myself, right? Because I've got this stable life, I've got this beautiful tribe of friends in New York City, finally got a great apartment, cute boyfriend, so why would I leave all of that? I went out with my co-founder and we said to each other, if we can raise five million dollars in one week, we should start this business. A day and a half later, we had raised ten million dollars.
24:34 Emma Grede? You are kidding me. Off a, off a presentation alone? There was no proof of concept? There was no restaurant opened? It was like, here's our idea.
24:42 Speaker 01 And it was a fifteen slide pitch deck. And we finagled the experience of it by renting out a restaurant with a pizza kitchen and doing the like, imagine if, imagine if storytelling, vision, and a lot of charisma.
24:56 Emma Grede? And in fairness, a baseline of experience from you having been in the restaurant business and understanding how, how things start, how you operationalize an idea, how you grow an idea. So you had that, but you were an unproven founder who had gone out and raised ten million bucks.
25:12 Speaker 01 Unproven founder, good pedigree with the Danny Meyer connection.
25:15 Emma Grede? Oh, yeah.
25:16 Speaker 01 You know, and I think what I learned, especially at that time, was like how to tell the story, how to really anchor in the end state and not to be afraid to bring the emotional part of the pitch. A lot of times when I see founders pitching, they're starting from the present state. And they're giving you all of their credentials and they're giving you all the reasons why they're right. But they're not showing you how the world's going to be different. And they're forgetting that people invest in people. And maybe the person on the other side of the table heard 10 other pitches that day. But you want to be the one that when they go to sleep that night, they're like, I just can't stop thinking about that person.
25:54 Emma Grede? Totally.
25:58 Emma Grede? Housing is one of the biggest payments most people make every month. Whether you rent or own, for a long time, it was just treated as a payment you made, not something that could become part of a rewards membership. That is what makes Bilt interesting. When you become a Bilt member, you can earn points on every housing payment, whether that's rent or mortgage. Then you can redeem those points towards things like flights, hotels, Lyft rides, Amazon.com purchases, future housing payments, and more. I also think the neighborhood concierge in the Bilt app is worth paying attention to. It's connected to your home and more than 50,000 merchant partners. So you can ask it to do things like make a dinner reservation, book a fitness class, schedule a Lyft, or pay your rent.
26:42 Emma Grede? It is not just giving you information. It can actually take action in the app and apply your member benefits along the way. For anyone thinking about what AI looks like when it's actually useful in daily life, this is a good example. It's tied to where you live, what you do around your neighborhood, and the things that you're already paying for. Download the Bilt app and join the membership for where you live at joinbilt.com/emma. That's J-O-I-N-B-I-L-T.com/emma. Use our link so they know that we sent you.
27:15 Speaker 02 Do you ever wish you could ask nosey questions about people's money?
27:18 Speaker 03 I have $729.71 in my bank account.
27:22 Speaker 04 We bought a $1.3 million house on a $350,000 income.
27:27 Speaker 02 On the podcast What We Spend, we ask those questions. It's a show about money and all the feelings that come with spending it.
27:33 Speaker 05 I want to be the kind of person who can just take care of the people in my life.
27:38 Speaker 02 Listen to What We Spend, an Odyssey original, available now wherever you get your podcasts.
27:49 Emma Grede? I often get asked how I thought I could go from running a marketing agency to starting a company. And I knew that I had an ability to tell stories, to convince. Because when you spend 10 years trying to convince companies to give you their dollars to spend on marketing, you have to convince them that you have a better way of telling their story, that you have something magical. And actually, when you pitch, that's what everybody's looking for. They're looking for that idea that they cannot not do.
28:20 Speaker 01 Yeah. But Emma, do you think also maybe you have the gift of the gab?
28:24 Emma Grede? Oh, I definitely have the gift of the gab. I can sell anything.
28:26 Speaker 01 Right.
28:27 Emma Grede? I can sell things that don't work and have done that too.
28:30 Speaker 01 And we love that. I don't actually have that. That's not innate in me.
28:36 Emma Grede? Interesting.
28:37 Speaker 01 So for anybody who says, gosh, I just don't, things don't just roll off my tongue. I'm the person that if somebody disses me, I think of the comeback the next day. And I'm like, oh man, what I should have said. And even for me, who doesn't have that natural gift, it worked out. Because I think there's some things that you can practice. It's really hard to learn work ethic. It's really hard to learn charisma at a certain level. But you can learn how to paint your picture. You can learn how to tell your story. And I think surrounding yourself with really audacious people who are not afraid to be like, oh yeah, what I'm doing is I'm going to change the world, gives you a little bit more permission.
29:14 Emma Grede? Absolutely. And so you went from obviously raising $10 million to raising quite a lot more than that.
29:21 Speaker 01 Right.
29:22 Emma Grede? What happened in the middle there? Because I think what people, you know, we always imagine that there's like some sort of glory story. When my experience tells me there's an enormous amount that kind of goes unsaid between that, you know, early stage kind of startup level funding to where you actually ended up.
29:40 Speaker 01 Yeah. I mean, my story with Zoom is as much glory as it is heartbreak. What happened in between that first $10 million check and the $500 million check? I mean, first in my life, I became a mom, which was not on my roadmap. I did not have children when I started Zoom. I didn't have a plan for children. And then here I am, thirty nine years old and pregnant for the first time. That was a big change. I had a fallout with my co-founder.
30:04 Emma Grede? Yeah.
30:05 Speaker 01 You know, these two people with huge ambitions and a huge connection in the beginning, who over the course of time just lost our way, falling out of love with our board, going from having a board full of people who I deeply admired to really feeling disappointed.
30:21 Emma Grede? Did you leave of your own accord or were you pushed?
30:23 Speaker 01 I left of my own accord.
30:25 Emma Grede? Good for you.
30:26 Speaker 01 With a tremendous amount of heaviness.
30:29 Emma Grede? Did you have a tremendous amount of money to go along with that heaviness?
30:33 Speaker 01 Yes.
30:33 Emma Grede? Oh, good. Makes it a little bit easier now.
30:37 Speaker 01 Quite a bit, quite a bit easier. But I had to find the courage for that, Emma. Let me tell you something. In no part of my story did I say I came to Silicon Valley because I thought it was going to make me incredibly wealthy. I truly believed and continue to believe that my life's work is to really help heal the planet. So that is what I was thinking about. I didn't even know what a unicorn was.
30:56 Emma Grede? We weren't talking about unicorns that much twelve years ago.
30:59 Speaker 01 No, nor did I think this little company that we were building was going to get to a two billion dollar valuation in the first three or four years. So there's a certain amount of like just vertigo that you experience, I think, when you're scaling that fast. Maybe you felt that.
31:15 Emma Grede? Absolutely. And I think that what happens is, you know, relationships change because everything changes.
31:22 Speaker 01 Right.
31:22 Emma Grede? And, you know, when you raise that type of capital, the pressure on you as a founder, the, the way that the dynamics within your company shift, both between you and your partners, but also between you and the board, those are real things. I haven't seen it work any other way. And we don't really talk about that enough. And of course, you don't go through that, you know, ten times and then get better. You know, it's like you're experiencing all of those dynamics for the first time. And it's really complex stuff to, to walk through.
31:52 Speaker 01 It is. So even though I was able to negotiate and create this great exit, a life-changing exit for myself, something that really set me up in my life, once that was all done, here I am with this tiny baby. And I honestly, Emma, didn't know what was gonna come next.
32:09 Emma Grede? Wow. I mean, the great thing for you is that so much great stuff has come next. But as you raised that unbelievable amount, because my understanding is that you left pretty soon after
32:19 Speaker 01 Right.
32:19 Emma Grede? the the huge raise, the four hundred and fifty million dollar raise. What was going on in that moment, to the to the extent that you can speak about it? And more importantly, what are your learnings and your takeouts? Because as you walk into the next businesses that you do, there would have been like a set of learnings for you or a set of takeaways that come out of that.
32:38 Speaker 01 Yeah, I mean, Zoom had all of the markings of a unicorn company. We had brilliant leadership. We had a fantastic team. Our market timing was great. You talked about timing. If you believe in bad timing, you also have to believe in good timing.
32:53 Emma Grede? Yes.
32:53 Speaker 01 Right? The market was right for it. There was capital flowing to it. And so that was the energy, the zeitgeist of the moment. But you know, I'm the girl who like started doing food trucks and restaurants in New York City. So there was another part of me that was really focused on like capital efficiency, low burn, product market fit. And those things were a little bit at odds. And I actually wasn't convinced that we needed that much investment that quickly, that early. But you could imagine at that time how crazy I sounded.
33:25 Emma Grede? Yeah.
33:26 Speaker 01 How crazy do you sound saying like, maybe that's a little too much money?
33:31 Emma Grede? Was there was there a lot of ego involved?
33:33 Speaker 01 Of course. I mean, we wound up even on that show Silicon Valley.
33:38 Emma Grede? Totally, totally.
33:39 Speaker 01 They had our pizza box. So you start to, your ego is really at odds, I think, with your sort of like soul in some ways.
33:47 Emma Grede? And were you at odds about the, not just the level of finance that you were raising, but also about the direction that the business was going into?
33:54 Speaker 01 Yes, because those two things are inextricably linked. You know, that when you raise venture money, it is not a grant. And it's an obligation to return it at ten X in about five years. So you better believe that you can turn four hundred fifty million dollars into a couple of billion dollars and quickly.
34:15 Emma Grede? Yes.
34:15 Speaker 01 And boy, is that a hard thing to do. So both the scale of the investment. The timing of the investment and really having to figure out how to have a rational strategy for turning four hundred fifty billion dollars into several billion quickly. That caused so much tension.
34:31 Emma Grede? Of course.
34:32 Speaker 01 And it just made it really clear the conditions to be successful here don't exist.
34:36 Emma Grede? I've got so many questions for you. How were you able to exit and take some money off the table? Because of course you had been part of creating all of this incredible value and you don't want to just walk away from that because you're at odds with your co-founder.
34:49 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think you just have to get clarity on what your rights are, which is the first thing. I'm so fortunate that before any of this happened, I had a fantastic wealth manager who took me on before I even had wealth, which was great. And the first she told me to do two things. One, she's like, go freeze your eggs. And I was like, not gonna do that because I'm probably not having kids. The second thing is she's like, look at all of your agreements and make sure that you have the right acceleration provisions and like, look at all of your operating agreements. So I knew even before that point what my rights were within the company.
35:23 Emma Grede? Right.
35:24 Speaker 01 In the beginning, it's just like all love and joy and you're like, let's do this together and oh yeah, sign an operating agreement. I hadn't looked at that thing, Emma.
35:31 Emma Grede? Wow.
35:31 Speaker 01 I hadn't looked at it. So I was not even aware until that. So thank goodness I got that really good advice early enough. So I knew exactly what my rights were and what the triggers were and what the provisions were and what the board could and couldn't do as it related to me. So first was arming myself with the information. And then the second was becoming like stoic and steely when it came time to fight.
35:54 Emma Grede? Because you had to fight.
35:55 Speaker 01 Yes.
35:56 Emma Grede? Yeah. And it's hard to fight when your heart's breaking.
35:58 Speaker 01 Yes.
35:58 Emma Grede? That's what everybody doesn't understand. Like, it's very, very, very difficult because you believe and I, you know, if you're anything like me, like you are the business, you know? And, and, and there's a, there's an element of you that's left in there at some point.
36:13 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah. I mean, we were at three hundred and fifty employees. I hired most of them. Like, I was in the hiring process. So there was also the saying goodbye and letting go of an incredible team. And it was just hard. It was hard also to see that the business didn't do well after I left. I'm not saying that those two things are directly related, but it would be silly not to think there wasn't some relationship.
36:33 Emma Grede? Absolutely.
36:33 Speaker 01 So I really had to fight and I really had to make my peace.
36:37 Emma Grede? But there's also that part of the strategy that you had was, you know, when you went out and raised all of that money, you weren't in total agreement with the strategy. So you must have had an inkling that it wasn't going in the direction and you would be better off moving to other things.
36:54 Speaker 01 Right. And remember also, I'm just coming out of my first experience being pregnant and having a child.
36:59 Emma Grede? Yeah, which is life changing on its own, without, without that pressure.
37:04 Speaker 01 Especially that first time. And for anybody who is going through that, who wasn't even planning to have children, it adds an extra level of disorientation.
37:12 Emma Grede? Oh, yes.
37:12 Speaker 01 Because I hadn't thought, oh, in the future, you will be a mom. And now that's happening. There was so much change happening within me in my life, at the same time that there was so much change happening at the company. And the thing, if you ask, like, how did you get through it? I started to really invest in my own spiritual practice, which is something that I had completely ignored.
37:35 Emma Grede? Neglected.
37:36 Speaker 01 And neglected for many, many years. And that is what got me through. That's what gave me the Stoicism and that, frankly, the anger that I needed to access to show up in the big way and fight like I needed to fight.
37:50 Emma Grede? Was that part hard for you to access the anger? You don't strike me as somebody that gets very angry.
37:56 Speaker 01 Oh, I've worked on myself.
37:59 Emma Grede? Haven't we all, babe?
38:01 Speaker 01 Colons is, we're a little, we can be a little hot under the collar, you know, you're getting the mellowed out version of Julia. Because like the same place where the joy and the exuberance lives, there's a lot of passion and energy there.
38:13 Emma Grede? Absolutely.
38:14 Speaker 01 So what I hadn't been able to do was access my anger in a productive way.
38:18 Emma Grede? Fair. But it's important that you keep that intact, because there are moments when you need to fight for yourself.
38:24 Speaker 01 Yes.
38:24 Emma Grede? When you need to fight for what is quite rightly yours. And I'm really happy to know that you got out of that situation with a good deal, a productive deal, that you'd surrounded yourselves with the right people.
38:34 Speaker 01 Right.
38:35 Emma Grede? What you go on to next is so amazing and exciting. And it kind of feels, the little bit that I know about you, like so much more in line with all of the things that you stand for. So talk to me a little bit, so you have. Have one child, you're on the other side. You have a breakdown in the relationship with your co-founder, so you're not talking. What's the time between you leaving Zoom and then starting on your next venture?
39:00 Speaker 01 So as soon as I left Zoom and even the months before, I started a journaling practice, which I had never had. I never liked having a journal because I felt like it was where you write down all your sad thoughts and it just makes you sad. So I didn't do it, but I began to read about Octavia Butler and all these incredible women and thinkers. Steve Jobs, who had these like journaling practices. And in those journals, you can see like the earliest vision for Moonshot, which was my snack company, which was really based on the experience of having this tiny baby, being someone who was so passionate about saving the planet and realizing that I needed to do something in this lifetime to make that happen. I had this vision for changing the way food worked, which was a through line.
39:43 Speaker 01 And I thought, what if we could actually start with snacks? You know, ninety five percent of Americans snack every day. Snacks are the bulk of our calories. If we could change snacks, maybe we could change the world. And you'll see in those journals, like these early little glimmers of what Moonshot wanted to be.
40:01 Emma Grede? Was there any part of you that thought, I can't start another company?
40:04 Speaker 01 Oh, so every day I had to battle those demons. One of the biggest ones was, will anyone want to invest in me after Zoom? And I'm so blessed that I have four investors.
40:16 Emma Grede? Yeah, I was gonna say the answer was yes.
40:17 Speaker 01 Yeah.
40:18 Emma Grede? But interesting that you didn't know that, that you even questioned that.
40:21 Speaker 01 I questioned it. I questioned it. I didn't know that.
40:25 Emma Grede? What did you do differently immediately?
40:27 Speaker 01 Well, one thing I did immediately differently was I got women on my cap table. And I got black people on my cap table. And I got queer people on my cap table. And I got people of color on my cap table.
40:37 Emma Grede? Because of the previous experience.
40:38 Speaker 01 Because I knew that they could see me in a way that my prior investors just could not or would not see me.
40:44 Emma Grede? Talk to me a little bit about that because we hear constantly how women are treated, how black women specifically are treated in those rooms, in those conversations. When you have to go out and, you know, if if you are one of the very, very few people that raise venture capital.
41:04 Speaker 01 Yeah.
41:04 Emma Grede? What was your own experience like?
41:07 Speaker 01 I used to ignore the percentages because they would psych me out. And if you're going to do something and someone says, oh, by the way, only point two percent of people like you are successful in doing that, would you even try? So I I just completely ignored the statistics.
41:21 Emma Grede? You have to.
41:22 Speaker 01 I did. And I'm I don't want to say, Emma, that like having a woman on your cap table solves for everything. But certainly not having any women or people on your cap table can create a dynamic that's just not going to allow you to show up as your best.
41:35 Emma Grede? Yeah.
41:36 Speaker 01 So that was like the most immediate change.
41:38 Emma Grede? In my experience, because I do have women and I do have, more importantly, black women and women of color around me at every level. What it does is shifts the conversation. When through perhaps no fault of their own, but just in experience terms, conversations start happening. What happens is somebody else raises their hand with a difference of opinion. And that makes thoughtful people stop and say, oh, I hadn't considered that. I didn't see it from that point of view. Perhaps there's something else we are missing here. And so I've seen the conversation shift because there's somebody else with a different perspective in the room.
42:15 Speaker 01 That resonates quite a lot for me. I think what it did for me was I stopped performing. I stopped.
42:22 Emma Grede? It changed your behavior.
42:23 Speaker 01 Changed my behavior, you know.
42:25 Emma Grede? You weren't doing a you weren't doing a dance of what you thought what the expectations were.
42:29 Speaker 01 My gosh, the way I used to feel for my old board meetings, it was like a combination of like going to the Met Gala and like going into battle. You know, I'm like.
42:38 Emma Grede? I know that feeling. I wrote about that in my book, you know, like the knots that I used to tie myself in pre-board meetings. I was like an absolute mess. And my husband named it, you know, he named it employee mentality. He's like, what is wrong with you? Like you are the CEO of this company. The expectation of the board is that you are going to paint the vision, tell them what's happening and bring them along on the ride. They are not your bosses. And yet somehow I had, I was like, I have. Twenty bosses here.
43:08 Speaker 01 Right, and twenty's a lot.
43:10 Emma Grede? And that's a lot of pressure.
43:11 Speaker 01 And what would happen is I wouldn't go, I would go with what appeared to be problems that I'd already solved.
43:16 Emma Grede? Yeah.
43:17 Speaker 01 Cause I know, I'm like, you're supposed to ask for help, so make sure you ask for help, but don't ask for too much help.
43:22 Emma Grede? Cause they'll think you're incapable.
43:23 Speaker 01 Cause you don't wanna look like you don't have your shit together. And that just didn't allow me to be my best self. So I think there was something in the way that I structured my new board. You know, I said no to a couple of term sheets that were higher valuations. Cause I just didn't feel like I was gonna be able to get in the room with those guys and like really have them work for me. Your board is supposed to be working.
43:41 Emma Grede? Your board is supposed to work for you and that is, yeah, a great board come with more than just money. They come with experience and they come with a set of opportunities and the ability to create more from what it is that you're doing. They're not just there to provide the cash and you certainly aren't supposed to be in some kind of performance to them.
44:00 Speaker 01 No, but I didn't know you could ask for that. It actually took one of my like best white male founder friends saying to me, well Julie, when I go to my board meetings, he's like, it feels like going to the spa. I was like, the spa, whoa, whoa, whoa, what am I doing wrong here and what is going on? I think one thing that was important to me in that period between having left one thing and starting another, was just who I surrounded myself with.
44:27 Emma Grede? Yes.
44:28 Speaker 01 And really developing like deep connections with other founders, ones who are a couple of steps ahead of me in the journey, ones who are right there with me, ones who were behind. And that has become like my deepest, deepest source of support, information frankly, and sometimes courage.
44:44 Emma Grede? It's almost like you get what you give, right? You have to be somebody that is willing to be vulnerable, that is willing to share information, that is willing to be honest about what's happening in your business. And it takes the walls down. People then behave with you like that. And I think when you're in this constant idea that you're in some kind of performance, you don't let people understand what it is that you're going through. You don't get the truth from them. And so you, you end up with a lack of those conversations and a lack of honesty all around you, which hampers you as a founder enormously.
45:15 Speaker 01 And it's never perfect. It's still not perfect.
45:17 Emma Grede? No.
45:17 Speaker 01 I have a board member now where every time I have to get on the phone with him, I have to go like do ten pushups before I get on the call and like eat a chocolate chip cookie afterward. He drains so much energy.
45:27 Emma Grede? But you don't have five of those board members, so it's progress.
45:29 Speaker 01 Exactly.
45:30 Emma Grede? Okay, so back to Moonshot because Moonshot really then led to Planet Forward, right? So just, will you, will you paint that for me so that we can understand the link between the two? Because when I read about you, what was so amazing, it's almost like you became your own first client, which is so crazy to think about, but almost like the, the best case study imaginable. Because it's like if you would put your own business through it, then I would believe that I can perhaps come on board too. But I want you to explain exactly how those two companies like, you know, worked with each other in the beginning.
46:01 Speaker 01 Sometimes the best things you ever build are the things that you don't even want to have to build. And that's what happened with Moonshot to Planet Forward. So people, when they think about climate change, rarely think about food. They should. It's about a third of the global greenhouse gas emissions that come from food. So Moonshot was this idea that we could flip that, that we can make food that would actually sequester carbon, restore watersheds, protect the planet. Okay, great idea.
46:27 Emma Grede? Great idea.
46:28 Speaker 01 But at some point, you've got to measure that. You know, at Skims, you measure your footprint.
46:32 Emma Grede? Yeah.
46:32 Speaker 01 You're setting goals around your emissions reduction, right? You have to measure, but the tools for little businesses like Moonshot, they just didn't exist. And I didn't want to have to build a technology platform to help brands measure and improve their environmental impact.
46:46 Emma Grede? But you needed it.
46:46 Speaker 01 But I needed it and I couldn't go pay consultants to do it. And there wasn't a good software to do it. And so out of necessity, we started hacking together. And then the spreadsheets become too cumbersome. So you're writing little bits of code and then your friends need it, so they're borrowing it. And I looked up and I was like, actually, the world needs this right now. We can never have any hope of transforming our food system if we don't have the enabling technology to make that happen. And Julia, you need to be the one to do it and you need to do it now.
47:25 Emma Grede? So you're sitting there having raised money for Moonshot, now thinking about another business. How did you make that switch? Because I think that is really the impressive part of all of this. Because that wasn't what you went out and said, you know, you were like, I'm going to create a snack brand. Now you're creating a tech platform.
47:40 Speaker 01 That was really hard. And what was hard about it-
47:43 Emma Grede? The old switcheroo.
47:44 Speaker 01 The old switcheroo. What was hard about it is now you have a set of investors who have gotten really excited about a tech multiple. So here you are, building a CPG brand, which is going to have some multiple, maybe two to five. But then you're building a software platform, which back in 2021 is trading at 20x. So now you've gotten your investors really excited about a tech play, but you're holding a food business and it's working and it's growing and it's launching in Target and you're in a Target commercial. Julia, you're in a Target commercial. Whoever thought that? So what do you do when you have a business that's working, but it's misaligned with what your investor expectations now are? And this is like another moment of heartbreak. In some senses, I would have never wanted to let go of Moonshot. It was the most feel-good thing.
48:29 Speaker 01 People loved it. It tasted good. My kids knew what it was. My mom could understand what it was when I told her what I did every day.
48:36 Emma Grede? Easy.
48:36 Speaker 01 Which, by the way, she did that Zoom pizza.
48:38 Emma Grede? Of course not. No.
48:39 Speaker 01 She used to have friends that would come up to me and say, Julia, how's it going at the pizza shop?
48:44 Emma Grede? Going great. You're like, it's going great. It's, you know, we make a lot of pizzas over there.
48:51 Speaker 01 Here I go.
48:52 Emma Grede? So you did have to decide it's one or the other.
48:54 Speaker 01 We had to decide.
48:55 Emma Grede? How did you make that decision? Because it wasn't like Moonshot was failing. It was actually on fire. Like that business was really tracking. It felt like it was, there was a lot of momentum.
49:03 Speaker 01 Right. It was truly a bit of very good fortune that Patagonia came to me.
49:12 Emma Grede? Dream buyer, by the way.
49:14 Speaker 01 You can't.
49:14 Emma Grede? You can write it better.
49:15 Speaker 01 A sustainability girly and Patagonia wants to do anything with you, you're psyched.
49:20 Emma Grede? Well, and also just to contextualize it for everyone, Patagonia isn't like a buyer. Like, it's not like they go out and buy a bunch of companies. Like, what they do and what we all know them for is that incredible product with this, like, baseline of sustainability and this incredible founder. But they don't acquire a lot of businesses. So even by virtue of, you know, that acquisition, that was like the gold standard of who could possibly buy a company in this space. It added credibility to what you were doing.
49:48 Speaker 01 And if you look in my journals, in those periods, you will see Patagonia written twenty five to fifty times in those journals. So I do think there's an element of like letting the universe know what you're looking for, even if it seems ridiculous, writing it down, being clear about it and then like attracting it to you.
50:06 Emma Grede? Did you set out to sell that company? Did you make the decision and then run a process to sell it?
50:12 Speaker 01 We knew that we were gonna have to either do two things, either spin it off and raise capital for it.
50:17 Emma Grede? Yep.
50:17 Speaker 01 And install a new CEO or sell it. There were two paths and we were like parallel processing those two paths.
50:24 Emma Grede? But essentially, you'd made the decision that actually Planet Forward was where your future was going to be and this, you would find some type of off-ramp for it.
50:32 Speaker 01 That's right.
50:32 Emma Grede? Okay.
50:33 Speaker 01 And I had to make my peace to know that I wasn't get to be, gonna get to be moonshot Julie. I don't know if you feel this way, when you're running your companies, like some amount of your identity lives in that brand.
50:44 Emma Grede? Definitely.
50:44 Speaker 01 And in that persona.
50:45 Emma Grede? Definitely, and when you leave things, it's not always just a glory dance. You can take the money.
50:50 Speaker 01 Yeah.
50:50 Emma Grede? And feel really gravely sad about what it is that you leave. I mean, I've had that on a couple of occasions where I've been, you know, disappointed that I'm, I'm not part of the transaction, that, you know, my identity's been wrapped up in that thing. And so it's not always just, you know, amazing.
51:07 Speaker 01 Also, there was a rebrand, right? So you build a brand, the brand has a persona.
51:12 Emma Grede? Mm-hmm.
51:13 Speaker 01 And that was a, a challenging thing. But so I knew at that point that my investors and I needed to go and build Planet Forward, which meant I had to find a home for me. Moonshot, I'm so fortunate that Patagonia had fallen in love with the brand because of what it was doing in the market and the excitement that it was creating. They independently had fallen in love with the brand, and I think it really is true that companies are bought, not sold. And the best way to find a really good buyer is to have a really good company for them to buy.
51:39 Emma Grede? Yes.
51:39 Speaker 01 I think at the point when you're like hawking your startup to buyers, the dynamics just shift pretty dramatically.
51:45 Emma Grede? Completely.
51:46 Speaker 01 It can be done. Sometimes we need a soft.
51:47 Emma Grede? It can be done and it is done, but I think that that's a really important distinction that you made. Companies are bought, not sold.
51:52 Speaker 01 Yeah.
51:53 Emma Grede? That's why I always feel like your first offer is usually your better offer because we have this idea that, you know, it's like, you know, somebody offers you something for a company and there's going to be a slew of other suitors. You go out, you find out there are no suitors, and the first offer was the best offer.
52:07 Speaker 01 Right. And I think we have like a fiduciary responsibility. We have to run the process, but our gut knows.
52:14 Emma Grede? It knows. And so you sold Moonshot?
52:16 Speaker 01 Yes.
52:17 Emma Grede? Amazing. Congratulations.
52:18 Speaker 01 Employees went over, my farmers got bigger contracts, my miller got bigger contracts, even the packaging. So literally the whole supply chain, which was what it was designed to do was to create a really healthy supply chain in food. It wasn't just that they bought the brand or they bought the revenue or they bought the doors. They bought the whole supply chain, which is where the impact was.
52:39 Emma Grede? And they essentially did that, not just because they loved the product and the brand, but because you had created the system for measurement to prove that this was the real deal.
52:50 Speaker 01 Right.
52:50 Emma Grede? With Planet Forward, because you were able to say, yes, like this is what we set out to do, but by the way, I've measured it and I can prove it to you and here's what that looks like.
52:59 Speaker 01 Right. And then the beautiful outcome is of course, Patagonia becomes a customer of Planet Forward, of the Patagonia Provisions business.
53:06 Emma Grede? Oh, you are clever.
53:07 Speaker 01 Yeah.
53:07 Emma Grede? That was like a really nice circle. You're like, oh, and by the way, I have a service over. You buy my company and you can come over here into Planet Forward. That's amazing.
53:15 Speaker 01 But also, you know, when you're playing a longer game, it influences how you show up in the transaction. Right?
53:21 Emma Grede? Yes.
53:22 Speaker 01 So you can negotiate every deal point down to the studs and get your elbows all the way pointy and try to take every penny off the table. And that, it wasn't my style in the negotiation because I was playing a longer game. I wanted to make sure my employees were taken care of and I wanted Patagonia as a long-term relationship, which meant that my bearing and presence in the transaction, obviously I'm negotiating the best for my company, but I'm also doing it in a way that's going to increase the likelihood that Patagonia wants to roll with me in the future.
53:50 Emma Grede? Well, and also in fairness, you were coming from a level of being extremely comfortable.
53:56 Speaker 01 Right.
53:56 Emma Grede? Right? That wasn't your big, you know, your big moment. Your big moment had already happened with Zoom.
54:01 Speaker 01 Yeah.
54:01 Emma Grede? So there's, you know, there's a level of flexibility that that affords you to be able to say, you know what, I, first of all, now you know that you are a skilled multi-founder. If you've done it twice, you can probably do it again.
54:13 Speaker 01 Right.
54:13 Emma Grede? And, you know, you've got the comfort level from what Zoom bought you.
54:16 Speaker 01 Yeah, there is that confidence that comes from having your first big win. There's also just all the mistakes that I had made in the past. I think in that time of overcompensation, I negotiated a lot of things way too hard. I thought that that was the way to be successful. I thought that being the hardest driving negotiator was proof that I was strong, proof that I was smart.
54:37 Emma Grede? And what have you learned?
54:38 Speaker 01 You have to play the long game. If you want to transact with someone over time, you are willing to be a little bit more flexible and generous.
54:45 Emma Grede? Yeah.
54:46 Speaker 01 And to always just understand like, what's the most important thing that they're trying to accomplish? What's really the most important thing that I'm trying to accomplish? And let's meet there. And some of the things are just ways for lawyers to make more money spinning up new versions of Deal Docs.
55:01 Emma Grede? Yes.
55:01 Speaker 01 And they're going to burn a lot of time and energy.
55:03 Emma Grede? That is a really true point. I always quote Melody Hobson because she's such a brilliant and sophisticated negotiator. But she always talks about this idea of the over ask, like never asking for something that you don't truly need. And so that when you say that you need something, that you really need that. So she will never ask the other side for something that she doesn't truly need. And in return, she doesn't expect that from them either. But I think that there is this idea that to be a good negotiator. That you have to be really, really tough. And actually, what the best relationships are, are mutually advantageous. Where you meet in the middle, everybody's happy and you can continue to do business together down the line. And that's what you've got with Patagonia. You've got a built in client for your now third startup.
55:47 Emma Grede? And a buyer for your second one.
55:49 Speaker 01 Right.
55:50 Emma Grede? Pretty genius. What do you think is the most important thing that founders can understand about raising capital?
55:57 Speaker 01 More is not more when it comes to raising capital. The bigger check does not mean that you're going to be more successful. And I really do believe that you just can't value yourself or your company based on your paper valuation. And the minute you start to believe your own hype around that, you just, you get weird.
56:21 Emma Grede? How have you, given all the accolades, you know, uh, first black woman to have a unicorn with the $450 million raise? How have you been able to uncouple yourself from those headlines? And those stories about you that have been told so frequently?
56:37 Speaker 01 I am fundamentally and unapologetically a nerdy person. I really care most about ideas, technology, change, innovation. The money is a wonderful byproduct of all those things. So it just, Emma, isn't really even in my nature to fixate on that part of the equation. Actually, I did my best to ignore it for a long time. And it was a dear friend who came to me and said, you need to show up for this. Even if it doesn't matter to you and your nerdy little heart, it matters to the world. It matters to other black women to see you. My immediate reaction was not like, this is dope. Oh my gosh. It was like, ooh, okay. And it took friends and why is people saying you need to walk toward this destiny?
57:22 Speaker 01 Cause it's not just a destiny for you, it's a destiny for all black women and you need to own that.
57:27 Emma Grede? It's important. It was important. And I think as somebody that, you know, came from outside this country, like, again, you seeing that it was possible, seeing that it was happening, seeing the proximity, like you were around the corner to me. I was like, wow, she can do that shit. I can definitely do it. But I do think that was important. That was good advice from, from good friends.
57:45 Speaker 01 Yeah.
57:54 Emma Grede? I want to talk to you a little bit about the money because you know I love to talk about money on this show.
57:59 Speaker 01 Let's get into it.
57:59 Emma Grede? For you, what has that, what does it mean? And do you still take the same level of responsibility when it comes to thinking about your wealth now that you have a lot?
58:09 Speaker 01 I decided very early on in my life to get good about money. I really did make a decision in my twenties that I was going to be good at money even before I had money.
58:20 Emma Grede? What does that mean to you?
58:21 Speaker 01 I had an angel investing portfolio that was like a fantasy angel investing portfolio before I had any money to deploy.
58:27 Emma Grede? Thinking about all the things you would do with money?
58:29 Speaker 01 Yeah, I would write down what I would have invested in, when I would have invested in, and I would track how it performed over time to give myself a sense of whether I, or not I even had a nose for that kind of investing.
58:42 Emma Grede? Do you have a nose for that kind of investing?
58:43 Speaker 01 I'm all right. I'm all right. I think I, there are, you're probably a much more talented angel investor than I am.
58:50 Emma Grede? I don't know why you think that. I mean, could, maybe, but maybe not, you know? I, I think it's really interesting. So you've chosen with your money to actually invest in other founders. Like, are you investing in the market or are you investing in entrepreneurs? What does it look like for you?
59:02 Speaker 01 I'm much more heavily invested in the market because what I discovered in that practice is I'm only okay at angel investing. So I'm not overweight in that part of my portfolio. I do my angel investing as an act of love and giving back to the community. I'm smart enough about who I am to know that's not going to be the thing for me. But I needed to track it and measure it and learn it, right? I learned about crypto early and taught myself that. I learned about the market. I learned about real estate. And I just taught myself like, what is a really beautiful, risk-adjusted, diversified portfolio for you to run your life around?
59:40 Emma Grede? And because I'm interested to understand where you learned that, because I see so many founders that... Make a ton of money and then they go, great, I made the money. Where did you learn that you could make that money work for you?
59:53 Speaker 01 Where I learned was, you know, wise friends, aunts, uncles, friends who had made money, mentors who were willing to talk to me about money. I had a boss once who was like, Collins, you need to get a 401K. I was like, oh, but then I won't have the money to go out and go to restaurants. He's like, just do it. So I think you can find along the journey, people who are going to advise you. But the important thing is do it before you have the money. Get good at money even before you have the money.
1:00:19 Emma Grede? Yeah, because you had that plan early on.
1:00:20 Speaker 01 Yes, I had that plan early on. And I think then when the money came, I had a much more rational and disciplined approach to how to deploy it because there is a little bit of a mind scramble. I don't know if you experienced this, you know, the first time you get money and you go to the ATM and you see, it can scramble your brain a little bit.
1:00:39 Emma Grede? Scramble, I was a fucking idiot. A total idiot. Are you crazy? I did exactly, like, I did the equivalent of like, you know, getting spinning rims and like, you know, yeah, you know, that was it, you know.
1:00:51 Speaker 01 You're like, I need grills.
1:00:52 Emma Grede? Yeah, yeah, like literally in every single way. And luckily, you know, I didn't have very much, there wasn't much to lose. But I think discipline around money and being curious about money are things that are in me from a kid. And so I was able to hone that, but it definitely took, it took a long time. And that's why I always find it so impressive when somebody like you says, you know, you were thinking about your wealth. And that level of thinking is really fundamental because I don't ever think that we plan enough. And luckily, you know, you've had multiple startups that have all worked out, but it could have been that they didn't. It could have been that, you know, your end with Zoom didn't leave you with that. And it feels to me like you would have been okay anyway because you were planning.
1:01:36 Speaker 01 Right, people spend more time imagining their wedding than they do imagining how they would run their family office. People spend more time in every detail of what it's going to look like to be married, down to the tiniest detail, before they've spent any time thinking about how they would manage their own money. And I just, that wasn't how I thought about things.
1:01:57 Emma Grede? And how have you been able to protect what it is that you have?
1:02:00 Speaker 01 I know that I'm somebody who is opportunistic. I love a good time, I love an opportunity. So I literally just have like an iron fence around my funny money. Like here's every year what you have in the kitty to go do your angel investing or your whatever, whatever, whatever. It's not zero, but it's not a lot, but it needs to be there.
1:02:20 Emma Grede? Right.
1:02:20 Speaker 01 And it's iron ringed and I have accountability. I have a person who will tell me no.
1:02:26 Emma Grede? Yeah, you need that. Every, everybody needs that.
1:02:29 Speaker 01 Yeah, and then that gives me the ability to be more disciplined and pragmatic about the rest of the portfolio. But I think whether you have five thousand dollars and want to start buying crypto or five hundred dollars and want to do something like it's important to have some amount of your money that you have a little optionality around so that you can experiment.
1:02:46 Emma Grede? And how's that changed now that you're a mother?
1:02:48 Speaker 01 I am teaching my kids about money and it's interesting to see how they respond. Mosi, in particular, the eight year old will make decisions about what not to buy versus what to buy. And he's thinking about, is this a good investment?
1:03:01 Emma Grede? Essentially, they, they get some money, they have to spend their own money. Because I always think it's, you know, it's so interesting when you're raising kids in a very different way to how you were perhaps brought up that it gets really tricky, you know? Oftentimes I feel like, you know, it's my job to try to manufacture some hardships for my kids. But that isn't, that isn't sensible either. And so I'm interested like how you even go about teaching them.
1:03:24 Speaker 01 But Emma, I think we do have to manufacture hardships for our kids. Because when you don't, you look at it and you're like, that's not cute. I do think you have to manufacture a little bit of scarcity.
1:03:34 Emma Grede? I know, I've, I've, I've tried to, I've tried to do that. And sometimes I feel bad about it because I'm like, Emma, they're not growing up in your reality. But there is a little part of me that goes, well, this is the only way I know how.
1:03:45 Speaker 01 What do you think about baby, uh, birthday presents?
1:03:49 Emma Grede? Oh, okay, so I'm not one of those moms that does like fifty gifts, you know? I do the one big present that you want and a couple of little things, but I am not like a big splurger. Like my kid, I always want my kids wanting for something.
1:04:02 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think it's true. Well, here's the thing I feel a little bit guilty about. Which is that when we're having birthday parties, I ask guests not to bring gifts for the boys.
1:04:10 Emma Grede? You do?
1:04:11 Speaker 01 Yeah. And I remember my mom being like, don't lock their blessing.
1:04:15 Emma Grede? Don't do that.
1:04:16 Speaker 01 But there is just like this expectation and you have to remember like my, what I tell mommy is like, my life's work is to try to safeguard this planet. And people are like, well, what are the most sustainable things to buy? The most sustainable thing to buy is to not buy the thing.
1:04:30 Emma Grede? To buy nothing.
1:04:30 Speaker 01 Really to just think about how much we're consuming. I think also raising kids during the pandemic and frankly, sometimes being a working mom. I defaulted to like, what's the thing that I can buy to fill the need? What's the thing that I can buy that's going to delight them or entertain them? Or make it easier that I missed a bedtime tonight? Or make that long plane ride easier for them? And I'm really trying to unwind that for myself.
1:04:54 Emma Grede? It's a slippery slope. It's a real slippery slope. How did you manage it with small children?
1:04:59 Speaker 01 I do believe in staffing up. I think it's really important to be able to hire a team around you. Find amazing people, be very, very generous and take away some of the expectation that you have about being the one who cooks every dinner, folds every towel, like that isn't necessarily the biggest value that I can have from my family. What's new in my life now is I'm also a single mom. For the first time, it hasn't even been a year yet.
1:05:24 Emma Grede? Wow.
1:05:25 Speaker 01 So I'm learning a lot about what it means to be like the person at home for the boys and it has so much less to do with making dinner for them. And it has to do with like giving them an extra snuggle or just being present with them. Um, but it isn't easy and it requires, I think, a lot of help.
1:05:42 Emma Grede? So I'm so interested to understand like where you are right now.
1:05:46 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:05:46 Emma Grede? When you look back at your career, at your resume, you've really done some unbelievable things.
1:05:52 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:05:52 Emma Grede? And because of the space that you've chosen to operate in, you're having real, like real lasting impact, I would say, because you're touching, I mean, your client list is incredible. You're working with some of the biggest, most prominent and the biggest growth companies that are out there. So what for you is important right now? Like it just, I'm, I'm interested to understand like where it makes sense to put your energy at this stage.
1:06:18 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think you've got to put your energy around what's the biggest problem of the moment. And when I started Planet Forward, the biggest problem of the moment was there wasn't the right technology to bring about a sustainable future when it came to food, fashion and beauty. So that was the problem, but that was eight years ago. That's the problem that we needed to solve and not just Planet Forward. Other companies have really worked hard, deployed lots, lots of capital has been deployed. We have solved the data and technology problem. There's no shortage of technology to solve climate change. It's not the problem anymore. What's the problem now? The problem is will. The problem is sustainability has a branding issue.
1:07:02 Speaker 01 Nobody thinks of sustainability as like the sexiest, most luxurious, juicy future. People somehow think that being sustainable means you're gonna be like a little bit hungry, like a little bit ugly. A little bit crusty. A little bit crusty, a little bit bored. You're gonna buy the thing, it's gonna rip and fall apart. And that's what's causing people to like rage shop and overconsume, right? And that's the biggest problem that I see now is how do we convince everyday people that the sustainable future is the sexiest, juiciest, most pleasurable future? How do we make the sustainability brand like the, the best brand? Yeah. And how are we gonna do that? Well, I- Do you have an answer? I bet you do.
1:07:47 Speaker 01 I do have an answer, or at least the stepping stone of an answer. But I've created a nonprofit called Planet House, Planet H A U S, really borrowing from Bauhaus. So you were a designer. Yeah, absolutely. So you know all about Bauhaus. The Bauhaus was a school of thought, came out of the Weimar Republic, and they decided to rethink everything about the built world. Why do chairs need legs? Why do tables need tops? Why can't you prefabricate homes? And it was this unapologetic, innovative thinking that has created the design that we live in now. You'd be hard pressed to walk down a block without seeing the influence of Bauhaus everywhere. What if we could create a Planet House? What if we could create a new aesthetic around how products are designed?
1:08:31 Speaker 01 Food, fashion, beauty, personal care? So that we design with principles of circularity, of low carbon, of water cleanliness into our products. So Planet House is a nonprofit where we show the world all of the most sustainable products. We set them up in an actual house. So you, Emma, would walk into the Planet House. You'll open the fridge, you'll see all the sustainable regenerative food in there. You'll open the closet, you'll see the Skims carbon-measured, you know, clothes. You'll walk into the bathroom, you'll wash your hands with the Dr. Bronner soap. And we're helping people have a real-life sensory experience of what it means to choose sustainability in their everyday lives. I'm so excited about Planet House.
1:09:12 Emma Grede? I'm so excited for you.
1:09:13 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:09:14 Emma Grede? I really am. I mean, if anybody can do it, you can do it. I have so much, I have so much faith in you. So as you look to your future now, having all of this success behind you, what do you still aspire to?
1:09:28 Speaker 01 I still aspire to some amount of spaciousness. I don't know if you feel sometimes like you're caught in the busyness trap. And I can't figure out whether I'm actually busy because I have to be or I'm busy because there's another story that I'm trying to unwind, which is that only when you're really busy are you really doing it, are you really successful. So the thing that I'm hoping for in this next phase that I haven't yet achieved is just more spaciousness and time.
1:09:58 Emma Grede? Amen. Let me know when you figure that one out, love. I absolutely love it. Okay, let's do the rapid fire. What's one healthy habit or routine that you swear by?
1:10:09 Speaker 01 I lift really heavy weights. I lift heavier weights than you would imagine for my size. And it is so good for bone density and it is so good for cortisol management and it is so good for sculpting, but lift heavy weights.
1:10:20 Emma Grede? There you go, end off. What's the funniest thing your kids have said to you lately?
1:10:24 Speaker 01 Oh, my gosh, Olu, the little one, who has this like raspy voice and he has like a Spanish accent.
1:10:31 Emma Grede? Cute.
1:10:31 Speaker 01 And he just took both cheeks of mine and squeezed them together and he goes, "Oof, you look perfect."
1:10:37 Emma Grede? Oh.
1:10:38 Speaker 01 And then ran away.
1:10:39 Emma Grede? You know, that's, I wish I could just, I need that on film. So cute, right? So, so cute. What do you value now that you didn't when you first started?
1:10:49 Speaker 01 Free time. Doing nothing, being lazy.
1:10:53 Emma Grede? Oh, yeah.
1:10:53 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:10:54 Emma Grede? All three. Yes, yes, and yes. What is a book that changed your life?
1:10:59 Speaker 01 Oh, Braiding Sweetgrass, one of the best books anybody that can read to imagine what living in a sustainable future will and can look like. Braiding Sweetgrass.
1:11:11 Emma Grede? Oh, I love the title. I want to read it just for the title. Okay, we'll definitely put that one on our reading list. Julia, thank you so much. You're wonderful. Appreciate you.
1:11:19 Speaker 01 Thank you.
1:11:20 Emma Grede? That was so lovely.
1:11:21 Speaker 01 Oh, good.
1:11:25 Emma Grede? If you're loving this podcast, be sure to click follow on your favorite listening platform. While you're there, give us a review and a five star rating and share an episode you loved with a friend. We'll be so grateful. Aspire with Emma Grede is presented by Odyssey. I'm your host, Emma Grede. Executive producer, Ashley McShan. Derek Brown. And me. Our executive producers from Odyssey. Leah Reese Dennis. Asha Saluja. Lauren LaGrasso. Producer KK Sublime. Stephen Key is our senior producer. Sound design and engineering by Bill Schultz. Angela Peluso is our booker. Original music by Charles Black. Video production by Evan Cox, Kirk Courtney, Andrew Steele, and Carla Stelgardo. Social media by Olivia Homan, Catherine Bale.
1:12:10 Emma Grede? Special thanks to Brittany Smith, Sidney Ford, my teams at The Lead Company and WME. Maura Curran, Josefina Francis, Hillary Schaff, Eric Donnelly, Kate Huxton Rose, Tim Meeke, Sean Cherry, and Lauren Vieira. If you have questions for me, you could DM me at aspirewithemmagreed. Grede is spelled G R E D E. That's aspire, A S P I R E with Emma Grede. Or you can submit a question to me on my website, emmagreed.me.
1:12:44 Speaker 06 Our presenting sponsor today is Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Anthropic is a research company first, built to make sure the transition to powerful AI goes well. When they launched Claude in 2023, its first users were businesses. Since then, it's been tested inside leading startups and enterprises. At DoorDash, a code migration that would have taken four engineers months to complete took one person three weeks. At Carvana, one team used to hunt through old tickets and code to answer a question. With Claude, they get answers 65% faster. And at Rakuten, engineers have achieved 99.9% accuracy on tough coding jobs using Claude. Today, nine Fortune 10 companies run on Claude
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