Eric Ryan, co-founder of Method, Olly, and Wellie — brands that together approach billion-dollar valuations — walks through his playbook for disrupting boring consumer categories. He explains how to spot a “sea of sameness,” identify cultural shifts a category has missed, steal ideas from unrelated industries, and keep the concept simple enough to work. Sam and Shaan then take turns pitching half-baked brand ideas — fiber supplements, a revamped American diner, white-label chicken, and gourmet packaged cheese — and Eric stress-tests each one against his framework.
Speakers: Shaan Puri (host), Sam Parr (host), Eric Ryan (guest, co-founder of Method, Olly, Wellie)
Introduction: Eric Ryan and His Billion-Dollar Brand Playbook [00:00:00]
Shaan: So we have with us today the king of commerce, the titan of Target, the big man of the brand — Eric Ryan is here. You are the co-founder, the inventor of products that sit on a lot of people’s shelves. There’s some in my kitchen right now. Method soap was one of the big ones. Olly Gummies that my kids have every day. Wellie Band-Aids. And you’re an investor in a whole bunch more. You’re kind of the magic man when it comes to reinventing consumer categories.
So when we did our call before this, we agreed to do two things. I said, I want to know your playbook. How do you go into a category, figure out which product to select, how to disrupt it? You have this four-step process you outlined to me. And the other thing we agreed on is we would each bring a couple half-baked brand ideas — ideas an entrepreneur could actually go pursue — and we’re going to pitch them back and forth to each other. We didn’t tell each other beforehand, so we’ll see what we came up with. How’s that sound?
Eric: Amazing. That sounds great. And that is way too kind of an introduction. So thrilled to be here. Thank you.
Shaan: How big were some of these businesses, just so we understand the magnitude?
Eric: They’re both probably getting close to billion-dollar brands now. But when you go in and see like even 10 million of soap or vitamins sitting in a warehouse, that’s what always blows me away — how many units of these products are sitting in people’s homes today.
Shaan: I’ve been looking forward to this. I remember Sam used to host a conference called HustleCon and he would invite founders and entrepreneurs to come speak. I didn’t know your story at all. I was sitting in the crowd, and I remember you got on stage and you talked about how you started Method, how you started Olly, how you started Wellie. You had all these little phrases. You were like, “I walk through the aisles and I look for a sea of sameness.” You had a picture of the dish soap aisle and it was like every single one was green — just like my mom’s cleaning product. And then you had this totally different-shaped bottle. It was blue or purple or whatever, and it stood out.
I really had never thought about how much thought goes into which category to enter, how to bring something fresh and new to the table, and how to hustle to get it off the ground. You had a great talk that day.
Method is probably a billion-dollar brand now. Olly Gummies is also probably half a billion to a billion. And one of the other claims to fame — Target loves you, don’t they? I feel like somebody told me that.
Eric: I love Target. It’s a mutual love affair.
Shaan: You’ve launched brands with them from the start. You have a kind of unique relationship with them, right?
Eric: I do. What we did back in, God, 2002, when we pitched this idea of designer commodities — at a time where no mass retailer worked with startups — through a lot of Hail Mary passes and some good luck, we were able to be the first to kind of go in there. It’s been an amazing partnership ever since.
Eric’s Four-Part Framework for Disrupting Categories [00:03:30]
Shaan: Can we do your process before we brainstorm the ideas? I want to hear the process you outlined. You’ve done this not once, not twice, but three times. I was like, can I nerd out with you a little bit?
Eric: Yeah. And as you’re going to hear, I’m really annoying to go to a grocery store with. To me, it’s like the Super Bowl of commerce. So every time I’m in a mass retailer, a grocery store, or a drugstore, I’m always hunting.
I have a really simple model, and it was built off of what I learned in advertising — how do you take a really deep consumer insight and translate it into great creative execution? My core thesis as an entrepreneur is to look for these white spaces where there’s a sea of sameness and it just smells ripe to go in and do different.
What I do is I look for a cultural shift or a big macro trend that the category has missed. In between where that shift is and where the category is — that’s the business opportunity.
In the case of Method, there were two big cultural shifts I found. One was this idea of the “lifestyling” of the home. Back in 2002, you look at a dish soap more than you use it. But nobody thought about these products as part of the emotional connection to your home.
Sam: Basically — looking good on your sink. I keep my Method soap next to my faucet, just looking good on the counter.
Eric: Exactly. Because you look at it more than you actually use it. So it’s a pretty meaningful part of the experience of buying a dish soap.
Sam: At the time, what else did you see? Like, “Huh, that’s new.” But then you applied it to dish soap.
Eric: It was really happening in personal care. I always say I’m a bit of a thief — I don’t steal from my competition, but I try to steal from as far away as possible. With Method, I stole from two areas. I stole from personal care — the colors, the fragrances, compared to how home care was positioned with these really toxic cleaners at the time. I brought a lot of that personal care approach over to home care.
And I also stole from housewares. I would always say, “I go to a department store, I look at the beauty aisle, and then I look at the housewares aisle.” We stole all these beautiful vase shapes. We wanted these things to look like little objects of desire sitting on your countertop.
Shaan: Okay, so the first thing you said was you look for a cultural shift that’s happening that a category has missed. It’s maybe happening elsewhere — the future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed. The shift is starting to happen, but it hasn’t hit the home care aisle yet.
Eric: I’m going to steal that from you. That’s great.
Shaan: That’s not original. A bunch of VCs like to say that one. So that’s the first thing. And are you looking for a new category or a pre-existing big category? Some people would say, “That’s already done, it’s already saturated, I need to find something that doesn’t exist yet.” Seems like what you did was go into things that already existed and you weren’t scared of the saturation.
Eric: That’s right. I think it’s much easier to make money by creating an iteration off of something that already exists, because you don’t have to drive all the consumer education for something wildly new.
I was living in London in the ’90s, super inspired by Richard Branson. What I liked about him was that he had a model. His model is an entertainment model — he’d go into really unsexy industries like airlines and apply his entertainment model that he understood really well. And he went into really well-established categories that were easy to understand and just put his twist on it. That very much became a lot of the way I thought about entrepreneurship.
Shaan: And then you talked about being a thief. You said: I go to a big category, I walk through the aisles, I look for a sea of sameness, I look for a cultural shift. And then you told me one other thing that was great — you said, “Have they made this unnecessarily complicated?” And you go, “I think they’re hiding something. There’s an insecurity there if they’ve made this product category feel over-complicated.” And another one was categories taking themselves too seriously. Can you talk about those two?
Eric: Yeah. Anytime a category is taking itself too seriously, they’re probably hiding something. There’s an insecurity there. A lot of my model is going into categories that are unnecessarily complicated. Can I really simplify it? Can I make it easy for the consumer? I love categories that take themselves way too seriously, because I love to bring almost an inner-child approach.
If you look at Method — it’s kind of what a kid would use to clean the kitchen. With Olly, I got adults to take gummy vitamins in masses. That didn’t happen before. With Wellie, I got adults to wear bandages with patterns and colors on them versus the nude ones that are supposed to hide with your skin but never really do.
And looking at Method, it was both the lifestyling of the home plus this: at the time, you were asked to pollute when you cleaned, or use poison to make your home healthier. There was this big macro trend of health and wellness and sustainability, but it was showing up in some categories and had yet to show up there. It’s really connecting the dots on those trends and bringing them to new spaces. That’s core to my model.
Stealing Ideas from Abroad: Trend Trips and Faraway Dots [00:12:00]
Shaan: I saw that you said one of your favorite ways to come up with ideas is to travel abroad. We had a guy named Kevin Ryan on the podcast — he’s founded MongoDB, a $30 billion software business. But very interestingly he also started Gilt, the women’s clothing thing. He said he got the idea for Gilt when he went to France and saw these flash sales for clothing. He talked about going abroad for ideas too. When you travel, are you going on trips just to find ideas?
Eric: Yeah, totally. I just think better when I’m in motion. Walking retail with a cup of coffee in your hand, ideas flow better than sitting at a desk. We also take designers with us on these trend trips. Our goal is not only to spot ideas, but to translate them immediately into a design idea we can bring back.
Also, when you’re in a foreign country, you’re jet-lagged — which means nobody’s bothering you. I think you look at things a little more fuzzily when you’re jet-lagged, which can be a good thing. It opens up new pathways. When you’re walking retail where everything is foreign, you don’t understand the language — trying to connect the dots between what somebody’s doing in one category and whether we could apply that to another space is so much easier to do when you’re out of your home market.
Shaan: So what’s an example? Where would you go, and what’s an idea you had on one of these trips that turned into a success?
Eric: One of my favorites — this was about 20 years ago, before collaborations became such a mainstream part of building any brand — we got Orla Kiely, who was known for very expensive handbags and patterns, to do a collaboration with us at Target. As far as I know, it was the first ever designer collaboration where someone known for very expensive items brought those patterns into a product that sold for $3. The first time I think Target ever did a designer collaboration at that price point. Out of London. Huge success.
There was also a building we saw in Japan that we absolutely loved the way it was skinned. We turned that into a handwash design.
Shaan: Like the shape of the building or what do you mean?
Eric: It was in Tokyo and it had this incredible, kind of pillowed texture on the outside. We turned that inspiration into a bottle.
Sam: You’re saying that really simply — “Oh, we saw the texture of a building in Tokyo and we turned it into a handwash” — like those dots seem really far apart. Can you describe your actual process?
Shaan: He said the texture of the building. That’s like when you’re, you know, on drugs and you’re like, “Can you feel this building? Wouldn’t it be great if that was a bottle of soap?”
Eric: I try to design everything like an object, because it’s all about creating these little objects of desire — especially when you’re doing it in a category like soap, where you have to buy it and you’re trying to turn it into something you want to buy. So I look at everything through this idea of: it’s an object. I looked at a building. The building looks like an object. And it was easy to think, “Oh, my god, that texture is amazing. What if that little object was sitting on a shelf at a store instead of in the ground as a building?”
The original Method bottle was actually a camping fuel bottle I found in Norway. I loved the shoulders on that bottle. So we translated that into our first ever product — because we couldn’t afford a designer at that point, I had to find something we could just riff off of.
”What If This, But for That?” — The Creativity Framework [00:18:00]
Shaan: You told me something I loved. You said your favorite question when doing these trips is “What if this, but for that?” The further apart those two things are, the more powerful the potential idea. It’s not always going to work, but if you just look at your competitors and say, “Oh, we could do that too,” that’s not a very powerful idea. But if you take something from a whole different country, industry, or genre and bring it to your genre, you suddenly have something.
An example that just came to mind — I’ve got little kids and the most popular show right now on Netflix is K-pop Demon Hunters. They basically did K-pop music combined with American kids’ cartoons, which wasn’t what people were doing before. Right now the most popular songs for five-to-eight-year-olds have half the lyrics in Korean, but kids love it. They connected two different dots that seemed far apart, and it created a pretty powerful idea.
Eric: First of all, you make me really miss being able to watch cartoons with my kids — they’re all older now.
What you’re describing is really about creating creative tension. The more disparate two ideas are that come together, the more creative tension you get. Method was the first to do “eco-chic.” We brought together high design and deep sustainability — two really opposing ideas. By bringing them together, it created this creative tension, and when you have creative tension, you create a deeper experience that drives much more loyalty. People stay within the brand.
I try to look for the most two disparate ideas that could come together. The other part that unpacks is this idea of finding something that lives at the intersection of familiar and novel. If it’s too familiar, it lacks differentiation. If it’s too novel, it’s incredibly foreign and it becomes harder to get somebody to try it. I look for ideas that bring together that creative tension, where there’s enough familiarity to jump in, but enough novelty that it makes a new experience. It’s easy to say, but it’s hard to find. That’s the art form of finding those intersections.
Sam: I’m not sure what percentage of Wellie or Method was just the fact that it was a different-colored Band-Aid or a different-shaped bottle. But if it’s a high percentage, it’s sort of insane. That seems too easy.
Eric: It kind of is. I think I fail more times by being too novel than being too familiar. I launched the most amazing laundry detergent years ago. It was 10x concentrated — the size of a shampoo bottle for 50 loads of laundry. I got the idea in Japan, where they had these pre-measured doses you could pump. But it was so hard to get consumers to believe that something so small could be so effective, because they’d been trained forever that a giant jug of laundry detergent is what you need to get your clothes clean. I’ve always overinnovated when I failed rather than underinnovated.
Shaan: I saw a quote from you and Simon Sinek where you said, “If it’s hard, it’s probably wrong.” And he said, “I know I have a good idea when I can’t believe others aren’t doing it.”
I think a lot of entrepreneurs — I fall victim to this — somehow think there’s a correlation between how hard you work and how valuable your business can get.
Eric: There’s a kind of golden rule, and it came out of a lot of parallel thinking from fashion: if you change one thing — one iteration off of the core — you have a higher probability of success. The second you change two or three things, you’re most likely going to fail. In advertising we used to say: if you throw a consumer one egg, they’re going to catch it. If you throw them two or three eggs, chances are they’re going to drop it. You’re throwing too much change at them too fast, whether that’s communication or a product.
Shaan: I did a call the other day with an AI company that’s raised a ton of money, close to a billion-dollar valuation. They initially grew because in AI there’s so much attention that people were willing to try a bunch of things, but now they were like, “Hey, how do we grow from here?” I kept asking the same question: “Cool. So why would somebody choose you? Like, why?”
Most people today are using Tool A. You want them to switch to Tool B. “Why is Tool B better than Tool A?” They were like, “Oh, it’s way better in all these different ways.” I was like, “Awesome. So just tell me the one that would immediately convince me.” And they said, “Well, there’s not really one.” I was like, “Cool. Okay, so let’s say there’s three — just tell me one of them first.”
They were so focused on “we’re better” that they forgot to say “we’re different.” They were trying to throw four eggs at me, and I was like, none of those eggs were very convincing, and they all just cracked on me. I wish they had just thrown me one egg: “For this type of person, here’s the problem with the tools you’re currently using, and we do it this way instead.” I definitely think this applies to not just consumer products.
Eric: You know where I think that comes from? Pure ego. A lot of entrepreneurs’ egos get in the way, and they almost intentionally over-complicate it to show how special the product is, therefore how special they are. The best entrepreneurs I’ve met are the ones who take incredibly complex ideas and simplify them down. Then it’s easy for consumers to get it, easy for their teams to execute. That art form of simplification is the biggest hack in entrepreneurship. The number of pitches I sit through where I’m like, “You’re intentionally over-complicating this to justify your valuation or justify your specialness.”
Sam: I think it is ego, but there’s something strange. Like, within my company with my employees, they’ll be like, “We have to do this, this, and this.” And I’m like, “But what if we just don’t do any of that and just make better ads? Just do one thing.” But for some reason it’s hard to conceptualize that a minor change on one thing can create significant value, because you think to yourself: I have to put a billion dollars worth of effort in to have a billion-dollar idea. But that’s often not the reality.
Deep Dive: How Olly Was Born [00:27:00]
Shaan: Well, can we do an example? You talked a little about Method. I want to talk about Olly — maybe it’s because I take it every day, my kids take it. You went into the vitamins category. Let’s take you back. You walked into the vitamins aisle. You see a bunch of sort of nature-type looking things. Flintstone vitamins just still hanging on for dear life. You saw an opportunity.
He said something on the pre-call that was hilarious. He goes, “I went into the aisle and I saw Okay, cool — first thing I observed, all of them were round. So I thought, I guess we’re going to have square packaging.” And I thought that’s literally the funniest — well, everybody’s round, so we must be square. If everybody was square, we would have been round. As simple as that.
Eric: And there was no focus group. No nothing. They’re all round, so we had no choice but to be square.
Shaan: That’s awesome. And the other thing I remember — vitamins used to be a game of inference. It would say “Vitamin D,” but you don’t know what Vitamin D does. You’d have to know the purpose of melatonin or whatever. But you guys just wrote “Sleep.” You wrote “Immunity.” You just wrote the benefit instead of the feature. Can you take us back?
Eric: Yeah. I had sold Method but was still involved, and for the first time in my life I felt a little royalist — like, I’m an entrepreneur, and suddenly I didn’t feel like one anymore. I was working for somebody else. I was also doing a project for Target to create what we called “Made to Matter” — the goal was to get them to have credit for having all these natural brands.
We were looking for a brand that connected with millennial moms in the vitamin category, and we couldn’t find one. So I just went and literally walked the aisle. The first thing I noticed was people stressing out trying to choose something healthy for them. Since I was studying the aisle, people assumed maybe I knew what I was doing. Like, people would just randomly ask me, “Do you know what magnesium’s for?”
Shaan: “You work here.”
Eric: Yeah, they were just like, you’re just standing there staring. And it was a dog’s breakfast. Really hard to shop. The brands were super uninspiring. Packaging was terrible. So that was the clue: dig here.
The first thing I tried to figure out was: what is that big cultural shift this category is missing? And what I found was that millennials view health and wellness as a lifestyle pursuit. The clue was really SoulCycle and the way SoulCycle had repositioned fitness into something that was almost spiritual. I love the branding of SoulCycle — the name, the whole identity. And so my inspiration was: what would the SoulCycle of vitamins look like?
And if we reimagine a vitamin as a lifestyle product — well, it’s got to be a square pack. And I always want to design everything to have a standout quality. So again, it’s really designed as a product, not a package. I wanted to design it like a jar, something you would want to leave out. Because if you left it out, you’d most likely remember to keep taking it, but it also had intrinsic value.
And then I realized we’d have to put a giant cap on it, so we might as well make the cap the logo. So the whole idea flowed within probably days: a square jar with a white cap — that’s what would make it iconic. Then it quickly flowed from there. Why sell biotin? Why not just sell beauty? Why sell melatonin? Why not sell sleep? These really unique blends. All in the spirit of turning a vitamin from something you have to buy into something you want to buy — a little object of desire.
The Hustle: Selling Emotion, Not Just Product [00:35:00]
Sam: That’s amazing. We didn’t talk about the hustle it takes to actually get them off the ground. There’s like the artist brain — “I took the roof of the Japanese hut and it became the lid.” But at that point you just have a product idea.
Eric: A box.
Sam: A beautiful box, don’t get me wrong.
Eric: The best box.
Sam: People love this box. But you know, all entrepreneurs are typically not the best in the world at a single thing — they’re pretty damn good at a couple of unrelated things. Maybe there are better product designers than you, but you also have the entrepreneurial hustle to just keep showing up in some way that other people would have given up on five days ago. You’re top 20% in two different things rather than top 1% in a single category. Is that true? And are there any stories of the hustle it took to actually get into stores?
Eric: Yeah, super true. As an entrepreneur, I think a lot about energy flow. When I’m working on something, if it’s giving me energy back, then I know it’s right. To your earlier comment of “if it’s hard, it’s wrong” — that’s a lot of the way I work.
I’m working on a concept right now that I’ve literally been pushing water uphill for six months, trying to get it to a place where suddenly last week it broke. I’m like, “Oh, there it is.” Now it’s flowing. I can’t stop working on it. The narrative is beautifully coming together, each insight unlocking the next.
But to your point on execution — ideas are easy, execution is the hard part. With Method, we were two guys in a dirty flat in San Francisco with zero experience on how to make or sell anything. We had to sell it into local San Francisco grocery stores where the manager made the decision. You would just show up at 6:00 a.m., and you’d have literally three minutes to pitch this new premium cleaning brand to a grumpy manager.
What I realized was that selling was really this transfer of emotion. I don’t think that manager ever truly believed in the product we were selling. But you’ve got to get him to believe in you — and in some cases, believe that you’re going to keep showing up until he says yes. That persistence. It’s really about finding that emotion, that energy, that’s contagious. Finding it first in what you’re building, so you can share it with other people and have the energy to keep going when things get hard. Which of course they will.
Artisan Operators: Building Companies That Can Imagine and Execute [00:40:00]
Shaan: Do you look at a company like an art project, jumping from thing to thing? Or are you more operational?
Eric: Both. I’m a project guy at heart — I love the start, middle, and finish of creating something. But to build great companies, the operating side is so important. My core philosophy of building companies is this idea of “artisan operators.” I want to build companies that have incredible imagination and creativity that can innovate, but also run a really good, predictable business — great supply chain, finance, controls. Doing both well. If you think about it, there are so few companies in the world — Apple, Nike — that do both really, really well at scale.
I do love, at the heart of it, the building. I heard Tim Koogle, who was on my board, refer to Yahoo as a “project” once — he started as employee number six, became CEO, scaled it through an IPO and beyond. When he called Yahoo a project, I thought that was pretty cool.
Sam: Do you have like an open check from Unilever or Target — like, whatever you’ve got going on, get after it, come see us in two or three years, and we’ll just buy your company?
Eric: I wish it was that easy, but no.
Sam: So says the guy in his chair with a cat on his arm.
Eric: I mean, we’ve had a lot of success. We’ve had a lot of failures too. Every one of them is hard, and hard in their own way. But I’m moving over — I joined Greycraft, and we’re launching a new Greycraft consumer brands fund. I’m moving into the VC space. I realize my superpower of working with entrepreneurs is to help infuse them with energy, because I’ve sat in their shoes so many times and I understand how hard it is. I love now not being the quarterback on the field, always throwing passes, but being the coach on the sidelines, coaching these young founders. It’s just a thrill.
The 24-Hour Trend Trip Cycle [00:44:00]
Shaan: You told me something kind of amazing. You said that on your trend trips to Tokyo or wherever, you took some people from Target with you during the brainstorming phase, and you had this system that was going to wow them — the 24-hour cycle. Can you tell that story?
Eric: Yeah. Trend trips are quite common in consumer, especially among retailers. The problem is you come back with all these amazing photos and then you’re buried in your inbox and the meetings you missed, and usually it goes nowhere.
The process that worked really well for us: we’d kick off every trend trip by grounding ourselves — here are the big macro trends. Then we’d hire someone on the ground in Asia, Europe, wherever, and we’d go to all the most influential retail occurring in that market. Everybody had almost like a scavenger hunt — an assignment. By the time we got to the pub at 5:00 for happy hour, everybody had to have multiple ideas they were excited about from the field. Then we’d talk about it, pick a couple, and as we were going to dinner, I would call it into our creative team in San Francisco, where it’s morning. They would have all day to work on the brief we just gave them. They’d send it at the end of their day. We would wake up and at breakfast we would present what looked like polished product ideas to Target. By the time we got on the plane to go home, we had actually sold in new products.
Shaan: That’s like how South Park makes an episode — Matt and Trey write all day, send it to their Korean editing team, next morning they wake up and run with it.
I saw the podcast version of this, Sam. We do a thing where whenever we have a guest on — especially when we do them in person — we bring a gift. Steve Bartlett, who’s another podcaster, was on Jimmy Fallon the other day, and Jimmy was talking about how when the episode was done, somebody from Steve’s team came and handed him this book — a photo book of printed photos from the podcast they had just done moments earlier. He was like, “I’ve never seen anything like this.” This guy’s been doing TV production with Hollywood stars for years.
Creating that little extra wow — and in that case it’s the speed of the turnaround. A lot of people will come up with mock-ups two weeks later at a follow-up meeting, but the emotion’s gone and the wow factor is gone. Doing it in the 24-hour cycle is that little extra, that entrepreneurial juice. Most people wouldn’t even think to go there. They’d think there’s an invisible fence — you can’t do that.
Eric: It’s living in that state of make. And I love that line by Steve Jobs: “I trust people, just not in groups.” It allows you to keep a really small team that’s agile, that isn’t overthinking things, just living in that state of make.
I’m a huge student of SNL and how Saturday Night Live’s entire creative process works. Any former cast member who’s written an autobiography, I’ve listened to it. There’s something so powerful about being in that state of make. And now with AI and digital tools where we can build things in such real time, I think it’s even more powerful. It’s also where you see real talent versus people who don’t know how to actually do anything — they know how to manage. Builders and doers really thrive, and managers kind of get in the way.
Sam: It would actually be really fun to see how you use AI to ideate in the physical product space. I’ve never thought about how folks making physical products are or aren’t able to use it.
Eric: I’m using it as a whole creative team and partner. It’s absolutely amazing what you can do.
Summary of the Method Before the Brainstorm [00:51:00]
Sam: Okay, so just to outline your process:
Find a big category — ideally already big, so you don’t have to educate consumers about something new they haven’t thought about buying. Find a sea of sameness where everybody’s doing the same thing. Look for a cultural shift elsewhere that hasn’t applied to this category. Ideally it’s something that’s overly complicated and takes itself too seriously. Then to come up with your idea, you be a thief — find unrelated things, say “What if we did that over here?” You’re trying to come up with a single stroke that cuts through the noise, whether it’s your packaging, your colors, your positioning — the square bottle when everybody else is round. Then you hustle to get the momentum going.
All right. I came up with a couple of half-baked ideas. I think one might be good, but the others are pretty tough. Did you have a chance to come up with some?
Eric: Yes. I got a couple.
Sam: Okay, I’m gonna pitch you one and I want you to give me the thumbs up, thumbs down. Feel free to be brutally harsh. It makes for better content.
Idea 1: Reinventing the Fiber Category [00:53:00]
Shaan: All right, I think this first idea is genuinely good. The others I don’t have a lot of faith in, but this one I genuinely believe in.
I think about products that my mom takes that I’m going to take someday — because humans aren’t changing that fast biologically. When I see my parents, I’m seeing a future window into what I might look like or what they prioritize. My mom was just over at my house, and one thing she takes religiously is fiber. She drinks fiber every single day.
I’m in a world where I hear about gut health and microbiome and fancy stuff, but she’s like, “I need to take this to poop.” And I’m like, yeah, that’s simple enough.
So I walked through the aisle to prepare for this podcast. I see Metamucil, which to me sounds like a disease. I see Benefiber, which sounds like an Obamacare spin-off. The leading brands in the fiber category are completely outdated. But there’s something familiar about fiber — if somebody said, “Hey, this increases the fiber in your diet,” I would have pretty high conviction that that’s good for me. I just don’t want to take a grandma product. I wouldn’t feel healthy taking it.
So I want a fiber brand where taking it feels like — the same way when I take protein or amino acids — I’m at peak performance right now. I want to reinvent the fiber category. Take it out of the grandma product space and do a fresh take.
Where does that land with you?
Eric: Well, let’s start with the space — because if it’s the wrong category, it’s pointless to go further. I think you found great white space. I agree — fiber is the new protein. As protein gets more and more saturated, we’re seeing huge growth across all areas of higher fiber.
The place I would look is Costco — walk the fiber products there. And you’re right, it’s all legacy brands. Nobody’s really put a fresh spin on it. Where would you steal from? I would steal from juice bars. That wellness appeal — what does a modern green juice look like as a fiber product? You can innovate on flavors around it. And it’s a really great margin category.
Shaan: I have a friend — do you guys know what Kegel exercises are for men?
Sam: I don’t know how to do it. You’re supposed to like squeeze something inside.
Shaan: Women — well, anyone, the few women who listen to this know what that is. But for men — I’ve got a buddy who made a Kegel exercise app for men. And I was like, man, I see why any man wants this. Sounds like you’re doing great for the world. But my honor costs too much — I don’t want to be an influencer for this.
And I wonder if there’s a little bit of that with fiber, where I don’t know if I want to talk about pooping more.
Shaan: So I did think about this. I have two possible angles. We either lean in or we swerve out.
The lean-in path: poop is poop. It could actually be funny. I actually pitched this to Hasan Minhaj — I said, “I got a product for you,” because I was like, his ad creative would perform better than anybody else’s. There’s a little bit of a sellout nature to any celebrity hawking a product, and it’s almost funny to sell out for something so clearly silly. So one way is to lean in and actually have a comedian as the face of the brand.
Sam: You could be the Dude Wipes approach.
Shaan: Exactly — Dude Wipes leaned into the use case. All right. And then there’s the swerve-out path.
Eric: Right, maybe the framing is a little more on metabolism or digestion. Can you use a different word? Because I don’t know anybody who likes the word metabolism—
Shaan: Yeah, like “cleaner system.” I’ve never heard of many products that talk about improving your metabolism, and you get away from the lower-intestine area. You move up toward the stomach, you get away from the gross stuff, and you talk about metabolism.
Eric: I love it. What I would do is create two very different concepts. One: the Dude Wipes approach — unbashfully claims that function. And then, to your point, a really elevated, almost beauty-like approach.
Shaan: Would you test those, or just look at them and feel which one’s right?
Eric: I like to solve the work in the creative. I’d take those two concepts, work with a designer and creative team, really bring them to life, and first ask myself: which one am I most personally excited about? Back to that idea of energy. Then I’d share with friends and family — because if they don’t like it, why would anybody else? If I was really torn, I’d do consumer auditions. Not to have the consumer choose A versus B, but just to hear feedback in a qualitative focus group to guide my decision.
And then I’d put it in front of retailers. I don’t ask buyers to choose — I think most people go into buyers with the intent of “I’m going to sell to you,” trying to prove themselves versus improve themselves. When I sit down with buyers, I always try to go in to improve and really invite their feedback into the process.
Shaan: Consumer auditions. I never heard that. That sounds way cooler than “focus groups.”
Idea 2: The SoulCycle of American Diners [00:63:00]
Shaan: All right, rookie. What do you got to pitch, Eric?
Eric: Okay. So I’m going to pitch arguably one of the most important and most lost institutions in America: the American diner. At one point, these beautiful silver spots were really the third place before Starbucks existed. In a world where I think we’ll see more of a backlash to AI — wanting to understand what’s real and what’s not — we’re going to want these places of human connection and deep authenticity. And there’s no better place to start your day.
My pitch: I create the SoulCycle of the diner. It would only be open from morning through lunch — one shift — which makes it a really good economic model. But when you walk in, it feels incredibly vibrant. The whole thing would feel like a modern barn: white beadboard with yellow accents. A standalone grab-and-go juice bar, coffee bar. But the rest of the restaurant would be set up like a diner — all stool bar seating, but the counter kind of flows throughout so everyone is around it. No separate tables. It’s really communal, and also really efficient for staff to move through it. When you pop in at 7 a.m., it’s popping. Great energy. Just a place you want to start every morning.
Sam: The seating is kind of like those conveyor belt sushi bars — the counter wraps around.
Eric: Yes. There’s that Parisian restaurant where the entire restaurant is built like a counter that meanders, so you have a full view of the kitchen and it’s very communal. In and out. And it’s about creating this amazing energy. I want to take on Denny’s and IHOP with that model.
Shaan: That’s awesome. I have a “what if” for you. In mobile gaming — I tried to make a mobile game once. Before I built anything, I went and talked to a couple guys who made really popular mobile games. I sat down, showed them a prototype, and they said, “Oh dude, you have a TTF problem.” I was like, “I don’t want a TTF problem,” but I was absolutely certain I had one based on the way they said it.
They said the most important metric in mobile game success is TTF — Time to Fun. From the moment you click the button to open the app, how long does it take to have some fun? Because I was like: open the app, registration screen, sign up, give me your email address, phone number, would you like push notifications, would you like reminders? Like, you haven’t even tried the app yet.
Sam: What’s my TTS? Like, the fun never came.
Shaan: There was no fun. Mario is one of the classic examples. You start Mario’s first level — no tutorial, nothing. A small Goomba starts walking toward you, the easiest enemy to defeat. If you jump on his head, you get a satisfying squash. Then there’s a brick above your head. You jump up, punch it, get a coin. Jump up, punch the next one — you think it’s a coin, but a mushroom comes out. You go get it, and you grow. In the first 15 seconds of Mario, you’ve learned all the controls, defeated an enemy, gotten money, and grown bigger and stronger. The greatest first 15 seconds of your life.
So I have an idea for you: I went to a diner this weekend. From the time we got there — all excited, kids wanted pancakes — to the time we had anything on the table was 22 minutes. They were busy. But I wonder if there’s some way that right when you walk in, there’s something. Because right after the diner, we went to Costco, and right when we walked in, there was a sample person. My kids got something and they were like, “Hey, what is this place? We like this place.” They instantly got a cracker when they walked in. So I wonder if with the diner you could eliminate the wait and bring that TTF way down.
Eric: I love that. What I think is — like Dunkin’s Munchkins — you do a really great gourmet cinnamon Munchkin. When you walk in, almost like a sample, you grab one as you go sit down. You get that first little taste. And you could do a smoothie shot next to it. A tray of smoothie shots and Munchkins. Takes the edge off customers while they’re waiting, so the wait never feels as long.
Two other little culinary steals: Five Guys has the barrel of peanuts — you go in and there’s just free peanuts to scoop. I love that.
Sam: My first business was a sushi restaurant, and in a traditional sushi restaurant, when you walk through the door, the entire kitchen staff — they don’t turn to look at you, but they hear the door chime and they all go — and the whole crew shouts like a welcome. It basically means “a customer is here, pay attention, welcome.” I think you could also have a ritual when somebody walks through the door that would be welcoming and unique. If you talk about SoulCycle, there’s a way to make the arrival interesting.
Shaan: We’re just Neanderthals. We’re going to talk about Aristotle and the philosophy of life and it turns out you just got to throw a bunch of nuts at my face when I walk in.
Eric: Dude, I love a good high five.
Sam: Yeah. You just got to say “what’s up” in Japanese and I’m good.
Eric: You can picture the playlist in this place — the best morning music. There’s something like: they hit something and “Good Morning, Good Morning” comes over the speakers each time somebody walks in the door.
Shaan: I’m so fascinated with Time to Fun now. I think about it for vacations — like going skiing. Time to Fun could be really low. Schlepping to get to the hotel? That sucks.
Eric: You arrive in Hawaii and they give you the lei right when you get out the door. Hotel check-in? Normally the fun is when you get to your room. In Hawaii, as soon as you get out the door: lei, blue drink, fun — instant.
Sam: Shaan, do you just have a running ranking of low-TTF experiences?
Shaan: Basically. There’s nothing better than arrival drinks. That’s the best moment of a vacation.
Eric’s Failed Venture: Cast Jewelry [00:76:00]
Sam: Would you ever get into a non-consumer-product business? Like a restaurant, something that’s not what you’ve done before?
Eric: Well, I just tried building a retail business. What we built was amazing, and it was working with the consumer — it was just impossible to fund in this current capital cycle. I tried to reinvent the American jewelry store.
My theory was: I always wanted to do retail where I could geek out on every expression from the playlist to the scents to the way you’re greeted. I’m a huge student of Danny Meyer and how he thinks about every detail — 15 seconds to be greeted, where does the salt and pepper go. But when you walk into a jewelry store, it’s the most intimidating experience. You never feel like you belong there. You have to ask for the world’s smallest price tag to be turned over, and then you have to give a reaction to something you thought was $5,000 but is actually $50,000.
The insight was: women self-purchasing is driving growth in fine jewelry, but nobody was really creating an experience for them. So we created this brand called Cast. We opened three stores in the Bay Area. I wanted Willy Wonka’s “Pure Imagination” to play in a consumer’s head when they walked in — feel like a kid in a candy store.
But getting able to sign leases, build out stores, operate omni-channel — we had an incredible partnership with Nordstrom who put capital in, but it was so capital-intensive. A path to profitability and then raising capital in this market was just incredibly difficult. Gold pricing was spiking, diamond pricing was crashing. You couldn’t sign an A-class lease because LVMH had eaten up so much of that space.
I realized: back to “if it’s hard, it’s wrong.” I worked on it from launch to dead. Three to four years.
Shaan: Yeah, a lot. But we worked hard at it. It was a fun business — designing jewelry, incredible culture, incredible team. Issa Rae was part of it. We were on White Lotus Season 2, the cast wearing our product. We had a profound mark on the industry in a very short time. But it was a business nobody wants to put capital into.
Sam: It’s not the easiest pitch at the moment — “How are you an AI company?”
Shaan: Sammy, you have great phrases. When he was telling me about the jewelry shop, he said, “It was like a plane made of gold.” It was a great idea, but it couldn’t get lift off. It couldn’t get airborne. No matter how fast it went down the runway, it just could not get off the ground.
Eric: I picked the wrong space to try to innovate in.
Idea 3: White Label Chicken LLC [00:80:00]
Shaan: Do you want to tell them more of your ideas, or — okay, I got another one here.
Sam: You think I had one bad idea? I’m a volume guy.
Shaan: No, your first one was a great idea. I would invest.
Sam: Thank you. All right. So now here’s where it’s about to fall off a cliff.
I walked through the grocery store looking for that sea of sameness. Honestly, I saw one category that stood out because I was looking for everyday products, repeat purchase, everybody buys this — but something where there’s not a brand. I don’t have a favorite brand. I couldn’t even tell you the names of four brands in the category.
So I’d like to introduce you to White Label Chicken LLC. Getting into the chicken game. We’re going to white label someone else’s chicken — take chicken from somebody else, not get into farming, but put our own brand on it. Because Sam, what’s your top three favorite chicken brands?
Eric: What about packaged chicken?
Sam: Packaged chicken. You go buy breast meat or whatever. It’s like nine bucks for the little mini tray.
Eric: Yeah, that’s a wear-inspiring name.
Sam: Well, the front-facing brand is not White Label Chicken. That’s a working title. What I knew was: I can’t believe there’s no Oatly for chicken. There’s no distinct chicken brand that stands for something and means something — whether it’s about the flavor, pre-seasoning, whether it’s like “this is man’s chicken and you’re going to get your protein from this meal.” I just kind of saw that white space and wanted to open the floor to you gentlemen to help me workshop this.
Eric: This is where it gets into familiar versus novel. This is very familiar. So how do you add novelty? You’re right — as soon as it gets put in a dinosaur shape with breadcrumbs around it, it becomes Dino Nuggets, incredibly well branded. Or it gets served at a restaurant as a sandwich — Chick-fil-A. But the chicken itself — Foster Farms did a pretty good job out in California, but it was really the advertising that was so good.
I would turn it into an origin story. Don’t sell the chicken — sell the farm.
Sam: That sounds smart. I wish I had said that.
Eric: As if Don Draper wore hoodies.
Sam: Don’t sell the chicken, sell the farm. I might say that to my wife later today in any context.
Shaan: Eric, do you have a pack of cigarettes you could light up right now? Because if you took one out after that line, you would be the coolest man I’ve ever met in my life.
Sam: Put your feet up, smoke a cigarette, and tell me about selling the farm and not the chicken. Because we don’t want to think about the chicken — because we murdered it.
Eric: We want to think that the chicken had a good life on this farm before it was killed. That’s going to make us feel good about the quality of the chicken. It’s going to make us feel good about the chicken’s short life. I would build the whole brand around this heavenly farm for chickens.
Shaan: What if we create an Instagram account and pour all our energy into building everybody’s favorite farm? And then from there — of course, if you’re going to buy chicken, you’d buy it from your favorite farm.
I have a friend who exited a multi-billion-dollar consumer brand. He was telling me this idea for his new business. He goes, “Do you know what ‘free range’ actually means?” And I was like, “I guess that means they’re running around a farm.” He said, “No, the definition is they’ve got a cage like 5 by 5.” Shockingly small.
He’s working on this thing where he’s putting RFID tags in cows and chickens, and as they move around the farm, as they go to the kill, their tag is scanned. And a consumer can actually see on his chickens how far they were running — what radius. His whole premise is that people could see whether this is truly free-range chicken or were they just in a small pen in their own feces. There’s a correlation between how healthy the farm was and whether they actually followed the rules.
Eric: And that builds that framework I always use: you’ve got to find the intersection of altruism and narcissism. With Method, you bought it for very narcissistic reasons — you love the fragrance, you love the design. But the altruism — it’s good for me, good for the planet — brought you back. Deliver on both and you have real power. In the case of our chicken farm here: we need to sell the narcissism that this is the most organic, good-for-you, great-tasting chicken, but also the altruism that while this chicken had a short life, it had a really good life.
Shaan: It was a great six weeks.
Eric: You know what — you steal from children’s books. Do the whole branding like it’s a children’s book of this magical farm. Make the farmers who work there part of the overall iconography of the brand, and make them heroes in it.
Sam: Old McDonald Had a Farm. It’s called Bingo Chicken.
Shaan: Old McDonald — is that available?
Sam: You’d have to do something weird with the spelling. You know, like “Old McDnld’s.” Do you guys ever buy these Vital Farms eggs?
Shaan: Yeah, all the time. They’re in my fridge right now.
Sam: This is exactly what you’re talking about — the sea of sameness, the commodity they made interesting. Look at the bottom here: “Medium Brown Egg” is literally the name of the product. Sterile packaging. And you just see these eggs. And then the Vital Farms thing on top, because they draw flowers and hay on the carton and you’re like, “Oh, farm-to-table, I’m doing good.”
Now that he said “sea of sameness,” I’m like — I do this all the time. I bought yogurt the other day because instead of Greek yogurt, this yogurt was Icelandic.
Shaan: I don’t know what that means, but I’m in.
Sam: Yeah. I was like, “For some reason it’s all Greek and this is from Iceland.” And I bought it.
Brand Naming: The Holy Grail of Four Letters [00:86:30]
Shaan: Do you have a theory on naming? Because you’ve named your products extremely well. How do you come up with names?
Eric: The holy grail of naming is one word, four letters. If you can do it — that’s really hard. Naming a brand is the most difficult part of a startup, because everything is taken.
Shaan: Do you use an agency, or do you just sit there and think?
Eric: It’s all different. I’m not good at naming, but I’m good at spotting a name. Method was — Adam, my co-founder, we were literally brushing our teeth at the same time and he goes, “What about Method?” I was like, “That’s it.” The lawyer said, “You’re never going to get ‘Method’ — it’s too generic.” Then I asked my lawyer over drinks — while he wasn’t working — “If you thought this name was really important to your success, what would you do?” He said, “I’d go for it.” Because lawyers never want to be wrong, but they don’t need to be right.
Olly came from working with Alan Dye, who was helping me — he was creative director at Apple. I come up with a jumping-off word for each name. With Method, I wanted to represent technique. If you’re in the gym, you use good technique to get force, because this was going to clean without force. So I wanted something that represents technique — and he said, “How about Method?” That was it.
With Olly, everything in the category was either pseudo-science — like Centrum — or very folksy, like Nature’s Garden or Bounty. I wanted a name that just sounded friendly. So he came up with “Olly Slate,” and then we realized “Olly” on its own was enough.
Shaan: You’re ripping through the story and it’s insight, insight, insight. You have what I call the curse of knowledge — you think this is normal because you just did it. And like, you didn’t even tell us the jumping-off word thing and that was so interesting. Someone’s a master when they’re fluid, and it’s incredibly clear when you describe the simplest things that you are exactly that.
Eric: The jumping-off word for Wellie — I wanted something about healthcare. We came up with “Nightingale.” Because Florence Nightingale is this icon, all about caring for you. And then Anthony Sperduti and Partners & Spade came up with “Wellie,” and I was like — done. Every time I see the name, there’s no debate. It’s like, “That is it.” And then it’s all hands-on: how do we secure this name.
Idea 4: Gourmet Baby Bell Cheese [00:91:00]
Eric: One of my favorite foods — and I watch my kids go through it — is packaged cheese. Kraft Singles, mozzarella sticks. I have never seen anybody do anything really interesting with it.
You go to the artisanal cheese counter, right? It’s art. We have this place on Shelter Island where we spend summers, and this guy Andrew runs the cheese wagon — literally a wagon. My wife and I will go there every few days, sit there and taste cheese with him, and it’s like wine. He romances it.
The gap: if you look at all the categories that have taken a more artisanal approach and then you go shop packaged cheese — it’s the same thing. Cheddar. Mozzarella. It has not changed.
My favorite packaging form in the world is Baby Bell — those little wax Pac-Mans that you split apart. My idea is to create a line of gourmet cheeses in those wax forms, but do really gourmet flavors and profiles in it. Make the packaging form slightly bigger. Different colors. Build a whole line of gourmet cheeses around it. If anybody wants to do this, please reach out to me.
Sam: This is for adults, not for kids?
Eric: Yes. My boys love Baby Bells. I want to do that for adults. Take something that’s a kid product and elevate it as an adult product. And there’s just something so fun about opening up that little wax.
Sam: Dude, I had three of these last night. I wrapped them in salami and just piled them in my mouth. I call it “balls of fun.”
Shaan: Time to Fun’s really fast.
Sam: Yeah, I could squirt a little mustard on it. But yeah — I love those cheeses. They only make Gouda and, like, the normal one. What is it about that packaging? Is it softer inside because of the type of cheese, or does the packaging do that?
Eric: I think it’s already like that, but it’s just — grab it, put it in your pocket, eat it as you’re walking. Grab-and-go. Single serve. Super easy. But I think there’s something very primal about opening it — like peeling back the wax, like opening an orange. You feel like a little monkey getting into your snack. And the time to fun on that is three seconds.
Sam: Yeah. It’s oddly satisfying — when you peel back the wax, the two things open up and the top part doesn’t fall off the bottom part of the wrapper.
Shaan: Like an oyster.
Sam: Have you guys seen those new Coke bottles where you twist the cap off and it peels back and the cap stays on the bottle?
Shaan: Oh no, I haven’t seen that. But I love that. Just delightful. And you can fully recycle the bottle because the caps usually don’t get recycled.
Now, we might be breaking the laws of physics here, but one of the most satisfying food experiences in the world is cracking the top of a Coke can. The sound is iconic. I wonder if there’s a way to create some sound or satisfying crack with the Baby Bell. But I think I’m making a good idea bad here.
Eric: You’ve overinnovated it.
Sam: Yeah. One iteration. Just Baby Bell — but fancy cheese.
Idea 5: Shaan’s Cheese Stamp — Change of Presentation [00:96:00]
Shaan: I also had a cheese idea. Yours is better, but I’m going to say mine out loud in case there’s something worth stealing from the carcass of this idea.
My mother-in-law came over, and she’s great, but she’s got a little mother-in-law-itis — like, “I know the answers and you’re still trying to figure them out, so let me just tell you.” She’ll say things like, “Kids love rice,” and I’m like, “No, no, this kid doesn’t eat rice.” Or, “All kids love milk,” and we’re like, “You can try, but this kid doesn’t drink milk.”
And then five minutes later: “Oh, he loves it.” I go over, and basically what she did was pour the milk into the top of the cap and give him a tiny mini cup. And he was like, taking shots of milk like a spring breaker. And I couldn’t believe it.
She said, “Change of presentation.” That phrase has become a big deal. Anytime there’s a food my kid doesn’t eat, it’s not a question of whether they like it — it’s what change of presentation do we need. Bread was another one. My wife takes a cookie cutter — a star shape — and he stamps out the bread. Now he likes it.
Eric: And now your mother-in-law is the man of the house.
Shaan: Well, I think she already was and I was just in denial. But I’ve now bent the knee.
So my cheese idea is basically — instead of just slices of cheese, you include a stamper. Shapes they can stamp the cheese into, like Play-Doh. You steal from Play-Doh, take those shape cutters, apply them to cheese, and sell it together as a little pack. I think my kids would love that.
Eric: I don’t know how scalable that is.
Sam: That’s the problem.
Eric: I agree with the insight of “change of presentation.” I don’t know if I agree with the application of it there. But turning it into a toy — giving them something they can do to the food — I like that idea. The question is how do you make it a consumable, so it’s an annuity and people keep buying.
Sam: He’s in the cheese, but he’s a competitor now. So he doesn’t like this idea.
Shaan: His cheese comes with a little stamper and he’s like, “Yeah, the haters said it wasn’t scalable.”
Sam: Dude, Shaan just pitched Kraft Singles with a cookie cutter.
Shaan: Exactly. I think I overcomplicated it. The story is key to understanding the idea. In fact, the label is going to include the entire story, verbatim, in size-eight font.
Eric: And instead of buying the chicken to support a good farm, we’re going to be supporting Shaan to stick it to his mother-in-law.
Shaan: What happened to the safe space where there’s no bad ideas? You’re like, “Watch what I do if you bring a weak, wimpy idea in here. I’m going to give it a wedgie.”
Closing: What’s Next for Eric Ryan [00:99:00]
Sam: I want to leave you with a big-picture question. You’ve obviously done it. You’ve proven yourself. You’re financially secure and free. What is the end of the story for you? Do you have a hero in mind — like, “I want to be like them”? Do you think thirty years down the road, “I want to have done XYZ”? Or do you not think about that at all? Because you could just keep doing this. It sounds fun. Is there a big picture?
Eric: Yeah. I’m a planner, so there definitely is a big picture for me. At the heart of it, I love building and creating. If I wasn’t doing that, I think I’d be really miserable. But what I don’t want to do anymore is be a CEO.
Sam: Were you the CEO before?
Eric: I’ve been CEO of my previous companies, yes. I love being in it with a team, building it every day, in the trenches with your team, helping steer the ship. I absolutely love that. But I’m at the stage in my career where the pressures of raising capital and answering to that capital — I want to work across more things. So I’m splitting my time between continuing to incubate new ideas — where I hire a CEO and team and work alongside them — and moving over to joining Greycraft to launch this consumer brands fund. Being more of a coach and helping work with entrepreneurs.
Sam: We’ve had a bunch of people come on here with that dream — I want to be part of the idea and the start, but the grind for ten years, I want an operator to do that part. Some people have told us how they do it well. Others have said they can’t incept their idea and energy into somebody else. That’s a really hard transfer. Do you have a strategy around that?
Eric: It’s hard. And that’s what I’ve been doing — more of an incubator model in my last few startups, where I’m not the CEO but I create the team. I love creating the concept, pulling together the team and the capital. But the part that’s been really hard is actually finding those leaders.
The reality of being an entrepreneur is that it’s iterative. You try something, it works or it doesn’t, you’re constantly iterating. Which means you’re running up against roadblocks. What I found is there’s a certain personality that can live in that uncertainty of a startup and stay committed. When something doesn’t work, instead of panicking, they quickly take the clues, figure out the adjustment, keep the team confident, bring them along. That’s the art of entrepreneurship that’s really tough to hire for, because the ones who are good at it probably have their own idea they’re working on.
What I saw was a pattern: I would hire very accomplished people whose entire careers had been fairly linear — good grades unlocked a good college, good school unlocked the right job, each step unlocking the next. And that always worked because they’re incredibly smart, talented people. But that’s not the reality in entrepreneurship. So I’d hire these incredibly accomplished CEOs, and as soon as things would start going wrong — which they always do in a startup — they would really struggle with the mental games. That’s the hardest part of this model.
Sam: You’re amazing. Every once in a while we have episodes where we’re like, “We have to have a Part 2.” Hopefully that will be the case with you.
Eric: Let’s do it. I would love to. I’m walking away on Monday morning with more energy. I really appreciate it. This has been such a fun conversation. And if anybody loves our ideas out there and wants to pursue them, please reach out.
Sam: It’s ericry.com and there’s a contact button, right?
Eric: Yeah, you could go to gobstop.com. It’s for this idea I try to build — these everlasting Gobstoppers, brands that continue to be able to refresh themselves and stay on trend. I try to bake that in at the center when I create something new.
Sam: You’re a ridiculous human being. You’re awesome. You have silly, crazy ideas and you’ve been able to make potentially hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars off of them. I mean, that’s the dream. So thank you so much. You’re the best.
Eric: You guys are great. Thanks for a lovely conversation.