What I Know

Thrive Market sells hundreds of highly curated very-good-for you pantry staples, and more than 1.2 million people are subscribers. Thrive isn’t just aiming to get organic, healthy food into more peoples’ pantries and diets–it’s aiming at planetary health, too–going plastic-neutral this year, and carbon negative by 2025. While doing all this–and working in a traditionally low-margin business, trying to keep costs down for his customers, co-founder and CEO Nick Green needs to carve out time for himself. He tells host Christine Lagorio-Chafkin how he makes time to work on his personal health, including his nutrition and supplement habits, and how he unwinds with his family.

 My guest today is striving to change access to organic, healthy foods, at reasonable prices…while also taking on Amazon with a very un-Amazon model…in that thinks he can do it all sustainably. His company is going plastic-neutral this year, and carbon-negative by 2025, and supporting regenerative agriculture while already offsetting the company’s entire shipping footprint. If you know supply chains, you know this sounds barely possible? Well, his business is working: It has more than 1.2 million paying members, and had more than $400 million in sales in 2021. It’s called Thrive Market, and he’s co-founder and CEO Nick Green.

Stuart Butterfield, the CEO of Slack, has just begun his parental leave, and is also stepping back from his role leading the company he cofounded in 2009. Host Christine Lagorio-Chafkin asked him to look back at his time as CEO of Slack, to what worked really well, and what he knows best. Turns out, one of the things that helped the team at Slack during its years of hyper-fast growth was fostering a culture where debate and disagreement were welcome. Butterfield, himself, had his mind changed many times, he admits.

Stewart Butterfield, the co-founder and CEO of Slack is on the cusp of 50, and on the brink of stepping down as chief executive of the extremely popular communications-for-teams software company he built. Slack has more than 18 million active daily users, and was acquired by Salesforce in 2020 for $27.7 billion. Butterfield exclusively takes host Christine Lagorio-Chafkin through his fascinating career of building games, startups, abandoning ideas, and running the fastest-growing enterprise tech company of its time.

Lindsay McCormick started her business without really meaning to start a business. She just wanted to try to make a sustainable, healthy toothpaste, without the landfill-bound packaging, for herself and her friends. But then to pay expenses she started selling it–and it took off, with increasingly eco-conscious consumers. She was inspired in part by the nature she was surrounded by in Southern California–she was a snowboard instructor and a surfing instructor, too. Today, while running Bite, which stands for Because It’s The Earth, and sells personal care items that are compostable, refillable, and plastic-free, she still finds inspiration way out in the deep.

Lindsay McCormick found inspiration in her pristine surroundings, back when she’d teach snowboarding in the winter and surfing in the summer. Respect for nature, where she spent so much of her time, led her to try to eliminate plastics and other landfill- or ocean-bound waste from her life, and to find healthy options. While traveling, she realized she was using a lot of tiny toothpaste tubes, and became fixated on trying to find a better way to brush, free from non-recyclable waste. What she ended up creating and selling in tiny, adorable glass apothecary jars online was Bite toothpaste bits. Over the years, she became committed to creating change for the planet, she tells host Christine Lagorio-Chafkin. Today, her company sells much more than sustainable toothpaste–including a whole suite of oral care, and even soap and deodorant–which went viral on TikTok. Today, the company, whose name stands for Because Its The Earth, has 10 employees and more than $10 million in sales.

The founder of her eponymous jewelry brand, Kendra Scott, has built her business into a robust online operation and more than 130 locations. But from the early days of running her business, she knew she didn’t want to manage the books. Scott tells host Christine Lagorio-Chafkin how she hired strategically, from an accountant to a comptroller, to a CFO–so she could focus on the creative and design work she loves.

Kendra Scott founded her eponymous jewelry line in 2002, and opened her first retail store in the height of the recession, in 2008, in Austin, Texas. She’d bootstrapped the company, balancing the books with credit card debt. She tells her story to host Christine Lagorio-Chafkin–including how she built a parent-friendly company culture, and a focus on developing relationships with her customers, using something she calls “The Sister Rule.” Today, Kendra Scott has more than 130 retail stores across the United States, and her philanthropic work has given more than $50 million to charities that benefit women and children. She’s also the author of a memoir, Born to Shine, which came out in 2022.

Airbnb co-founder and chief executive Brian Chesky never thought of himself as a “businessperson.” That’s because he was educated as a designer, and has a degree in industrial design from the Rhode Island School of Design. To him, staying creative and keeping good design top-of-mind are key to his role at the helm of a public, 6,000-person, international corporation. He explains to host Christine Lagorio-Chafkin how he nurtures his own creativity--by engaging with his own curiosity and putting pen to paper.

When the global Covid-19 pandemic hit, Airbnb’s core business all-but ground to a halt. It lost 80 percent of business in eight weeks. The company’s co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky explains in candid conversation with host Christine Lagorio-Chafkin precisely how he restructured the company’s teams, and put the company on one radically simplified calendar-based product-launch plan, and then released it all to the world…as the 6,000-person global business prepared for its IPO. And today, Chesky is getting back to his roots, and is listing a bedroom in his own home on Airbnb.