For many startups, ideating is the fun part: coming up with ingenious schemes to grab eyeballs and start conversations. But before you dive into that stage, take a step back and define your goals.
— Neil Blumenthal
A good collaboration pushes the boundaries of both partners.
It's impossible to predict crises - or to control them once they hit - but you can absolutely prime yourself to ride them out as best as possible.
Businesses should focus on solving problems, putting the customer first, delivering value - not gimmicks - and growing in a sustainable manner.
At its best, entrepreneurship creates jobs, solves problems, and galvanizes creative thinking.
It may seem premature, but you need to be thinking of your exit from the moment you accept capital, because at that moment, you've made an explicit agreement with an investor that he or she will eventually be able to gain liquidity.
Avoid the 'squeaky wheel gets the grease' habit of overreacting to the loudest feedback. The first time you hear a particular piece of feedback, treat it like a clue and do some investigating. Find out how deep it goes - maybe it stops at the surface and won't be an issue, maybe not.
At Warby Parker, we use the survey platform Culture Amp to take employee engagement surveys that help us become ultra-responsive to the needs of our teams.
For better or worse, cash is the oxygen of your business, and you can't last long in any environment without it.
We've built our own technology platform in-house, which operates our website and powers our retail stores.
At Warby Parker, we moved our focus to promotion only after we'd spent time creating our product, a user-friendly website, and an on-the-ball customer experience team.
When a person has work, she has income and can achieve financial self-sustainability. She can prioritize her family's health and education. Her standing in the community is lifted, and so is her confidence.
For every Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, there's 30 other entrepreneurs that started their business after working for several years.
Florence Nightingale. She is one of the most dynamic social entrepreneurs in history.
It never gets old watching someone receive their first pair of glasses and regain their vision and their life.
We have never met with politicians. I don't know the first thing about how to get heard. My suspicion is that it's to donate a lot of money.
Brands are only powerful if they're real and authentic.
Creativity is always intense.
At Warby Parker, we ask ourselves a number of questions when deciding whether or not to partner up with a designer, or a nonprofit or brand. Is the potential collaboration new? Is it unexpected? Will it result in something worth talking about over dinner? Will it do good? Will it introduce us to a new audience?
The idea that you don't spam people with five emails a day or that you offer free shipping just seemed obvious to us, because that's how we want to be treated as consumers.
Just because one company is able to succeed with a specific model doesn't mean others will follow with equal or any success.
Asking for money can be especially intimidating.
If you don't plan to dive in and dedicate all of your time to your startup, you probably shouldn't be looking for funding. It's hard enough asking for money when you believe in an idea; asking for money to fund something you're iffy about is ten times more strenuous.
By creating a feedback culture within your office, you ensure that people continue to learn, grow, and challenge themselves.
Warby Parker is a data-driven company.
Regardless of what you plan to use it for, the goal should always be to raise money right before you need it. You don't want to get into a situation where you need cash and you're unable to raise it - or you're unable to raise it on favorable terms. As with any negotiation, you want to raise from a position of strength.
When it comes to marketing, creative resources are often worth far more than dollars.
No matter what product or service your company offers, people have a way of finding out if you are genuinely providing value.
Social enterprise is at its most impactful when the goal is empowerment, not relief.
Successful entrepreneurs are pretty methodical about the problem they're trying to solve.
I'm not as smart as I think I am.
I came to Washington primarily to meet other entrepreneurs. That being said, I was also curious to hear how our federal government was thinking about entrepreneurship.
The rules of optical dispensing vary from state to state. Dispensing eyeglasses is not that complicated, and even if it were complicated, there should be uniform rules.
If you think about what are glasses, they are the best example of form and function.
For any collaboration to work, each partner must have a strong sense of identity. If one overpowers the other, it's like mixing lemonade with water - you wind up diluting the brew.
It's not easy to keep good sleep habits as an entrepreneur, especially at the early stages when there's always a fire to put out.
I completely believe in the lean startup and minimum viable product; I just I think that people are setting the threshold for minimum viable too low.
Venture capital is an inherently optimistic form of investment - which is both its primary strength and its primary weakness.
It's never easy asking for help.
At the end of the day, an entrepreneurial journey is all about de-risking: How can you spend the least amount of time and money to accomplish your goal? The more information you can gather, the more comfortable you'll be investing time and money into a particular offering.
Within an office, it's important to create opportunities for anonymous feedback.
During times of plenty - when venture funding is abundant and startups multiply like rabbits - every business looks like a winner.
Exploring emerging technologies like new refraction technology will enable people to get prescriptions cheaper and more conveniently, which will, in turn, provide increased access to prescription glasses.
On the day it launched, Warby Barker received more than twice as many visits as our regular site.
I previously worked as the director of VisionSpring, a non-profit dedicated to distributing glasses to people in need.
Nothing creates cool like scarcity.
Every day, write down a few frustrations. And then at the end of the week, you'll have maybe 10 problems. By the end of the month, maybe you have 40 to 50 problems. And then you can spend time thinking about, Is there a viable business in solving any of these everyday frustrations?
If you peek behind the curtain at any type of company, you'll see that things are far less organized than you'd expect.
I personally try to buy the best-quality items at the best price that do the least harm and from companies that are striving to do good - many of those companies are run by young entrepreneurs.
Details matter. They create depth, and depth creates authenticity.
