How we became eyewear entrepreneurs: Neil Blumenthal and Dave Gilboa of Warby Parker
By Susannah Hutcheson 9:54 am EDT June 30, 2017
Welcome to our series “How I Became a …,” where we’re digging into the stories of accomplished and influential people and finding out how they got to where they are in their careers. We’re finding out what their biggest challenges, their biggest passions and their biggest pieces of wisdom are — for you.
Note: This interview has been lightly edited.
Eyeglasses are expensive, good needs to be done around the world, and almost 15% of the world’s population doesn’t have the access to glasses that they desperately need.
Those principles propelled Dave Gilboa and Neil Blumenthal into co-founding and running Warby Parker. The company, which was started out of their grad school apartments, has transformed into a business with over 50 stores around the country, over 1,000 employees, and a program that gives a pair of glasses to someone in need with every purchase.
USA TODAY College caught up with co-CEO’s Dave Gilboaand Neil Blumenthal to talk starting a brand, lost glasses and business school.
What’s your coffee order?
Dave: Usually I just prefer a straight black coffee.
Neil: A bottle of water.
What’s the coolest thing you’ve ever done?
Dave: Starting and growing Warby Parker has been an inspiring and rewarding journey. Starting a business with very close friends, building a team, creating a brand, making millions of our customers happy, and putting millions of glasses on people’s faces through our nonprofit partners has been really amazing.
Neil: Not to be repetitive, but I plus-one Dave’s. And, before business school I was at VisionSpring, and I started a bunch of their programs, including one in Bangladesh that celebrated and distributed a million glasses to someone in need. To be a part of that was pretty cool.
Career path?
Dave: I grew up the son of two doctors, and I was 100% sure that I was also going to become a doctor. I was a bioengineering major in college, went to UC Berkeley, took all of the pre-med classes there, took the MCAT, and while I was in school managed care started taking over the healthcare industry.
There were just major changes that, talking to my parents and friends, made it seem like the concept of being a practicing physician was evolving into something different. So I started looking into other paths and decided that it might be a good idea to learn some business and then one day be able to create that with other things to hopefully create a positive impact and make the world better.
So I joined a management consulting company — Bain &Company — and I worked there for three years in San Francisco and Stockholm.I moved to New York And worked for a small merchant bank called Allen and Company, working in finance and working with entrepreneurs to raise money and investing in healthcare and internet companies. I decided after a couple years of that that I wanted to figure out how to combine some of those business skills I’d learned with the idea that I could use those to help people. I took a few months off to travel before going back to business school to either start something or join an early-stage company.
While I Was traveling, I lost my glasses and they cost me $700. I lost them in Thailand while backpacking. I showed up to the first day of grad school without glasses, kind of complaining to anyone who would listen that glasses were too expensive. I Met Neil and we became friends, and Jeff (Raider) and Andy (Hunt) (our other two co-founders) were all kind of the same friend group at school. We had all had the same kind of experiences when it came to losing glasses, breaking glasses, and being frustrated by the process.
Then Neil came to us about the idea of making glasses, given his experience at VisionSpring, and we got together and decided we were going to bootstrap the business and launch out of our apartments while we were still in school.
Neil: I went to Tufts undergrad and was studying international relations. I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do, but I had this idea that I wanted to make a difference and do good in the world. I think,like many college graduates, I didn’t know exactly what to do, so my instinct was to continue going to school. I did some grad coursework in the Netherlands On conflict resolution and mediation under the thought process that I would go to work for the State Department, foreign service, or work for a think tank that would come up with policy to end deadly conflict.
Continue Reading:
http://college.usatoday.com/2017/06/...s-warby-parker
and
http://visionspring.org
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