How Thrive Market's millennial CEO built a "Costco model" for healthy eating

Fortune

Thrive Market CEO Nick Green explains how he built a healthy food membership grocer (think: Whole Foods meets Costco) that boasts over $700 million in sales.

Transcript

00:00It sounds terrible to say this, but the way I described that first entrepreneurial journey

00:03was failing my way to success. I made every mistake in the book from bad hires, to micromanaging,

00:10to operational mistakes. My first ever job was actually starting my first company. After doing

00:15really well on the SAT, I started teaching SAT classes in high school. And that evolved

00:21into my first business when I was an undergrad at Harvard called Ivy Insiders. So I call myself an

00:27accidental entrepreneur. We got bought three years later by another test prep company.

00:32And then in the back half of that year, I started looking at what my next thing was going to be.

00:36And so I met Gunnar, my first co-founder. He pitched me initially as an angel investor,

00:42and he had this big idea to make healthy living accessible to anybody. By the end of the meeting,

00:48I was basically pitching him on like, let's do something together in this space. And that was

00:52when we stumbled into the Costco model. We had some real challenges from the get-go in fundraising.

00:59I talked to 50 plus VCs, all of whom rejected us. But looking back on it, I think the thing

01:04that really kept us going was that strength of the mission.

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