Words matter. These are the best Neil Blumenthal Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
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.
Be personable to everyone you interact with.
One of the core values of the startup world is that you must have a list of core values. Like all abstract ideas, they’re easy to dream up and tricky to implement.
At its best, entrepreneurship creates jobs, solves problems, and galvanizes creative thinking.
If faced with two competitive candidates, every company will hire the person who evinces more enthusiasm.
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.
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.
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.
The trick to maximizing your team’s productivity is to create a workspace that’s flexible, so it can be altered according to the ever-changing needs of the company and its team members.
Building a consistent experience and firm identity was instrumental in our ability to swiftly build our online presence, open four stores as well as a mobile store in a converted yellow school bus, and launch six shops-in-shops.
I believe that the concept of ‘design’ encompasses every aspect of customers’s exposure to a brand, from the moment they hear about us to the first time they visit our store to the process of ordering and anticipating the arrival of their glasses.
Within an office, it’s important to create opportunities for anonymous feedback.
When you look at the reasons people leave companies, it’s usually because their boss is a jerk or because they aren’t learning and growing.
I was captain of the soccer and basketball teams in high school, and I was the equivalent of class president.
By creating a feedback culture within your office, you ensure that people continue to learn, grow, and challenge themselves.
On the day it launched, Warby Barker received more than twice as many visits as our regular site.
We’ve built our own technology platform in-house, which operates our website and powers our retail stores.
If you think about what are glasses, they are the best example of form and function.
When we were creating Warby Parker, for us it was about having a positive impact on the world and having a strong social mission.
Millennials are eager to make an impact, which makes them ideal for start-ups.
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.
The key to an ideal workplace, in one hyphenated word, is this: self-awareness.
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.
A good collaboration pushes the boundaries of both partners.
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.
All those articles that scold Millennials for their supposed entitlement? Forget them. Millennials are great employees.
All companies – and not just startups – face the same eternal challenge: resource allocation.
It’s never easy asking for help.
If you peek behind the curtain at any type of company, you’ll see that things are far less organized than you’d expect.
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?
We’ve built a company that distributes a pair of eyeglasses to someone in need for every pair sold; that purchases carbon offsets; and that hosts mentoring programs at the office.
When my three co-founders and I started Warby Parker in 2010, our primary intention was to sell good-looking, affordable eyewear online.
Giving employees agency over their workspace encourages them to think carefully about the conditions in which they work best, and it gives them the tools to forge that environment.
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.
Walking in the morning improves my whole day. I think more clearly, my points of view are sharper, and I’m more decisive.
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?
If you’re entitled, you likely think you know more than you do.
Successful entrepreneurs are pretty methodical about the problem they’re trying to solve.
People who are passionate about Warby Parker are passionate about creating a company that can scale, be profitable, and do good in the world – without charging a premium for it.
One of my favorite products at Warby Parker also happens to be our worst-selling item: the monocle.
During times of plenty – when venture funding is abundant and startups multiply like rabbits – every business looks like a winner.
Every generation trash-talks younger generations. Baby boomers labeled Generation X a group of tattooed slackers and materialists; Generation Xers have branded millennials as iPhone-addicted brats.
Theoretically, an open-plan office is a great format for a changeable work environment, a place where employees have a say over how they work and a place that can adapt to their needs and to the needs of the business.
Every moment contains an opportunity to create feelings of satisfaction and excitement in a customer. It’s up to retailers to make it happen.
Creativity is a business imperative.
Self-awareness is a trait – or maybe ‘practice’ is the more accurate way to put it – that everyone can always improve at. It is part emotional intelligence, part perceptiveness, part critical thinking. It means knowing your weaknesses, of course, but it also means knowing your strengths and what motivates you.
When it comes to marketing, creative resources are often worth far more than dollars.
Share your personality with interviewers, but keep a professional filter safely adhered to it.
