Reese Witherspoon on Stories That Sell | Dreamforce 2026
In a candid, conversational interview at Dreamforce 2026, host Erin sits down with Reese Witherspoon to explore the evolution of her career from actress to media entrepreneur. The dialogue opens with a nostalgic look at Elle Woods, a role that taught Witherspoon the power of being underestimated and the importance of self‑ownership, themes that echo throughout her later ventures. Reese recounts the catalyst for founding Hello Sunshine in 2011 – a frustration with the lack of female‑led stories after a demeaning script and a subsequent industry audit that revealed studios weren’t developing any women‑centric projects. She self‑funded the company, optioned books like Gone Girl and Wild, and turned them into box‑office hits and Oscar‑nominated films, later expanding into TV with Big Little Lies (8 Emmys) and other series. The conversation delves into lessons from earlier businesses (Type A Films, Pacific Standard, Draper James), emphasizing customer behavior over rhetoric, and how retail insights informed media decisions. Reese explains her content‑selection process: leveraging her prolific reading habit and Reese’s Book Club as a live focus group to gauge audience appetite, then deciding the appropriate medium (film, series, podcast). She highlights the book club’s impact – over 80 NYT bestsellers, dozens of adaptations, and tangible financial empowerment for authors, including one who paid off her mortgage. The interview also covers her self‑taught entrepreneurial path, the centrality of relationships in fundraising and talent acquisition, and the importance of humility in learning business fundamentals. Reese stresses adapting to shrinking attention spans by meeting audiences where they are (short‑form video, YouTube, social platforms) and the need for bold, authentic storytelling. Trust emerges as a recurring value, both in personal collaborations (e.g., with Nicole Kidman, Jennifer Aniston) and in broader business culture. The session concludes with Reese’s core lesson: relationships matter more than technology; people, not AI, provide the emotional connection that drives success.
Chapters
Join me. Thank you all. What a warm welcome. I can tell by the size of this room and how full we are that they're just as excited to talk to you as I am.
I'm so excited to be in the cloud.
Have you ever talked in a cloud before?
Really in the cloud.
I was also going to say, isn't this how you sit down with all of your best friends, just like face to face? With a couple thousand people surrounding you.
I'd feel better if it was rotating.
You know what? We can do that.
I kind of feel like I've got my back to you guys. Hey, guys.
Well, thank you.
I'll just keep doing that.
We'll just trade sides maybe throughout the conversation. Thank you for being here. We're so excited to have you.
This is such a pleasure. You guys have had such a great lineup over the past few days. I mean, these are hard acts to follow. Sam Altman and Dario Amadei. And I'm like, and me?
What do I do?
We are equally excited to have you here.
will all bear with me for a moment. I want to just share a little bit about Reese that I— we cannot start without just reminding us of where this icon has come from and what you've done. So, you are one of those names that really doesn't need an introduction, but I'm going to do it anyways. You are Hollywood's most beloved star, a rare double threat, actually after our last conversation, like a quadruple threat, but award-winning actress, powerhouse media mogul, a mom, an incredible businesswoman, an entrepreneur. And we know and love you for so many of your iconic roles. June Carter Cash from Walk the Line, the era-defining Elle Woods from Legally Blonde. And more recently, we've seen you in the critically acclaimed Big Little Lies.
Big Little Lies, yeah.
Little Fires Everywhere and The Morning Show, all series, right? All series that she both starred in and produced through her own media company, Hello Sunshine.
Yeah.
Hello Sunshine, together with Reese's Book Club, aims to bring women's stories at the center of TV, film, and publishing, a venture that has made Reese one of the most powerful and revered producers in the industry. So along the way, she's written a few books herself. She started a retail brand, Dropper James. Both on and off screen, the list goes on and on. Sharp, funny, relentlessly entrepreneurial, you've spent decades proving that being underestimated is usually just someone else's mistake. You guys, Reese Witherspoon.
Thank you, Erin. Thank you. Thank you.
As we were starting questions, I was trying to think of, you know, what's the character that, you know, we first fell in love with with Reese? And I'm like, it's every single one. And so maybe I'll just take us back to maybe one of your most iconic, from my own lens as well. But Elle Woods wasn't just a career-defining character. She was career-defining for a generation. She became an icon of being underestimated, yet relentless, smart, warm, unapologetically herself. And now that character is really getting a revival. And so my first question to you is, why do you think Elle has stayed with people for so long?
You know, I think Elle Woods— I was 22 when I played that part. I think I was 23 when the part came out. And I I think something that was really important to me, and it actually has a lot to do with Gloria Steinem. I was having this moment where I read the script and I really, I wanted to do the movie, but I felt like it felt so light and about how she looked. And it was really important to me that it had some substance to it that would be a stickiness to it. And I was watching a documentary on Bravo. I just had a baby.
I had a little baby at the time.
Oh, wow. my daughter, and Gloria Steinem was on this documentary talking about how important Goldie Hawn's career had been in creating these characters that you thought she was kind of dumb and you would underestimate her, but she always packed this powerful punch at the end.
Mm-hmm.
She was always not something— she would either be a really grounded person, like I'm thinking about Private Benjamin was this big movie in the '80s where, you know, she enters the Army, you know, and at the very end she breaks up with her fiancé and punches him in the face, and Gloria Steinem said, was such a seminal moment for women watching that, and I thought, that's what this is.
Yeah.
Elle Woods comes in in a perfect package that you want to dismiss her. You wanna say because she's pulled together, that she's thinking about her appearance, that she can't be a woman of substance. But that's actually not true, you know, that you can actually be this modern feminist where you can present beautifully, care about your appearance, but also get a perfect score on your LSAT.
Yeah.
You know, and those don't have to be exclusive, you know, mutually exclusive. So I think that was one of the pieces of it. And also, I think the idea that you're underestimated. I mean, I don't know probably a person in this room that hasn't had an experience where somebody told you either you weren't good enough, you weren't smart enough, you couldn't do that, you can't dream that big. And you did it anyway. And isn't that the best feeling? I think that's the Elle Woods feeling.
Yeah, it's that hero's journey, right? You can all— it stays with you, like someone triumphed, they pushed through. What do you think she has meant to you as a character personally?
What's that?
What do you think she's meant to you personally?
Oh, gosh. Well, I had no idea this character that I created when I was 22 years old would live with me for this long. I mean, I just thought other characters would become more important. You know, you don't realize that your legacy— you're building your legacy when you're 23 years old is just bizarre. But I had grown up going to all-girls school and reading a lot of feminist theory, and I just really wholeheartedly want to impart a lot of that self-worth messaging inside of the film. So to me, it's really important too that it broke this rom-com convention of ending up with a guy at the end. She really doesn't end up with— it isn't this journey about this guy telling her who she is or being part of her identity. Her identity is that she graduated from Harvard Law School and gave the valedictorian speech, and she would go on to be an incredibly powerful lawyer, but that her life is her own. It's hers to mess up. It's hers to achieve. But that, I think, is what's resonated for a long time, and it's what stayed with me. My life is my own.
Yeah.
And every mistake I've made and every wonderful accomplishment Hold the same kind of weight and space in my life. They're both amazing and wonderful, and it's all part of this beautiful journey that we're on.
Yeah, not centered on someone else, but it's your own life, right?
My life is mine. I know that feels like, of course your life is yours, but I think as a woman, there's a lot of moments where you feel like your life is defined by when you have children. Are you having children? Once your children come into your life, they run your life. I mean, my children ran my life for probably 15 years, you know? And now I'm coming into a new part of my life, which is empty nester. My daughter's 27, my son is 23. I have a little 14-year-old, but he just, you know, is on his own e-bike journey.
Once you've had 3 and you're down to 1, it's like, you know, none. We're good.
Oh my God, e-bikes. I can't. It's just, it's all every day. It's like, Mom, can I get an e-bike? I'm like, oh my God, he's tenacious and ambitious. Very Elle Woods of him.
Great characteristics for later.
I gave birth to 3 of them. Yes, I know. But yeah, your life is your own. And at these moments, like these crossroads, right, you hit these moments in your life where you go, okay, if I don't do something to change my life, if I don't make these decisions, someone will do that for me. Someone will make these decisions for me. So it's better to be the captain of your own destiny.
Yeah, I feel like that's very— I mean, you fast forward a couple of decades. I love it. You fast forward a couple decades and you launch Hello Sunshine, which really started as the realization that there were not enough films being made with female characteristics at the lead, which I think plays into what you're talking about right now, right? Of you owning your path and you weren't seeing those stories perhaps reflected. So take us through a little bit of that journey and what brought you to know that you wanted to get moving with Hello Sunshine.
Yeah. Well, around 2011, I'd been a working actress for 20 years. had made movies at every single studio. And, but we had this really interesting kind of dip in our business after 2008. That financial crash caused the DVD market to shift. It was kind of the beginning of social media and the beginning of streaming. And I got this really awful script. My agent called me and said, oh, you got to read the script. It's so good. It's so great. You got to read it. And I read it and I was like, this is absolutely offensive. It was about some imbecile man and 2 women who were fighting over him. And there were boob jokes, and there were racist tropes. And I called my agent, and I said, this is drivel. Like, why would I want to do this? She said, every actress in Hollywood wants these 2 parts. And I said, well, that's frightening. And— I do what anybody does when they realize a problem. I just got mad, and I called my mother. And I complained. And I was like, Mom, you will not believe this. This is unbelievable. There's boob jokes. They want me to do boob jokes. Like, I'm not— I'm better than this. I'm better than this. And my girlfriends are better than this. My actress friends are better than this. And she was like, oh, I don't know what to do. I'm a nurse. You know, like, what do you— So I complained to everyone I could complain to. And then I did a listening tour. I went to see every head of every studio in Hollywood. And I said, what are you developing for female leads? Because I got a little girl. Like, what are we putting into their brains? Media is very, very important. These movies are very important. And every single studio said to me, we are not developing anything with a female lead. Nothing. Not one movie. And then one studio had said to me, we are developing one movie that's going to star a woman, but we can't have 2 this year.
Not in the same year.
And that was my like, are you joking me? We're 50% of the population globally. The total addressable market is 50% of the world.
Yeah.
And you're not even like considering developing, which is a drop in the bucket for them. So I just, I realized in that moment I could either get busy being amazed by this problem or I could do something about it. So, I rented a little office. I decided to self-fund a company. I started reading stacks and stacks and stacks of books in galleys 6 months, like, before they would come out. And I bought 2 books and optioned them, Gone Girl and a book called Wild. And you guys know what that is, but I had no idea, you guys, that the books came out and hit number 1 the same month in, I think, July of— 2013 or something on the New York Times bestseller list. And I was like, oh crap, now I have to make the movies. They have to be good. But I leaned on those relationships I built for 20 years, and I called my friends and I was like, look, I'm gonna self-fund this development. It's gonna be hard, but I'm going to be in one of these movies, and then I'm gonna work like a dog to get great actress in the other one. And we ended up getting 3 Oscar nominations and $600 million at the box office. And I was like, okay, I'm on to something. I'm on to something. So the next project we did was called Big Little Lies. It was based on a book. Nicole Kidman wanted the book. I wanted the book. So instead of like going up against each other, I called Nic and I was like, I don't really know you. Like, we're always in different movies, but do you want to make a TV show together? Like—
That's amazing.
She was like, oh yeah, that's a great idea. She was like, as long as I can play Celeste, it's It's fine. And so we did it. And like movie stars weren't really doing TV at the time, but it was also like, hey, let's be bold and try this new thing. And we went to every streamer and we pitched it and we ended up getting 8 Emmys.
That's incredible.
Yeah. So it was an auspicious start. Now I can tell you there's been lots of hills and valleys. But it was that entrepreneurial leap and the ability, like, also to go, I'm not going to work for anybody else. I'm only going to work on this for the next— I mean, it's been now 12 years of my life.
And that takes a lot of courage, right? There's those early days where you aren't necessarily putting anything out yet and seeing the results yet. Do you think you knew that you were onto it, or were you just driven by being so enraged that you're like, whether or not, I'm going to do this?
Well, rage is a great motivator.
Yeah, I agree.
It's just this great motivator. And also, have you ever had this moment in your business where you look around and you go, well, these people are idiots, and that one over there, I've known him for 5 years, I don't even know if he knows what he's doing. Like, I could do his job 5 times better in my sleep. And then I was like, okay, also I'm going to take a bet on myself. I am— I always say I'm my best lottery ticket. 'Cause I know I'll show up and I know I will pay off. Now, it might not be a home run, but I'll definitely hit a double or a triple.
Yeah.
'Cause of how hard I'll dig in. I will make the 100 phone calls that need to make it done. But I also, the cool thing too about finding out your passion and when it aligns with what you've actually built a career doing is like you start to realize people around you are passionate about the same thing. If your business has a mission inside of it, you're gonna find like-minded people who wanna walk on that path with you. Yeah, that's it. So I was really lucky. I— thank you. I found these amazing people who quit their corporate jobs and their comfy, cozy lives and their 401 plans and their, you know, fancy healthcare plans. And we started walking with this mission and Yeah, 6 years later, we sold to Blackstone for a big number.
Which is the ultimate payback for those no movies being made for women. We did.
That sort of calmed the rage a little bit.
You felt better.
I don't feel so mad anymore. I feel pretty good about that.
I love that. Well, Hello Sunshine wasn't your first business. There was Type A Films, there was Pacific Standard, Draper James, and you've been very candid about your learnings and challenges in those businesses. What did those early ventures teach you about building a successful business, and what did you change over the years?
Okay, well, I was talking to somebody today about, you know, building a retail business is— wasn't my best idea. I've had some good ideas. That wasn't my best idea. That's just a really hard business. But I think I learned fundamental principles through building a retail business that brought me to Hello Sunshine. 'Cause it made me understand customers better. It made me understand what people are willing to pay for and what they're not willing to pay for. 'Cause you can have all these principles in your mind, like, this is gonna be made in a certain way with artisans. No one wants to pay for that.
Yeah.
They don't wanna pay a premium for that. They'll talk all day long that they don't like fast fashion or they all want fast fashion.
Yeah.
Right? Everybody's principled until it really actually comes to the pay till and they're like, all their principles go out of the window. So you gotta be smart about customers and and look at their behavior, not the rhetoric online about what they say they care about, right? It's like, what do they actually do?
Right.
So the movie business is no different. Like, what will people show up to a movie theater for? What do they think is just a podcast? What do they think is a television show where they would rather binge it over, you know, 8 to 10 episodes? So a lot of what we do in our business is trying to discern What sits in what category in media.
Tell us a little bit more about that. How do you navigate that discernment in order to determine when something is meant for a movie or maybe a series or a podcast, or what is that spark that helps you know?
Well, it helps that I had 35 years of reading. I mean, with all— like, I've never read more books in my entire life. I was like, wait, be careful what you wish for, because I started a book club and now I'm like, oh my God, I'm drowning in reading. But it's like the greatest gift too because I have this ability to just really look at a book and go, people are going to love that. Like somebody pitched me Theo of Golden. I was like, that is a runaway. Theo of Golden, have you all read Theo of Golden?
Yes.
Oh, it's such a great, beautiful book. It has these fundamental principles that are about human connection and small-town community. That's what we all like kind of secretly want. I mean, it's why Hallmark movies work. We all want to live in a tiny little Georgia town that has like one post office, and we have like a coffee shop where everybody knows our name. And that's— I can see things. I'm good at reading for popularity. Like, I can see what books work. And then I've got this amazing team that works at Hello Sunshine, and we'll all just sit down and have like a meeting. We'll go, okay, is that a TV show or a film? If it's a film, what kind of film? Is it a streaming film or are we going to try and make this a box office movie? And who is this for too? Like, who are we targeting so that we, before we ever begin, there's all this foundational work that goes into understanding the customer.
Yeah.
Also, the book club is a good litmus test, right? So we'll pick the book and if it gets traction with an audience, we have this empirical data that it can build from there.
It's like the masterclass in focus groups, right? Like I have— you did just design the book club so that now you have a focus group for the movies now.
Yeah.
I mean, it is. It's great feedback.
Yeah. Yeah. And actually, yeah, all of Hello Sunshine and our media platforms, whether it's on Instagram, Facebook, or TikTok, is a litmus test for what our audience will— what we should invest in next. And it's kind of a great way of kind of cherry-picking audience, their interests. And going towards those interests and cutting bait on things that don't work.
Yeah. So what makes this even more incredible is that you are a self-taught founder. You learned through doing, right? We talked a little about the doers.
I didn't go to business school.
You didn't go to business school.
I went to Harvard Law School, but only in a movie.
I mean, but she also—
I didn't go there for real.
She went to Stanford also, so let's not fool ourselves on who we're talking to here. But you—
I was a literature major. Like, I never went to business school.
Well, you know, people who work hard work hard, so.
But I did get to talk at Harvard Business last year, and I was like, well, this is weird.
In our eyes, you have a degree.
I do.
Well, thank you.
Oh, wait. Can I tell a funny story? Yeah, of course. So, you know, everybody thinks I'm a lawyer. It's bizarre. But I got put on jury duty, like, probably 7 years ago, and it was a murder trial. And— no, it wasn't a murder trial.
Well, it makes it more fun. Let's just say it was a murder trial.
That made the story better. But no, it was like a— it was a kind of serious— And I was on this trial for 5 days. And we went to the jury deliberation room at the very end of the trial. And they said, okay, well, who is gonna be the foreman? And they all pointed at me. And I was like, what do you mean? And this girl goes, well, you went to law school. You're a lawyer. And I was like, no, no, no. I didn't. But then I realized I knew more about the law being in Legally Blonde than trying 12 people who were American citizens. And I was like, well, this is troubling. And then we went through the whole process, and people literally referenced the movie and whether or not you could have kind of a doubt, a reasonable doubt, or sort of a doubt. What was the thing again? And I was like, oh my God, I'm so frightened for the world.
You were more lawyery than the rest of them. Maybe not all the way a lawyer, but like a little step closer or two.
I was close enough to being a lawyer.
Lawyer adjacent.
Anyway.
We'll add it to your description when we read you in.
She was acquitted.
Oh my goodness. Well, talk to us a little bit about where you think you got your business chops, your early confidence, you know, Risa's School of Business. Like, where did it— as you started crafting what you were going to make moving forward, what did that really look like?
I think a lot— well, I mean, I'm sure a lot of people in this room were entrepreneurs, like, when they were little kids. I just always had the bug. I wanted to sell things in lemonade stands, but how could I upsell things, like add a brownie to your lemonade and run the margins correctly? and I ran a barrette customization stand out of 3rd grade and I got detention for it. Because I was whatever, I don't need to get into it. But I was always cooking up ideas to engage customers and wanting to be part of the marketing piece of things. And I think also a big part of my early career was making sure I, when I had time off, filming, I would go intern as post-production, or I would intern in pre-production on other people's movies. So I learned every side of my business. I think that's really important for younger people. Like, you need to understand how your business operates, and you need to have done almost every job inside the org to understand the effort of everyone.
Yeah.
And how important that collaborative effort is, right? Because any good business is like choreography and concert and teamwork. And if you can't have deep appreciation for the person doing the job over there, it doesn't work. So, I do think that was a fundamental of business that just sort of was part of my life and part of what helped me when I had to start a company of my own, get started.
Yeah, that makes sense. Tell us about a gamble that you took on yourself that perhaps you— it wasn't obvious whether it would make sense on paper, but that you A gamble you took that worked out.
Yeah, I think it was really scary taking that. First of all, raising capital was really scary. I mean, just going out in the world and this was— I mean, I was a 34-year-old woman raising capital and they had certain people gave me my Series A funding and they had to call my former bosses at different studios to vouch for whether or not I was a person who said, you know, what I—
Delivered.
Yes, was I accountable? I thought that was like remarkable, but it makes sense. But it was just, it was really important to me that I had maintained all those relationships because at the end of the day, everything is a relationship business. You can have AI automate so many parts of meaningless tasks, but it's the little interactions that we have with each other that are human that are really important. And people would send me pictures from when I was 20 and I showed up on their set or I came to their movie premiere or there was a union strike and I showed up and brought everybody donuts, you know. I just, I try to emphasize that to people too, like even as things are rapidly changing in my business, Don't be afraid because if you've been the person you said you were and you really showed up for others and you really did the thing you said you would do, you're gonna be okay. You know, it is a relationship. Everything is relationship-based.
Yeah, and then those relationships will have your back when things get hard, when things are good, they'll be there with you. And I think when we talked about earlier too that, you know, connection is just so incredibly important right now and making sure that you're fostering those, that as you're carving maybe an uncharted path forward, You know, you have people that you can lean on and you can bring along with you.
Yeah, that's true. I was really proud of all the people who came with me and really helped me start my business because it didn't work if, you know, there wasn't this strong foundation of people who were actually— also, I'll say the other thing that was scary was not knowing a lot of the terminology that people speak very quickly and talk about EBITDA and ROI, and I was I was lost and I had all these creative ideas and marketing ideas, but I'd never been in the weeds in terms of P&L. And so I had this amazing woman, Sarah Hardin, who left her big fancy corporate job to help me. She was my first CEO at Hello Sunshine. And I would just whisper to her, I was like, what is EBITDA? And I wasn't afraid to ask her really dumb things and she never made me feel small for asking them. So I thought that was important.
And that in itself is brave, from when you were a child in the lemonade stand and going out there and adding the bundles. Just a lot of bravery coming through your story.
Yeah, and humility, you know, and realizing nothing really big is possible unless you just jump 2 feet into a cold pool.
Yeah, absolutely. So I want to go back to the premise of Hello Sunshine and your book club. The idea was that women's stories were not being told and that there was a lot of white space. Half the population, you shared, is absolutely wild. And it's funny because it seems so completely obvious, right? So you've pushed forward so many compelling, entertaining stories. We've named a few of them already today. Big Little Lies, The Morning Show, the last few years. We almost take for granted that that wasn't the norm. I mean, truly, even myself, I've become so accustomed to getting to see these beautiful stories with really dynamic female leads. And I almost, as I was thinking about these questions, I forgot. I'm like, that wasn't our norm.
Yeah.
And so my question for you is, What connected with you in telling women's stories and seeing females in the lead was such a valuable white space to go take up?
Well, yeah, I mean, thank you for saying that because I do think there's— we do forget, right? And that status quo at the time was there'd be one woman in a movie and she was usually the wife or the girlfriend of the superhero or the guy, or there'd be like one movie with a woman but it was about something very small and interior and it was always in relationship to a guy. to a man, and it always had something to do with romance.
Yeah.
But like even that story where I say I called Nicole Kidman and we weren't— we didn't really know each other. I didn't know a lot of other women in my business because we were siloed.
Yeah.
You were the one girl.
Yeah. It almost sets up a dynamic of being pit against, right?
Yeah.
Rather than with.
Well, yeah.
And you broke that down.
And also when you don't know, you know, and we weren't having conversations with each other. But we had to kind of break through that, right? And go, also, don't be afraid. We're gonna bet on each other and there's power in numbers. So I think when that kind of opened, that was like 2017. I'm not talking about 1912.
Yeah.
I'm talking about 9 years ago.
Yeah.
I had never been in a scene with 5 women of the same caliber ever in my entire career. And I'm sitting there with Nicole Kidman, Laura Dern, Meryl Streep, Zoe Kravitz and Shailene Woodley, and we're all having a conversation about the dynamics of motherhood and friendship, domestic violence. I mean, the other thing that was amazing about that show was that it felt frothy and fun, but it was about domestic violence.
Yeah.
And the secrets that we keep, and that's 1 in 3 women is experiencing that. So I feel really proud of the relationships too. Like, getting to work with Jennifer Aniston on The Morning Show is like this crazy surreal serendipity because Because we did Friends together. I was her sister.
Yeah, I remember.
On Friends. And that wasn't 1912, but that was 1999.
Okay. Who's counting? No cell—
I mean, we barely had cell phones. And it was just— but now getting to talk about women in journalism and how scary it is to be a female journalist and how, you know, we don't trust broadcast journalism anymore. And those are the themes that— and workplace harassment. That's what the show is about, you know. Getting to dive into all of that in a really complex way and getting to have female writers and directors around us helping fill out those stories is just a dream come true.
Yeah, it's so inspiring, and you're telling so many meaningful stories that need to be told and much more complexity than I think before in the 1912s we were getting. But I speak for, I think, many women in this room and many men as well to say that we're so grateful.
I mean, I think that too. I was like, does it just occur to me? When Jen and I met each other, most of what people knew about us was about our hair. I mean, think about that. Most of what people talked about with Jennifer was her hair.
Yeah.
In 1999. And people talked about my hair in a movie. And like, the fact that we've become the boss and now we run a show that's a multi-hundred million dollar show a year, and she and I are the lead producers, and that we're in charge of 400 to 800 people a year to create this production for Apple TV is amazing.
Okay, selfishly, you have to tell us a little bit what it was like to reconnect with her on a project. I'm sure, you know, you lived whole versions of yourselves between when you first worked together closely and then now you're working together closely again. What was that like?
It's incredible because we both had these very deep lives, but we've also lived under the microscope of public scrutiny, every relationship, our parenting journeys, our decision to have kids, not have children. You know, that's everybody's discussion, you know? And so to have some sense or semblance of control or wisdom to impart or to be able to shape the stories that Hollywood is telling or— we were the very first show on Apple TV. The fact that they took that leap with us, but we also You know, took it with them is a big deal. You know, to be first movers in a space, it really, it meant a lot to us both. I mean, we're bound for life. We're like sisters.
I love that. Well, it's easy to take a bet on 2 people like yourselves, especially when you're willing to bet on yourselves. So they just probably saw what you saw, and I think none of us could have imagined how big that was and how incredible story it was to watch come to life. So let's talk a little bit more about the book club.
Yes.
We just chatted about how you're able to garner all this intelligence from it, right, on what's working, what stories are taking, how the book club reacts to it. Talk to us a little bit about how it started.
The book club actually started because somebody was stealing from me. I can name names.
We're ready.
Yeah. I don't know who they were, but I, when Instagram first started, I was like, remember when Instagram started? Do you guys remember that?
So weird.
We're like, who cares what anybody's doing and why are we sharing? I don't understand. And I remember I had this young woman came over and she explained to me like social media and like, I don't know, you could take a picture of your pasta and like people want to see. And I was like, really? That feels so dumb. And she was like, okay, but what do you like do? And I was like, I just read a lot of books. I'm just I'm like a— I was always a girl who read a lot of books. She goes, okay, well, take pictures of your books and then put them online. And she was so cute. She was really helpful. And you should have seen how scared I was, guys. I was like, people are gonna know things about me. And I was like, oh, I don't care if people know what I was reading. But anyway, my point back to the stealing was, then somebody started going on Facebook and saying they ran— they were me and they ran my book club. And they were like, I'm Reese and I'm on Facebook and this is my book club and I chose this book and this book. I was like, wait, first of all, I wouldn't choose any of those books. They were like Fifty Shades of Grey or something. I was like, that's not— I did not pick that book. So I was like, oh wait, I have to own this. So that's when I kind of got the idea with my CEO, Sarah Harden. She was like, why don't we sort of create structure around this, a behavioral cadence too, where you pick a book a month, and then we'll start creating content around it. Nobody knew what content was then. We were like—
Yeah.
I'll just do like little videos where I talk about why I like the book. Now we have 3.5 million followers on Instagram. We have over 60 million people across all the platforms with Hello Sunshine and Reese's Book Club. And it's been a tremendous success and this flywheel where the thing I didn't understand was picking these books was going to change these authors' lives.
Yeah.
You know, I knew people would read the books, but I didn't think people would read that many books. But it can— the most profound thing is like one time I got this text and it was a picture of a key. And I said to the one— it was a Reese's Book Club author. And she said— I said, what is that? And she said, I was able to pay off the mortgage on my home. And this makes me emotional.
You're going to make me cry.
It's like, you don't understand what financial freedom means to one person. Like, I didn't even think of that. She goes, and I'm going to be able to pay for my kid to go to college because I don't have to worry about my mortgage.
Yeah.
And do you understand I'm going to be the first person in my family's line of, you know, generations to fully own my own home? And the kind of financial security that provides for so many women. So we have over Out of 120 selections, 80 of them have become New York Times bestsellers.
That's amazing.
Which is amazing. And I— we've turned 10 of them or 12 of them into movies and television shows, which is just incredible to expand the reach of the storytelling because I just think it's one of these ways that we stay human, you know, stay literate, stay human. And there's this— there was an amazing book that came out 2 years ago called James by Percival Everett. Did anybody read James? It's a retelling of the Huckleberry Finn story from this slave's perspective. The slave Jim is actually this man named James.
Yeah.
And the writer won the Pulitzer, and he said, I think the most subversive thing right now to do, the first most subversive thing, is to be a reader, to make up your own decisions about how you feel about things, not have an algorithm tell you how to feel about things. The second most subversive thing you can do is belong to a book club because now you're socializing these ideas, right?
Yeah.
Now you're going, hey, hold on, let me challenge the status quo. What did this book say? What did that— no, I read a book, you know, and you're talking about real things that people have to research for years and years to finally get that publishing deal. So I'm all in on books and keeping literacy alive. Absolutely. And thriving. Yeah.
It's such a life-changing impact, not only to the authors, but also to those that get to make that connection around the books, right? And how they chart their path forward. So we're all grateful for you for doing that.
Yeah.
So you've spoken publicly about the shifts in attention span, even noticing that your own kids aren't going to movies anymore. You've said, and I think this is a quote for you, You've got to go where the audience is, not lament the fact that they didn't show up, which as a marketer speaks to my core. So what does going where the audience is look like for Hello Sunshine?
Well, you have to be constantly on your toes in this ever-shifting world. I mean, attention span is getting shorter and shorter. I mean, I can't believe you guys have been sitting here this long. I feel like the human capacity to listen to another human go on and on is about 20 minutes. Let's get real, that's what it is. I think you have to think in terms of not lamenting, oh God, nobody wants to see a 2 and 3-hour movie anymore. You have to pivot, you have to shift. If your information has to be more impactful and it has to be in quicker bites or the way you distribute your marketing dollars has to be more thoughtful. There's 3 billion people on YouTube. You cannot compete with that. It's just where eyeballs are. And then, you know, I think you have to take your bets too and be bold.
Yeah.
I think, you know, fortune favors the bold. I wrote that on a piece of paper and stuck it on my 14-year-old's mirror. You got to make big, brave decisions. And we need real leadership in these days where people are afraid to say stuff, you know.
Yeah.
You got to really get people's attention by being authentic. And I think I'm leaning on people that people trust too. I'm seeing that more and more people don't trust anyone. People aren't rooting for people and people don't trust. So I think there's even more emphasis on if you have people within your networks or people in the world that you want to employ, look at if people trust them. I think that's going to be one of the most important values going forward.
Yeah, we agree. It's one of the values that we hold very true and that trust is something that we make sure at Salesforce Of course, we stay connected to, right? Because it's everything.
Yeah.
It's our number one.
It's like Matthew McConaughey sitting there talking about it. I'm like, I want to call Matthew and go, do you really know what you're talking about? Do you know what I'm saying? I'm just like, yeah, no. Yeah. No. I'm not saying like— but y'all, I know Matthew. I've done a movie with Matthew. I really think he does.
No, you'd be surprised. He knows a lot.
Because I was like, I know, I really, I could have called Matthew and be like, Reese, of course I know, of course I know. You know, Agent Force is an incredible software that you need to use. And why, you know, employ a bunch of Agent Force? But he really cares.
He really is very involved.
And I do trust him because you can tell that he's, discerning in his choices and careful with what he aligns with. And that's trust. And I trust him implicitly, but I was like, this is really, really impressive.
Yeah. Listen, and he gives us feedback, right? We talk about, we have a long-running joke at Salesforce about the feedback.
I wanted him to say like, are you using AI or is AI using you?
We'll work that into the next video.
Hold on, I'm gonna have to trademark that really quick. Trademark that really quick. Really, really quick. Hold on, Chelsea. Okay, yeah, she's trademarking right now, right now.
Okay, so most of us in this room aren't in entertainment, although I would say we are thoroughly entertained right now. But throughout the lines of your career, entrepreneurship, risk, judgment, grit, it all translates far beyond Hollywood. So what is one lesson that you would leave this room with?
Oh boy. I mean, a lot. Like, the people that you're on your journey with are so important. The people standing next to you when you fail or succeed, it's just everything, right? So I only really— I trust the people around me because the highs are really high in the Hollywood business and the lows are really low. I mean, the Saturday morning after nobody goes to see your movie on Friday night, It's just, it really, I mean, it sucks. The shade is cold. So I think, you know, in the world where everything's shifting, relationships matter, the people you stand next to matter, what you pour into them, what they pour into you. We all don't know. We're all in existential dread right now, right? But how we feel about each other still matters.
Yeah, I agree.
It still matters. AI doesn't wipe your tears and it doesn't make you laugh.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know? Yeah.
Doesn't make you cry, but your coworkers do.
Yeah.
They really, really do. Absolutely.
Well, I just wanna say thank you for coming and sharing all these thoughts with us. We had a great time with you.
Thank you. You guys have been great.
Thank you.
Give it up for Reese.
Thank you.
