21 Dec 2018 · 7 min
Gunnar Lovelace, co-founder of Thrive Market, started an animation studio at 21 and sold it before building the e-commerce health-food company to 400 employees. He argues for launching quickly over perfectionism, learning ferociously, and treating fear as a teacher rather than overthinking decisions.
This is Five Minute Friday. Welcome, everyone, to this episode, a very special one, because we have a special human being on a dear friend of mine that I've connected with recently who is up to a big game in life and is looking to transform the world. and the health that we experience in the world. His name is Gnanar Luvlace and he is a serial entrepreneur in nonprofits, technology, fashion and real estate. But most recently he is the founder and co-CEO of Thrive Market, which is the largest e-commerce company in LA and is revolutionizing the health food industry.
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Now it seems like it'd be a lot to learn how to create this, like, animation cartoon company at 21, essentially, and teach. And then understand how to teach education at the same time. Did you have a lot of people working with you? How big was the company?
It was about 20 of us. So it wasn't a big company.
You started it yourself as the founder?
Yeah, I started it and then we ended up selling the company about a year into the project, which was great. I mean, it wasn't a huge hit, but it was a great, you know, it was like 21 and I had a nice win. And yeah, I mean, for me personally, I think one of the things that has always been my orientation to life is just learn as ferociously as possible. and it's one of the things that I tell a lot of my other entrepreneurial friends, particularly women that I think are actually more qualified than men often, but think that they need to know more and prepare more. And I think that we often overthink what we need to do next. And instead, the most valuable thing that we can do is just put ourself into the situation, get into the driver's seat, make the mistakes and see how, see the real world dynamic instead of trying to overthink it. And that to me, personally has been such a powerful learning lesson over and over and over again. I've never built a company like Thrive Market before. We're 400 employees. I've never operated with 400 employees before. But you just have to lean into it and you're honest with yourself and honest with your leadership team and make a lot of mistakes and make sure that there's a culture that it's okay to make mistakes while still being very oriented towards excellence and performance. and just be willing to learn. And I think that's such, and I know you share that. I mean, that's what your work's all about.
Yeah, it's interesting you say that because a lot of entrepreneurs that reach out or email me, and I'm sure you get the same thing, they're always asking a lot of questions, they have fears, they have doubts, concerns about putting themselves out there, creating a product or a company. And they always ask, how did you do it? And I'm always like, to be honest, I was just so ignorant about how to do it that I didn't have the fear of looking bad or looking silly. I was willing to put myself out there and try.
Right.
And take a lot of action over and over and make mistakes. A lot of people just aren't willing to make those mistakes. They don't want to look bad in their family or friends. It sounds like that's what you did. You were just willing to put yourself out there and learn as you've- yeah.
They'Re like learning opportunities. It is a mistake, but it's also compost for what's going to come next. It's like a fertile terrain for which the next seed will come.
Exactly.
And, you know, it's that willingness to just fall down over and over again and pick yourself back up there's gonna be things that really work well, and all it takes is a few things to work well. That's it.
You don't have to be perfect at everything.
That's right. And you look at most people that have been really successful in their lives, they've all had similar experiences, you know? And I think, I think, you know, you sound like you had inherent confidence.
I did not.
I was really insecure. And I've always used fear as like a teacher for me. So like, wherever I was afraid of something, I would be like, okay, I'm really terrified of this, so I'm actually gonna go try to do it because I'm really scared of this. And I can tell, like, that just became a early teacher for me. And I think, to the point of the conversation, I think it's such a powerful thing just to be willing to take the plunge, get into it. And I love the mantra, Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. We are always overtraining, we're always overthinking it, we're always trying to make it perfect. Get out there as quickly as possible, friends of mine that are starting businesses or thinking about ideas, Like, is this right? Is it good enough? You know, I need another six months to make this perfect, and I'm just like, Stop it.
Just do it.
Stop it. Like, get out there. There's nothing better than having real market feedback, real people touching it, real people giving you feedback about what they think about it. And that's actually the fastest way to iterate on it.
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