The Early Days | Kara Goldin

So I started Hint about a little over 12 years ago now. And I didn't come at it in a traditional way. I didn't have a CPG background. I was not— I never aspired to run a beverage company. So as I mentioned earlier, I grew up in Arizona. Should have been drinking lots of water. Yeah. So lots of people from Arizona here. Yay! I'm a Sun Devil, yeah. Go Sun Devils! Wow, so great. So great. I'm learning my fork again too as well. So I'm actually— was just agreed to be an advisor to Michael Crow. So I'm going back 4 times a year. So as I told him, I never thought, as I had a lot of fun at ASU when I went there, I never actually thought that a president of ASU would actually be asking me to come back and And advise him. So it's a lot of fun. But anyway, so getting back to my story, I left ASU and ended up working in New York. I wanted to write for actually Fortune Magazine and I— crazy, probably for another time story, but I flew out there and basically wouldn't leave them alone until they hired me. And soon went on after Fortune, I ended up working for this little company back then, which was really little, called CNN. And I was obsessed with CNN only because— actually 2 things, because Ted Turner was married to a woman named Jane Fonda and I thought like she's a badass and she's like breaking down walls. And then also because I could actually get home from work late and watch the news as long as I had cable. And I thought that that was super cool and it was very customer-driven, et cetera. So after working at those 2 places, I ended up moving out to San Francisco with my soon-to-be husband. We were engaged, met him in New York. And he really wanted to go into internet law and I didn't really know what the internet was, but I had been following following a guy named Steve Jobs and this was totally aging myself, but in the early '90s, I became very intrigued by the idea that he was making computers very easy and beautiful and very visual for people, which is really, I always considered myself to be very much a visual learner. And so I had read an article after I moved out to San Francisco about his project that he was doing inside of Apple. It was a project called En Passant inside of Apple. And 3 guys that worked for him spun the company out because Apple decided that they were going to focus on some other things and it was doing CD-ROM shopping. And I picked up the phone and called one of the guys after reading an article in the Wall Street Journal about this company. They were comparing it to some other companies out there that were very early, early stage companies, CompuServe and Prodigy. I don't know if any of you— you guys were probably all tiny little babies at that time when that stuff was coming out. It was very text-based compared to sort of the graphic stuff. So I decided to go and grab lunch actually in San Mateo with this company. They had hung a shingle just off of Campus Drive and over in— just off of the 92. And basically I was invited to come in and work for them and my job was to go out to retailers. And I thought, well, I love to shop from retailers like J.Crew and L.L.Bean and some of the others, so I can definitely help them figure out how to actually go online. And so while I was doing that, I met a guy named Steve Case who was starting a company called— or he had actually started a company called AOL. I had actually never heard of AOL. and he invested in this company alongside Apple and they asked me to come on full-time and run this thing called Shopping on AOL. So nobody ever thought it was going to really be anything and some of my favorite stories are after working on sort of building this thing out for AOL, we were looking for a bookstore and I'll never forget, Borders said no to us, Barnes Noble said no to us, and I figured out that there was this crazy guy who had like a couple of bookshelves that was doing this company called Amazon. So Amazon was actually books before they were lots of other things. And so I reached out to Jeff Bezos and said, hey, we really want you to talk to us about potentially being the bookstore on AOL. And I flew up there and couldn't actually find his office space. There was no sign on the door, it was just in this big warehouse. And I called him while I was like driving around looking for his company and he said, oh, actually I can't work with you or I can't meet with you today because I'm really busy. And I was like, well, how busy can you be? I just flew up from San Francisco to Seattle to meet with you. And I don't want to turn around and go back, like when will you be ready? And he said, well, if you can help me actually build out some bookshelves that I just got from Home Depot, that would be awesome. And then we can talk while we're building bookshelves. And I'm like, I'm in. So I go up there and I'm helping him build out lots of bookshelves and really, really funny. And then finally, I said to him, why do you think an online bookstore will actually work. Like, you've got Borders, and you've got Barnes Noble. And he said to me, would you ever, when you go to a bookstore, have you ever asked the guy behind the counter about a book recommendation based on something that you love? And I said, yeah, of course, I have asked him. And he said, do you ever really get a response that you think is like, that the guy actually knows, or the girl actually knows what you're talking about? And I said, no, actually. And he said, that's the problem that Amazon is going to solve. And I think about that all the time because I— he is somebody that I greatly admire for what he has built, but it really goes back to sort of what was the reason. And I'll get to this in a little bit as I started Hint, but basically I was running AOL's e-commerce business, I— Amazon was one of our first retailers for our site. By 2001, I had helped build this into a billion-dollar business for AOL. And I was traveling 300,000 miles every year. I was trying to open up AOL China. Payment systems were a problem then and it was really pretty tough to do e-commerce. But so they let me stay in San Francisco in order to jump between Shanghai and Virginia and New York. And by the time it became $1 billion in revenue, I thought, wow, like I built this thing that I never really thought was actually going to happen and it's really exciting and I'm ready to go and do something else that really makes a difference and really solves a problem. It was kind of on— it was on its way to really becoming something and I thought, At this point, I really want to go do something else that makes a difference. And I kept telling people that, including my family, and I had had at this point 3 kids and had them boom, boom, boom right at the end of my time at AOL and then continued on to have some more— have another kid and then a 4th kid while I was writing the business plan for Yahoo. For hint, but basically was looking at lots of different nonprofit companies thinking, okay, I want to do something that makes a difference and that really means a nonprofit. And as I started to look at nonprofits, I thought there's so many and so many are doing such great things, but really for me, I felt like I was so early on in kind of building out what e-commerce was that every time I looked at these nonprofits, they moved so slowly. It wasn't that they weren't doing great things, it just really was something that— it was sort of like being on a bullet train and then all of a sudden being in a car, right? Like I just felt like it's just not moving fast enough and I found myself like talking to people in these meetings and going like this and rushing them along and I thought, I need to do something that really is in the building phase and something that's really going to make a difference. But I still didn't really know what that was and I just kept networking and trying to talk to as many people as possible and A lot of people down here in Silicon Valley were saying, come and do AOL 2.0, and I thought, I could, I could go do that, but is that really what I'm passionate about? Is that really what I want to go do?