Gunnar Lovelace

Lewis: This is 5-Minute Friday!!

Welcome everyone to this episode a very special because we have a special human being on a dear friend of mine that I have connected with recently 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 Gunnar Lovelace and he is a serial entrepreneur in non-profits, technology, fashioning, and real-estate. But most recently he is the founder and co-CEO of thrive market, which is the largest e-commerce company in L.A and is revolutionizing the food industry.

It seems like a lot to learn how to create this 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?

Gunnar: It was about 20 of us it wasn’t a big company.

Lewis: You started it?

Gunnar: Yeah, 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 great like 21 and I had a nice win and for me personally I think that as always been my orientation to life has just like learn as ferociously as possible and that’s one of the things I tell a lot of my entrepreneurial friends, particularly woman that I think are actually more qualified than man often but I think they need to know more and prepare and I think that we often overthink  what we need to do next and instead the most valuable thing we can do is just put ourselves in the situation and get into the driver seat, make the mistakes and 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 again. Like I’ve never built a company thrive market before you know like 400 employees, I’ve never operated 400 employees before but you know you just have to like leaned into it and your honest with yourself and your leadership team and make a lot of mistakes and make sure that there’s a culture that’s it’s okay to make mistakes while still being very oriented towards excellence and performance and just be willing to learn and I know that you share that, I mean that’s what you worked all about.

Lewis: Yeah, it’s interesting you say it because a lot of entrepreneurs that reach out or email me and I’m sure you get the same thing what question they have fears, doubts and putting themselves out there creating a product or company and they always ask how you do it, and I’m always like ‘To be honest I’m always ignorant about how to do it, I didn’t have the fear of looking bad or looking silly, I was willing to put myself out there and try 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 front of family and friends. It sounds like that’s what you did you were willing to put yourself out there and learn as you.

Gunnar:  Yeah they are like learning opportunities, it is a mistake but it’s also a composed for what’s gonna come next, it’s like fertile terrain for which the next seed comes and you know it’s that willingness to just fall down over and over again and pick yourself back up and there’s gonna be things that really work well and all it takes is a few things to work well.

Lewis: You don’t have to be perfect at everything.

Gunnar: That’s right. And you look at most people that have been really successful in their lives they’ve all had similar experience and I think you know you sound like inherent confidence I did not, I was really insecure and I’ve always used fear as like a teacher for me. So wherever I was afraid at something I would be like ‘Okay, I’m really terrified at this so I’m actually gonna try and do it because I’m really scared of this.’ And I can tell that became early teacher for me and I think to the point of conversation I think it’s such a powerful thing to be willing to take the plunge, get into and I love the mantra don’ t let perfect be the enemy of good. We are always overtraining, we’re always thinking, we’re always trying to make it perfect you know get out there as quickly as possible, friends of mine that are starting businesses or thinking about ideas like is this right? I think in another 6 months to make this perfect and I was like 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.

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