20VC: What Larry Paige, Mary Meeker and Ben Horowitz All Have In Common, Why You Have To Build A Movement Not A Brand & Why This Really Is A Great Time To Be An Entrepreneur with Joey Zwillinger, Co-Founder @ Allbirds

**Harry Stebbings** (0:00)
This is The Twenty Minute VC, and we are back for another episode of Founders Friday with me, Harry Stebbings, at H. Stebbings, with two Bs on Snapchat. Check it out to see all things behind the scenes from us at The Twenty Minute VC, but to the show today. And what does Larry Paige, Mary Meeker, Ben Horowitz and Dick Costolo all have in common? Well, they all love Allbirds shoes, and so I'm thrilled to welcome Joey Zwillinger to the show today. Joey is the founder at Allbirds, the startup that makes the world's most comfortable shoes. Check this out, made out of wool.
They have funding from the likes of Maveron, Lerer Hippeau and Slow Ventures, just to name a few, and an army of loyal fans that, as I said, includes Larry Paige, Ben Horowitz and Dick Costolo. Prior to co-founding Allbirds, Joey enjoyed a range of careers, from investment banking with Goldman Sachs to venture capital with industry ventures to working at next generation food and nutrition company, Terra Via. I do also have to say a huge thank you to Rebecca Caden at Maveron for the kind intro to Joey today, without which this episode would not have been possible. But before we head into today's episode, Pendo helps companies create products that customers love. It was founded when alumni from Rally, Google, Cisco and Red Hat combined their heads and their hearts to build something they wanted but never had as product managers, a complete platform for product teams. With Pendo, you can understand product usage and rapidly make data-driven decisions, survey users in-app for NPS and feedback, deliver contextual help to improve UX and user onboarding, promote new features in product to drive adoption without requiring any engineering resources. Pendo is the proven choice of innovative product leaders at Salesforce, Optimizely, Citrix and many more leading companies. Learn more today at go.pendo.io/harry. That's go.pendo.io/harry. But what if you're starting out in the industry and want to learn to code? Like I was four years ago, I went to Treehouse, the online school where you can learn how to build websites and apps. Their course library has thousands of hours of content where you can learn all sorts of topics including JavaScript, iOS, Android and more with high quality video instructions from real industry experts teaching you all you need to know and quizzes and code challenges keeping you engaged and on track. Learn on your own schedule and go from beginner to pro. So simply head over to teamtreehouse.com to start your free trial. But enough of my dulcet Harry Potter-like tones and so I'm delighted to hand over to Joey Zwillinger, founder at Allbirds. That's...

**Joey Zwillinger** (2:22)
You have now arrived at your destination.

**Harry Stebbings** (2:25)
Joey, it's such a pleasure to have you on the show today. I'm very, very starstruck. I've been a huge Allbirds fan for a long time, but a big thank you to Rebecca at Maveron for the intro. And thank you so much for joining me today, Joey.

**Joey Zwillinger** (2:35)
Thank you for having me. It's a great pleasure to be here.

**Harry Stebbings** (2:37)
I'd love, though, to start with a little about you and how an engineer turned to creating one of the coolest fashion and shoe startups with Allbirds. So what's the origin story?

**Joey Zwillinger** (2:47)
Yeah, it's a bit odd. I was an engineer working in biotechs, which is not your natural transition into becoming a cobbler.
So maybe I'll wind back a little bit. I've been an engineer since I was 18, went to college and studied it and always had my passion for things in the math, physics and that realm. And left and for just a couple of years tried to learn about business.
I really had absolutely no idea what business was when I left college and had no business mentors growing up. So it was a quick look into just what business was. And I quickly found that what was my passion in life and what I would want to do with my career was to use the private sector, which has this great dynamism. You can just make up your own rules and reasonable bounds to a lot of very creative things. And what I wanted to use that private sector for was to positively affect the environment. And for various reasons in my upbringing, that was kind of what I found my passion for. And so I joined a small venture capital firm at the time in San Francisco called Industry Ventures and started looking at clean tech deals, as was the parlance of the time for private companies and technology striving to make a bunch of money off of renewable energy. So I started looking at those businesses and didn't really think that the venture capital model was exactly right for that space. And so I went out and talked with, I don't know, maybe 30 to 50 companies with the goal of joining one of those companies as an operator. And I ended up picking one of those companies, I'm sure not to be a great ride, it was a company called Solazine, where we engineered microorganisms and made high-performance chemicals, cosmetics and food actually. I ended up leading the chemicals business unit within Solazine. We took the company public in 2011, it had a pretty wild ride. And what I learned, a couple of different things, but one of the things that was most poignant to me was when you're trying to sell from a business to business perspective, even if it's a great product, it's a good price, and it has this overwhelmingly positive message around sustainability. The big brands just don't understand how to take that and market it effectively. And turning a brand, what I learned, when they have an entrenched positioning and trying to re-engineer some of the products within that many ingredients, it's sort of like turning the Titanic. It just takes, it's just not gonna happen. And it takes absolutely decades to do it. So I started thinking about, well, how do we do that ourselves? And how do we teach the world, how to effectively market highly renewable, really innovative chemicals and other ingredients and materials?