Warby Parker: Dave Gilboa & Neil Blumenthal

**Guy Raz** (0:00)
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**Dave Gilboa** (1:46)
We hadn't told anyone that the site was live.

**Neil Blumenthal** (1:48)
We didn't want to drive any traffic to it because we weren't sure it would work.

**Dave Gilboa** (1:53)
So I get an order and then 10 minutes later, we get another order and then another order and then another order. And we kind of go from this feeling of elatement to, oh crap, we don't have this much inventory.

**Guy Raz** (2:14)
From NPR, it's How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists and the stories behind the movements they built.
I'm Guy Raz, and on today's show, two of the founders of Warby Parker tell the story of how they birthed an idea, an idea that disrupted the entire eyeglass industry in America and grew into a billion-dollar company.
So back in 2008, Neil Blumenthal and Dave Gilboa both arrived on the campus of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. They were there to start business school, and they met each other and two other students, Andy Hunt and Jeff Rader, and the four of them would go on to co-found Warby Parker. But in 2008, at that time, they didn't know that yet. What they did know, and something that they all had in common was, they were really frustrated with how eyeglasses worked. And it stemmed from this thing that, well, most people have probably experienced at some point. They kept losing their glasses. And Dave, in fact, right before he started business school, had accidentally left his glasses on an airplane.

**Dave Gilboa** (3:26)
And they'd cost me $700. And I just couldn't justify as a full-time student paying that much for a new pair of glasses.
The new iPhone 3G had come out. I waited in line at the Apple Store, paid $200 for, and it did all these magical things. And meanwhile, the technology behind a pair of glasses is 800 years old, and it just didn't make sense.

**Guy Raz** (3:47)
And what you're like, okay, I've got this amazing iPhone, this magical portal to all of human knowledge. And it cost me 200 bucks, and yet these eyeglasses made out of plastic are like super expensive.

**Dave Gilboa** (4:01)
Yeah, so I was complaining to anyone that would listen about why glasses were so expensive. And then Andy kept losing his glasses, and he was buying everything online, but couldn't figure out why he couldn't buy new glasses online and why no one was effectively selling glasses online.

**Guy Raz** (4:17)
Right, because, I mean, this is like 2008, and I mean, by that point, it wasn't like selling things online, it was this brand new idea.

**Dave Gilboa** (4:25)
Yeah, and so we kind of started this conversation where we were kind of frustrated by different pieces of the eyewear industry, and we knew that Neil had spent a number of years working for an eyewear nonprofit, and probably knew a lot more about this than we did. And so we were on the computer lab one day, and we started asking Neil a bunch of questions, and no pun intended, but I think all our eyes were open that there was this massive opportunity.

**Guy Raz** (4:50)
What do you remember about that meeting in the computer lab, Neil? What, like, what were they asking you?