Thrive Market’s Nick Green on Long-Term Thinking, Healthy Living, and Building a Mission-Driven Business

by | Jan 21, 2025

Nick Green, Co-Founder and CEO of Thrive Market, shares how the drive to make healthier eating more accessible has shaped the company from the very beginning; from operationalizing its core values to hiring talent whose purpose aligns with the mission. He explains how mission-driven thinking includes setting long-term sustainability goals, finding “non-zero-sum” ways to make an impact, and sharing stories to build loyalty in customers who share Thrive Market’s core values.

 

What is Your Why?

Nick explains how Thrive Market’s mission is deeply personal, rooted to a lack of affordable, healthy food options in the area where he grew up.

Hiring for Purpose Fit

Nick discusses the importance of purpose-fit when hiring for a fast-paced, mission-driven company, and how he looks for talent that match Thrive Market’s vision.

Co-Founding Thrive Market

Nick shares the origins of Thrive Market, including how a shared passion for health helped him and his co-founders to weather earlier failures.

Profits, Sustainability, and Long-Term Thinking

Nick explains how the mission has guided Thrive Market over ten years, including long-term goals that have ended up increasing both sustainability and profits.

Generational Shifts and Operationalizing Values

Nick discusses how Thrive Market keeps its values at the forefront of the company’s culture, and how younger workers seem to place more emphasis on meaningful work that matches their values.

About Nick Green

Nick Green is Co-Founder & CEO of Thrive Market, a membership-based online market that makes healthy, sustainable living easy and accessible for everyone. Since launching in 2014, Thrive Market has grown to more than 1 million paying members and become a touchstone example of a mission-driven company at scale.

 

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TRANSCRIPT

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
This week on Culture Leaders Daily, we bring you my conversation with Nick Green, Co-founder and CEO of Thrive Market. We talk on this show about balancing purpose and profit and Thrive Market is the perfect example of a mission-driven company. What I loved about this is the concrete examples they gave of when they’ve chosen purpose over profit and ultimately it led to profit. Anyway from the start, Nick and his co-founder self-funded this organization because they believed in making healthier, eating easier and more accessible. That commitment has served them every step of the way from weathering a 100% failure rate when pitching to investors to building sustainability goals into the company’s growth model all the way to today where that shared mission is a key part of keeping a loyal base of customers. We also talk about building the culture of a growing company, how Thrive market hires people who truly care about healthy eating and how they operationalize their core values in a shared living document. There’s a lot in this conversation I think that you’ll enjoy. So please welcome to the podcast Nick Green. Nick Green, what is your why?

Nick Green:
We are on a mission to make healthy and sustainable living easy, affordable, and accessible to everyone. It’s been our why since day one and it will be into the future.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
So that’s the Thrive Market mission statement.

Nick Green:
That is our mission statement, make healthy living, easy, affordable, accessible.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Do you have a personal mission statement or a personal why that’s separate or have you in this company merged so completely that the company’s mission statement is yours as the co-founder?

Nick Green:
Well, the mission is deeply personal to me. I mean, the reason that I started Thrive Market was growing up middle class in the Midwest 30 years ago and seeing how hard my mom had to work to make healthy choices for our family, and I think it kind of basically boggled my mind that multiple decades later it was still really hard to do and still hard in the same ways. For us, it was always was there a health food retailer nearby? Usually the answer was no. Were there options that were at a good price point if they were nearby? The answer was almost always no. And then there was just the confusion and intimidation of where do you start? And the fact that several decades later, millions of people are trying to make that shift, trying to eat healthier, put better food on their tables, and yet those barriers are still very present. That was the reason that we started Thrive. So it is very personal for me and I think one of the reasons that we’ve had the success that we’ve had over the last 10 years and that we are in it for the long run, is that there is that overlap between the personal mission and the business mission.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
And when you hire people, do you look for that purpose fit as well?

Nick Green:
Absolutely. We look there first. To us, that’s kind of the non-negotiable. Building a business is really hard and being part of a high growth, fast moving mission-driven business is really hard. So unless you a why it’s going to get old really fast and the kind of work that our teams are doing, our thrivers do, it’s not just punching and punching out. It really requires that extra discretionary effort, that extra interest in the member and that extra creativity to always be looking at how we can make things better. And the motivation to do those things really comes from the mission. So we found very consistently that the people that are the best fit are those for whom that mission precedes their involvement with Thrive. Either they’ve experienced themselves personally or they feel really connected to the broader interest in sustainability or healthy living, and those people are great at Thrive. And the people that maybe that’s not as important, even if they’ve got great skillset fits usually aren’t the ones that

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Last. So how do you check for that? What interview process do you go through or system do you use to identify purpose fit and make sure that it’s authentic, right? Because I would imagine there’s a lot of people they’ll know that it’s important to say, I really care about sustainable healthy living, and maybe that’s not true.

Nick Green:
I think the first thing I would say is that people do to a large degree, and I think I do believe that the same way that we’re finding that so many more consumers want to be conscious in what they purchase. I think people are becoming more conscious in where they work. And whether that’s a generational thing, which I think it is to some degree or just like a broader cultural shift, I think more people are saying, I want to work somewhere that aligns with my values. And so I do think there’s a really significant self-selection where the people that are interested in Thrive Market across all roles tend to be individuals that care about healthy living, care about sustainability. Those causes resonate in their own lives and they want to have an impact at a significant scale. So I would say the first thing is just that self-selection.
And one of the great things about the brand really being a reflection of our mission is that you can’t miss it, right? Anyone who’s thinking about working at Thrive knows that’s what we’re about. And so I think that that makes that self-selection pretty strong in the interview itself. Obviously you can ask people, do you care about this? Et cetera, et cetera. And to your point, people will give the answer they think you want to hear. What we found is that the more meaningful way to interview for that is just asking for examples of how healthy living and sustainable living integrate into their life and finding whether has actually been that mission has been part of their personal journey already. And that’s something that you can’t fake. That’s something that you were doing before you decided you want to get a job at Thrive Market.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Yeah, a lot harder to come up with a fake story in the moment than to say yes, I’m definitely passionate about that.

Nick Green:
And then I would say just to extend that, obviously someone can make up a story or piece together a narrative. I’ve found that the most important part of the hiring process is not the interview itself, that’s very important, but it’s actually the back channels and the references where you get to talk to folks that have worked closely with that person and know them infinitely better than you could in one or two interview sessions. And so we do emphasize that a lot because that’s also where that who is this person authentically will come through. And I think a lot of interview processes and hiring processes lead that till the end offers already been made. Now we just have to check these boxes and do a reference check. We really view that as really integral to finding whether the fit is there and it’s just as important if not more than the interview process itself.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Interesting. So this podcast Culture Leaders is about the masters of movements and people who have created something impactful or fulfilled some significant purpose and understanding how exactly did you do that and what can people learn from that? And so as I was looking into your story and your background, what I often look to is relatability to the listener. How does this person relate to the listener and what maybe makes them special? That can be sometimes unrelatable. So when I was listening to your story and trying to understand your background, my fear for the listener listening to you is that you would be unrelatable because you seem like a super genius. You had a perfect SAT score, is that right?

Nick Green:
I did, but the backstory on that will make it, I think more relatable.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Okay. Tell us because when a guy with the perfect SAT score creates a successful business, it’s like, well, yeah, he’s a super genius. How am I going to emulate that? Yeah.

Nick Green:
I think the reality, and some people might be surprised about this, a lot of people probably wouldn’t, is there’s really not that much correlation between doing well on standardized tests and doing great in life, the standardized tests. And my first business was actually helping kids get better scores on standardized tests.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
And

Nick Green:
Part of the reason I wanted to do that is that I was a good test taker, but I also knew lot of people, especially in my community where people weren’t doing a lot of test prep, who were very smart, some that were every bit as smart as me, that didn’t do well in tests. And so my belief is that test taking is a skill. It’s a skill like anything else that some people are better at to start, but that anyone can learn. And the mission of that first company was to basically gamify the process to defang this ridiculous notion that the test is a test of your IQ or that it’s some sort of test of your value as a human being. Instead really look at it as this is a game, you can get better at it just like anything else. And no matter where you start from, you can improve.
And so that was the first company. I think that what I found is that the things that made me good at standardized testing actually were the things I had to unlearn to be good as an entrepreneur, right? With the standardized test, you’re learning, there’s really clear rules, there’s really clear guidelines. If you just practice in this defined way, you’ll get to the result. You jump through hoops, you do your I and cross your T’s, you have to be aim for perfection. These are all things that get you in a lot of trouble as an entrepreneur and really in a lot of areas of life. So I found that being a good standardized test taker was very helpful for getting into college. It was very helpful for starting my first business, but in terms of life skills and entrepreneurial skills and things that really matter, it wasn’t necessarily helpful at all.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
And so, okay, I’ll take your word for it, that you’re not just a simple super genius and that you actually had, well, we know from the story of Thrive Markets beginnings that it was challenge after challenge, failure after failure, other approach after other approach to try and get to where you are now, which is a profitable business that’s doing very well. What strikes me about your story is that I think a lot of leaders talk about the importance of purpose, the importance of mission, but it’s almost like because it sounds good, it’s something you figure out, the company already exists and let’s make sure we have a compelling mission. They do it backwards where the mission comes almost after the company. And your story really started with mission, and every time you ran into a roadblock, you kind of won with mission. And so I would love to dig into the story to show how a purpose-driven organization can actually drive results because it can be perceived as a touchy feely approach to business. And that mission is good for motivating the file and rank, but then ultimately we need to make money. And so sometimes mission gets pushed aside in order to make the hard decision, which is around profitability, and you really break that mold.

Nick Green:
Yeah, I think that’s absolutely right. And to take it back a little further and even tie it to your last question, I was not a natural entrepreneur. The kid that was really bookish really focused on following all the rules, getting good grades, doing well on standardized tests. I was a very blinders on, follow directions, like I said, jumped through the hoops kind of kid. And the reason that I started my first company was because I just sort of had this realization about standardized testing and the barrier that was to higher education. And I happened to have had a mom who was really, really passionate about education and helped me to see how important that was in my life, and I wanted to break that barrier down. So I saw in my first entrepreneurial journey starting it was called Ivy Insiders, that mission could take someone who was not a natural entrepreneur who at the time had no ambition to start a business and really catalyzed what ultimately was a high growth business.
We hired Ivy League undergrads to go back and test fraction of Kaplan, and it was a really powerful business model. But the reason that it worked was because we started trying to solve a problem that we really cared about and that we related to. So when I started Thrive at that point, I had unlearned a lot of the things, like I said, of being a perfect student, had gotten my first trial by fire as an entrepreneur, and I wanted to do something that could matter on an even more fundamental level in education. And the one thing that I think that’s true about is health. If you don’t have education, you can’t do a lot of things, but if you don’t have health, you can’t do anything. And coincidentally, that was actually the one other pillar of my mom’s parenting growing up, so was we got to get educated.
My mom wasn’t able to graduate from college and came from a family where the education opportunities were not significant. Very working class. She said, we have to have to go to college. You have to get that education. You won’t have to open up these opportunities. But the other side that she saw, again from her own family upbringing, she grew up working class large Mexican American family and not a lot of knowledge on healthy living. And so saw a lot of family members that had diabetes, struggled with weight and obesity, hypertension, you name it. And her goal was to reverse that in the next generation. And she really did it in her own life already, just making healthy choices for her own diet. But she wanted to do it for her kids. And for me, that was the catalyst for Thrive. And it’s how do we empower other moms, other parents, other families, really anyone to do what my mom had done, knowing the transformative impact that it had and how fundamental health really is.
And I think that that just as it was with the first company only with an even bigger opportunity, a bigger market and a bigger problem to solve has been our absolute kind of secret weapon and the foundation of everything we do. Like you said, it becomes a filter for strategically what should we do next human wise, who should we hire next? And even for financial decisions, I think a lot of people assume that the mission is going to sort of be a cost center. It’s going to undermine your profitability goals, and it’s been really, really different for us. The more we lean into the mission, the more loyalty our members have for us, the higher our renewal rates end up being, and that drives actually the major source of our profitability. So we’ve found that mission being core to everything we do and preceding the business as opposed to being, like you said, a bolt-on to the business or kind of an ancillary part. It’s been our greatest

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Strength. So let’s start at the beginning. You meet, how do you say his first name? Gunnar?

Nick Green:
Yeah.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
You meet Gunnar. He’s also equally passionate about health. He’s got his own idea and you hear his idea and say, Hey, let me do that with you. And you guys decide you’re going to be co-founders of a business together, which I guess I want to ask about already because you hear all these horror stories about people co-founding businesses and making sure you pick the right partner. And it felt like very quick from the way that I heard it described. Was there fear in jumping too quickly or where did the courage come from to do that?

Nick Green:
The courage came from the mission too.
At the time he was, I met him as an investor. So I had sold my first company and he was pitching on basically doing Groupon for healthy food. He was going to call it, it was called Shop Drive. And I didn’t love the business name, I didn’t love the Groupon model, but the moment I met him and he said, we’re going to make healthy living accessible and affordable to anyone, he grew up on Hippy Commune in no high California where they were doing organic group buying of organic products back in the eighties and nineties. I had grown up in the middle class and Midwest where there wasn’t that access and saw how hard my mom worked to try to make it possible. And so when he said, I want to take what we did at the commune and make it possible for anyone, that was a mission that just immediately resonated.
And yeah, it was quick in that first meeting. By the end of it, I was basically pitching him on doing something together. And I’m a very rational person. I usually make decisions in a very methodical way. And yet the biggest decisions I’ve made and the most important decisions I’ve made, and frankly the best decisions I’ve made have always been ones where it just felt right and the gut impulse was so strong and so aligned that I acted on it without that consideration. And thrive was definitely one of those things. And from a personal standpoint, Gunnar and I, while very mission aligned, we had such different backgrounds and such different skill sets, and that complementarity was really powerful. And so I do think that it can be valuable to build a business with someone where there’s a relationship and trust, but it’s also really valuable to build with someone that you compliment one another. And that was definitely the case. And then when we brought in our co-founder Sasha, who’s our CTO, he had a completely different skillset, very different background. And I think even though none of us were close before, we became close very quickly because we were in the trenches. And I think that complementarity made us really affected together.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
So you bring Sasha on, you guys have all invested some of your own money, you’re self financing, and you had some failures, some restarts, right? Sasha helps you through that, and now you’re going after more investment from the VC world to kind of take it to the next level. And tell us about that.

Nick Green:
Well, I mean we had trouble fundraising for the beginning. So even before Sasha came in, Gunnar and I had self-funded the business and thought we’d be able to raise money since we had started and sold businesses before and we failed, we got rejected by every VC we talked to. We were basically talking to people in la, New York, San Francisco. They’re like, well, why can’t people just go to Whole Foods? You’re not going to be able to compete against the health food retailers. And it’s like it just didn’t click that most parts of the country don’t have health food retailers on the corner, and it didn’t click that even those that did, people might not be able to afford. So that was

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
The challenge. How many VCs did you pitch and get rejected by?

Nick Green:
I mean, it was dozens and dozens, over a hundred I’m sure, over the course of the seed round. And it was a hundred percent rejection rating. So we were rejected by everyone we talked to. It almost doesn’t matter how many there were, it was like everyone said no. And it was really challenging. And I think this tying it back to the mission, I think had we not had a mission, had we not been in it as true believers, it would’ve been a really easy point to say, Hey, we’re getting the feedback. Maybe these VCs know something that we don’t, should we do something else?

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Did that voice go in your head?

Nick Green:
Oh, absolutely, absolutely. And sometimes it

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Was, did you have conversations like, Hey guys, maybe we should quit?

Nick Green:
No, it didn’t get to that level. It didn’t get to the level. And I think the reason was that bulk and I were all in. We had funded the business ourselves, we believed in it, and we also knew that we had a lot of conviction that we were going to be successful. So already at that early stage, we were talking to influencers about promoting the business and we were seeing them be really interested. So we hadn’t pitched them yet on investing, but they had agreed to get alongside us advocate for what we were doing, share it with their audiences. And that gave us confidence that one way or another we were going to get to the starting line. And when we did, this was going to be a rocket ship. And the aha moment was the kind of two inflection points at that early stage where getting Sasha on board where we actually built the product, because before that we were having a lot of trouble there as well. And then the second part was basically going to these influencers that we were going to partner with for promotion and asking them to invest as well. And once that happened, we got to our seed round. It was a very different path, 15, 25, $50,000 chunks brought in 150 plus influencers in lieu of one or two VCs. But it ended up being the best thing that ever happened to the business because it actually got these people even more aligned with us, got their incentives aligned and put them on the same side of the table.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
So now you’re running a business and it’s selling things and you’re shipping things and you’re losing money. It’s not yet profitable, but it’s growing, which I guess at the time was kind of what we were looking for. Growth, not necessarily profitability, but while that’s happening, you’re also making decisions about the business, like carbon neutral shipping for example, that’s costing you even more money than you’re already spending on running the that are mission-driven decisions. Was there debate? I mean, was that a challenging, those decisions that you made, were those challenging discussions or was it a given? Was it so mission-driven that it was like, well, obviously we’re going to do carbon neutral shipping when you have to balance the people, the profitability, the profitability, the sustainability of the business, what does that look like in the conference room?

Nick Green:
Yeah, I mean it’s not easy. And I think the challenge is getting away from a yes or no on things and rather thinking about how do we sequence them. So we envisions from the very beginning about being the most sustainable e-commerce company that had ever existed. We wanted to do zero waste fulfillment, carbon neutral shipping. We are already very interested in that, what was very early in the regenerative movement. And yet we had to start with, alright, what’s the first step and at this scale with our current financial profile, our current resources and what’s available, what can we do? So there were a few things where we just put our flag in the ground. One was on carbon neutral shipping. If we’re going to be an e-commerce company, we’re going to be shipping with carriers all over the country. It’s just if we’re going to say we’re a sustainable business, we can’t have our transportation contributing to global warming.
And at the time, the market was pretty undeveloped, so the credits were quite cheap. So it was actually not very inexpensive or very expensive to do the carbon neutral shipping. And that was one that worked from the beginning, zero waste fulfillment, we could not do as an example, but within three years we did go zero waste in our first fulfillment center, and now we’re fully zero waste across the whole network. So we’ve sequenced that one a long time. We were able to remove a lot of version plastic from our packaging from day one. I’m using a product called gmy, which is basically gives the cushioning without the plastic bubble wrap.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Yeah, I got that. You guys sent me a box and I saw it was wrapped in this kind of interesting paper. I don’t know what that is, but it was fascinating.

Nick Green:
It’s a honey comb kind of

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Honeycomb to protect. Cool.

Nick Green:
That’s a totally amazing product. And it’s also gotten cheaper over time as they’ve gotten to more scale. So again, what we think about as always, how do we push the envelope and go as fast as we can, but also do it compatible with where we’re at as a business? And we were removed a lot of virgin plastic back then, but even last year we did a whole effort to remove another 30 or 40% from where we’re at at that point. And we also started buying plastic offsets that went plastic neutral. So we’re always looking about how we can go further, but we’re also being realistic about what’s possible given the market and the stage of the business. One thing that’s made it really possible for us in particular to get out ahead of where a lot of other businesses are at is that we tell the stories about what we’re doing and that creates a lot of loyalty from our members.
And I think it’s really, really unique when your mission not only inspires your people, but if it also resonates and becomes your brand with your members, your customers, then you have this opportunity to get direct value back in terms of loyalty, in terms of engagement, and in terms of referral today, 10 years into the business, our top source of new members is still existing member referrals. It’s one of the things I’m the most proud of is that our members are out there as our number one evangelists. Influencers are big, but our members are actually even bigger. And that has given us a really significant growth tailwind. And it wouldn’t be possible if we weren’t doing all these things. If people are getting value just economically from Thrive or just from a utilitarian standpoint, they’re going to use us, they might renew, but are they going to go tell other people? Probably not as likely if they’re getting value, but they’re also proud of what Thrive represents and the way that it aligns with their values and the mission that they’re on as a membership community, that’s where you get people out sharing the vision and sharing with their friends.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
So you give away memberships too, right? I mean, that’s another place where you’re forfeiting profitability in interest of the mission.

Nick Green:
In a strict sense, yes. But that assumes that those people would’ve otherwise bought memberships. So this is another really important point for us. We look for opportunities that are, I call ’em non-zero sum. So meaning you can create mission benefit while also creating business benefit, or at worst, you can create mission benefit without doing any business harm and giving away free memberships is one of those, right? We give away free memberships by and large to people who are low income and wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford a membership or their teachers or their students or their military veterans groups that we wouldn’t otherwise have huge participation in the membership. And the membership doesn’t cost us anything. So it’s a hundred percent margin product, if you want to think about it that way. We can give that away all day long, as long as we’re not cannibalizing people that would’ve otherwise bought the membership. And then if those people purchase with their memberships, that’s driving revenue that at the time wasn’t very profitable, but over time it actually has the product sales that become profitable. So every time we bring in a gives membership, there’s an opportunity to create business value. It’s not as much business value as a paid membership, but it’s a lot of mission value and it’s a creative to the whole business. That’s a really great example of where business value and mission value go hand in hand and they’re not distracting for one another.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Do you have some kind of initiative around finding these non-zero sum opportunities, or is this just you as you operate as a leader of a business looking for opportunities? I mean, is this some kind of program within your organization?

Nick Green:
Really, it’s a decision making framework and it’s also a challenge to our employees to say, how can we do this in a way that’s valuable to the business and the mission? And again, not just assume that it has to be done as a cost center. So I’ll give you another example. When we went zero waste in our fulfillment centers, that is a cost, but every one of those initiatives to reduce waste also has potential savings. If we can reuse items in the fulfillment center or we can give them to another entity that will actually pay us to take away the paper waste, those are opportunities for us to make money. If we can reduce our waste in the first place, that’s opportunities to use less material and improve our bottom line. So we approach that as basically one, a mission initiative, but two an ROI initiative and what’s the ROI going to be on the CapEx that we did there?
We did a giant cardboard baler that basically crushed cardboard and then made that into something that we could sell as a product. There’s businesses that take that and then reuse it. And that was a positive NPV project. It took 18 months to get an ROI and that, which was pretty good. And it was probably 25 different things that we did to go zero waste, but it also drove ultimately business value. And those are the kinds of opportunities that we go through. And if you don’t set up upfront to challenge to the team, let’s try to do this in a way that’s business accretive and mission aligned, then it’s very easy to do one or the other. That’s sort of the shortcut. But if you set that challenge, we’re going to do both now, figure it out if people step up.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
So with all this, what I’m hearing a theme around or a trend towards is very long-term thinking about the business, right? We will do this, maybe not now, but if eventually, and so you don’t have to get stuck into the short term cycles that public companies do. Does that incentivize you not to go public? I mean, what can the public corporations of the world learn from your leadership style or approach that they can’t really benefit from being a private company yet they’re running into these issues too?

Nick Green:
Well, I think whether you’re a private or a public company, there’s a lot of distortionary incentives to be short term. So if you’re a public company, it’s seen the stock price fluctuate and it’s being beholden to your quarterly earnings. If you’re a private company, you’re often pre profitable and it’s you have to get to that next fundraise and you got to think short term in order to attract VCs in six months or 12 months, and you’re continually out there fundraising. So I think that that temptation exists for a lot of private companies and for a lot of public companies. And I think frankly, that temptation exists just in general in capitalism where it’s like, alright, I want to make money now. I want to drive as much growth as I can now. And again, I think for us, the mission has been that filter, one of our core values to company is think big, and part of that is being really ambitious, but another part of it is really thinking long-term and the mission requires it, right?
Making healthy, living easy, affordable and accessible for everyone is not something that we’re going to do in a year. It’s not something that we’ve done in even 10 years. We’re 10 years in, but we have 1.6 million members. We’re doing high, hundreds of millions of dollars in sales. We’re very scaled out from where we started, but the US grocery market is a trillion dollar industry. There’s a hundred million plus households in the us so it is going to be a multi-decade journey. And I think the mission really has forced us to think on that scale. We were very fortunate actually to bring in investors when we did bring institutional investors in. Our largest investor is not a traditional venture fund. They’re actually an evergreen fund with a single limited partner that’s a family office, and they’re very patient, sort of long-term capital. And that’s given us the ability to manage the business in a very different way.
And I think, I’m not a public company, so I can’t comment on how easy or hard that would be, but I do think there’s public market investors as well that are looking for long-term holds that really care about the values of a business not only to shareholders, but also to stakeholders. And one of the things that we’ve done, even as a private company, is become a public benefit corporation. So we actually changed our corporate structure to recognize and codify our commitment to our stakeholders, to the environment, to our employees, to our members beyond just our commitment to shareholders. And some of those things also help us to, if in the future we wanted to go public to make sure that we’re not going to be just beholden to shareholders, we’ll already have in our formal legal structure that commitment to be more stakeholder driven. And again, in my view, in the long run, that will create more shareholder value.
And that’s where I go back to the non-zero sum. To us, it’s not shareholders versus stakeholders, stakeholders. It’s when you serve your stakeholders better, you create all these flywheels that ultimately strengthen the business, improve the bottom line, make growth more sustainable, and help it to compound over time and therefore ultimately deliver more value to the shareholders. The key there to your point, is to view it on a long enough timeline. If you look in the short term, there’s opportunities to kind of skimp and squeeze and take shortcuts, but if you look at it in the long term, if we do what right by our mission, if we make healthy living more accessible and affordable for everyone, that is the path whereby we will create massive enterprise value for our shareholders.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
It feels intuitive, and yet I don’t see it being embraced as a philosophy of business leadership as much as we would hope. Right? I mean, why is there so much resistance to what seems like common sense in your opinion?

Nick Green:
I don’t think there’s resistance, but I think change just takes time. And I think that, again, I would say the conscious consumer movement, which is really what we’re focused on, or the conscious living movement, people wanting to vote with their dollars, shop their values, put healthy food on the table and have healthy products in their home, but also be part of a community that supports those values and supply chain, that kind of consciousness is on the rise. It has been on the rise for more than a decade. It transcends politics, it transcends socioeconomics. Half of our members live in the Midwest and the southeast 50% have at household income under a hundred thousand dollars. We have as many members over the age of 50 as under the age of 35. So there’s really a broad base, I think for this changing shift. I think that those people, one, they’re going to demand over time, that more companies become more conscious as well.
I see that happening. I think that we’re obviously, we’ve been the beneficiaries of consumers that want that. And I think more companies that do the right thing and that do think long-term have missions that go beyond just being profitable or creating short-term shareholder value, I think they will be rewarded for that. And then to my point earlier about people wanting to work on things that align with their personal mission, I think the generation right now that’s leading the biggest companies in the world is not millennials or Gen Zs yet, but it will be. And I think as that shift happens, you’re going to see more leaders who come in and their personal values are going to be reflected in how they run these businesses. So the change is never as fast as you want it to be, but I don’t see there being an active sabotage effort or an active resistance. I think that people are just relatively slow to change, and we’re lucky to be at the tip of the spear and seeing, at least for our members how just deeply engaged they are in the mission and how much value that can create as a

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Business. I don’t think that it’s sabotage. I guess what I see out there is fear, fear-based decision making over consciousness. That sounds great, but right now I got to make sure that I secure my company, my job, my whatever, by making this decision. And so it’s fear versus faith.

Nick Green:
That’s a great point. And I think the point I would make is you need to have something to have faith in. And for us, that’s the mission. If I just went and said, we’re going to be a long-term company, think in the long-term, build something for the next a hundred years, I think that sort of doesn’t ring true unless there’s a north star that you’re pointed at on that multi-decade timeline and a broken record on this. But I do think that is for us, we didn’t start with be long-term. We started with what’s our mission? And our mission is one, and that is what we have faith in. That’s where the way that, to your point, the way you conquer fear is by having faith in something bigger. And it’s not that it’s not hard, it’s not that when we say, all right, we’re going to go zero waste in the fulfillment centers, we want it to pay back in under two years, people aren’t like, oh yeah, that sounds awesome. That’ll be easy. Like, oh shit, how do we do this? This is really difficult, but we can figure it out because we have where there’s a will, there’s a way.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Yeah. So there’s this, speaking of generations, there’s this energy out there around that younger generations just don’t want to work anymore, that they don’t care that they’re totally disconnected from that sense of fulfillment. Do you experience that or how do you overcome that? What do you think that’s really about? I

Nick Green:
Think it’s about the same conscious living and consciousness movement that we are just speaking about. I think that, and I don’t think this is exclusive to younger generations, but I think in general, more and more people are asking bigger questions about what makes a fulfilling life? What do I really care about? What are my values? And they want their career in so far as it something they spend a lot of their time doing to reflect that and be aligned with it. They want their consumption, the things they buy, the businesses they support. And so far as we are a consumer oriented economy and culture, they want that to reflect those values. So I think people are, we are in this advanced technological, highly tuned capitalist economy. People are looking for authentic experiences and wanting the way that they engage either as a producer or as a consumer to align with their values. And I think that that is happening across the board, but it’s especially in younger generations because they’re just getting started. They’re the digital natives, the Gen Z climate change has been something that’s been on their radar since they were kids. And so I don’t think human nature has changed. I don’t think they’re lazier. I don’t think they’re less motivated. I think the way that they’re motivated is different.
And frankly, we tried to create a place at private market that attracts really talented people who really care, who aren’t open to just punching in and punching out, and then create a culture of radical empowerment and a work life that’s also compatible with having a family and a home life such that they can work really hard, create a lot of impact, channel their talents, but not do it at the expense of their health or their family or the other things that need to fit in as well. So that’s really important to us and something I think that has been a major competitive advantage.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Can you tell us about low ego, high expectations culture, and how do you foster that? What is that to you?

Nick Green:
Low ego. I mean, the way that we talk about it is it’s getting it right, not being right, and just that distinction. And we also, one of our core values is authenticity coming in and it’s showing up as your full self, but it’s also being really intellectually honest. All right, we’re going to seek the truth. Whether that corresponds with our biases or not, whether that was our idea or not, whether it contradicts something we were advocating for or not. And I think I keep going back to the mission, but that gives people a grounding to think of something higher and bigger than themselves. And I think to be lower ego when they’re focused on the mission. And then I think our culture of radical empowerment gives them that vote of confidence from us as a company to be their best selves at work. I also think that we were a remote first company.
It’s something we planted our flag in several years ago. It’s been a real process and iteration to get to a place where that really works, but it gives people a lot of freedom, and I think it attracts people who value that freedom for the right reasons. So yeah, I think being low ego and results driven, it goes hand in hand. It’s about people focusing on getting to the right answers, not about just being right themselves and frankly in a remote environment. I think we’ve been forced to be more results driven. I think it’s really easy when you are in person to use proxies for results. It’s like I see someone working a lot, they’re speaking up a lot in meetings. All of these things that we’re attuned to socially that may or may not actually correspond to results. Once you cut the leash and everyone is independent and you can’t sit over people’s shoulders and they have to be able to sink or swim on their own, we’ve built in a lot more structure to measure results. And it’s the flip side of the freedom. You have a lot more freedom, but you also have a lot more accountability. And I think that’s been a really powerful thing. And for those people that are willing to take the accountability and step up and are results driven and align with the mission, it’s really, really incredible. And then for some people, that’s not what they’re interested in. So it’s about finding the right fit.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
So I think a lot of companies are good at memorializing their culture, their values, their mission, but they’re not as good at operationalizing it. Can you tell us something about how you operationalize the values coming to life in the day-to-day?

Nick Green:
Yeah, that’s a great question. And it’s funny that you use that dichotomy because I actually feel like memorializing it has been the way that we operationalize it at scale.
So if you’re a small company, the culture and the values just can be communicated by osmosis. If you’re an in-person company to some degree, that will happen and there will just be a culture that emerges. But especially as you get to scale and especially in a remote environment, you now have to be very deliberate and I think codified and structured in the way that you operationalize culture. For us, we’ve actually memorialized what we call our Thrive os. And so it’s our Thrive operating system. And the principle behind Thrive OS is that culture is not just the sign on the wall. Culture is not just the statement of values. Culture really is the way that we work, and it is the thing things that we do every day. And to be a company that does these consistently across all areas of the business, across long spans of time, across different operating environments, you have to have some sort of documentation that expresses that. And then training that brings people up to speed on what that culture is. There’s a phrase that it’s not ours, but we really co-opted it, which is culture over control. And I really see those as two alternatives. So either you can tell people what to do or you can give them the way that we work so that they can do it themselves.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
And

Nick Green:
So to have that culture of radical empowerment, we actually need to operationalize and systematize the way that we work in the Thrive os. We have our four values. This is the fundamental starting point of the Thrive os. Along with the mission. We have 12 principles that translate those values into behaviors. And then we have hundreds of pages basically that follow from that and explain how that translates into our cross-functional squads, our OKRs, our annual operating planning process, the way we run meetings, the way that we engage with the mission, the way we think about our business model. And that guide is really not to overstate it, but it’s like the Thrive Bible. It really is the core document that lays out what we believe, how we work, how we’ve gotten where we are and where we’re going. And every person reads that when they come on board. And then a lot of the training is basically digging in and engaging conversations around different parts of that os.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
So it’s literally code for how to behave.

Nick Green:
It’s the code and it’s not like

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
It’s the code of your os.

Nick Green:
Yeah, it’s our operating system. And I don’t want to overstate the degree to which we’re being prescriptive because it’s more, it’s guardrails and guidelines, not
Hard rules, but it is from 10 years in running our business, what have we found to be the case when we’re succeeding? Where have we made mistakes and how does this relate to the mission, to our values, to the principles and to what we also know about other companies that have done big, hairy audacious things and done them successfully. So it’s not a document that’s came straight out of my head. It really is more like borrowing ideas from all over the place and then incorporating our own learnings as a company and kind of like a wiki evolving over time, continuously, it’s an editable document and anyone can submit ideas to be added into the OS as well.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
So just is maybe not an important question, but what I’m curious about who owns that document, who’s ultimately accountable to the document?

Nick Green:
So are leaders all have access to it and can edit different parts that relate to their part of the business. But it is owned by the people ops team, which is our HR team and the office of the CEO, which is my

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Team

Nick Green:
Co-owned. So myself, my staff and my EA are very active on it. And then the people ops team is really most involved in translating that out into the onboarding, the training process.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Yeah, the people, events, performance management, all of that. Did that idea emerge? Did you steal that from someone? Did you hire some consultants? I mean, where did that come from? Did you just come up with that idea?

Nick Green:
I did not come up with it. I read a book called called Brave New Work, I believe is what it was called. It says like seven or eight years ago. And that had the idea of the company basically culture as an operating system.
And so that was the initial idea. And then it was also studying the cultures of other, like I said, other companies that have done big audacious things. Netflix is a culture that I think is really interesting. Amazon’s a culture in part by virtue of just being in e-commerce and done what they’ve done at the scale they’ve done that is really interesting. And both very different cultures than us, but ones that have been very deliberate and thoughtful and consistent about their cultures over time. So I spent a lot of time studying those as well. And a lot of the ideas come from those companies.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
What year did Amazon buy Whole Foods?

Nick Green:
That was in 20, I want to say 2017 or 2018.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
So your idea was Whole Foods meets Costco online, then Amazon buys Whole Foods. Did you have a panic attack?

Nick Green:
So it’s interesting, we didn’t consider ourselves Whole Foods meets Costco online. That’s how other people described us.
And maybe somehow, sometimes we did too just for shorthand. But we always had this vision of taking the baton from Whole Foods and going further. I think Whole Foods, half of the people don’t live within driving distance of a Whole Foods. Most people that do can’t afford the price premium and Whole Foods at 30 years in, even before they were bought by Amazon was already in a world where they were going after mostly larger brands that were pretty widely distributed. We always wanted to get brands on earlier, be at the tip of the spear of innovation and be at a price point and geographic access to go to anyone. So we never really, this is what I was telling you about when we talked to VCs. Everyone asked, how are you going to be with Whole Foods? We were never really worried about that. I will say that when Amazon bought Whole Foods, it was a kind of holy cow moment for a lot of our investors who call us up.
What’s going to happen now is like Whole Foods going to now become better price point and more accessible, and they go after the Thrive Mission. I think what we found instead is that Amazon viewed Whole Foods as a strategic asset on their mission, which is to be everything store. And what they’ve done is basically Amazon Whole Foods. And so that’s neither bad nor good. It’s just aligned with what they’re trying to do. But today, whole Foods carries more Carry Honey Nut Cheerios, there’s echoes on the shelf. They become more centralized and they’re buying more mainstream brands. And that’s actually opened up more space for us to plant our flag as that place that has the highest quality standards that brings brands on early, that creates really purpose-built experiences for healthy living. So yeah, ironically, what I think from the outside probably looked like the biggest threat to our business back in the very early days ended up being something that opened up more white space for our mission.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Beautiful. Okay, so it’s time for the last question. This is my favorite question, and it is, what is something that you don’t get asked about very often in these types of interviews that you wish you were asked more often?

Nick Green:
This has been a really interesting interview because it actually has focused on the things that I always want to talk more about, which is Oh good. Which is the mission and the culture. So I feel like if you’d asked me in any other interview what it was, I would’ve said those two things. We end up often going deep on the business metrics and the performance and the scale. This has been really, really thoughtful and really fun to have a chance to speak about what we’ve done differently with the mission and the culture. Because ultimately, as I said, those are the things that have been our competitive advantage as a business. They’re ultimately the things that drive value for our shareholders. And part of what we want to do as we go forward into the next decade is to be more of an example for other companies to see it’s not zero sum. You build a great business or you have a strong mission. It’s actually the mission and the culture drive business performance. And if you do them right, they become your biggest asset. It’s definitely been the case for us, and we want to show that others can experience that as well.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Well, I would love to tell your story. We’re writing a book right now that we’re just about putting, finishing touches on, but I would love to tell the Thrive Market story in the book if you’re open to us writing up some of this interview and getting your approval on it, because I think your story is one that people could learn from and see that it doesn’t have to be woo woo, it can be profitable. It’s actually a great way of running businesses. And those two, the dichotomy that it’s either or needs to be broken, that’s our mission.

Nick Green:
Absolutely. Would love to. Yeah.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Okay, great. Well, I’ll follow up with you on that. Nick, thank you so much for coming on here and for being the leader that you are and creating a space for people. How many employees do you have right now?

Nick Green:
We have over a thousand employees.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Well, creating a business for a thousand people get to thrive in serving millions of your consumers and being a story for the tip of the spear for a better way of running organizations. Thank you so much.

Nick Green:
Thank you.

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