In Ben Hindman’s case, how about a lollipop company?

But not just any lollipop company.

After co-founding Splash, scaling it and then selling it, helping build Peel Insights before Shopify acquired it, and working alongside Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke, Ben decided to trade software for something decidedly more tangible.

Good-for-You Candy.

His latest venture, Le Lick, makes electrolyte-infused lollipops, aiming to bring together great taste, thoughtful ingredients, and a little more fun.

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On a recent episode of Worthy for Thirty, Ben and I talked about the move from B2B technology into consumer packaged goods (CPG), how he’s approaching brand building, and why he’s embracing creativity, generosity, and vulnerability along the way.

What I appreciated most about our conversation wasn’t that Ben had figured everything out. No one does, for the record.

Quite the opposite.

He’s building something from scratch while questioning conventional wisdom, and openly acknowledging the fear that comes with it.

Here are six lessons from our conversation that I think every founder, creator, and business leader can learn from.

1. Your weirdness might be your greatest competitive advantage

There’s no lack of advice unsolicitedly telling entrepreneurs to study competitors, follow best practices, and build what the market wants.

And there’s value in all of that.

But what happens when everyone follows the same playbook?

You end up with a lot of sameness

Ben has spent much of his career doing the opposite.

From his early days creating unconventional experiences to building Splash and now Le Lick, he credits much of his success to having the freedom to be himself.

He recalled something a former boss at Thrillist once asked him when reviewing an event concept:

“Where’s the WTF factor?”

The idea was simple. What makes this experience so unexpected that it leaves an impression compelling someone to tell someone else?

That philosophy pervades Le Lick.

Instead of launching the brand with a set of three flavors industry experts recommended, Ben launched with six and quickly added more.

Instead of coloring the candy itself, Le Lick uses colored sticks.

And instead of building a traditional wellness brand, he’s leaning into humor, unusual flavors, and even a custom lollipop designed to get Skrillex’s attention.

Some of these ideas might sound ridiculous.

That’s partly the point.

The takeaway: Differentiation doesn’t always require a breakthrough technology, idea, or an enormous marketing budget. Sometimes it starts with having the confidence to create something that doesn’t look like everything else.

For founders, the question is worth asking:

What are we doing that people will actually remember?

2. Creativity isn’t reserved for the ‘creatives’

I asked Ben a question that I think gets overlooked in business.

Can anyone be creative?

His answer was a quick ‘yes.’

He shared the story of a business he once experimented with called Don’t Paint the Walls.

The concept involved putting people in hazmat suits, handing them paintbrushes, turning on music, and encouraging them to go wild.

What he discovered was that people weren’t necessarily lacking creativity.

They were afraid of outside opinions.

They were concerned about whether they were good at painting or whether their work would look right.

Remove that pressure, and people started creating.

Ben also made an interesting observation about his finance lead, whom he described as incredibly creative with spreadsheets.

I loved that example.

Because creativity isn’t assigned to a job title.

It’s the operations leader who finds a better process.

The finance executive who solves a problem differently.

The founder who sees an opportunity in an overlooked category.

The takeaway: One of the most important things a leader can do is create an environment where people feel comfortable experimenting without worrying about looking foolish.

If every new idea needs to be perfect before someone shares it, how many good ideas never see daylight?

3. Trust your taste, but be open to customer feedback

One of my favorite moments in the conversation came when Ben talked about working at Shopify.

He recalled watching CEO Tobi Lütke make creative decisions based on something surprisingly simple.

His gut.

Even while leading a company with thousands of employees, Tobi was willing to weigh in on something as seemingly small as a color choice.

What impressed Ben wasn’t the decision itself.

It was the confidence behind it.

The willingness to trust his judgment.

Ben has carried that lesson into Le Lick.

When developing an orange coconut lollipop, the team went through 26 rounds before settling on the final flavor.

They gathered feedback, experimented, and refined the product.

But eventually, someone had to make a decision.

Ben trusted his taste.

Interestingly, he doesn’t apply that same judgment to every flavor.

He doesn’t particularly love watermelon, so he gave someone on his team ownership of developing it.

That’s an important distinction.

Trusting your instincts doesn’t mean assuming your preferences are universal.

It means knowing when to make a call and when someone else has a better perspective.

For business leaders, this is especially relevant today. Be self-aware.

We have access to more customer data, competitive intelligence, and market research than ever before.

All valuable tools.

But data doesn’t eliminate the need for judgment.

The takeaway: Listen to your customers, gather the evidence, and empower people with different perspectives. Then be willing to make a decision.

You can’t outsource every creative choice to a survey.

4. Your customers might value something completely different than what you’re selling

Here’s a lesson that every founder and marketer should pay attention to.

When Le Lick first entered the market, much of its marketing focused on functional ingredients.

Electrolytes. Sugar content. What made the product different from conventional candy.

Those seemed like obvious selling points.

But as customers started buying and coming back, Ben noticed something.

They weren’t necessarily returning because of the functional benefits. They were returning because they loved the taste.

That epiphany compelled the company to rethink its messaging.

Instead of leading with ingredients and nutritional details, Le Lick began emphasizing flavor and the experience of enjoying the candy.

The functional benefits were still there.

They just weren’t necessarily the primary reason people fell in love with the product.

This is such an important lesson for anyone building a business.

Founders spend months or years developing products. Naturally, they become attached to the features that make those products special.

But customers don’t always care about the same things.

A founder might sell efficiency.

The customer might buy peace of mind.

A software company might promote its features.

The customer might simply love how easy it is to use.

A candy brand might promote electrolytes.

The customer might just want something that tastes delicious.

The takeaway: Pay attention to why customers return, not just why you think they should buy.

That distinction can change your marketing, positioning, and even your product roadmap.

5. Giving back doesn’t have to wait until you’re successful

This part of the conversation felt especially relevant to what we’re trying to explore on Worthy for Thirty. Sounds very Kyle Gordon-esque.

Ben believes generosity should be built into how Le Lick operates, not something the company considers after it reaches a certain revenue milestone.

During our conversation, he shared that Le Lick had given away approximately 14,000 lollipops in the previous month.

Some went to events. Others supported meaningful causes, including care packages for people dealing with illness or recovering from breast cancer.

And yes, giving away candy can also be good marketing.

Sampling allows people to experience a product they might otherwise overlook.

Ben doesn’t shy away from that commercial reality.

But he also genuinely enjoys giving.

That’s part of who he is, and he wants it reflected in the company he’s building.

What made the conversation particularly interesting was his willingness to acknowledge the tension.

He admitted the company had given away too many lollipops that month relative to its finances.

That’s a real challenge for an early-stage business reinvesting its money into inventory.

Generosity carries a P&L implication.

So how do you build a business where giving is sustainable?

Ben is still figuring that out. Just like we all are :).

He’s working to measure the impact of sampling while remaining committed to the belief that generosity can be good for people and good for business. At the same time.

The takeaway: You don’t need to wait until your business is wildly profitable to make a positive impact.

But if giving is central to your mission, you also need to run the numbers and run an economic model that supports it.

Purpose and profitability aren’t competing ideas.

The challenge is designing a business where they can reinforce each other.

6. Experience doesn’t eliminate founder fear

This might have been the most relatable part of our conversation.

Ben has built businesses, experienced exits, worked alongside accomplished entrepreneurs, and navigated the ups and downs of startup life.

You might assume that starting another company would feel easier.

That experience would replace uncertainty with confidence.

But Ben admitted something that doesn’t always make it into curated founder story reels we see on Instagram.

He still feels afraid.

Afraid that the business won’t work.

Afraid that something he’s poured himself into could disappear.

And sometimes frustrated that, despite everything he’s learned, fear remains such a powerful emotion.

I appreciated his vulnerability.

Because it’s easy to confuse entrepreneurial optimism with an absence of doubt.

They’re not the same thing.

Ben described what he calls delusional optimism as being able to see around the next corner without necessarily knowing what’s waiting three corners ahead.

You keep moving anyway.

You trust your experience, your team, and your gut.

And you learn to make decisions without having every answer.

That’s entrepreneurship.

The takeaway: Confidence isn’t knowing that everything will work out.

It’s being willing to keep building when you don’t know.

For founders and leaders, the goal shouldn’t necessarily be to eliminate fear. It’s to avoid letting fear dictate every decision.

What Ben’s journey teaches us about building a business today

There’s something fascinating about watching an experienced technology entrepreneur enter the CPG industry.

In software, you can change a feature, update a website, or test a new experience relatively quickly.

In consumer products, you’re dealing with so many moving parts: manufacturing, physical inventory, ingredient costs, packaging, and margins.

Mistakes can be expensive.

And unlike software, you can’t simply push an update to a lollipop.

Ben is learning those realities firsthand.

He’s working to reduce production costs, understand customer behavior, build brand awareness, and figure out how to scale without sacrificing what makes Le Lick different.

But he’s also bringing lessons from his technology career into an industry that operates very differently.

Experiment quickly.

Listen to customers.

Make memorable experiences.

Trust your team.

And don’t lose the personality that made people pay attention to your brand in the first place.

That combination is what makes his story so interesting.

He’s not just trying to build another candy brand.

He’s exploring whether a company can be commercially successful while staying playful, unconventional, and generous.

And he’s doing it without pretending to have everything figured out.

The question I’d leave founders with

After speaking with Ben, I kept coming back to one thought.

What would you build differently if you weren’t so worried about what everyone else thought?

Maybe you’d finally launch the product you’ve been sitting on.

Maybe you’d stop copying competitors and develop a brand that actually reflects your personality.

Maybe you’d give your team more room to experiment.

Or maybe you’d build generosity into your business now, rather than waiting for some future milestone.

Whatever it is, there’s something worth learning from Ben’s willingness to embrace the uncomfortable parts of entrepreneurship.

The uncertainty.

The creativity.

The weirdness.

And the vulnerability that comes with putting something new into the world.

Because the businesses we remember aren’t always the ones that followed the rules most closely.

Sometimes they’re the ones brave enough to create their own. Uber comes to mind.

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Listen to the full conversation

In my conversation with Ben Hindman, co-founder of Le Lick, we explore entrepreneurship, building a CPG startup, consumer brand marketing, creativity, founder fear, and what it really takes to do good while doing well.

🎧 Listen to the full episode of Worthy for Thirty on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you enjoy podcasts.

Explore Le Lick:

https://enjoylelick.com

Worthy for Thirty features conversations with founders, business leaders, and changemakers proving that doing good and doing well can be part of the same equation.

If this resonated, share it with a founder or creator who could use a reminder to trust their instincts and keep building.

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What if scaling your business isn’t about finding more customers, but making it easier to support and growing your existing client relationships?

It’s a question that came up during my latest Worthy for Thirty conversation with Jarrett Applewhite, Co-Founder of Cootoh, and returning guest and co-host Chef Ed Porter.

Jarrett is building a platform that makes it easier to book private chefs. But what grabbed my attention wasn’t the technology. It was how he uncovered the problem worth solving.

And there’s a lesson here for anyone building a startup, growing a small business, or trying to turn a creative passion into a living.

1. Sometimes the Problem Isn’t Demand. It’s Everything That Comes After.

When Jarrett began working with independent chefs, he defaulted to thinking they needed more customers.

Then he began managing operations for roughly a dozen of them.

What he discovered was surprising. Many chefs already had packed schedules. They just couldn’t keep up with the administrative work.

Menus. Proposals. Scheduling. Invoices. Payments.

The work kept piling up.

So Jarrett and his team developed Chef OS, a tool that uses AI to help chefs handle those managerial tasks faster. A chef can upload a photo of a menu, organize dietary information, and prepare a customer proposal during a conversation.

The goal is to streamline a process that might take two weeks to a day or less.

The takeaway for founders: Before spending money building something new, spend time doing the work yourself.

As Jarrett put it:

“You gotta live it. You gotta live the problems yourself.”

It’s simple advice, but easy to overlook when everyone is racing to launch the next big thing.

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2. AI Isn’t the Moat. Understanding People Is.

Everyone has access to the same Ai tools.

So what happens when your competitors have access to the same technology?

I asked Jarrett that exact question.

His answer came down to distribution, trust, transparency, and knowing your customers better than anyone else.

That last point is especially important.

Jarrett regularly brings chefs together to discuss what they need. Those conversations help shape what Cootoh builds next.

Chef Ed offered a useful reminder:

“A tool is only as good as the problems it solves.”

For creators and founders, that’s worth remembering.

Don’t add AI to your business simply because you can. Use it to remove something your customers already find frustrating.

And if you’re not sure what that is, ask them.

3. Your Community Might Be Your Moat Instead

One of the most interesting parts of our conversation was Chef Ed’s perspective on community.

He travels extensively, works with different clients, and sees firsthand how relationships create opportunities.

His vision for Cootoh went beyond connecting chefs with customers.

What if chefs could collaborate across cities? Share knowledge? Connect with local farmers? Build relationships that lead to opportunities they wouldn’t otherwise have?

Suddenly, the platform becomes more than a place to book a service.

It becomes a way for people to grow together.

This applies well beyond hospitality.

A newsletter writer can build a community around shared interests. A fitness instructor can connect clients who support one another. A founder can bring customers together to exchange ideas.

The lesson: Don’t just ask how many people use your product. Ask whether you’re helping them build meaningful relationships.

Because customers can come and go. Communities provide staying power.

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4. Ownership Changes the Conversation.

This is where Cootoh’s mission gets particularly interesting.

Jarrett isn’t just thinking about helping chefs earn more money.

He’s thinking about how they can build independent businesses, grow their personal brands, and have greater control over their careers.

He even raised the possibility of a cooperative ownership structure where chefs could eventually share in the business itself.

It’s an idea, not an announced business model. But it speaks to something bigger.

As more people pursue careers as independent creators, consultants, and entrepreneurs, there’s an important question worth asking:

Are we building businesses that simply profit from people’s talents, or businesses that help those people build lasting value for themselves?

The two don’t have to be mutually exclusive.

And that’s exactly where doing good and doing well can meet.

5. Growth Needs Trust.

There’s one more detail from our conversation that stayed with me.

Cooth doesn’t simply accept every chef who signs up for its customer-facing marketplace.

Jarrett described an interview and practical cooking evaluation where chefs have 90 minutes to prepare two dishes using a set of ingredients.

Why go through that effort?

Because hiring a private chef is personal.

You’re inviting someone into your home. You’re trusting them with your guests, your food, and an experience that matters to you.

Chef Ed made a great comparison: meeting someone for coffee is very different from inviting them into your house for coffee.

That trust can’t be automated away.

And the same principle applies to any business.

Growth gets people through the door. Trust gives them a reason to come back.

For founders, the challenge is figuring out how to maintain that trust as the business gets bigger.

The Bigger Picture

I left this conversation thinking less about private chefs and more about what it means to build a useful business.

Jarrett didn’t begin by asking how AI could change hospitality.

He spent time with chefs, experienced their frustrations, and started solving problems.

Chef Ed brought the other side of the equation: the first-hand chef perspective. The relationships, creativity, and human connection that make the work meaningful in the first place.

Together, they offered a reminder that feels particularly relevant right now.

Technology should give people more time to do what makes them valuable, never at the detriment of making the human part of their work less valuable.

Whether you’re building a startup, launching a creative business, or trying to grow something you’ve already started, that’s a principle worth keeping close.

And perhaps the best place to start is with one question:

What’s taking up your customers’ time that you could give back to them?

Listen to the full conversation

In this episode of Worthy for Thirty, I sit down with Jarrett Applewhite, Co-Founder of Cootoh, and Chef Ed Porter to explore AI in business, entrepreneurship, independent ownership, and the future of hospitality.

We discuss what it takes to build a startup around real customer needs, why community matters, and how founders can create businesses that do good while doing well.

Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Worthy for Thirty is a podcast about founders, entrepreneurs, and changemakers building successful businesses while making a meaningful difference.

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We spend a ton of time debating outcomes: valuations, prices, hiring numbers, growth. This week’s headlines allude to a more pragmatic question: Who created the system that produced those outcomes?

From Anthropic’s atypical IPO governance to McDonald’s AI-assisted pricing to new disability-employment infrastructure, three conversations from the Worthy for Thirty archive provide the same lesson: values become reinforced when they’re the basis for how decisions actually get made.

💰 MARCIA DAWOOD: PURPOSE HAS TO SURVIVE THE TERM SHEET

Marcia Dawood — “Ep. 56: Marcia Dawood, Angel Investor, Author and Podcast Host” — February 12, 2025

Revisit the episode

When Marcia came on the show, she challenged one of the most persistent assumptions in business: that investors eventually need to decide between impact and returns. Her larger argument was that capital is a means to an end. Used intentionally, it can create financial value while funding innovation, broadening access to entrepreneurship and supporting companies solving meaningful problems. Worthy For Thirty

Now consider Anthropic. In IPO disclosures reported September 29, the AI company revealed a new Founder LLC structure that will give its seven co-founders 50.1% of voting control while Anthropic remains a public-benefit corporation. The structure is intended to help leadership protect its stated mission of developing AI responsibly, even when those choices could conflict with shareholders’ financial interests. Reuters

That’s a fascinating real-life test of Marcia’s thesis. Purpose and profit are easy to pair when they point in the same direction; the harder question is what happens when they don’t. Anthropic is preempting the answer to that question before public-market pressure arrives by putting mission directly into governance.

The Worthy idea: If purpose disappears the moment shareholders disagree, it was never much of a system. Governance is where values get teeth. Also, listen to my conversation with Eric Ries. We discuss this fact.

🍔 BLAKE NIEMANN: TRUST IS A PRODUCT INGREDIENT

Blake Niemann — “Build for the Consumer. Everything Else Is Noise” — December 24, 2025

Revisit the episode

Blake’s Levels Protein playbook was refreshingly no-frills: be consumer obsessed, remove friction, and assume consumers are smarter than brands sometimes give them credit for. He explained transparency not as marketing language but as an operational discipline, from ingredients and packaging to tiny details like a clean-peel canister seal, and argued that innovation only matters when it solves something consumers actually want. Worthy For Thirty

That perspective feels particularly relevant after Reuters reported on September 29 that McDonald’s is increasingly using machine-learning tools to suggest menu prices across its nearly 14,000 U.S. restaurants. The system sifts through transaction data and estimates what customers may be willing to pay at individual locations; McDonald’s says franchisees still have the ability to set their own prices, although Reuters found that some operators felt pressure to follow the recommendations. Reuters

There’s nothing inherently anti-consumer about using better data to price a product. But there is a brand question hiding in plain sight: Does the customer understand the rules of the relationship? An algorithm can make a transaction more precise while simultaneously making the experience feel less sincere, or should I say ‘human.’

Blake’s lesson isn’t “never optimize.” It’s that every optimization ultimately lands with a human being, and trust is part of what that person is buying.

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♿ DIEGO MARISCAL + MINDY SCHEIER: ACCESS WORKS BEST BEFORE SOMEONE HAS TO ASK

Diego Mariscal + Mindy Scheier — “How Mission-Driven Founders Can Build More Inclusive Companies” — July 1, 2026

Revisit the episode

My conversation with Diego and Mindy restated accessibility from accommodation to business design. Diego spoke about how disability can actually build unusually valuable entrepreneurial muscles: adaptability, tenacity, and creative problem-solving, while Mindy made a case for involving disabled people in the product development process before something goes to market. Their point was straightforward: raise funds for access early and build it into the company’s DNA vs. waiting until someone with a disability encounters a limitation. Worthy For Thirty

On September 30, 2Gether-International and Making Space publicized results from a Truist Foundation-supported workforce-development initiative for disabled professionals. The organizations reported 70 executive-track apprenticeship placements, 17 participants moving into full-time competitive employment, six entering freelance or contract work, and a 20% increase in cohort confidence around requesting accommodations and self-advocacy. InvestorsHub

The same idea is appearing at a policy level abroad. Singapore unveiled new measures on October 4 aimed at raising employment among people with disabilities from 34.7% to 40% by 2030, including a dedicated Employment Support Office, expanded training and work exposure, job-redesign support for employers and broader pathways into sectors including technology. People Matters

Both developments move beyond telling companies to “be more inclusive.” They start with an outcome and work backwards to build pathways, incentives, training and infrastructure.

The Worthy idea: You don’t unlock overlooked talent by asking people to work within the existing system. You redesign the system so their talent can be captured.

🚨 GUEST RADAR

• Eliza Blank / The Farmlink Project: On October 1, The Farmlink Project joined the Zero Food Waste Coalition’s Steering Committee, alongside the U.S. Composting Council, the coalition’s first steering-committee expansion since its founding. The move gives The Farmlink Project a larger role in shaping federal, state, and local food-waste policy using its experience connecting surplus farm food with communities that need it. Waste360

• Phil Schermer / Project Healthy Minds: Project Healthy Minds is heading into a major week: its annual World Mental Health Day Gala takes place October 8 at Spring Studios in New York, with fashion designer Naeem Khan serving as artistic curator; WWD spotlighted the collaboration today. The organization’s free World Mental Health Day Festival follows October 10. Women’s Wear Daily

ONE IDEA TO TAKE WITH YOU THIS WEEK

Markets tend to reward the result. Leaders have to design the steps needed to get there.

Governance settles the outcome when money and mission collide. Transparency determines whether optimization strengthens or erodes consumer trust. Infrastructure decides whether inclusion becomes real or stays trapped on a piece of paper.

The strongest organizations don’t just state what they value.

They decide where those values live when the tension arrives.

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Authors and entrepreneurs Eric Ries and Kass Lazerow discuss the hidden costs of growth, the business case for purpose, and why the companies that endure may be the ones willing to leave money on the table.

What happens when doing well starts making it harder to do good?

It’s a question I’ve been wrestling with since starting Worthy for Thirty.

Most entrepreneurs start with good intentions. They point out a problem, create something valuable, attract customers and, if they’re fortunate, grow.

But somewhere between raising capital, answering to investors, growing operations, and pursuing an exit, the original mission can become negotiable.

The business becomes successful. But does its purpose survive?

That’s the tension I wanted to explore with Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup and his latest New York Times bestseller, Incorruptible.

And it’s the exact reason why I invited past Worthy for Thirty guest Kass Lazerow to join me as guest co-host.

Why Kass? Because she’s lived the decisions Eric writes about.

Kass and her husband, Mike, co-founded Buddy Media, raised venture capital, scaled the business, and ultimately sold it to Salesforce in 2012 for ~$1B.

But when Kass previously joined Worthy for Thirty, what stayed with me wasn’t just the financial success. It was how intentionally she and Mike built a company around its people, shared ownership, culture, and giving back.

I experienced that culture firsthand during my time working alongside them from 2010-2012. Their commitment to Cycle for Survival helped shape my own belief that professional success and meaningful service can be mutually inclusive.

Kass didn’t just talk about doing good while doing well. She operationalized it. Everyone had a role in giving and being of service.

Today, as an investor and advisor to the next generation of founders, she’s confronting many of the same pressures from the other side of the table.

Eric brings the blueprint. Kass brings the lived experience of building, defending, and ultimately selling a company without treating its culture as expendable.

Together, they referenced several business questions that deserve more attention from both emerging startups and established companies.

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1. Your mission statement is just words on a page. Your mission is reinforced by your decisions.

Eric argues that many founders don’t truly understand the corporate structures they’re creating.

A company might publicly promise to prioritize customers, employees or social impact while its governance and incentives obligate leadership toward maximizing financial returns.

That disconnect becomes particularly consequential when difficult decisions come up.

Eric cites the acquisition of pharmaceutical company Vectura by Philip Morris International as an example of what can occur when financial considerations conflict with an organization’s original purpose.

His broader thesis: Creating shareholder value and creating genuine economic value aren’t necessarily the same thing.

The business implication

For startups, mission should influence governance, ownership, and investor alignment, preempting any initial major conflict.

For established businesses, the challenge is evaluating whether executive compensation, board oversight, and financial incentives actually reinforce the values being communicated to customers and employees.

Ask yourself: If our most profitable opportunity conflicted with our stated mission, who would have the authority to say no?

2. Culture isn’t a cost center. It’s part of your moat.

Kass recalled a moment at Buddy Media when she proposed spending $1 million on an out-of-home, airport advertising campaign.

The board pushed back, wanting more salespeople instead.

Kass saw something different: an opportunity to establish Buddy Media as a category leader, attract talent and strengthen employee retention.

She says all three outcomes came to fruition.

Later, as Buddy Media grew to approximately 350 employees, Kass defended company traditions that investors questioned for financial reasons.

Her position was clear: these investments weren’t discretionary expenses. They helped define the company values.

Eric describes the opposing pressure as a kind of financial gravity: the constant temptation to cut costs, increase prices, and optimize short-term returns.

The business implication

Not every cultural investment is justified. But not every valuable investment produces an immediate, easily measurable ROI.

For startup founders, the lesson is to define the behaviors and experiences that make your organization distinct before rapid growth makes them harder to preserve.

For established companies, it’s worth examining whether cost-cutting initiatives are quietly removing the trust, institutional knowledge, and employee loyalty that contribute to long-term performance.

Reflection: What are we treating as an expense today that might actually be an investment in our future competitiveness?

3. Costco’s $1.50 hot dog is a prime example of brand differentiation.

One of my favorite examples from our conversation involved Costco. Who doesn’t love an impromptu Costco trip?

For decades, Costco has maintained its $1.50 hot dog and soda combination despite enormous opportunities to increase the price. Inflation, tarrifs, etc are all rational to justify a cost increase.

From a conventional financial perspective, raising prices seems obvious.

But Eric sees something more valuable than the additional margin: a promise customers know Costco will keep.

Rather than jettisoning that promise, Costco has invested in its supply chain to help sustain it.

That’s not simply a pricing strategy. It’s a demonstration of organizational character.

And it connects directly to Kass’s experience at Buddy Media.

When pressured to eliminate traditions that reinforced company culture, she chose to protect them and find savings elsewhere.

Different businesses. Same underlying principle.

The business implication

For startups, differentiation doesn’t always require a revolutionary product. It can emerge from an unusually strong commitment to something customers or employees value.

For established brands, the challenge is identifying which promises have become intrinsic to customer trust and resisting the temptation to monetize every available opportunity.

Ask yourself: What promise would our customers care deeply if we compromised or negotiated it in lieu of higher financial returns?

4. In the age of AI, what makes your business unique?

I asked Eric a question that’s becoming increasingly relevant to founders and executives.

If three competing companies have access to the same AI tools, similar technology and comparable information, what actually makes one different?

His response challenged the obsession with efficiency.

When businesses optimize for the same metrics using the same playbooks, they risk becoming increasingly the same. Look at LinkedIn, Meta, TikTok etc. Each platform copies the other.

Eric referenced management thinker Mary Parker Follett and her concept of the invisible leader: the shared purpose that guides an organization beyond the authority of any individual executive.

In other words, your competitive advantage may increasingly depend on what your organization believes, how it behaves, and which commitments it refuses to abandon.

The business implication

For startups, AI can accelerate execution, but speed alone may not create a lasting competitive moat.

For established companies, technology adoption should strengthen the customer experience and organizational identity rather than just replicating what competitors are doing.

Ask yourself: If every competitor adopted our technology tomorrow, what would still make us meaningfully different?

5. Building an incorruptible company requires structural decisions, not just good intentions.

Perhaps the most actionable part of our conversation involved corporate governance.

Eric discussed how Public Benefit Corporations (PBCs) can give founders a legal framework for pursuing financial returns alongside a stated public benefit. Hello, double bottom lines.

He also pointed to governance approaches used by companies such as Novo Nordisk and Anthropic, where organizational structures are intended to help protect long-term mission.

The important distinction is that a Public Benefit Corporation is a legal corporate form, while B Corp certification is a separate assessment and certification process.

A PBC isn’t a guarantee against mission drift, nor is it necessarily appropriate for every business. But it creates another option worth understanding.

The business implication

Early-stage founders should consider how incorporation documents, investor agreements, and board composition could affect their ability to protect the company’s purpose. With the advent of AI and a deluge of information, seek out to understand what structures make the most sense. Defer to advisors and mentors to ask them to help you validate.

Established companies can revisit governance, decision rights and incentive structures rather than assuming those choices were permanently settled at incorporation.

Ask yourself: Have we designed our company to protect its mission, or are we relying on the good intentions of whoever happens to be in charge?

The lesson I keep coming back to

There’s one final detail from my conversation with Kass that I think captures the spirit of this entire episode.

Nearly 15 years after Buddy Media’s acquisition, she shared that roughly 20 to 40 former colleagues still come together to participate in Cycle for Survival (me included), supporting rare cancer research.

Think about that.

The company was sold. People moved on. Careers evolved and grew. On to the next.

But something Mike and Kass helped build continued to bring people together long after Buddy Media sold to Salesforce.

That’s not a traditional business KPI. Yet it says something meaningful about the durability of a company’s culture. Perhaps it’s a ROI on culture?

And it’s why the connection between Eric and Kass matters so much to me.

Eric challenges founders to engineer companies capable of protecting their mission. Kass demonstrates what that commitment can look like when the decisions become difficult, expensive and personal.

The Lean Startup helped entrepreneurs learn how to build companies that work. Incorruptible asks whether we’re building companies that remain worth believing in.

For me, that’s the next frontier of doing good while doing well.

Not whether purpose and profit can coexist in theory.

But whether we’re willing to build businesses where they can coexist in practice and reality

Now I’d love to hear from you: What’s one non-negotiable principle your business, even if protecting it meant sacrificing short-term profit?

Listen to my full Worthy for Thirty conversation with Eric Ries and guest co-host Kass Lazerow on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Find their books:

• Incorruptible by Eric Ries

• Shoveling Shit by Mike and Kass Lazerow

Worthy for Thirty explores the people and businesses proving that doing good and doing well don’t have to be mutually exclusive.

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On to the weekly business at hand.

The most interesting business shifts seldom show up all at once. They start on the periphery, an overlooked consumer behavior, an access problem, an inefficient system, and eventually the rest of the market catches up.

This week, three conversations from the Worthy for Thirty archive feel less like old interviews and more like a reflection of what’s happening in our current climate: nonalcoholic beer becoming mainstream, AI literacy becoming infrastructure, and food waste moving from a PowerPoint slide bullet into the kitchen itself.

🍺 BILL SHUFELT: LAY THE GROUNDWORK FOR THE EVENTUAL SHIFT

Bill Shufelt — “Ep. 51: Bill Shufelt, Co-Founder & CEO, Athletic Brewing Company” — November 13, 2024
Revisit the episode

When Bill came on the show, one of the most useful ideas was bigger than nonalcoholic beer. After realizing how much better he felt during a 30-day break from alcohol, he recognized that consumers shouldn’t have to decide between partaking in the social ritual vs. pursuing their wellness goals. It shouldn’t be an ‘either or’ decision. Athletic bet that if you made the product genuinely good, nonalcoholic beer didn’t need to live in a penalty box for people who “couldn’t drink”—it could become a choice people actively pursued. worthyforthirty.com

On September 22, Reuters reported that AB InBev is adapting its portfolio to changing drinking habits and health-and-wellness demand, including more zero-alcohol offerings, smaller package sizes, and even beverages with protein or electrolytes. The company also sees nonalcoholic beer as an opportunity around casual meals and occasions where traditional beer may not fit. Reuters

That’s what category change looks like: the behavior that once seemed niche or fringe starts influencing the incumbent’s roadmap.

The Worthy idea: Don’t ask whether a new behavior is big enough today. Ask what happens if consumers no longer want to go back.

📚 MIKE CLARKE: ACCESS DOESN’T AUTOMATICALLY MEAN ADOPTION

Mike Clarke — “Reading is FUNdamental” / Co-Founder, Storyvoice and Senior Director of New Media at Scholastic — January 2, 2024
Revisit the episode

Mike built Storyvoice from his experience working with Syrian refugee communities in Lebanon, where he saw children struggling to access education and language resources. His team eventually moved from a one-to-one reading-buddy concept to a scalable one-to-many platform built to make shared reading free, safe, and accessible; by the time of our conversation, Storyvoice had reached more than 100,000 classrooms and families across 35 countries. worthyforthirty.com

Now replace “reading” with “AI literacy.”

On September 23, Verizon announced a $70 million AI-skills initiative pairing free training from organizations including IBM, Google, Microsoft, Anthropic, Coursera and OpenAI with local nonprofits such as Goodwill. Verizon’s own framing is instructive: access to content alone isn’t enough, so community organizations will provide coaching and hands-on support to help people actually turn courses into usable skills. Verizon

A day earlier, Zoom Cares announced another $2.75 million in AI-for-Good grants, including support for teachers, workers, refugees, and nonprofits trying to build real AI capability—not simply tool access. Zoom

Mike’s Storyvoice journey offers the same lesson: technology scales possibility; human infrastructure turns possibility into participation.

The Worthy idea: Distribution gets a tool into someone’s hands. Design, trust, and support determine whether it changes anything.

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🥕 ELIZA BLANK: IMPACT GETS REAL WHEN IT ENTERS OPERATIONS

Eliza Blank — “From Founder to Safety Net: Eliza Blank on Building Impact That Holds” — January 21, 2026
Revisit the episode

My conversation with Eliza kept returning to a deceptively simple principle: reliability is impact. At The Farmlink Project, that means building the logistics and partnerships necessary to move surplus food from farms to communities facing food insecurity; Farmlink helped distribute 150 million pounds of surplus produce in 2025. Eliza’s insight was essentially to optimize before expanding; to make the system dependable enough that people can count on it. worthyforthirty.com

That came to mind watching what begins in New York today.

Mill’s third annual Make Food Not Waste Restaurant Week, running September 28 through October 4, brings together Michelin-recognized restaurants, James Beard Award winners and neighborhood operators with an explicit commitment to zero-waste cooking. Participating kitchens are using Mill to rethink how ingredients and scraps move through the back of house rather than treating food waste solely as a consumer-awareness campaign. GlobeNewswire

That distinction matters. Sustainability becomes difficult to abandon when it stops being a message and starts becoming the system.

The Worthy idea: The strongest mission-driven businesses don’t just communicate their values. They operationalize them.

A quick note from one of Worthy for Thirty’s newest sponsors, Gustus Vitae. Long before they became a sponsor, I had the opportunity to sit down with co-founder Frankie Scanlon to talk about how Gustus Vitae has grown from its farmers market roots into a brand built around quality, community and making cooking more accessible and fun. That conversation, and the way Frankie and his team think about building a business with purpose, made it a no-brainer to support the show. Gustus Vitae crafts small-batch, all-natural seasonings, sea salts and artisan cane sugars designed to make everyday food better. Click here to shop Gustus Vitae and get 15% off your order + free shipping—and support a brand that supports Worthy for Thirty.

🚨 GUEST RADAR

• MJ Gottlieb / Loosid: On September 23, Loosid announced an expansion of its recovery platform aimed at connecting formal treatment with everyday sobriety, including tools for treatment providers and its AI-powered Sobriety & Addiction Mentor, SAM. The move pushes Loosid further from a consumer community app toward infrastructure for ongoing recovery support. openPR.com

• Bill Shufelt / Athletic Brewing: Athletic and Graza announced Cold Off The Press on September 23, a limited-release nonalcoholic pilsner made using Graza extra-virgin olive oil. Beyond the novelty, it’s another example of Athletic treating NA beer as a platform for product experimentation rather than merely an alcohol substitute. Brewbound

ONE IDEA TO TAKE WITH YOU

Non-alcoholic beer. AI education. Food waste.

The industries are different, but the pattern is the same:

Yesterday’s edge case can become tomorrow’s OS.

The leaders worth following are the ones who see consumer behavior change before everyone else does and builds the product, infrastructure or system that makes that new behavior easier.

By the time the market agrees, they’ve already been ahead.

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Startup culture has spent so much time celebrating speed: raise the round, bring on users, hire aggressively, open locations, capture the market.

My conversation with Kyle Gordon, Co-Founder & CEO of Dillas Quesadillas, offered a contrarian playbook rooted in firsthand experience.

Dillas has grown to 11+ err 11.5 locations across company-owned and franchised restaurants. But Kyle said something that stuck:

“We could probably have fifty units right now if all we cared about was unit count.”

They don’t.

And that’s the point.

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1. Never forget about your people

Kyle calls Dillas a people-first company. That isn’t employer-branding copy. It’s a decision heuristic.

When faced with competing choices, he asks: Which option benefits our team members more?

More importantly, Dillas refuses to grow faster than its people and systems can support.

That’s a measured approach in contrast to the “growth at all costs” mindset that has permeated parts of startup culture.

The founder exercise: Before approving your next growth initiative, ask:

If demand doubled tomorrow, what breaks first: our people, product, culture, or systems?

Your answer may be more important than the growth opportunity.

2. Build the system and know-how first

Kyle didn’t come out of college and immediately start Dillas.

He took a $13-an-hour job at a then-emerging Raising Cane’s and spent roughly seven years learning restaurant operations, leadership, and scale before leaping.

That experience molded Dillas.

Today, Kyle is almost obsessive about systems. His franchising philosophy is particularly illuminating: rather than selling five franchises to five people, prove the model with one operator across multiple locations, identify what needs to be fixed or refined, perform the fixes, and then copy it.

That’s not just a restaurant lesson.

For a SaaS founder, it could mean proving retention before allocating money into acquisition. For a consumer brand, proving velocity before expanding distribution. For an AI startup, proving the workflow actually solves a customer problem before adding another dozen features.

Scale should accentuate features that already work, not hide something that doesn’t.

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3. Mission is built into the foundation

This is where Kyle’s story fits nicely into the premise of Worthy for Thirty.

Before Dillas’ first restaurant even opened up, Kyle and his team volunteered at Minnie’s Food Pantry.

At the time, Kyle believed he had roughly $1,000 left in the company’s operating account. The pantry was selling $100 fundraising candles.

Kyle bought two.

By his own math, he had just spent roughly 20% of what was left over.

Why?

It was a sign to himself and his team about the company they intended to become.

That distinction matters.

Mission-driven companies don’t wait around until the P&L gives them agency to establish their core values.

They decide what they value and then design the business accordingly.

Dillas now syncs giving to its top line. Kyle describes the result as a “virtuous cycle”: sales grow → giving grows → communities benefit → stronger community relationships can support the business → giving grows again.

That’s cause marketing at its most interesting, not as a one-off campaign, but as an economic flywheel.

4. You don’t need money to start giving

There’s an easy and expected objection:

That’s great once you’re successful. What if I’m bootstrapping and can’t afford to give money away?

Kyle’s answer was beautifully simple:

“Give time. Just show up. Find a yes.”

Volunteer. Meet the principal at the local school. Help at the football game. Talk to students. Find out what a nonprofit actually needs.

Cash doesn’t always need to change hands to make an impact.

That may be the most actionable takeaway for any early-stage founder reading this.

Don’t ask:

“When will we be big enough to have a mission?”

Ask:

“How can we be resourceful and what can we do with what we have right now?”

The Worthy for Thirty takeaway

Kyle’s story reinforces something I’ve heard repeatedly across these conversations:

Purpose and performance become much more powerful when they’re designed to compound together.

Great product first.

People capable of delivering it.

Systems capable of scaling it.

A mission that gives people a reason to care.

And the patience to let all four work in tandem.

In a business culture that often treats speed as the objective, Dillas offers a useful alternative:

Maybe the goal isn’t to grow as fast as you can.

Maybe it’s to build something worth growing.

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This week, three conversations from the Worthy for Thirty archive seemed newly relevant for the same reason: the smartest organizations don’t just ask people to care. They meet people where they are.

🧠 Mental-health resources need to be made available yet made easy to access and use

Phil Schermer + Stephen Sokoler — “Ep. 21: Phil Schermer, Founder & CEO, Project Healthy Minds and Stephen Sokoler, Founder & CEO, Journey” — March 23, 2023
Revisit the episode

When Phil and Stephen came on the show in 2023, the main point of the episode wasn’t simply that companies should talk about mental health. They argued that CEOs and executive teams need to treat employee mental health as a company priority, normalize conversations around it, and make mental-health care an intrinsic part of how a company operates. Worthy For Thirty

That distinction feels incredibly important. On September 15, the World Health Organization updated its guidance on mental health at work, stressing that leadership commitment, manager training, employee participation, and workplace structures allow people to actually flourish, not simply post or manage benefits sitting on a portal somewhere. World Health Organization: On September 21, the U.S. Department of Labor also published new guidance determined to address insurance practices that restrict access to mental-health and substance-use treatment, with a proposed parity rule expected later this year. Axios

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The leadership question is becoming less “Do we offer mental-health resources?” and more “How can we help our employees actually use them?”

The Worthy idea: A benefit isn’t a benefit if friction keeps people from accessing it.

🪑 Cate Luzio: Belonging is something you design

Cate Luzio — “From Banker to Builder: Cate Luzio’s Masterclass on Launching a Community-Driven Business” — October 15, 2025
Revisit the episode

Cate’s approach to building Luminary has always been excruciatingly practical. She and her team removed application barriers, grew the community around the idea that there should be “room at the table,” pushed her employees to challenge her decisions, and treated the people building the company as active community participants, not just staff executing a founder’s vision. Worthy For Thirty

That came to mind this week when Sheryl Sandberg, Meta’s Former COO, argued that women turning down or stepping down from senior corporate roles shouldn’t automatically be construed as declining ambition. She spoke about fewer opportunities, weaker sponsorship and mentorship, caregiving demands, and workplace structures that make advancement less attractive or attainable; Lean In’s research found that women’s interest in top roles rises substantially when they believe their employer genuinely wants women in leadership. Business Insider

Cate’s perspective is insightful and useful because it shifts the burden from the individual to the design of the environment. Instead of asking why someone isn’t leaning in, leaders should ask whether they’ve created an environment worth leaning into.

The Worthy idea: People are more likely to pursue opportunity when they can actually see themselves inside it.

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❤️ Stephen Ready: Friction is a tax on generosity

Stephen Ready — “Ep. 50: Stephen Ready, Co-Founder & CEO, INSPIRED” — October 30, 2024
Revisit the episode

Stephen’s thesis behind INSPIRED was clear: charitable action shouldn’t require consumers to stop what they’re doing, find a nonprofit, and then make a separate donation. INSPIRED was created to make year-round giving frictionless by allowing consumers to give through their existing purchases, and brand engagement allowing brands to go along the ride of supporting their consumers’ favorite causes and nonprofits. Worthy For Thirty

There was quite a remarkable real-world example of that idea this week. On September 14, the Taco Bell Foundation announced a record $32 million in grants to 700 nonprofits, with the program fueled in part by customers choosing to round up their checks. The average Round Up donation is just 43 cents; in 2025, those tiny transactions collectively generated more than $51 million! Taco Bell

That isn’t only a fundraising story. It’s a product-design story: Taco Bell placed generosity directly inside a behavior millions of people were already exuding.

For brands that say purpose is part of the business, that may be the more interesting question: Where can impact live inside the transaction rather than beside it?

The Worthy idea: Make doing good the easiest next click.

🚨 Guest Radar

• Mindy Scheier / Runway of Dreams: On September 16, New York State announced that its forthcoming Adaptive Clothing Grant Program is expected to launch in January 2027. The announcement was made at Runway of Dreams’ Fashion Revolution event during New York Fashion Week and will support designers, entrepreneurs, and researchers developing functional, fashionable clothing around the needs of people with disabilities. Empire State Development

• Leah Shepherd / Victoria’s Voice Foundation: Victoria’s Voice joined Capital Region Crime Stoppers, Louisiana Blue and Acadian Ambulance on a new East Baton Rouge youth drug-prevention campaign launched September 15. High-school students are creating peer-to-peer PSAs around fentanyl, opioids, vaping and other substances, while LSU student-athletes are helping extend the message to young people and families. WBRZ

• Phil Schermer / Project Healthy Minds: On September 18, Project Healthy Minds unveiled programming for its October 8 gala and October 10 free World Mental Health Day Festival in New York, with participants including Karl-Anthony Towns, Terry Crews, Jonathan Haidt and Nina Westbrook. PR Newswire

A quick note from one of Worthy for Thirty’s newest sponsors, Gustus Vitae. Long before they became a sponsor, I had the opportunity to sit down with co-founder Frankie Scanlon to talk about how Gustus Vitae has grown from its farmers market roots into a brand built around quality, community, and making cooking more accessible and just plain fun. That conversation, and the way Frankie and his team think about building a business with purpose, made it a no-brainer to support the show. Gustus Vitae crafts small-batch, all-natural seasonings, sea salts, and artisan cane sugars designed to make everyday food better. Click here to shop Gustus Vitae and get 15% off your order + free shipping—and support a brand that supports Worthy for Thirty.

One idea to take with you

Purpose is strongest when it becomes built into the architecture.

If you want more people to ask for help, pursue leadership, or give back, persuasion only gets you so far. Remove the friction. Make the path clear and intuitive. Design the experience around the behavior you say you value.

Because eventually, what an organization believes matters less than what it makes easier for the people it serves to do.

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What are you unwilling to compromise as we grow?

Talk is cheap when it comes to mission or when the decisions are easy.

When conflict arises between monetization and staying the course with that mission, things start to get interesting.

My recent conversation with Kira Shishkin, Founder & CEO of informed.now, might be a prime example of that tension.

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Kira is creating what he dubs a minimalist news concierge: one text per day containing a concise briefing of what actually changed in the world over the previous 24 hours.

No clickbait. No outrage loops. No endless feed.

And, most notably:

No advertising.

That last part isn’t a marketing feature. It’s a business constraint.

And that distinction is key.

Your business model shows me who you actually serve

Kira contends much of what’s wrong or broken with our current media landscape can be traced back to a fundamental shift in incentives.

As readers became accustomed to getting news for free, media companies needed another customer.

Advertisers filled that void. How else can you keep the lights on or better yet pay your employees?

Kira’s argument is straightforward: once advertisers become the customer, the economics of the product inevitably begin responding to what advertisers value: attention, clicks, time on page and engagement.

informed.now is trying to reverse that equation.

“We only accept revenue from a reader.”

Kira takes an existential stance: if readers don’t find informed.now valuable enough to support, then perhaps the company shouldn’t exist.

That’s an unusually uncompromising business philosophy.

It’s also unique to anyone running a for profit business.

Because informed.now isn’t merely promising to put readers first.

Its revenue structure forces it.

And that raises a question every founder should consider:

Does your business model reinforce your mission or will it eventually require you to compromise it?

The Non-Negotiable Test

I’ve discussed non-negotiables with several guests on Worthy for Thirty.

The industries change.

The tension stays.

With JW Wiseman and Curious Elixirs, the product has to pass a heuristic of requirements: taste, customer experience, how it makes someone feel and the functional ingredients, before it earns its way into the market.

With Bill Shufelt and Athletic Brewing, purpose wasn’t something engineered just for the corporate responsibility page. Building a new category and reinvigorating an existing one also meant thinking about employees, community and impact alongside the economics of selling beer.

With MJ Gottlieb and Loosid, the question becomes even more consequential: how do you grow a company serving people in sobriety without allowing growth, partnerships or monetization to degrade the dignity and trust of the community you’re trying to serve?

And most recently, in my upcoming conversation with NYT best selling author, Eric Ries about Incorruptible, we explored another version of the same question:

How do you design an organization so that keeping the promise doesn’t depend entirely on the people running it? It has staying power!

Different founders.

Different businesses.

Same underlying challenge:

How do you make the mission difficult to abandon?

That’s one of the commonalities between these conversations.

And I increasingly believe it’s one of the most important distinctions between a company that is mission-marketed vs. one that is actually mission-built.

A mission should constrain you

Founders are taught to fight for optionality.

More customers.

More channels.

More features.

More monetization.

More markets.

But purpose-driven companies occasionally need to do the opposite.

They need constraints or guardrails to keep their mission intact; it’s the organization’s north star that helps achieve double bottom line goals.

For Kira, one of those constraints is advertising.

Accepting advertising could theoretically create another source of revenue. But it would also introduce another group of people whose interests informed.now may run in opposition of those of the reader.

So Kira has removed that constituency completely.

That’s what makes this conversation particularly interesting from a business perspective.

The constraint is the strategy.

Look outside the show and there are fascinating examples of this.

Patagonia provides perhaps the most extreme case. The company didn’t simply publish a purpose statement. Its ownership was restructured so that the Patagonia Purpose Trust controls the voting stock and exists specifically to protect the company’s values and mission. Excess profits after reinvestment can flow to the Holdfast Collective to fight the environmental crisis.

Patagonia explicitly asked:

How can we make abandoning our mission structurally harder?

informed.now is asking a smaller but philosophically similar question:

How can we make exploiting the reader economically irrational to us?

That’s purpose moving from marketing into the business DNA.

But here’s where Kira’s experiment gets more challenging

The fascinating part of informed.now isn’t whether this philosophy is successful at its current size.

It’s whether it survives scale.

Kira told me informed.now is considering renewed B2B pilots, offering businesses customized information around areas like healthcare, finance or economic trends.

That’s where the next chapter becomes interesting.

Because success will create temptations that failure never does.

Imagine informed.now becomes 10X larger.

Then 100X.

A major corporation offers a lucrative enterprise contract.

A potential sponsor wants influence over which topics appear each morning.

A sponsor offers enough money to reduce subscription prices.

An investor offers capital that could accelerate growth but wants certain metrics to increase.

A product team discovers that sending three notifications instead of one materially improves retention.

Each decision might make perfect business sense on its own merits.

Collectively, they could create something that looks very different from the company Kira intends to build.

Kira already recognizes part of this tension. When we discussed product development, he told me the team is almost obsessed with not adding features.

The goal is the opposite of what many technology companies pursue:

take up the least amount of brain space possible.

Instead of maximizing time spent with informed.now, Kira wants to minimize it.

Think about how unusual that is.

Most digital products ask:

How do we make our solution ‘sticky’ so users spend more time with us?

informed.now asks:

How quickly can we give you what you need so you can leave?

That is a radically different North Star.

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The five questions every founder should answer before growth mode

Kira’s experiment offers a fruitful exercise for almost any business leader.

Before your next funding round, major partnership, new revenue stream or growth effort, write down the answers to these five questions:

1. Who is our end customer?

Not who uses the product.

Who ultimately funds the business?

Those aren’t always the same person.

2. What behavior does our revenue model reward?

Clicks?

Transactions?

Subscriptions?

Attention?

Outcomes?

Retention?

Your mission statement may describe what you value.

Your revenue model reveals what the organization is financially rewarded for doing.

3. What money are we willing to turn down?

This might be the most difficult question.

If there is no customer, advertiser, investor, partner or revenue stream you would ever reject, how non-negotiable are your values really?

4. What metric are we deliberately NOT maximizing?

For informed.now, attention itself is something Kira doesn’t want to maximize.

Every mission-driven company should know which conventional metric it is willing to sacrifice to protect something more important - like mission.

5. What happens when the founder isn’t in the room?

This is where the Eric Ries conversation becomes particularly relevant.

A founder’s conviction is not infrastructure.

If the mission disappears when the founder leaves, then it was never fully embedded into the company.

The strongest mission-driven businesses eventually turn beliefs into systems, incentives, governance and economics.

A quick note from one of Worthy for Thirty’s newest sponsors, Gustus Vitae. Long before they became a sponsor, I had the opportunity to sit down with co-founder Frankie Scanlon to talk about how Gustus Vitae has grown from its farmers market roots into a brand built around quality, community and making cooking more accessible and fun. That conversation, and the way Frankie and his team think about building a business with purpose, made it a no-brainer to support the show. Gustus Vitae crafts small-batch, all-natural seasonings, sea salts and artisan cane sugars designed to make everyday food better. Click here to shop Gustus Vitae and get 15% off your order + free shipping—and support a brand that supports Worthy for Thirty.

The informed.now paradox

There is one tension I left my conversation with Kira thinking about.

informed.now wants factual news to remain accessible.

There’s a free-forever tier. The paid product was $55 per year when we recorded, with a $99 lifetime option being piloted. Kira specifically talked about wanting the product to remain accessible to students, immigrants, people beginning their careers and people without significant disposable income.

That’s admirable.

It’s also economically challenging.

Because Kira is simultaneously saying:

We won’t monetize your attention.

And:

We don’t want someone’s ability to pay to determine whether they can access the facts.

Those two promises create a very narrow lane through which the business must scale.

That’s not a flaw in the model.

That’s the experiment.

Can informed.now create enough value that a sufficient number of people voluntarily pay for something many consumers have been conditioned to expect for free?

Can B2B subsidize broader accessibility without becoming the constituency that begins dictating the product?

Can the company grow without optimizing engagement?

Can it remain minimalist while customers inevitably ask for more?

And perhaps most importantly:

Can Kira make his non-negotiables survive his success?

Doing good while doing well requires both halves of the sentence

This is why the informed.now story fits so naturally into what I’ve spent the last several years exploring on Worthy for Thirty.

I’ve interviewed founders building beverages, nonprofits, technology companies, healthcare platforms, marketplaces and movements.

The strongest mission-driven businesses I’ve encountered rarely treat impact as something that happens after the business succeeds.

They try to put it inside the mechanism that makes the business successful.

Mission Craft Cocktails commits a 1 meal donated to Feeding America for every 1 bottle sold.

Patagonia embeds purpose into ownership and governance.

informed.now makes the reader the source of revenue because Kira believes the reader should be the constituency the product serves.

Different mechanisms.

Same principle:

Mission becomes much harder to abandon when doing good and doing well depend on the same transaction.

That’s the sweet spot.

Because philanthropy can be reduced.

Marketing campaigns can change.

Founders eventually leave.

But when impact pervades the economics of the company, abandoning the mission can require changing the business itself.

The exercise I’d leave founders with

Take out a blank sheet of paper.

Draw two columns.

On the left write:

WE WILL ALWAYS ________.

On the right:

WE WILL NEVER ________.

Force yourself to put three things under each.

Then ask your leadership team one final question:

Would we still honor these if breaking one of them doubled revenue next year?

If the answer is yes, you’ve probably found a non-negotiable.

If the answer is “it depends,” you’ve probably found a preference.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with either.

But leaders should know the distinction.

Because inevitably every growing company meets a moment when its mission becomes inconvenient.

That’s when you realize whether purpose was something written on the wall or something built into the business.

And perhaps that’s the bigger takeaway from my conversation with Kira Shishkin.

Doing good while doing well isn’t about committing to a mission that sounds good alongside the business.

It’s about creating a business where maintaining the mission and building a successful company become increasingly difficult to separate.

🎙️ My full conversation with Kira Shishkin, Founder & CEO of informed.now, is live now on Worthy for Thirty on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and wherever you listen to podcasts.

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Elissa Kalver is one of those people.

Elissa is the founder of WeGotThis.org, a Stage IV metastatic breast cancer thriver herself, and someone whose work is built on service, embodying the ethos of the show: use what you’re building to make somebody else’s life better.

WeGotThis.org began with a simple but eye-opening realization during Elissa’s own treatment: when someone has cancer, their loved ones desperately want to help and support but often don’t know how. This compelled her to create the first nonprofit universal gift registry specifically designed for people with cancer and their caregivers, giving patients going through treatment a way to ask for what they actually need.

Now, Elissa and her team are asking us to help again.

Introducing the ‘Be Like Brittney’ Fund ❤️

This October for Breast Cancer Awareness Month, WeGotThis.org is doing something beautifully simple:

31 days.
31 metastatic breast cancer thrivers.
31 unrestricted $500 grants.

Donate Today

No receipts. No justification for how the money is spent.

A plane ticket. A concert. A weekend away. An electric bill that takes one worry off the table.

Whatever brings that person a little more joy.

And there’s an important reason behind it all.

The fund honors Elissa’s friend and metastatic breast cancer community warrior Brittney Beadle, who was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer at just 18 years old. Brittney spent more than a decade living with the disease while advocating, traveling, dancing, giving, and encouraging others to keep finding joy and living a life that matters.

She died earlier this year at only 29.

Her legacy inspired a very Worthy idea:

Cancer takes enough. Why not put something back?

An estimated 170,000 women are living with metastatic breast cancer in the United States, according to the most recent estimate cited by Susan G. Komen. MBC is treatable, but it is not currently curable; treatment focuses on extending life and preserving quality of life.

Those numbers make this campaign feel even more human to me.

Because $500 isn’t going to change someone’s diagnosis.

But it can change a day. It’s service to others that creates a ripple effect extending beyond the $500 donation.

It can create a memory. Remove a financial burden. Pay for something a family has been putting off. Or simply give someone permission to choose joy without having to explain what they need or why they need it.

And 31 is only the beginning.

The initial goal required $15,500 to fund 31 people. WeGotThis.org has received 300+ nominations, and the organization doesn’t want to stop at 31. Knowing Elissa (go big or go home), the goal is now at $50,000, and they’ve raised over $33,000!

With October right around the corner, hitting this goal is both meaningful and urgent!

Donate Today

Every additional $500 raised means another person living with metastatic breast cancer can receive a grant.

This is where I’m asking the Worthy for Thirty community to show up.

This one is personal.

I’ve had the privilege of speaking with more than 100 founders, executives, nonprofit leaders, and creators through this show.

Elissa is in rarefied air.

She has (constantly) reminded me that being mission-driven isn’t something you put in a deck or on an About page. It’s what you choose to do when you have an opportunity to make somebody else’s life a little better, especially when the social media reels stop rolling.

That’s the work WeGotThis.org does every day.

And it’s exactly the kind of work I want this community to rally around.

So I’m asking you to help me help Elissa say “yes” to as many of those 300+ nominees as possible.

If 20 people from this community give $25, that’s another $500 grant.

If 10 give $50, that’s another thriver.

If one person gives $500, you’ve just put unrestricted joy directly into somebody’s hands.

And if donating isn’t possible right now, sharing this post with someone else matters too.

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💗 Want to help fund joy? Donate.
💗 Living with MBC? Nominate yourself.
💗 Know an MBC thriver? Nominate them.

Donate or nominate someone through the Be Like Brittney Fund

October can be an incredibly complicated and emotional month for people actually living with breast cancer. Good chances we know someone who has cancer and/or has gone through treatment.

So instead of simply turning everything pink, let’s help put something tangible into the hands of the people living it.

31 days. 31 thrivers. And hopefully, with our help, many more.

Let’s be like Brittney.

— Eric
Worthy for Thirty

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Looking through the Worthy for Thirty archive, three conversations rise to the top because each guest was talking about the same thing: how values become more enduring when you build them into the system.

🤖 JONAH GOODHART: “TECH FOR GOOD” NEEDS AN OPERATING MODEL

Jonah Goodhart — Ep. 24: Jonah Goodhart, Co-Founder, Montauk Labs — May 4, 2023
Revisit the episode

When Jonah came on the show in 2023, actually in person at P&T Knitware in NYC, he made an important callout: technology alone isn’t inherently positive; it needs human intervention to shape it. He and his brother Noah founded Montauk Labs around the concept that technology could solve meaningful problems while still building sustainable businesses. In healthcare, for example, Jonah described using their background in data and analytics to improve health outcomes, not just uncovering another application for the technology because it existed. (Worthy for Thirty)

That feels particularly relevant now.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called this week for AI companies to slow the advancement of frontier models enough to create stronger safeguards, proposing independent evaluators, coordination between leading AI companies, and greater international cooperation. Two days later, Microsoft released its own draft AI “code of conduct,” including requirements that systems remain correctable, shut-downable, and under human control. (Reuters)

We’ve quickly realized AI can do extraordinary things. The question now is whether the structures surrounding it can mature as quickly as the capabilities do.

Jonah’s conversation offers a useful perspective and guide: don’t start with what the technology can do. Start with the outcome you actually want it to create.

The Worthy idea: Technology scales capability. Leadership has to scale responsibility with it.

👶 SARAH STEINHARDT: PHILANTHROPY CAN FILL A GAP. IT CAN’T BE THE WHOLE SYSTEM.

Sarah Steinhardt — Ep. 37: Sarah Steinhardt, Co-Founder, Welcome Baby USA — December 5, 2023
Revisit the episode

Sarah co-founded Welcome Baby USA around an incredibly tangible gift for indigent mothers: boxes with diapers, wipes, feeding essentials, clothing, and other basics newborns need during the first four weeks of their lives. But what stuck with me from our conversation was that Sarah didn’t devise charity as the end-all, be-all solution. She talked about hospital and clinic partnerships, learning from social workers and pediatricians, and ultimately the need for systemic government support for essential baby-care resources. (Worthy for Thirty)

This week, Americares received the largest donation in its history: $50 million from an anonymous Connecticut family as U.S. government cuts have uprooted programs ranging from maternal and child health and HIV treatment to other global-health services. Half of the gift will support Americares’ effort to reach 100 million people with healthcare by 2030; the other half will strengthen its endowment. (AP News)

It’s an incredible act of generosity.

It’s also a reminder of something uneasy: when essential services depend on extraordinary acts of generosity, the underlying system may be tenuous.

That’s what made Sarah’s perspective so useful. Donations matter enormously. Corporate partnerships matter. Volunteers matter. But mission-driven organizations can also use their closeness to the problem to help demonstrate where temporary relief needs to become part of a permanent system. Do we look to free enterprise to create it?

The Worthy idea: Generosity is strongest when it reinforces a system, not when it is forced to become one. It’s also a question of perhaps where government dependency ends, and private businesses or nonprofit intervention starts.

♿ MINDY SCHEIER: ACCESSIBILITY IS A PRODUCT STRATEGY

Mindy Scheier — Ep. 34: Mindy Scheier, Founder & CEO, Runway of Dreams & Gamut Management — October 5, 2023
Revisit the episode

Mindy’s journey began because her son Oliver, who has a rare form of muscular dystrophy, wanted to wear jeans like his friends. She created a pair herself, and eventually turned that experience into a business and nonprofit to help mainstream brands build products for people with disabilities, understanding their needs from the start. Runway of Dreams has collaborated with brands including Tommy Hilfiger and Victoria’s Secret, while Gamut Management is the consulting arm helping companies enter the adaptive-products market from concept through launch. (Worthy for Thirty)

This week, Vogue profiled Weldun, a new luxury marketplace created around functional fashion. Founder Carly Berlin founded it after a double mastectomy (perhaps she and Elissa from WeGotThis.org should chat) made her realize how difficult it was to find clothing that accommodated changing physical needs without sacrificing style. Weldun organizes products around needs like easy on/off, healing and recovery, sensory considerations, and flexible fit, and it includes existing luxury pieces whose accessible features may never previously have been marketed that way. (Vogue)

That feels like a natural growth of Mindy’s platform.

Accessibility doesn’t have to mean building a separate, clinical product for a small audience. Designing for disability, recovery, aging, pregnancy, or limited dexterity can uncover product improvements that make something better for far more people; inclusion is the strategy.

The opportunity isn’t simply inclusion.

It’s better design.

The Worthy idea: Inclusion becomes durable when it improves the product.

🚨 GUEST RADAR

Bill Shufelt / Athletic Brewing: New England Patriots quarterback Drake Maye and Dallas Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott have become athlete-partners and equity holders in Athletic Brewing as part of multiyear relationships tied to the brand’s new “Athletic Fits” campaign. Athletic is now available at more than 200 professional and collegiate sports, endurance and entertainment venues; a meaningful next step in its push to make nonalcoholic beer an integral part of mainstream sports culture. (CT Insider)

Monica Yunus + Camille Zamora / Sing for Hope: Twenty-five years after Sing for Hope’s roots at Juilliard, six artist-designed Sing for Hope Pianos returned to Lincoln Center’s Hearst Plaza on September 11 for public play and programming through September 20. The activation reconnects the organization with the artistic community where its founders first began mobilizing musicians around service following the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. (Sing for Hope)

Sapreet Saluja / New York Cares: To commemorate the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, New York Cares partnered with 9/11 Day on a four-day service effort aboard the Intrepid, with more than 1,000 New York Cares volunteers supporting an effort to pack over three million meals for New Yorkers facing food insecurity. (New York Cares)

ONE IDEA TO TAKE WITH YOU

AI guardrails. Baby essentials. Adaptive clothing.

Very different problems, but the same leadership challenge:

Can the thing you say you care about survive growth?

Mission statements can inform and convey to people what you believe. Systems decide whether those beliefs are still important when the company gets bigger, the technology gets faster, or the problem gets more demanding.

Values become durable when they shift from the statement into repeatable action.

Until next week,
Eric

Worthy for Thirty — where leaders doing good while doing well tell their stories.

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We made our phones smarter, faster, but harder to put down; wwe tethred to it. Sleke’s co-founders are asking what happens when we optimize technology for something else.

What a strange contradiction to modern life.

Our technology has never been more robust. Our phones can operate businesses, move money, navigate cities, and connect us to almost anyone.

And now AI promises to accelerate every digital interaction at hyperspeed.

Yet it has never felt harder to simply separate ourselves from our phone.

That tension is at the center of my conversation with Austin and Brennan, co-founders of Sleke.

They aren’t anti-technology. They’re asking a more interesting question:

What if our mobile technology did what we needed and then got out of the way?

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Connection without the obsession

The idea for Sleke originated while Austin and Brennan were living abroad.

They used Instagram and Facebook to stay in touch with people back home. But those same platforms continually pulled their attention away from the life happening directly in front of them.

They wanted the utility of a smartphone without being glued to it.

When they couldn’t find that middle ground between an everything-phone and a “dumb phone,” they decided to build it themselves.

Their product philosophy can essentially be reduced to:

Complete the task. Get off the phone.

That’s a provocative idea in an economy that has spent years optimizing for the opposite.

More sessions. More clicks. More notifications. More time spent.

But this conversation isn’t only about how Sleke is building a phone.

It’s about the choices companies make when designing technology and the choices the rest of us make when using it.

For founders and leaders: Is more engagement actually success?

Through hundreds of early customer conversations, Sleke boiled down what people actually needed from their phones into five categories:

Messaging. Money. Maps. Music. Life management.

Their filter for additional functionality is simple: Does this help someone solve a real-world problem, or does it encourage them to stay on the device?

That question is worth borrowing.

If you’re a founder, CEO or senior executive, consider what your organization is actually optimizing for.

A banking customer doesn’t want to spend more time in a banking app. Someone making a reservation doesn’t want a 20-minute experience. And an employee using AI doesn’t need another platform demanding attention—they need it to remove work.

So what?

The metrics we’ve traditionally associated with successful technology, time spent, sessions and engagement- aren’t automatically synonymous with customer value.

Sometimes a great product should make itself temporarily unnecessary.

Now what?

Look at one important customer journey in your business and ask:

What is the customer actually trying to accomplish, and how quickly can we help them accomplish it?

Then examine every additional click, notification, feature, and prompt between those two points.

Some may generate value.

Others may simply create engagement.

That distinction will become increasingly important as AI gives companies the ability to insert more technology into virtually every interaction.

For the rest of us: Stop treating all screen time the same

Sleke originally focused heavily on reducing screen time.

Then its users complicated the thesis.

What about reading a book? Learning a language? Using a fitness app?

Those activities can increase screen time while still contributing something meaningful to someone’s life.

Brennan described users wanting to “choose their own adventures,” deciding which digital activities deserve a place on their device rather than treating everything on a screen as equally problematic.

So what?

The goal probably shouldn’t be to use technology as little as possible.

It should be to use it intentionally.

Twenty minutes of reading isn’t necessarily equivalent to twenty minutes of scrolling an infinite feed.

The more useful question becomes:

Did I choose to do this or did the technology choose for me?

Now what?

Try auditing your phone by purpose rather than screen time.

When you reach for it, notice whether you’re there to communicate, accomplish, learn or consume.

Then identify the apps where you routinely enter with one intention and emerge 20 minutes later doing something completely different.

Those are probably better candidates for intervention than your total daily screen-time number.

For founders: Your earliest customers can be your product team

There’s another lesson in Sleke’s story that has almost nothing to do with phones.

When the company began selling in 2024, Austin and Brennan intentionally kept marketing limited.

They wanted customers with what Austin called the “hair on fire problem”—people frustrated enough by their existing smartphones to tolerate an early product and actively help improve it.

For roughly the first six months, they spoke with every user every week. As a bootstrapped company, those conversations helped determine where limited resources should go.

So what?

Early-stage growth can create the illusion of validation.

Deep customer understanding creates something more useful: direction.

Now what?

Before spending more to acquire your next thousand customers, ask what you’ve learned from your first hundred.

Who feels the problem most intensely?

What workaround are they already using?

What do they repeatedly ask you to fix?

And are you building from those signals—or from assumptions?

For all of us: Where does the technology ultimately send you?

Toward the end of our conversation, Austin made an important point.

Getting people off their phones isn’t enough.

There will always be another screen.

The bigger question is what happens after we put it down.

Technology can help facilitate community, relationships and real-world experiences rather than replace them. As Austin put it, intention ultimately determines much of technology’s benefit or downside.

That leaves two very different questions coming out of this conversation.

For the people building and leading companies:

Are you designing technology to capture more of someone’s attention—or to give some of it back?

For the people using it:

Is technology helping you do what you intended to do or quietly deciding what you’ll do next?

We’ve spent decades asking what else technology can do.

Maybe the more interesting question in 2026 is:

What can better technology give back?

Time. Attention. Focus. Connection.

For founders, that’s a product opportunity.

For the rest of us, it’s a choice.

And increasingly, I think both matter.

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A restaurant chain is turning surplus food into a conduit for combatting hunger. A professional-services giant is allocating $100 million to helping its workforce build distinctly human skills. And Uber is cutting thousands of jobs to remove organizational complexity. Different businesses, same question: What does your company actually reinforce every day?

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🍗 RONNY SAGE: PURPOSE WORKS BETTER AS INFRASTRUCTURE THAN A CAMPAIGN

Guest: Ronny Sage, Founder & CEO, ShoppingGives
Episode: Ep. 36 Ronny Sage, Founder & CEO, ShoppingGives
Published: November 28, 2023
Revisit the Ronny Sage episode

When Ronny recorded with me on the Worthy for Thirty podcast, he explained that ShoppingGives works through three interconnected pieces: identifying the right cause relationships, incorporating social impact throughout the consumer journey, and then managing the compliance and measurement needed to understand whether those programs actually work. He also shared examples where brands saw more than a 40% increase in customer lifetime value among consumers who participated in giving programs. (Worthy for Thirty)

That conversation came back to me this week because Chick-fil-A kicked off Hunger Action Month with plans to match up to $1 million in donations to Feeding America partner food banks (you may have heard of Feeding America through my conversation with Marcin and Amit at Mission Craft Cocktails) across more than 40 markets. But the more interesting story is the operating system supporting it: its Shared Table program now involves more than 2,700 restaurants and 1,600 nonprofit partners, redirecting surplus food into meals rather than treating hunger relief as an isolated event. (Chick-fil-A)

That distinction matters.

A donation is an event.

Repetition becomes part of the business model.

Ronny’s contention wasn’t that every company should partner with a cause at checkout. It was that when impact is linked to how a company already operates, and measured with the same seriousness as other business initiatives, it has better odds of surviving budget cuts, leadership upheaval, and changing marketing priorities.

The Worthy idea: If your mission disappears when the campaign ends, it probably wasn’t embedded deeply enough. Also a reason why we submitted an SXSW panel — to help mission-minded / focused brands on how to embed that mission into their business infrastructure and foundation.

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🧠 DAN REICH: AI IS MAKING CURIOSITY MORE VALUABLE, NOT LESS

Guest: Dan Reich, Co-Founder, Troops.Ai and TULA
Episode: Ep. 13: Dan Reich, Co-Founder, Troops.Ai and Tula
Published: November 4, 2022
Revisit the Dan Reich episode

Dan had already founded, scaled, then sold businesses, while investing in numerous other companies, when I asked him what actually sustains entrepreneurs over time. His answer pointed to passion and curiosity: Are you genuinely interested in the problem? Are you willing to keep asking why it works the way it does and whether there is a better answer? (Worthy for Thirty)

Four years later, major companies are effectively putting a price on those qualities.

EY announced this week that it will invest $100 million in employee rewards tied to skills including judgment, adaptability, business acumen, experimentation and innovation as AI changes professional services. Awards can reach $25,000, and EY’s framing is newsworthy: technology adoption matters, but so does knowing what to do with the technology once you know how to use it. (Fortune)

Shopify COO Jess Hertz made a similar argument this week when she described the ideal AI-era employee as “X-shaped”: someone capable of developing depth across multiple areas while continuing to learn quickly as the work changes. (Business Insider)

For years, we assumed automation would make expertise more valuable.

It may also make learning velocity more valuable.

Knowing something matters. Knowing how to question it, connect the dots, and pivot quickly when the answer changes may matter even more.

Dan was talking about founders in 2022.

Increasingly, he may have been describing the employee of 2030.

The Worthy idea: In a world where information continues to get cheaper by the minute, curiosity becomes more expensive.

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✂️ MIKE + KASS LAZEROW: GROWTH CREATES COMPLEXITY. GREAT LEADERS REMOVE IT.

Guests: Mike & Kass Lazerow, Co-Founders, Buddy Media & Golf.com
Episode: Unpacking “Shoveling $h!t”: Mike & Kass Lazerow’s Raw Truths on Entrepreneurship & Impact
Published: June 5, 2025
Revisit the Mike & Kass Lazerow episode

Mike made a point during our recording that is easy to agree with and incredibly difficult to practice and execute consistently: startups have limited resources, so focus has to be ruthless. He and Kass also described Buddy Media’s culture in detail: transparency, celebrating wins, and keeping people connected as one of the many things that allowed the business to survive tremendous growth and even acquisition. (Worthy for Thirty)

This week, Uber announced its largest round of layoffs since 2020: approximately 3,300 employees, the equivalent of ~10% of its workforce. CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said the restructuring is intended to flatten management layers, simplify decision-making, and make the company faster as it competes in an increasingly complex transportation market. (Axios)

There’s a leadership lesson hidden within the layoff headline.

Companies spend years adding people, departments, and processes because growth seems to demand them.

Eventually, someone has to pose the question:

Is all of this helping us grow, or just proving how large we’ve become?

That’s the uncomfortable side of scale.

The challenge isn’t only knowing what to build.

It’s knowing what to stop doing.

The Worthy idea: Complexity accumulates naturally. Focus has to be intentional.

🚨 GUEST RADAR

Bill Shufelt → Athletic Brewing

Athletic Brewing named Dan Kleinman as its new CMO, effective September 8. Kleinman previously spent nearly a decade at Deutsch Family Wine & Spirits, including helping build Josh Cellars; the hire comes as Athletic increases national media investment and pushes from category pioneer toward a broader global brand. (Marketing Dive)

Rob Tod → Allagash Brewing

Allagash White was inducted into the American Craft Beer Hall of Fame this week, one of only five beers selected this year. The organization described it as a benchmark Belgian-style witbier, backed by awards from 19 competitions in the U.S. and Europe. (WGME2)

Luke Mickelson → Sleep in Heavenly Peace

The nonprofit’s eighth annual Bunks Across America is now underway from September 5–12, bringing chapters together across North America to build 12,000 beds for children who currently lack one. (Sleep in Heavenly Peace)

🧠 ONE IDEA TO STEAL

Companies tell us what they believe all the time.

The more useful question is:

What does the system encourage people to do?

Chick-fil-A built giving into restaurant operations.

EY attached money to curiosity, judgment, and adaptability.

Uber decided streamlining the org chart was valuable enough to restructure it.

That’s where culture becomes visible.

What gets rewarded gets repeated.
What gets repeated eventually becomes the company.

Until next week,

Eric

Worthy for Thirty

Doing good while doing well shouldn’t be mutually exclusive.

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Entry-level workers are struggling to get in the door and get hired. Experienced professionals are being displaced and replaced. And the conundrum is that employers still can’t always find the people they need to fill critical roles.

All of those things can be true at once.

That contradiction was at the center of my recent Worthy for Thirty conversation with Nicholas Wyman, Executive Director of IWSI America, and Dr. Deborah Williamson, Vice President of IWSI America.

IWSI, or the Institute for Workplace Skills and Innovation, operates at the crossroads of employers, job seekers, educators, and the government- more state than national- helping build and maintain talent pipelines through apprenticeships, skills development, coaching, and workforce programs.

But what really caught my attention during our conversation wasn’t the ability to try to predict exactly what work will look like five or ten years from now.

It was something much more useful:

What can we do today to set us up for a promising tomorrow?

Because the American workplace is undergoing several transformations at the same time. AI and automation are directly and indirectly impacting the tasks companies need people to perform. The COVID-19 pandemic permanently changed where and how many of us work. In-office, hybrid, or fully remote. Make your choice. Yet some experienced workers are struggling to re-enter the workforce, while younger workers, like recent college graduates, are realizing that getting that first opportunity can be unseemingly difficult.

And nobody knows exactly where all of this ends.

That uncertainty might be the intention.

Give up trying to control the future. Prepare to adapt to it.

Nicholas made an important distinction during our conversation: there are technical skills, and there are what he and IWSI prefer to call employability skills.

Technical skills are always changing or being updated. The software changes. The equipment changes. AI changes the workflow. Industries adopt new technology.

Employability skills stay with you through your career. The pejorative descriptor is ‘soft’ skills.

Reliability. Communication. Resilience. Curiosity. Adaptability. Working with others. Showing up when you say you’re going to show up.

It comes off as simplistic in an era infatuated with AI proficiency, but Nicholas broke it down even further:

“Be reliable and show up.”

He contends that doing those two things regularly provides employers a reason to give you a chance.

That sat well with me because we tend to discuss the future of work from the top down: AI models, labor statistics, economic forecasts, layoffs, interest rates.

IWSI approaches it from the inverse.

What does this particular person know how to do?

What might they be capable of doing?

And what is preventing them from getting there?

The overlooked skill might be the one you already possess.

One of my favorite ideas from the conversation was backwards design.

When people look for a job, Dr. Williamson explained, they often start with the job posting.

They read the requirements and ask:

Do I fit the description? Am I the one they’re looking for?

But that can be the wrong starting point.

Instead, look backward.

What have you actually done?

What problems have you solved? What environments have you thrived in? When have you led (this shows up in many different forms)? When have you worked under pressure? What have you built, organized, fixed, sold, taught, or improved?

Then ask:

Which of those abilities transfer somewhere else?

Dr. Williamson said IWSI often has to unpack those experiences through deeper conversations because people don’t often recognize the value of their lived, professional experience and the skills that come with it.

Nicholas is a great example himself.

He started his career as a chef.

Today he works in workforce development.

Those might appear to be completely different careers until you break the first one apart.

Running a kitchen requires managing people, meeting deadlines, dealing with customers, solving problems, coordinating workflows, and performing under pressure.

Those capabilities don’t magically evaporate when you leave the kitchen.

Your job title isn’t your skill set.

That’s a significant distinction for anyone who has been laid off, wants to pivot into a new career or fears their current role could eventually be eliminated by technology.

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Apprenticeships deserve a much bigger place in the American workforce.

There’s another idea we probably need to rethink: the assumption that education happens first and work happens second.

Nicholas described an apprenticeship as essentially a longer-term paid internship where you learn both on and off the job.

He knows the model personally. He entered the workforce through an apprenticeship after leaving high school and later continued his education.

His philosophy is simple:

The right education at the right time.

Learning doesn’t need to follow a perfectly linear progression of high school → four-year college → career.

You can work.

Learn.

Earn a credential.

Change industries.

Go back to school.

Learn something new.

And repeat.

That’s lifelong learning in a much more practical way.

And apprenticeships aren’t limited to the traditional vocational trades.

IWSI’s work includes pathways into occupations such as dental technicians, optical technicians, and pharmacy technicians, including a California initiative that connects people with disabilities to apprenticeship opportunities.

For employers struggling with talent shortages, that raises an important question:

Instead of continuing to search for the perfect employee, what if you helped create one?

Hiring someone isn’t the primary KPI. Retaining them is.

This might have been the most important point in our entire conversation.

I asked Nicholas and Deborah how they measure success.

The obvious answer would be placements.

How many people got jobs?

Nicholas retorted.

“We don’t just want the person to get the job... We want them to keep the job.”

That changes the calculus.

A placement is a moment in time.

Retention is an outcome.

IWSI spends a great deal of time on what happens before and after someone is hired: interview preparation, resume development, employer expectations, mentoring and coaching.

And importantly, Nicholas argues that a mentor shouldn’t necessarily be someone’s direct supervisor.

An employee needs somebody they can speak with when something isn’t working, sometimes about seemingly mundane issues, before a small problem becomes a reason to leave or be fired.

That has implications that extend beyond apprenticeship programs.

Employers spend enormous amounts of time, money, and energy recruiting people.

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Maybe the more interesting question is:

What are you doing during someone’s first 60 days to ensure they’re set up for success?

Nicholas went even further.

Forget the first 60 days.

Think about the first 60 minutes.

Does the person get the culture?

Do they know who to ask when they need clarification or have an important question?

Does someone actually explain the “unwritten” rules?

Do they feel comfortable raising a problem before it becomes something bigger?

Those tiny interactions can determine whether a new employee begins building confidence or immediately starts losing it.

AI makes human skills more important, not less.

I don’t subscribe to the idea that AI will simply eliminate work as we know it.

It will eliminate some jobs.

It will change or impact many more.

And it will likely create jobs we haven’t thought of yet.

Nicholas pointed toward sectors including healthcare, hospitality, tourism, and service industries as areas where human interaction remains integral, while acknowledging that some administrative and processing work is prone to automation.

But the bigger lesson from our conversation was this:

Don’t build your career around predicting which technology wins or which technology becomes preeminent. Build it around becoming increasingly useful.

Learn the technology. Always be a student — from recent college graduate to seasoned employee.

But also learn how to communicate. Do it well and concisely

Ramp up technical proficiency.

But also become dependable.

Develop expertise.

But remain curious enough to become a beginner again.

Because the people best positioned for the next version of work may not be those who perfectly predicted what was coming.

They’ll be the ones who learned how to keep learning.

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A five-step exercise you can do this week

If you’re going through a career change, entering the workforce, worried about AI, or just wondering what’s next, here’s an exercise inspired by Nicholas and Deborah’s advice.

1. Inventory your past.
Write down what you’ve accomplished across jobs, school, volunteer work, side projects, and life experiences. Don’t worry about whether it sounds impressive. Just get it on paper.

2. Identify the value.
For every experience, ask: What did this require me to be good at?

3. Know your attributes.
Are you dependable? Analytical? Energetic? Organized? Creative? Collaborative? Goal-oriented? Don’t just list them; substantiate them; find examples that demonstrate each one.

4. Find one thing you’re ‘missing.’
Look at the type of work you’re interested in and identify one credential, skill or experience employers constantly request. Then find a clear and compelling way to start learning it.

5. Get out there!
This was perhaps Nicholas’s most practical advice. Stop relying exclusively on online applications. Talk to someone. Volunteer. Ask for coffee. Follow up. Attend something. Make the phone call.

As he put it during our conversation:

“Don’t wait for your ship to come in. Swim out to it.”

The future of work may actually be the future of learning.

Near the end of our conversation, Nicholas told me that at the young age of 58, he’s taking guitar lessons

Not because he’s embarking on a second career as a musician.

Because it’s difficult.

He’s pushing himself to learn something new.

He also attends workshops and online courses in subjects that interest him, including areas outside his professional expertise.

I really appreciated that.

Because perhaps we’ve been asking the wrong question.

Instead of:

“What career will be safe from AI?”

Maybe it’s:

“Am I still capable and willing to learn something new?”

The workplace will always change; now even faster.

Technology will keep getting better.

Certain jobs will go away, and new ones will emerge.

The advantage won’t necessarily belong to the person with the perfect résumé.

It belongs to the person passionate about remaining curious, translating what they’ve already learned, developing what they’re missing, and keeping moving.

Dr. Williamson’s final advice captured that beautifully:

Take an inventory of everything you’ve accomplished, don’t sell any of it short, and build from there.

Worth considering this week

If your current job was eliminated tomorrow, which three skills would you take with you?

If you can’t answer that yet, that’s probably a worthwhile place to start taking inventory of both your skills and experience.

My conversation with Nicholas Wyman and Dr. Deborah Williamson of IWSI America is part of the Worthy for Thirty podcast, where I speak with leaders working at the intersection of business, purpose, and measurable impact. The audio version of this conversation is available wherever you listen to podcasts.

If this write-up was valuable, subscribe to Worthy for Thirty on Substack and send it to someone who’s entering the workforce, navigating a career transition, hiring talent, or simply trying to figure out what comes next.

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Last week, I wrote about protecting the principle while experimenting with the delivery.

This week, something different caught my attention: some of the biggest opportunities are hiding in plain sight.

Mac & cheese. Milk. Online creators.

None are new. All three are being retinkered.

And three conversations from the Worthy for Thirty archive suddenly feel particularly relevant. Stick with me here.

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🧀 MAC & CHEESE JUST DELIVERED A MASTERCLASS IN DISRUPTION

Barilla is acquiring GOODLES, the better-for-you mac & cheese company that launched in 2021.

The price wasn’t disclosed.

The numbers tell an incredible story.

GOODLES grew from 0.8% to 7.8% of U.S. shelf-stable mac & cheese spending in just three years. Even more interesting: the company says 80% of its sales come from consumers who previously didn’t shop the category or are now buying more of it. GOODLES will continue operating independently, with CEO Jen Zeszut and all 73 employees staying on. (The Wall Street Journal)

In other words, GOODLES didn’t just steal customers from the competition.

It made an old category interesting to new ones.

And weirdly enough, that sent me back to popcorn.

💡 THE WORTHY IDEA

When I sat down with Tom Leigh, co-founder of Tommy Popcorn, we discussed entering one of the oldest, most commoditized snack categories around.

Tommy’s approach wasn’t:

How do we make another popcorn?

It was closer to:

Where is the whitespace everyone else has stopped looking for?

The company examined search behavior to discover flavors consumers wanted but couldn’t easily buy. Then it layered those insights with unconventional flavors, experiential marketing and an intentionally mysterious fictional founder named Tommy. (Worthy For Thirty)

Tom’s lesson was that data can tell you where to play, but storytelling gives people a reason to care once you arrive.

GOODLES is an apt parallel.

It didn’t birth mac and cheese.

It reconsidered who mac & cheese could be for, improved the nutritional proposition and ensconced in a brand that looks nothing like the category incumbents.

Barilla certainly noticed.

Why it matters now → Founders love talking about creating new categories. Sometimes the bigger opportunity is reinvigorating an old category everyone else assumes has already been figured out.

Don’t ask, “What hasn’t been invented?”

Ask: “What hasn’t been reimagined?”

🎧 Revisit my conversation with Tom Leigh
How a Fake Character Is Building a Very Real Brand — February 4, 2026

🥛 CHOBANI IS BETTING $1.2 BILLION THAT MILK ISN’T FINISHED

Speaking of old categories...

Milk.

Chobani announced a $1.2 billion investment in Pennsylvania this week to establish its first dairy-product manufacturing operation in the state.

At full scale, the facility is expected to process more than 3 billion pounds of Pennsylvania milk annually, roughly 30% of the Commonwealth’s current milk production, and create more than 900 jobs. Chobani is also working on traditional dairy milk with higher protein and less sugar. (Pennsylvania Government)

Think about that for a bit.

We’re living through an era of oat milk, almond milk, functional beverages, protein shakes and seemingly endless beverage innovation.

And Chobani is putting $1.2 billion behind...

cow’s milk.

That brought me back to Sam Stewart of Mad Hippie.

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💡 THE WORTHY IDEA

Mad Hippie didn’t begin with a trend report saying the world needed another skincare company.

Sam and his wife Dana had a problem.

Living in Nicaragua and surfing frequently, they began to realize what all that sun exposure was doing to their skin.

They got curious.

Then they iterated.

A lot.

Sam told me the early products went through roughly 50 versions. The company first thought surfers would be its primary consumer. They weren’t. So instead of abandoning the underlying problem, Mad Hippie changed the audience and kept refining the solution. (Worthy For Thirty)

That’s the distinction.

Being committed to the problem doesn’t require being committed to your first solution.

Chobani’s bet on milk feels similar.

Consumers haven’t suddenly stopped caring about nutrition, protein or convenience.

The product delivering those benefits can change.

Why it matters now → Innovation doesn’t always require teaching consumers a completely new behavior. Sometimes you take something incredibly familiar and rebuild it around what consumers care about now.

Mad Hippie did it with skincare.

Chobani thinks it can do it with milk.

And $1.2 billion says they’re pretty serious about finding out.

🎧 Revisit my conversation with Sam Stewart
How Sam Stewart and Mad Hippie Built a Beauty Brand With Purpose, Patience, and Persistence — June 10, 2026

📱 THE CREATOR ECONOMY MAY BE APPROACHING ITS “NOW WHAT?” MOMENT

Creators became media companies.

Then brands reallocated billions of dollars in their media budget to fund them.

Now comes the difficult part:

Is the math, mathing?

Digiday reported this week that creator marketing may be approaching an economic correction, raising questions about whether influencer economics can sustain their current trajectory. At the same time, creator-focused companies continue attracting capital: CreatorFi announced a $45 million raise this week aimed at financing independent media. (Digiday)

Those two seemingly contradictory headlines sitting next to each other:

Money is pouring in.

Skepticism is increasing.

Which sent me back to one of the people who helped build the creator economy before got that label.

Elisa Camahort Page.

💡 THE WORTHY IDEA

Elisa co-founded BlogHer around a clear mission: create opportunities for community, education, exposure and economic empowerment for female bloggers.

When we spoke, her advice wasn’t “get bigger.”

It was:

Build for the people you serve, not for abstract scale.

And she was equally adamant about monetization: mission has to function as an operating system. It should influence partnerships, hiring, pricing and product decisions, not sit in a paragraph on the About page. (Worthy For Thirty)

That feels especially relevant now.

The creator economy spent years optimizing for:

followers → impressions → reach → sponsorships.

But sustainable businesses eventually have to answer harder questions.

Who are we actually serving?

What value are we creating and extracting?

Would this community still notice or care if the algorithm stopped helping us tomorrow?

Why it matters now → Distribution can make you visible. Community can make you durable.

The next phase of the creator economy may belong less to the people who build the largest audiences, and more to the ones who establish the strongest relationships with them.

🎧 Revisit my conversation with Elisa Camahort Page
Doing Good Without Losing the Plot — June 3, 2026

🚨 WORTHY RADAR

A few alumni worth watching this week.

Bill Shufelt → Athletic Brewing

Athletic’s relationship with endurance sports continues to get stronger. IRONMAN published the story behind Personal Record, its collaboration with Athletic Brewing, a non-alcoholic beer developed around post-race celebrations. (Ironman)

The review from my conversation with Athletic’s co-founder, Bill becomes more compelling: the opportunity wasn’t simply making better NA beer. It was making alcohol-free beer feel completely normal in places where beer already belonged. (Worthy For Thirty)

Luke Mickelson → Sleep in Heavenly Peace

Sleep in Heavenly Peace’s decentralized model is showing up across the country ahead of its September bed-building efforts. Lowe’s volunteers in Wilmington are preparing to build 125 beds for local children, while SHP groups in Oregon and elsewhere are organizing additional community builds. (WWAYTV3)

One bed becomes a chapter. A chapter becomes a network. A network becomes a movement.

🧠 ONE IDEA TO STEAL

Mac & cheese.

Milk.

Popcorn.

Skincare.

Creators.

This week’s stories reminded me that innovation has a branding problem.

We tend to associate it with inventing something nobody has ever seen before.

But sometimes innovation looks like something much less glamorous:

Look at something everyone thinks they understand and ask a better question.

GOODLES asked what mac & cheese could evolve to.

Chobani is asking whether milk can resonate with a new generation of protein-conscious consumers.

Tom Leigh looked at popcorn and saw unused storytelling territory.

Sam Stewart kept refining his brand’s skincare products until the market answered.

Elisa Camahort Page helped evaluate and reevaluate what an online audience could become when you treated it like a community.

You don’t always need a new category.

Sometimes you need a new way of seeing the old one.

Until next week,

Eric

Worthy for Thirty

Doing good while doing well shouldn’t be mutually exclusive.

P.S. 100+ conversations are now sitting in the show’s archive.

The best part isn’t figuring out which one is newest.

It’s figuring out which one the world just made relevant again.

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The lunches are packed.

Calendars are changing.

Sports and activities are starting again.

And across the US, parents are returning to that well-known end-of-day question:

“How was school?”

“Good.”

For most of us, that answer isn’t sufficient.

Dinner needs to get cooked. Homework needs to be completed. Someone has practice. Someone needs a bath. Tomorrow’s lunches won’t pack themselves.

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But after my recent conversation with Leah Shepherd, Executive Director of Victoria’s Voice Foundation, I’ve been thinking differently about that exchange.

Perhaps “good” is where the conversation should begin.

Not end.

Because as our kids begin another school year, establishing new friend relationshipss, flexing their independence, and spending more of their lives in places we can’t see, Leah’s message feels particularly relevant:

Prevention starts long before we think we need it.

And sometimes it starts simply by asking another question.

01. Return to school should also mean return to talking.

Victoria’s Voice started from unimaginable loss.

In 2015, David and Jackie Siegel lost their daughter Victoria to a drug overdose.

What ensued eventually turned into a mission dedicated not simply to responding to substance use, but to preventing another family from experiencing the same tragedy.

That differentiation matters.

Victoria’s Voice Foundation provides education designed to help parents recognize warning signs around vaping, drinking, drugs, mental health, and other potentially dangerous behaviors.

During our conversation, Leah kept coming back to two words:

“Prevention works.”

And there’s probably no better time to think about prevention than the beginning of a school year.

New classrooms.

New social circles.

New pressures.

And, corresponding to their age, increasingly independent digital lives.

We talked about how many of us grew up learning about sex and drugs.

Many assumed that talking about something might encourage kids to try it.

Leah believes the opposite.

Kids will experience difficult things regardless of whether adults prepare them for those times. She contends that communication and education give them a better chance of knowing what to do when they do.

That changes the question from:

“Is my child old enough for this conversation?”

to:

“Will I have had the conversation before they need it?”

02. Don’t settle for “good enough.”

This was the part of our conversation that hit closest for me.

I have two young kids.

And like every parent, I’m busy.

There are plenty of days when I just ask:

How was school?

“Good.”

What did you do?

“Nothing.”

And we’re talking about the next thing.

During the episode, I remembered something I’d watched a friend do with his son years ago.

His son gave him the standard answer about school.

But my friend kept digging.

What did you learn?

Who did you sit with?

Who did you talk to?

What happened at lunch?

At the time, I thought he was really probing.

Now I understand what he was doing.

He was creating a habit of conversation.

Leah took that idea even further.

If your child is on a social platform, don’t just ask whether everything is okay.

Ask specific questions.

Has someone you don’t know contacted you?

Has anyone ever offered you something?

Have you seen something online that made you uncomfortable?

During our conversation, Leah put it simply:

“Ask them. Flat out ask them. That’s how you’re gonna find out.”

That’s a line I’m taking with me into this school year.

Because our kids are getting older whether we’re ready for it or not.

The conversations probably need to grow up with them.

03. We don’t always know what our kids aren’t telling us.

This is the hardest part of Victoria’s story.

Victoria kept a diary.

Before her death, she sent a message to a friend saying that if something happened to her, she wanted it published.

Her parents eventually did that.

Today, Victoria’s actual diary is a key piece of the Foundation’s education work, supported by resources intended to help parents pick up on warning signs and know where to turn if they’re worried about their child.

Think about that for a second.

Someone can live in our home.

Eat dinner at our table.

Go to school every morning.

Answer “good” when we ask how their day went.

And still be experiencing something we know nothing about.

That doesn’t mean parents should live in fear.

It means curiosity rules.

Attention matters.

Specificity matters.

And making it routine to talk about uncomfortable things before something goes wrong matters.

The start of school gives us a natural reset.

Not just for bedtime routines and homework schedules.

For communication, too.

04. Prevention isn’t delegated to one organization.

One of my favorite parts of this conversation actually had very little to do with parenting.

It was about how Victoria’s Voice operates.

The organization doesn’t pretend it can solve every part of the problem.

Victoria’s Voice primarily focuses its education efforts on high school students, with some middle school programming. It collaborates with organizations that can reach students differently, including programs that begin conversations as early as elementary school.

Leah’s mantra:

“A rising tide lifts all boats.”

She doesn’t perceive other nonprofits working in drug prevention as the competition.

The more organizations partnering, the more kids they can reach.

There’s a big implication there.

Keeping kids safe isn’t exclusively a parent’s responsibility.

Or a teacher’s.

Or a school’s.

Or a nonprofit’s.

It’s an ecosystem.

Parents talking at home.

Teachers paying attention.

Schools educating.

Communities providing resources.

Organizations filling gaps.

And kids hopefully learning that asking for help isn’t something to be ashamed of.

One thing I’m evaluating this school year

I’m going to try to ask the second question.

Not every conversation with our kids needs to become an interrogation.

But I don’t want:

“How was your day?”

“Good.”

to automatically be the end of the conversation.

Tell me something funny that happened.

Who sat with you at lunch?

Who in your class had a bad day?

What’s that thing everyone is talking about right now?

Did anything happen today that made you uncomfortable?

What happened today that I wouldn’t know unless I asked?

Most days the answer will likely be nothing.

That’s fine.

Because we’re not only trying to uncover problems.

We’re creating the comfort that we can talk about things - anything

So if the day comes when something isn’t okay, hopefully that conversation doesn’t feel like you’re starting from scratch.

The conversation before you need it.

Toward the end of my conversation with Leah, we talked about stigma.

Substance use or abuse isn’t unique to one type of family, one neighborhood, or one demographic.

And believing “not my kid” can itself become dangerous.

Leah’s message to parents was unequivocal:

“If you think it can’t happen to you, I am here to tell every parent: yes, it can.”

It’s heavy.

Especially at a moment that’s supposed to feel optimistic.

A new school year. A fresh start.

But maybe that’s why now is the right time for this conversation.

Not because something is wrong.

Because nothing has to be wrong before we start paying attention.

Prevention isn’t panic.

It’s preparation.

It’s education.

It’s asking one more question.

It’s creating a home where uncomfortable subjects aren’t automatically off limits.

And it’s realizing that sometimes the most important conversation you have with your child is the one you have before you think you need to have it.

🎧 Worth(y) your thirty

My full conversation with Leah Shepherd, Executive Director of Victoria’s Voice Foundation, delves into Victoria’s story, overdose prevention, naloxone awareness, parent education, social media, stigma, nonprofit leadership, and what families can do before substance use becomes a crisis.

For parents specifically, I can’t think of a more relevant time to listen than the beginning of a new school year.

Listen to the full episode of Worthy for Thirty. It’s available on all podcast listening platforms.

And consider asking your kid one more question tonight.

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Chef Ed Porter has worked in award-winning kitchens, competed at the highest levels, vied for culinary dominance on national television, created music, produced films, and built a career around food. His biggest advantage? He still approaches all of it like a student who doesn’t stop asking questions.

Near the close of my conversation with Chef Ed Porter is when he gives himself a job title I’d never heard before:

“I am the executive intern.”

It reads or sounds like a contradiction.

It may also be one of the apt descriptions of what it takes to build a creative career today.

Because Ed has already accomplished a lot.

He studied and trained at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, NY - yes, that CIA. He worked alongside Marcus Samuelsson when Samuelsson was still an emerging 25-year-old chef. He’s worked and cooked across the US with stops in New York, Minneapolis, the Bay Area, and Houston. He was a contestant on Guy’s Grocery Games (and other TV shows you’ve probably heard of). He created an album pairing 12 songs with 12 courses. Today, he hosts the Taste Music Hear Food podcast, is developing a documentary series, and is working on a premium sorbet line.

But listen to him talk for five minutes, and you quickly notice that what’s written on a piece of paper isn’t really the full narrative.

Curiosity is.

And that story starts with a homemade coconut ice that was apparently pretty terrible.

🍧 INSIGHT #1: Chase the thing you can’t stop trying to figure out

Growing up in the Bronx, food wasn’t just dinner for Ed.

It was geography.

Culture.

Seasonality.

Sound.

He remembers neighborhoods through what they smelled like. Summer meant the jingle of the Mr. Softee truck. Particular foods defined certain holidays. Different blocks introduced him to entirely different cultures.

And somewhere along the way, Ed and his brother became fixated with remaking the coconut ices they bought on the street.

They grabbed Coco López, milk, and anything they could find in the kitchen.

The result?

“It was terrible, by the way. It was horrible.”

But the failed recipe was an early inflection point.

Ed wasn’t studying a cookbook. He wanted to understand how something was made and worked. He yearned for lived experience at a young age.

That instinct never went away.

He eventually taught himself to make peanut butter cookies by understanding variables and recipe structure. Later, when he needed knife skills but didn’t have formal training, he rode his bike to the library, found books using the Dewey Decimal System, purchased a $12 chef’s knife and practiced on sacks of carrots and onions.

There was no YouTube tutorial.

No TikTok chef.

No AI prompt giving him the answer immediately.

There was a simple question:

How do I improve?

Ed told me that the “never-ending quest of how and why” is still his north star.

That feels relevant in this moment.

We have more access to information than any generation before us. The competitive advantage isn’t necessarily having the answer anymore.

It’s deciding which question is worth asking.

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🎵 INSIGHT #2: Your unfair advantage may be the things that seem mutually exclusive

For years, Ed essentially lived two creative lives.

There was Chef Ed. And there was Musician Ed.

Food supported studio time. Music was the creative outlet he couldn’t let go.

But the two identities rarely shared the same room.

Then came Pressure Cooker.

While appearing on the Netflix cooking show, Ed wrote the chorus to a song. He completed and then recorded the full song after coming back home. He sent it to his castmates and the show’s producers.

They loved it.

The song didn’t make the show’s final cut.

So Ed decided to release it himself when the show launched.

It went viral and something clicked.

Rather than asking whether he should be a chef or a musician, he began asking a much more introspective question:

What can I create that the average musician can’t, and the average chef can’t?

His answer became Day Zero: a 12-song album inspired by the traditional 12-course fine dining experience, with each song paired to a course.

The listening party became a tasting party.

The audible met the edible.

And the concept evolved into Taste Music Hear Food: the podcast.

I love this because we’re often encouraged to find our lane.

Ed did almost the opposite.

He found the intersection between his lanes.

Food. Music. Culture.

Those turned into the three pillars connecting nearly everything he creates.

The implication isn’t that we need to combine two careers or passions.

These perceptively divergent paths may actually be the most differentiated thing about you.

🍽️ INSIGHT #3: Breaking bread is bigger than what’s on the plate

The deepest part of my conversation with Ed wasn’t really about cooking.

It was about human-to-human connection.

Ed believes there are four universal languages: food, music, love and, unfortunately, violence.

The first two fascinate him because they can cross borders without requiring translation.

You don’t need to speak someone’s language to realize when music moves you.

You don’t need to share someone’s background to value the food they’ve prepared for you.

And when we intentionally bring those experiences together, Ed believes something bigger can happen.

“When you sit down and break bread with someone and you have a reverence for the hands that prepare the food [and] the culture it came from, it’s hard for biases to exist in that realm.”

There’s an intimacy to feeding another person that we seldom stop to consider.

That’s why Ed isn’t particularly interested in food as consumption.

He’s interested in food as storytelling.

What if the music you’re listening to, the food you’re consuming, and the culture you’re immersing yourself in weren’t separate ingredients?

What if they were developed to tell a unified story?

That’s the question underneath much of his work today.

And it connects directly back to the kid growing up in the Bronx who understood neighborhoods partly through their food before he ever had the vocabulary to describe why.

💡 WORTHY OF NOTE

Near the end of our conversation, I asked Ed what advice he’d give a young creative trying to find their way.

His answer wasn’t “build a personal brand.”

It wasn’t “find your niche.”

It wasn’t even “work harder.”

It was much simpler:

Ask questions. Tell people what you’re trying to build. And get comfortable with admitting you don’t know, or better yet, identify what you don’t know.

Ed believes many of us have people in our networks who could help us solve the problem we’re facing.

We just need to tell them.

As he put it, too many people are trying to create in a vacuum when human beings are naturally communal. The best things, he argues, are made together.

Which brings us back to that unusual job title:

The executive intern.

You can become accomplished without deciding you’ve arrived.

You can be an expert and remain a student.

You can build a career around what you know while remaining relentlessly curious about what you don’t.

Ed has spent decades doing exactly that.

From a $12 chef’s knife to fine dining kitchens.

From cooking to television.

From television to music.

From music to podcasting and filmmaking.

And somehow, the pervading concept across his many endeavors is that he is trying to reverse-engineer a coconut ice in his mother’s kitchen.

Stay curious long enough and you never know where the question might take you.

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Worthy for Thirty explores the people building businesses, organizations and ideas where purpose and performance don’t have to be mutually exclusive.

Where doing good while doing well is table stakes.

If someone forwarded this to you, subscribe today for stories, ideas and conversations worth carrying into your week.

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A 30-year-old brewery embraces change. A cocktail company incorporates purpose into its business model. Taylor Swift fans demonstrate how community creates impact.

I often think about conversations from Worthy for Thirty, especially when new events make discussed insights relevant again.

This week, three conversations came roaring back.

👀 A 30-YEAR-OLD BREWERY MAKES A 2026 MOVE

Craft beer is under pressure as consumers habits change while non-alcoholic and THC beverages gain ground.

Then Allagash Brewing hired Matt Place, a former Athletic Brewing sales leader, to run its 30-person national sales team.

I’ve recorded with both founders: Rob Tod of Allagash Brewing and Bill Shufelt of Athletic Brewing. Their businesses are different, but this hire connects craft beer’s past with its future.

💡 THE WORTHY IDEA

Don’t confuse growth with momentum.

Allagash has stood the test of time by protecting its craftsmanship, culture and values; not by chasing every trend. But longevity doesn’t mean resting on your laurels.

You can preserve what makes a company unique while bringing in people who understand where the market is going.

That isn’t jettisoning your DNA. It’s protecting it from irrelevance.

Why it matters now → Enduring companies understand the dichotomy of what must never change and what should.

🎧 Revisit my conversation with Rob Tod

🥒 LETS TALK ABOUT PICKLES

Mission Craft Cocktails launched a 25% ABV dill-infused Pickle-Rita as pickle-flavored products surge across snacks and drinks.

But the more interesting story is what happens after the purchase.

💡 THE WORTHY IDEA

Mission Craft Cocktails donates 1 meal to Feeding America for each bottle sold. It’s hard-coded in the brand DNA and unit economics!

For co-founders Amit Singh and Marcin Malyszko impact through combatting food insecurity is as important as making a great tasting product.

That matters as Feeding America reports that 48 million Americans, including 14 million children, experienced food insecurity in 2024.

The chain is simple:

🥒 Pickles trend
↓
🍹 Mission launches a Pickle-Rita
↓
🛒 Someone buys it
↓
🍽️ Part of the revenue fights hunger

Mission doesn’t ask consumers to choose between a great product and impact. A purchase creates both.

Why it matters now → If your mission only works when business is good, it isn’t really part of your business model.

Where does your mission show up in the math?

🎧 Revisit my conversation with Amit & Marcin

⚡ TAYLOR SWIFT FANS JUST TAUGHT A MASTERCLASS ON COMMUNITY

New York Cares received part of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s charitable giving as part of their wedding. Then the organization noticed Swift fans donating in meaningful amounts: $13, $26, $87 and $198.90.

So it created a goal of 1,989 donors and invited Swifties to volunteer.

The donations helped turbocharge ‘The Giving Era.’ More than 200 fans gathered at a Lower East Side school and packed 2,200+ backpacks with school supplies for NYC public school students. Many were volunteering with New York Cares for the first time.

That brought me back to my conversation with Executive Director Sapreet Saluja.

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💡 THE WORTHY IDEA

Build for belonging, not just conversion.

New York Cares could have treated the gift as a fundraising moment. Instead, it built a bridge from:

fan → donor → volunteer → participant

The lesson applies to businesses, too. Community originates with something people already care about. Your responsibility is to give that energy a platform.

Why it matters now → Don’t just ask, “How do we acquire more people?”

Ask:

“How do we give people who already care a reason to belong?”

🎧 Revisit my conversation with Sapreet Saluja

🚨 WORTHY RADAR

The alumni network is thriving.

Bill Shufelt → Athletic Brewing

Athletic Brewing partnered with MetLife Stadium, the New York Giants and the New York Jets, its first sponsorship covering two NFL teams and their stadium.

Run Wild IPA and Upside Dawn will be available throughout the venue.

The callback: Bill and I discussed normalizing NA beer in social settings. An NFL tailgate is about as “beer” as America gets.

Now Athletic is there.

That’s behavior change in public.

🎧 Revisit Bill Shufelt’s Worthy episode

Amit + Marcin → Mission Craft Cocktails

Mission is growing its margarita portfolio and national retail presence.

The question isn’t just whether its product line grows. It’s whether its impact model grows with it.

more SKUs → more distribution → more revenue → more meals.

Sapreet Saluja → New York Cares

New York Cares 2026 objective is to reach more than 70,000 volunteers this year.

The Swiftie activation points to a powerful model:

Don’t just find donors. Find communities and give them a way to serve.

🧠 ONE IDEA TO STEAL

Craft beer. Pickle margaritas. Taylor Swift fans packing backpacks.

They share one lesson:

Protect the principle. Experiment with the delivery.

Allagash protects its culture while evolving its business.

Mission keeps its 1 for 1 commitment while experimenting with products that consumers want.

New York Cares keeps service at the center of its operations while providing new ways to get people involved.

Eric

Worthy for Thirty

Doing good while doing well shouldn’t be mutually exclusive.

P.S. There are now 100+ Worthy for Thirty conversations in the archive. I’m going back to them to uncover ideas that continue to matter.

Sometimes the best insight isn’t new.

The world just caught up to it.

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The Conversation That Can Change Everything

There is a particular kind of pain that is easy to miss.

It is part of the person who looks like they’re doing fine. The person we believe is put together: great job, loving family, supportive friends, responsibilities, tons of hobbies, experiences, etc.

But inside, something is breaking.

That is where Jason Senzon found himself nearly nine years ago.

When Jason joined me on the podcast, he didn’t begin with his career, his company, or a polished version of his story. He described himself as a family man whose life looked like it was working while, privately, he was trapped in addiction, isolation, anxiety, and a growing distance from the people he loved most.

Then came a moment of truth.

At 1:30 in the morning on September 7, 2017, Jason woke his wife and told her: “I need help. It’s time.”

That sentence changed everything.

Asking for help is strength

For many people, especially men, asking for help can feel like you’re ‘weak.’ We are taught, directly or indirectly, to keep it together, power through, solve the problem ourselves, and avoid becoming a burden.

But Jason’s story offers a different definition of courage or willingness.

Courage is not pretending nothing hurts.

Courage is saying the thing you are afraid to say.

Courage is admitting that whatever you have been doing is no longer working.

Jason went to treatment for 28 days, then spent another month in a sober living house before returning home. At that time, his children were one and four years old. He now talks about the hope that they will know him as a sober father one day at a time.

That phrase matters: one day at a time.

Not a lifetime of promises and empty platitudes. Not a perfectly mapped path. Just the next right action.

Sometimes the next right action is a call. A meeting. A text. A conversation with a friend. A decision to tell someone, “I’m not okay.”

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We all carry things quietly

Jason made an observation that reaches beyond recovery: many of us become experts at suppressing things; not allowing them to come out.

We might call it stress. We might call it being busy. We might convince ourselves that we are simply tired, distracted, irritable, or overwhelmed.

But unresolved anxiety, grief, shame, fear, and pain have a way of demanding attention eventually.

Jason spoke about feeling uncomfortable in his own skin long before his addiction took hold. On the outside, he was succeeding socially, academically, and athletically. Yet inside, anxiety was always taking hold, and he did not know how to talk about it.

That is why conversations about mental health cannot begin only when there is a crisis.

They have to become part of everyday life.

They have to happen at home with our kids, with our partners, with our friends, and with the people at work who may be quietly carrying more than we realize.

A simple question can make room for someone else’s reality:

“How are you really doing?”

Not “How are things?”

Not “Everything good?”

Not the question we ask while preparing to move on.

The real question. And then the willingness to stay long enough to hear the answer.

What coffee has to do with recovery

Jason and his co-founder met in recovery. Together, they started Wyndcrofte Coffee around a simple idea: vulnerable conversations often start over a cup of coffee.

Coffee is not the solution to addiction, anxiety, depression, loneliness, or any of life’s more difficult realities. But it can create a setting for something important: connection.

It gives two people a reason to sit down. It slows the day down for a few minutes. It offers a familiar ritual that can make an unfamiliar conversation feel a little more possible.

Wyndcrofte is a for-profit company, but Jason and his co-founder built charitable giving into the business from the beginning. The Caron Treatment Centers and Release Recovery Foundation are their first charitable partners. Rather than wait until the company was bigger or more profitable, they began supporting nonprofit partners that help people access treatment and recovery resources.

That choice says something about the kind of business they want to build.

It’s about great tasting coffee, but there’s more.

It could help people feel less alone by fostering connection.

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Service without a scorecard

One of the most resonant ideas from our conversation was Jason’s view of service.

He said that if we help someone only because we expect something in return, we missed the point.

Service is not transactional. It is not a networking tactic. It is not a way to create a debt that someone else must repay.

It is a decision to do the next right thing because it is the right thing.

That can be hard in a world that constantly measures outcomes, followers, revenue, influence, and returns. But some of the most meaningful things don’t have an ROI attached to them.

You may never know what happens after you answer the phone.

You may not know whether the person you encouraged to seek help actually did.

You may never learn that your honesty permitted someone else to be honest, too.

Still, it matters.

If someone comes to mind, reach out

As you read this, someone may have come to mind.

Maybe it is a friend who has been quieter than usual. A family member who keeps saying they are “just busy.” A colleague who seems fine but has changed. Or maybe the person who came to mind is you.

You do not need the perfect words.

Try one of these:

- “I’ve been thinking about you. How are you, really?”

- “You don’t have to explain everything, but I’m here if you want to talk.”

- “Is there something you’ve been carrying alone?”

- “Would you want to grab a coffee this week?”

- “I care about you. You do not have to figure this out by yourself.”

One conversation may not solve everything. Jason is clear about that. But it can reduce the weight someone has been carrying. It can interrupt isolation. It can create a bridge to the next right action.

And sometimes, that is where change begins.

If this piece made you think of someone, share it with them. Not because you have all the answers, but because a small act of connection can remind them they are not alone.

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VOTE FOR OUR SXSW PANEL

What happens when retail investors, social media, and AI start shaping stock prices as much as earnings calls do?

In this episode of Worthy for Thirty, I sit down with Katie Perry, CMO of Zerohash and author of the new book Ticker Shock, for a conversation that reframes how we think about markets, money, and the companies that move them.

Katie is on the front lines of financial infrastructure. Zerohash is the “AWS of crypto and fintech,” enabling companies like E*TRADE, Gusto, and others to build crypto products, move money instantly with stablecoins, and modernize how value flows. But what makes her perspective especially valuable is how she connects the dots between technology, regulation, narrative, and human behavior, technology, regulation, narrative, and human behavior.

Why markets are now communication systems

Katie’s core thesis in Ticker Shock is simple but powerful: companies can no longer treat investor relations as a back-office function. In a world where retail investors dominate the narrative, visibility, emotion, and timing are strategic levers. A brand campaign, a viral moment, or a CEO’s LinkedIn post can move a stock faster than an analyst note.

She explains how IR teams now need “social listening” systems, how marketing and investor relations must stop living in silos, and why companies that fail to understand this shift will lose control of their own story.

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The rise of the retail investor as a market force

We dig into how retail investors went from meme-stock punchlines to a force that shapes perception, coverage, and even institutional behavior. Katie shares examples from GameStop to Palantir, showing how retail can:

• Set the narrative tone for a stock

• Influence how analysts and institutions think about a company

• Force leadership to respond in real time

Her point isn’t that retail “owns” the market. It’s that they own attention—and in modern markets, attention is leverage.

Crypto, stablecoins, and the infrastructure you don’t see

Katie breaks down what Zerohash actually does in plain language:

• They’re not a crypto token or a trading platform.

• They’re the infrastructure layer that lets companies add crypto capabilities without building everything from scratch or navigating every state’s licensing regulation.

• They enable stablecoin payments, instant cross-border transfers, and new ways to move money that most people will never see, but will absolutely feel.

She also talks about why regulation is an accelerant, not a brake, and how the involvement of major institutions (BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, big banks) is quietly normalizing digital assets faster than most people realize.

The new playbook for founders and leaders

If you’re a founder or executive, this part is gold. We discuss:

• Why video, social presence, and authentic storytelling are becoming table stakes for leaders

• How charismatic CEOs like Jensen Huang or Alex Karp can become strategic assets if the business fundamentals are in place

• What “being media-trained” means in an era where every clip can live forever

Katie’s background in journalism, marketing, and investor-facing media gives her a rare lens on what it takes to lead in public.

The origin story behind Ticker Shock

One of my favorite moments is when Katie shares how the book came to fruition: a 3 a.m. idea, a cold email to a Wiley editor, and a year of turning hundreds of interviews with CEOs and CFOs into a cohesive playbook. She talks about:

• Writing through uncertainty

• Why she’s targeting universities and professors as much as practitioners

• How she defines success beyond sales: sparking better conversations about how companies communicate with investors

Why this matters now

Whether you’re a founder, investor, marketer, or just someone trying to understand where finance is headed, this episode is a masterclass in how narrative, infrastructure, and technology are converging.

Katie’s message is clear: the future of money isn’t just about new assets or new tech. It’s about storytelling: who gets to tell the story, how fast, and to whom.

If you enjoyed this, subscribe to Worthy for Thirty for more conversations with founders, investors, and operators who are building the next chapter of business.

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When Your Life Makes Sense in Reverse

Most people want a straight line.

A clean story. One that starts with an idea, moves through a plan, and ends with success.

But real careers rarely work that way. More often, they look messy while they’re happening and obvious only after the fact.

That’s what makes Alex Fredericks’ story so compelling.

He is the founder of ToneWell, an AI wellness platform that turns a 30-second voice note into personalized insights about energy, body, and readiness. But if you only look at ToneWell, you miss the point. The real story is not just about what he built. It’s about how every earlier chapter in his life prepared him to build it.

Music. Consumer goods. Brand building. Touring. Problem solving. Reinvention.

At first glance, those things may look unrelated. They are not.

The Skill Was Never the Title

Alex does not define himself as your typical founder. He does not lead with startup language or a polished origin story. He talks about being a problem solver.

That matters.

Because too often, people confuse a job title with a skill set. They think the path matters more than the pattern. Alex’s path says otherwise. He started in music not because he wanted attention, but because music helped him move through the world as a dyslexic child. Later, he moved into consumer goods, where he learned how to understand products, people, and why something works.

The through line was never the industry.

It was the instinct.

He sees things. He understands how they fit together. He works backward from the outcome.

That is a founder skill, whether or not anyone calls it that.

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Reinvention Is Not Random

There is a version of career growth that treats reinvention like a dramatic pivot. One day you are in one world, the next day you are in another.

But most reinvention is quieter than that.

It is accumulation.

Alex’s years in the music business taught him how to adapt, move fast, and figure things out with limited resources. Touring bands meant solving the immediate problem: Where are we going? Where are we sleeping? How do we keep moving? What is the next decision?

That kind of experience does something important. It teaches you not to freeze when conditions change.

It teaches you that execution matters more than identity.

And that may be why ToneWell makes sense. It is a company built by someone who has spent years learning how to translate chaos into action.

The Best Ideas Often Come From Real Life

ToneWell is built around a simple but provocative idea: your voice may carry signals about your body and your state of readiness.

That idea feels futuristic, but it is also deeply human.

It does not ask people to become something else. It asks them to pay attention to what they already have: their voice, their rhythm, their presence. In a world full of complicated wellness promises, something is refreshing about a product that starts with something familiar and accessible.

That is part of why this conversation stands out.

It is not about technology for technology’s sake. It is about using technology to notice patterns in everyday life that people usually ignore.

And that raises a bigger question: what else are we overlooking because we are too busy looking for complicated answers or perhaps are distracted?

The Hard Truth About Building

Alex says he had never really thought of himself as an entrepreneur until now.

That is interesting, but it is also revealing.

A lot of people imagine founders as people who wake up with a startup identity already intact. In reality, many founders become founders by doing founder work long before they use the word. They adapt. They ship. They solve. They keep going when things break.

They connect the dots along the way.

That is what makes the work real.

Not the branding. Not the label. Not the language.

The work.

Alex’s story is a reminder that entrepreneurship is often less about declaring yourself and more about proving, over and over again, that you can move an idea into the world.

Key Takeaways

• Your career does not have to be linear to be meaningful.

• The skills that matter most are often hidden inside earlier, unrelated chapters.

• Reinvention is usually built through repetition, not sudden transformation.

• The strongest ideas often come from close observation of real human experience.

• Founder identity is less important than founder behavior: adapt, solve, execute, repeat.

• Be of service in whatever you pursue to either the people you market to, or the vocation or industry you’re in

Something to consider

Not every path looks strategic while you are walking it.

Some paths look like detours until one day they look like preparation.

Alex Fredericks’ journey is compelling because it illustrates how a life created through curiosity, resilience, and problem-solving can eventually become a company. And maybe that is the lesson underneath all of it: the work you do before the thing you are “supposed” to be doing is often the very work that makes the future possible.

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