Gwyneth Paltrow on Goop and Embracing Ambition | DealBook

Gweneth has created a remarkable business in group and I would argue it is on the cut not even on the custom it's now broken out is I think one of the great lifestyle brands at this very moment just to give you an idea of what of what goop is and all of the the pieces that it touches there's a Content company podcasts and magazine TV show coming on Netflix we're gonna be seeing real Hastings in just a minute live events there are the wellness products which you know so well skin care products the fashion lines you label the fragrance there's retail now in LA New York London pop-up stores and we know it's worth now north of 250 million dollars maybe maybe more maybe more you're just not even gonna it's not gonna help but here's where I want to start the conversation I want to start the conversation around when you started this company and specifically around the the idea and the word ambition because for many years it seemed to me as you were building this company you hired us a couple other CEOs first to do this at least publicly I wasn't sure if you ever really wanted to to own the idea of this being this big ambitious company and I feel like now you have and I want to understand what that is and what that was well I think you know as growing up as an actor in the nineties an actress at the time we didn't say actor at the time ambitious was actually a very dirty word for a female actress so I think we were taught to be compliant and pliable and not to be difficult and I think if you demonstrated great ambition for a big career it was looked down upon and then I did the crazy thing of kind of putting that down and deciding to start a business with great trepidation and so yeah I was ambivalent about my own ambition for a long time and even as I started to really just create content for the first five years before I even thought about any kind of monetization or anything I didn't think that I had the authority to create a business or to even think my way around it so it has definitely been a humbling process to embrace my ambition and to really start to feel that being ambitious is actually a beautiful thing but did you always want did you always want this and the reason I ask is I you know I think there was an interview we saw laura dern you weren't your on the set with Laura Dern and said to her that you wanted to start a business and when you were 25 years old I don't remember this conversation but she swears that it's true do you always know you I mean I love this story used to read the business section the New York Times I still hope you do o course barbarians at the gate yes who's one of your books but so where do you think this came from given that you grew up in a family of people in the arts and in the film in theater world I always have been very drawn to business I think it's fascinating and very dramatic in and of itself right and so I I just always read about it I always loved it and yes you're right I grew up in a very art forward household but a lot of business people around you yes because when we moved to New York City I was born in Los Angeles and I lived there mostly until I started the seventh grade and then I came here and that's when I went to school with a lot I went to an all-girls school Spence and I my wife went to Spence I don't know where she is I love her already yeah and I that's when I started to go to school with the daughters of some very prominent businessmen and I started to ask lots of questions they had grown up you know in kind of a hippie school in California with lots of all the parents were artists pretty much so okay so when you first started GUP and I said I mentioned you admit you at higher to CEOs first along the way so tell me what that well I wouldn't understand was that you hedging in the beginning because you weren't sure or cuz you still want it to be an actress or because what what was going on there I I just didn't know what the I was doing and so I thought I just needed to outsource everything and I thought I needed a grown-up and around me to you know tell me what to do and and that was a really interesting part of the process you know to to understand that really I nobody knows what the they're doing and and you can learn whatever it is that's specific to your business that you need to learn and then the more you embody that the more successful I think the business has the potential to be so when did you decide that you actually knew what you were doing ah it still hasn't happened but it's a process and I think I'm I'm very comfortable running goop I know the business backwards and forwards and I have you know very granular knowledge of the business and very kind of big daydreams about where the business is going and I think I'm getting well-equipped to run this particular company but I'm okay let's talk about let's talk about the daydream because one of the things you've said is that you've compared at least as a model of sorts you've talked about Disney right explain that I will so obviously I'm probably like point zero zero zero zero zero one percent the size of a company like Disney but Disney's really acts as a bit of a North Star for me because when I look at a company that has first of all there's there their execution on a brand level is always perfect they know exactly who their demographic is and they know exactly how to make their demographic feel incredibly happy and that what they serve them is very resonant for the demographic but if you look at the business you know it's taken content at the nucleus and it has all of these incredible lines of business coming out of the content so obviously I'm much much smaller and different demographic and you know different goals but um different question which is at least up until recently I would argue people thought of goop as your company long-term is the goal for it to be too for you to think about Gwyneth Paltrow and goop at the same time or for them to be very separate and I will tell you I now talk to young women who talk about goop and for better Wars don't talk about you I don't know if you think that's a good thing or not that's the best thing that's my dream for the company I mean ideally it would be its reach and it's you know impact would be far greater than I could possibly be as you know Gwyneth Paltrow so I think you know as you grow a brand obviously I do I had the platform I do have the diminishing platform in that sense because I'm not you know out doing films all the time anymore far from Sue can we talk about that when you think about cuz you still you're in the politician yes and we've been watching the politician at home and you have been in obviously these Marvel movies for quite some time how much when in terms of weighing I know you say you want to get out of I don't know if you want to get out of the Hollywood business or not but when you think of that as a platform yeah right how important that is in terms of at least in the immediate term growing the business and how how those things balance or not yeah I mean I think you sort of have to adjudicate carefully when if you're me when to leverage yourself for the business and not to in a consumer-facing way because I really do want the brand to grow irrespective of me but at the same time I can be in certain situations really helpful liebherr to launch something or to amplify something and it and by the way I think it's okay to take the slower route and let the content speak for itself and grow in that way simultaneously but you know it's it's about but no but how do you do that because sometimes I sometimes I see stuff out there that's coming from you on Instagram and other places and sometimes I see stuff around goop that has nothing to do yeah with you and I'm trying to think are you something I'm saying oh I wish that what are you thinking well I'm only one girl you know or maybe I'm not a girl but I think the idea is to really connect with people using a variety of you know touch points and I don't want to be the only one but how much does the platform matter I mean one of the things that's I which I'm not surprised by but you know there's still a sort of tabloid culture you are still very much a celebrity right so how much how important is that right when you go down the street I don't know if you under waiting here or not you were whether you were followed by cameras I don't know with a guy there was a guy there was a guy there's a guy so but is that do you say to yourself I want them to follow me or I don't want them to follow me I don't want them to follow me but I've always had a very ambivalent relationship with celebrity and I think look you know it is a way to start a brand right you have a platform you have a following you can launch something on the back of that a lot of times I think you know but if the landscape has changed a lot and I think especially in terms of celebrity journalism you know that's been really disintermediated by social media so I don't know that you one has to rely on that tabloid thing or that you know as much as in days past I'm not really sure though um back to the business itself how far do you think you can take this brand and what do you think it represents and the reason I ask is there's there's a luxury component to it clearly but there's also an effort for it to be accessible right and I imagine those things collide oftentimes well I mean I don't think of us as a luxury site and i think i think we're aspirational I think we make things of incredibly high quality and we buy to thousands of incredibly high-quality and I think that you know like if you were to take an AOV of a site like a big luxury site like a net or port a or a motor or something you would find ours was much much lower and I think that's because we do sell a lot of beauty and wellness products and things that are you know have a more accessible price point however we do make I things with really good ingredients and really excellent raw materials and we make really efficacious things so we're never gonna be able to compete with a value proposition or drugstore kind of a price but I think it's a good thing for to aspire you know I do I believe that it's a beautiful quality in the human spirit and I'm not talking about a price point you know I'm talking about buying things that work and that make you feel good or that make you feel like you know you are part of a certain community and so I hope that as we continue to grow we continue to democratize wellness and you know it's been interesting over every iteration of the business to watch you know we started kind of when I turned on ecommerce with more expensive we just sold apparel and now you know as we refine the mission and and really hope to impact people's lives positively on the CPG side you know I think we are much more approachable and attainable do you think about it as a licensing baby do you think about licensing do you think about wanting to own pieces what's the push-pull here licensing like I think you could go into food for example when I saw you last night we're talking about food we were we always talk about food I could see people buying goop food at the supermarket I don't know if that's something you do yourself I don't know if that's somebody partner with I think those are all options I think you know one of the great things about having started and all these different verticals is that we have the latitude to go into them and create lines of business around them but at the same time you know you have to focus on what you're doing so that's that's a challenge sometimes in the business you're doing a lot of things would you other things yourself maybe we should be doing that all the time like what you know I think that there are things when you well it's it's actually an interesting question because you know we spend a lot of money making content and we don't monetize the content so you know you could look at a vertical and say oh this doesn't make any money and or this you know if you were gonna get really specific oh you know the people who read this type of content don't turn into a high LTV customer so isn't worth continuing to create that kind of content I really believe it is but it's interesting tension that's created all the time within the business around you know what do you what is it okay to lose money on and what is it okay not to lose money on I was told that around the company you guys often say that you do the hard things well and easy things not so well right what does that mean well we're trying to get better at the basics but that's what I mean that we historically you know it's very hard to build a brand as any founder can tell you it's hard to get traction with the customer it's hard to build trust and authority and I think we've done that well and we continue to do that while I think it was difficult to create the contextual commerce model and we've done it really well I think we actually do it very very well but we've done other things just terribly you know like what well like the technology's been a real issue I think things that for other people are far more intuitive our turnkey have been really hard for us performance marketing you know what is the lesson the other thing I was asking you about because there's big controversy about some of the products that you've sold over the years is people who say pseudoscience by the way there's an entire book do you know there's an author who's reading the book about you Dan you do did you know him no okay and but very critical of some of some of the products and there were issues at certain points what what's the lesson of that experience has it changed the way you sell stuff today what you get behind what you don't get behind I think you know so in the beginning when we were selling third-party products and you know we would find some very cool clean female founded brand and be like oh we want to sell this and then we would restate claims that they made on their website that turned out not to have any no basis behind them so those are mistakes we made early on that we don't make anymore and we have our own science and regulatory team to bet everything but then there are certain things that just you know I think especially around female sexuality it's uh it seems to be an incendiary topic for certain people which I find really interesting because well I just think that it scares people when women have that kind of autonomy over their sexual health and their integrated I don't know why I'm actually still it's something that I think about a lot why culturally there's this resistance to it but it's amazing like we can write a piece about you know and on any you know about women's sexual health and there's always and people go yeah but we really believe that it's important to be trailblazers and we are not scared of controversy we don't want to make mistakes and you know restate claims that you can't restate that stuff like that which we don't do anymore but I think we we like pushing boundaries we like creating conversations and we also like creating a space where you know maybe some of these topics are hard for people to talk about and for by us talking about them we help eliminate shame in that person's life and that's super important to us um you have a number of entry capitals I think some of them actually may be here that have invested in your company shouldn't of curse then so I was curious do you what do you think I mean at some point they they've they've entrusted you with a lot of money and you're gonna they're gonna want to exit so to speak that's what they say that's what they say so what how do you think about that well the next is that five-year plan is that a ten-year plan do you say I want to be a publicly traded company do you say I want to sell this somebody else do you want to be doing this forever what what's the plan here I just really want to go one quarter at a time right now okay I really I don't like thinking about an eventual exit because I think that it limits the scope of what we're doing and I think it limits the scope of innovation and I mean I am sensitive in terms of valuations like I don't want to overvalue us to the point that we could never be acquired I've watched that happen while I've been building this company but I don't know I really love what I do and I think we're doing something great and I would like to get it to scale and so I feel like we have a lot more work to do before I think about that okay I want to pivot the conversation just one second okay if you could yeah and because we're gonna get deep and maybe a little personal for a second oh dear no no you I want to talk a few if we can for just a moment about Harvey Weinstein okay and the reason I want it I want to do that and you'll see cuz I'm actually gonna relate your business in just a second okay is that you were and and please give her a round of applause for this a critical source to some New York Times reporters who really exposed carving and you played a major role in that yeah I just hope I'm drinking Bill Gates's water but the reason I wanted to raise this issue of Harvey one scene is that that Wesley Morris who's a columnist the New York Times and if you saw this wrote a beautiful ode to you in The Times recently and wrote the following and I want to read it aloud and I want to get your thoughts on this he said I've spent two years wondering whether pal Cho's taste for acting had diminished because of that man whether having his company seemed synonymous with with some of her strongest most popular work compelled her to start a company of her own one where the work concerned not acting but being being whole being better being ridiculously better did you read this you know I never read I try never to read anything about myself but so many people forwarded me that lovely amazing piece that I did read it so what did you what do you think of that I mean I know that's why I said it could be personal deep but what I think he sent it better than I could say it myself and it it there's definitely it's something that I've been processing over the last year or so that I don't even think that I was aware that it possibly could have tarnished the way that I viewed my first career until I got involved with Jody and Megan in the book and and you know honestly have been still in the in the process of trying to metabolize what that was and what it means and I'm not really sure but I think he's right I have sort of a strange me to question which is I imagine you must have a very complicated view of Harvey wants to give him the new home for a very very long time yeah today oh no seriously gosh I've never I have not been asked this before you know I I don't like to be binary about people or about things I think we're all equal parts or varying percentages light and dark and and I think that you know he was a very very important figure in my life he was my main boss he he gave me incredible opportunity and yet during that time we had a very very fraught complicated relationship highs and lows and the the PostScript to that chapter of my life is where it gets extremely complicated for me because information came to light about who he was and how he was behaving that I didn't know during my already very difficult time with him so I'm not sure I'm not sure how I feel it's um I know you know we I think we for me anyway I like to resist the urge to I don't know B to binary about anything or anyone and I try to always mine an uncomfortable situation for the life lesson in it let me ask you a follow-up to that which is there have been and because you were a real leader in this there have been so many other men who've been exposed during this period for wrongdoing and one of the questions I think that clearly clearly the victims of this of what took place not only need to be acknowledged and the years of pain that that will continue but yep what do you think we think should happen to these men I wonder no I genuinely um can they repent is there something that can do I think that it's I don't think you can generalize I think that there are there's a spectrum but it does seem to me for the more egregious offenders that really loss of power is what keeps them from further offending so if they don't have the power then they lose that dynamic and then games over sort of hard to put it back to the business let's talk about vaginas that is an episode by the way of what you're doing on Netflix next right that you have a whole whole thing about about women we do well tell me tell us because we're gonna be seeing read in a minute Oh what are we gonna be seeing I don't know this is they don't like me to talk about a lot they don't know but it's a six part document when t 20 and we're really excited about it it's um six deep dives into goop subjects that I'm not allowed to say except you knew that one I'm a reporter final question um tell us what's going on with this there seems to be some kind of back-and-forth and you've been having with Jeff Bezos I know that he's like one of the few people that you've been trying to reach for a very very long time and yeah I gathered that he's ghost did you and I don't really understand what's happening you know you win some you lose some you know I know I did well I had reached out to him I've I've look I've learned so much by being brazen and reaching out to people and saying could I have a conversation with you would you mentor me so he was one of the people that I reached out to and he never really wrote me back I tried a couple times and then I told this story and I think in the Wall Street Journal and then he emailed me back and he said when it's it's Jeff and the Wall Street Journal tells me that you would like to get in touch with me so that there begun our very brief conversation because after that yeah not so much the problem was with the Wall Street Journal weight of Paltrow everybody thank you so much for the conversation

Channel: New York Times Events

Views: 47,957

Rating: 4.576159 out of 5

Keywords: gwyneth paltrow, goop, iron man, the politician, marvel, the avengers, netflix, gwyneth paltrow goop, gwyneth paltrow interview, gwyneth paltrow avengers, gwyneth paltrow harvey weinstein

Id: NTs3PW5rElg

Length: 25min 5sec (1505 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 06 2019