Worthy for Thirty: Where stories of leaders doing good while doing well are told!

Hello Summer!

A short work week so let’s jump in!

I had a chance to catch up with my friend and former colleague, Helaine Knapp, CEO & Founder, CITYROW to discuss the ups and downs of running a successful fitness business.

Highlights of our conversation are found below.

CITYROW programming is built around an indoor water rower coupled with strength training which can be done in one of their studios or at home via their connected rower.

Helaine and I worked together 12+ years ago at Buddy Media where we worked with the likes of Dan Reich & Jeff Ragovin (both past guests and both investors & advisors to CITYROW). It was also around this time that Helaine began to explore whether building a fitness business around a gym rower ‘had legs.’ It was Helaine’s discovery, based partially upon her own fitness-related injury, to find a workout that was both low-impact to the body and high-intensity. Time after time she kept coming back to the rower.

“And then, you know, I had this idea, I was like, ‘I wonder if I can make rowing like sexy and cool, mainstream, right?’ It’s this unsung hero, but it really needs a makeover. And so I quickly realized, ‘what if I pair it with strength training work?’ To me, that should be perfect. Cardio, strength, it’s a HIIT [high intensity interval training] class.” - Helaine Knapp, CEO & Founder, CITYROW

If self-awareness is a startup founder’s superpower then Helaine has it in spades!

“If you’ve like ever listened to me or seen any of my writing, like self-awareness really is everything because it’s one thing to be able to say everything that you’re good at, but it’s even more powerful to acknowlege the area that you’re not good at, because that means you can solve for it.”

While Helaine continues to lead her team and grow the business — omnichannel, connected fitness is here to stay — she still finds time to give back, mentor, invest, and coach early-stage founders.

“And I think at this point, I want to be the person that I was always looking for as an early stage founder. I want to be the person that young founder can come to and be vulnerable. You know, it’s really hard to be vulnerable whether it’s an investor. Doesn’t matter how close you are to them.”

Helaine doesn’t mince words when it comes to running a fast-growing fitness business, COVID-19 pandemic notwithstanding. The trials and tribulations predated 2020 and continue to persist to the present day. Again tapping into her self-awareness bona fides, Helaine has made sure to capture the lessons and experiences she’s witnessed to perhaps inspire and provide perspective to other entrepreneurs. ‘Making Waves’ her book set to release in 2024! (Set your P&T Knitware reminders!)

“I know I keep coming back to this analogy of being a quarterback, but you really, when I look back and I think about all the moments and you know, the voice of this book is that I really wanna add a new voice to the startup world that talk about the underbelly. I wanna talk about what it really takes. I wanna talk about not just rainbows and butterflies. I want this to be a book that gives you real insight into what happens and what happened to me.”

So much to digest and so much to learn from this full conversation!

To watch the full conversation — Worthy for Thirty YouTube Channel

To learn more about CITYROW — CITYROW.com

Want to purchase a CITYROW connected rower for your home?

Happy Monday Everyone -

Memorial Day weekend starts this Friday the unofficial, official start of summer.

Diversity is an important part of Worthy for Thirty. I love speaking with and championing founders who are not only smart, tenacious, and building world-class products and services yet most importantly, serving their communities. As a minority or female founder, they’re taking their profits and reinvesting them back into the communities they serve.

The panelists I had on this episode are also building the bench of future minority and female founders by the work and examples they’re setting:

Kate Brodock, CEO, Switch and General Partner, W Fund was always interested in gender equality along with supporting minority founders. She was able to parlay her experience as an operator into being tapped as CEO of Switch which goes beyond the standard definition of a venture capital fund. It provides founders and investors with resources, accelerators, investing opportunities, and education all built upon a foundation of inclusion.

“I was part of and then for a number of years ran a large global organization that focused on women in technology and entreprenuership. We had about 60 chapters around the world at one point. And in 2016 I was able to actually merge those two kind of parallel paths.” Switch CEO, Kate Brodock

Salim Holder, CEO & Co-Founder, 4th Ave Market, is the largest black-owned Hair & Beauty Supply Store targeting people of color. Salim is using his classical consumer package goods brand management experience to find a way to empower the brands that sell their wares on the 4th Ave Market platform, the consumers who are looking for a high-quality product, while ensuring ensure the money spent on these products are reinvested back into the community.

“I kind of looked at it and said, ‘wait a minute,’ as consumers that are spending $2B a year, we’re being forced to choose between stores that don’t have what we want and stores that don’t want us in there. When we created 4th Ave Market, I started to realize the opporutnity was much bigger than just selling products to our consumers and to community.” - Salim Holder, CEO & Founder, 4th Ave Market

Last but certainly not least by any stretch, I invited past guest Aubrey Flynn, CEO & Founder, GOALS Ventures to discuss how he too is building a sustainable business and technology platform for entrepreneurs who serve underrepresented communities whether that is based on race, ethnicity, veteran status or socio-economic factors. Aubrey is cracking the code on how to teach and use technology with his entrepreneur-customers to shrink the wealth gap in the US.

“We’ve [GOALS Ventures] cultivated a community of about 600 entrepreneurs and brands. Companies like Amazon are part of the network. Influencers like Charles Barkely and his brand, Redmont Vodka, Indigo by Snoop Dogg, Judge Judy, her new show ‘Judy Justice,’ is a part of our network. So really excited to provide digital transformation, and service in the space of social, digital advertising, e-commerce, search engine optimization, and just customer relationship management as part of a software as a service model that you can also do yourself or leverage our team and our concierge service where we’ll come in and do the work for you.” — Aubrey Flynn, CEO & Founder, GOALS Ventures

Click here to watch the whole conversation on YouTube

Hello Everyone -

It’s always fun, interesting, and thought-provoking to record another podcast episode. Adding to those elements, recording a conversation live! And that’s what I did. I booked time at NYC’s Lower East Side Bookstore and Podcast Studio, P&T Knitware. If you love books, especially ones about NYC or authors based or from NYC, this is your store. Want to record your own podcast episode? Their studio is open to the community!

On this episode, I had my friend Jonah Goodhart join me. I met Jonah back in 2016 when I attended his company’s, MOAT, conference in Montauk. This was when I was helping run digital marketing for Prestige Brands and we hired MOAT to help us understand our advertising analytics such as engagement and viewability (did someone actually see our ad?? What a novel concept!)

Jonah is very self-aware both as an operator and angel investor over his 25+ year career starting from his days at Cornell in the late ‘90s launching an early affiliate marketing company, Colonize.com, which built large email lists of consumers who wanted to be alerted about free items from brands in the early aughts of the world wide web. Big brands, such as Barnes & Noble caught wind and paid Jonah & Noah to refer them customers.

After Colonize.com led Jonah & Noah to become the first outside check into Right Media which at the time in 2002 was the first digital ad exchange marketplace. Once Right Media sold in 2007, they took a break to angel invest and use the 3 years between the exit and founding MOAT to decide the next step in their career journey.

“And my brother and I have tried to do this throughout our, I guess almost 25 year career at this point, is we've tried to pause and say, you know, what are we? What's happening? What do we understand? What do we not understand? What are the trends that we're seeing? And we paused and we said, you know, there's gonna be a lot more innovation, a lot of companies that, uh, we can potentially be involved in, that we could support.”— Montauk Labs Co-Founder, Jonah Goodhart

Fast Forward, MOAT sells to Oracle in 2017, Jonah stays on for 3 years and just as he was going to travel the world with his wife in 2020 the world shuts down because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Jonah took the opportunity to use this time, with Noah, to evaluate what’s next.

“And we said, you know, but yet the satisfaction and fulfillment we get from being a part of a company, which you know, for us is about the people that we get to work with and is about waking up and having that feeling of, ‘yes, I want to go do something that inspires me and that feels good and that feels like I'm making a positive difference in, in other people's lives.’ And so what it led to for us was creating a venture studio, which is what we're doing now. And that concept was all right, how do we take technology? Which is, you know, there can be technology for good and there's technology for not so good. And we've seen lots of examples of, of both. How can we take technology for good and use it to make a positive impact on the world in some way? You know, in my mind it's about building sustainable businesses.”

Jonah and Montauk Labs are pairing the same entrepreneurial zeal that’s been omnipresent throughout Jonah’s career with public issues affecting a large amount of Americans, such as access to healthcare.

“The US has a lot of things in the healthcare space that are great. It has some other things, perhaps some of the incentives that are not so great. How do we sort of think about building a business in this, in this world with a clear vision? And our vision was, how do we use our background data and analytics to improve health outcomes?”

Click to listen to the full conversation on YouTube

Hello Everyone -

An important topic on this show is second chances or using CONBODY’s Coss Marte parlance, providing a first opportunity to someone who may not have had one, to folks going through the US prison system and who are coming home.

My guests for this conversation were referrals from previous guests, Andrew Glazier of Defy Ventures and Aria Finger, Reid Hoffman’s Chief of Staff.

I had on Bottom Bunk Sneaker House, CEO & Co-Founder, Cole Richman who spent 8 years inside the California prison system for dealing drugs who discussed his experience first-hand coming home with limited work opportunities and co-founding Bottom Bunk during his stay in a halfway house with his partner, and Zo Orchingwa, CEO & Founder, Ameelio, a technology non-profit which provides free digital communication tools for those incarcerated to speak with their friends and family — from Ameelio’s research, communication is vital to reduce recidivism and mass incarceration. In addition, prison phone call companies are predatory by charging large sums of money for individual inmates to make calls home.

The important question: how can we work collectively to help those who have been rehabilitated, who were proactive working on themselves while incarcerated, and are now looking to establish an opportunity once they’re home?

Hello Everyone -

Combating antisemitism in the US is a huge issue and discussion point for me and this podcast. How can we all lean in and work towards reducing the vitriol and harmful rhetoric that, at times, has led to physical violence against the Jewish community?

I sat down with U.S. Congressman Josh Gottheimer (NJ-5) along with past guests Dan Reich and B.A. Van Sise to get their perspective. Perhaps a lot of the hate and animus towards the Jewish community is rooted in an education, or lack thereof, about Judaism, its culture and traditions.

Congressman Gottheimer is a co-sponsor of legislation, The HEAL Act (Holocaust Education and Antisemitism Lessons) in the US House of Representatives, that if signed into law, will standardized Holocaust education across the US. We’re used to communities with large Jewish populations — like NY/NJ/CT, LA and Chicago — to understand the Jewish experience. What sort of education and exposure does the rest of the country, especially more remote parts of the country, receive and then need?

To put the dangerous rise of antisemitism into perspective, the Anti-Defamation League reported to NPR that 2022 saw the largest increase of anti-Jewish attacks since it began its tracking and that’s on top of a sharp increase the year before.

It will take an ‘all-hands-on-deck’ approach, both Jews and non-Jews to collectively stamp out all forms of hate, especially antisemitism where the Jewish community is a disproportionate victim of all race-related hate crimes despite being 2.4% of the total US population. Thanks to Robert Kraft and his team for launching the #standuptoJewishhate campaign to drive necessary awareness to the issue which is helping get all communities involved.

Cautious optimism

Hello Everyone -

Mental health, and when it’s not optimal, in America is a pressing issue. While the topic may have felt it was living in the periphery pre-pandemic, it was magnified and worsened through the apex of lockdowns to our now ‘new normal’ where we are still either working / operating completely remotely or in a hybrid environment.

Chronic ailments such as anxiety, and depression along with a whole slew of other mental health-related illness have profound impact on the individual sufferer, and within the context of business, can negatively affect productivity.

“Employees who report poor mental health are less engaged, less productive and, according to Gallup research, miss almost five times more work days than those who report good mental health.” — Chris Barbin, Forbes Contributor

I had the pleasure of speaking with returning guest Phil Schermer, CEO & Founder, Project Healthy Minds and Stephen Sokoler, CEO & Founder, Journey to discuss the need for CEOs & Founders along with their the executive suite to make mental health for a company’s employees a top priority. This is not to say the urgency is coming only from the top. Employees are too advocating for mental health resources and discussion from their employers.

The first step to better mental health and its care is normalizing the conversation around it, and to make employees feel comfortable to talk about it openly.

You’ll hear Stephen & Phil lay out the steps for companies to make mental healthcare a vital part of any organization.

Watch & listen to the full conversation on YouTube:

Traveling this spring? Make sure to check out COMRAD compression socks for all your travel needs!

Hello Everyone -

I had pleasure of catching up with a childhood friend, B.A. Van Sise. B.A. is a published author — Invited to Life: Finding Hope After the Holocaust — is his second book. B.A., in addition to his literary accomplishments, is an acclaimed photojournalist. His ‘Eyewitness’ installation at the Museum of Jewish Heritage was his photographic foray of meeting with and taking pictures of Holocaust survivors throughout the US. The pictures of survivors adorned the museum windows, and it was the museum’s first public art exhibition.

Invited to Life: Finding Hope After the Holocaust is a continuation of B.A.’s important work, in addition to taking photos of Holocaust survivors based in the US, tells their story of making America their own. After unspeakable tragedy and trauma, these individuals made their way to the states to make life anew with the hope that they were able to put what they experienced behind them. These are human stories with their trials and tribulations.

The conversation’s full visual version is on YouTube:

Hello Everyone -

When it comes to your favorite brands what sets them apart? What are the defining characteristics that make you fond or better yet more than willing to patronize them? Is it the service provide or product they make, or perhaps it’s the intangibles — meaning by giving your money to this brand you know that money will go to continuing to provide a superior product or service and in addition, allow that brand to advocate for specific causes important to you or continue to be a pillar in the community it serves?

Is it their brand purpose that sticks out?

I had the ANA’s Ken Beaulieu, who leads their Center for Brand Purpose on the podcast to discuss ‘brand purpose.’ How do we first define it? Ken’s explanation below:

“We [ANA Center for Brand Purpose] define it as the reason your brand exists beyond profit, beyond making gobs of money. It's your North Star, it's your DNA, it's your ethos. And it should be tied to your business strategy and inside and out. It's gotta be rooted in everything that you do.” — Ken Beaulieu, ANA

What are brands which you associate with being purposeful? Patagonia immediately comes to mind. Their reason-to-be is to serve, protect and save Planet Earth. What are some other brand examples that fit this description?

Watch my full interview with Ken on YouTube or you can listen to the audio on wherever you enjoy podcasts. Ken lays out the ‘8 Characteristics of Purpose-Driven Brands.’ To learn more about brand purpose along with Ken and his team’s work head over to the Center’s website.

Good Morning Everyone -

Mental health is a prevalent issue in the US which has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Most Americans who experience mental health issue symptoms are less likely to identify what they’re going through and experiencing based on stigma and that is compounded with not knowing where to turn. Who can I speak to? What resources are available to me? Is this covered my insurance? Is my employer aware of mental health and its impact on my and the overall company’s productivity?

Many of these questions and topics were discussed during my conversation with Phil Schermer, Founder & CEO, Project Healthy Minds, non-profit technology mental health startup and returning guest, Aria Finger, Chief of Staff to Reid Hoffman. In Aria’s past life as CEO, DoSomething.org mental health was a pressing topic and issue for the organization’s membership base. Aria’s predecessor, in fact, launched the Crisis Text Line in 2013.

Mental health will be a recurring topic on Worthy for Thirty. Next week, Phil and Stephen Sokoler, CEO & Co-Founder, Journey, a corporate mental health resource platform will be coming on the show to continue this important conversation.

Full conversation on YouTube:

Other upcoming conversations:

* Second Chances with Zo Orchingwa, Founder & CEO, Ameelio + Cole Richman, Co-Founder & CEO, Bottom Bunk

* Combatting Antisemitism with Congressman Josh Gottheimer, DIBS Beauty Co-Founder, Dan Reich & Author, B.A. Van Sise

* Underrepresented Entrepreneurs with Aubrey Flynn, CEO & Founder, GOALS Ventures, Salim Holder, Co-Founder & CEO, 4th Ave Market, and Kate Brodock, General Partner, W Fund

COMRAD Socks are great for travel and everyday wear. Check ‘em out!

Good Morning -

The last time we checked in it was December 2022. Looking at the calendar we’re in the second week of 2023. January seems like a loooong month. For those following ‘Dry January’ or working hard to stick to your new year’s goals (see, I didn’t say ‘resolutions), this community is cheering you on!

As you may remember, in Fall 2022, I spoke with Coss Marte, Founder & CEO of CONBODY about his path from spending 7 years in prison, to developing a passion for fitness (it saved his life!), and turning that passion into a thriving, for-profit fitness business once he was released. He credits Defy Ventures, a 501(3) non-profit organization working inside close to 30 prisons in the US along with working with people leaving incarceration, for providing him with career readiness, personal development, and most importantly, entrepreneurship support.

I had both an informative and insightful discussion with Defy Ventures’ President & CEO, Andrew Glazier, about all the great work Defy Ventures’ is doing.

You can listen to our whole conversation on how Defy Ventures’ is confronting mass incarceration head-on by helping its EITs (entreprenuers-in-training) prepare for life, post-release with mentorship and education — invariably helping these individuals develop a self-narrative that will help them create then sustain their second chance.

Defy Venture’s EITs average recidivism rate is <10% vs. the national average which is >30%!

Watch here or listen to the full conversation wherever you listen to podcasts:

Traveling this winter? Make sure to wear COMRAD Compression Socks on your journey! Your legs and mind will thank you! Save 30% off your purchase today!