How Bombas pairs scaling impact and profit

The very best founders I know are brilliant at building systems. They connect teams, they remove bottlenecks, and they eliminate single points of failure. And yet When it comes to their own wealth. Most are running a disconnected stack. A tax accountant here and a state attorney there, a wealth manager who doesn't talk to either one of them.

Creative planning was built to fix exactly that. One integrated team of tax professionals, state planners, investment specialists, all coordinated by a dedicated wealth manager who sees your full financial picture and keeps every piece working together. Proactive tax efficiency, state strategy, investments all under one roof. Creative planning where wealth works together. Learn more at creative planning dot com slash masters of scale.

Hey folks, Jeff Berman here. I am thrilled to share some of the new names who will be joining us at this year's Masters of Scale summit. This may be our biggest stage yet. Reed Hastings, Meredith Whitaker, Van Jones, Amjad Masad, and more. Will be there with us October 20th through 22nd in San Francisco. If you're building something great, or you want to build something great, We want you there with us too.

Join us at masters of scale dot com slash apply twenty six. That's mastersofscom slash apply. Twenty six. Every step along the way, including the day that you are filming in front of the sharks, they are like

Just because you are here filming in front of the sharks does not necessarily mean that you are gonna air. That's David Heath on getting picked for the hit TV show Shark Tank. with his then nascent sock company. Bas. And here's his business partner.

Randy Goldberg. They give you no guarantees. If we call you And you do all the work, you may not fail.

If you film, you may not air. So like you cannot bank. At any moment until they call you and say Two weeks out, your episode is gonna air. You have to act like business as usual.

They did get the call, though. And they held a watch party for their episode. So, the moment comes We're elated. We have friends and family around, we have a team in place, we think we're ready.

The episode begins and then we're watching it. By the way. Watching yourself on TV when they're trying to make it look dramatic and you're sweating. It's not the most comfortable ex you know, so we're watching this, and then you start to get the texts and then you start to get the calls and the calls say The side is down.

It's the last thing you want to hear in the biggest moment in the history of your company. You're pouring everything into this process. to get this thing on the air, to like be on national TV. And then the side is down and you feel You just feel like

You blew it. Despite that rocky takeoff, Shark Tank helped launch Bombas into hyper speed. The mission driven company donates a pair of socks for every pair sold. That's led to more than a hundred and forty million donations so far.

You gotta have incredible talent at every position. There are fires burning when you're going out. Such an idiot. And then you go back to this is totally gonna be amazing. There are so many easy ways. I have no idea what to do. Sorry, we made a mistake. But you have to time it right. We haven't made it just how you do it. This is masters of scale. I'm your host.

Jeff Berman. David Heath and Randy Goldberg are two of the co-founders of Bombas. Their story is full of lessons about how to design a product that stands out. And scale not just your profits. but your impact on your community.

David Nardy, welcome to Masters of Scale. Thank you for having us. Thank you. Excited to be here. I'm thrilled to have you, uh long time wearer, first time conversation. And this is longtime listener, first time conversation. So there we go. So

Why socks? Randy and I were working together at a media company. And I was scrolling on Facebook as one does back in two thousand eleven. And I came across a post from the Salvation Army that said socks are the number one most requested clothing item at homeless shelters.

And it kinda stopped me in my tracks where I was like Wow. Here's an item of clothing that I don't spend more than a few seconds a day thinking about and yet This is being perceived as like a luxury item for six hundred thousand people living here in the US and even more globally. And

I remember Yeah. Thinking like that's pretty sad. And I walked over to Randy's desk and I was like, Did you know this fact? And obviously he had it, and I watched a similar reaction and And the reason socks are such an issue is because most organizations and shelters don't accept used sock or underwear donations. And if you're sleeping on the street for hygiene reasons, obviously. Even for socks. For socks, yeah.

I mean foot hygiene is a big issue if you're sleeping on the street. A fresh pair of socks means a lot. potentially you're walking more or you don't want to take your shoes off at night. You're afraid they're gonna get stolen. All sorts of foot issues come up. This is what we heard and then We would we talk to organizations and they said we have to buy socks and our budgets are strapped as it is. So we were like, Wow, this makes so much sense. We really want to help. We kinda drew the connection to Tom Shoes. I mean, at that time I think in their fifth year of business doing a couple hundred million of revenue, really pioneered that buy one, give one model.

At the time we were like Well why don't we See if we can create a fun little sock company. Didn't really think it would be much that could give, you know, a pair of socks to the homeless community for every pair that we sold. And that was kind of the spark of the idea. But this was before it was relatively easy to start an apparel company where, you know, a lot of the logistics problems are solved, uh, you know, manufacturing, et cetera. Commerce and the technology. was prohibitively expensive at the time. But what's interesting is if you could afford e commerce at that moment.

And you could afford to build a site, the marketing was basically free. Now that's totally flipped, right? Because the social landscape was less crowded because they weren't charging for like, you know, I don't think Whatever you post it, all your followers would see it. Right. Right. Facebook ad platform barely existed at the time. But before we get to marketing and how you solve that, you have to have a

product to sell. Yes. Yes. So you become obsessed with socks, but how do you even figure out how to m start manufacturing socks? We knew that we wanted to donate a lot, right? And given the model, we then realized okay, in order to donate a lot, we had to sell a lot. You know, sell a lot. what product like white space were we gonna fill that was differentiated from what we were seeing out in the marketplace. And I think when we looked at the marketplace, we realized very quickly Eighty-five percent of all sock sales were dominated by the low cost, low quality commodity type brands. Think of twelve pairs of white socks and a

plastic bag, you're gonna get a Costco, Target, Walmart, T J Max, whatever. And then the other fifteen percent was this hyper niche Athletic performance. Focused categories by brands that were super small, but focused on running, cycling, basketball, skiing, you name it, right? Hyper focus. We went down to the local sporting goods store here in New York City, Paragon, and we looked at the wall of socks.

We were like what? differentiates an eighteen dollar pair of socks from the sub one dollar a pair that you're gonna get in this plastic bag. And the more and more we started to test the product and wear it, we're like, Whoa, there's actually a tremendous amount, as you might imagine, or if someone's running a marathon, right? they can't have blisters, they've gotta regulate their temperature, like it's gotta be super cushiony, have the support in all the right places. And that's where like the second like aha moment came. We're like, why do athletes

Why should they be the only ones who are feeling comfortable and supported and Having zero experience in the apparel manufacturing retail world outside of, you know, a three month stint I added the gap when I was fourteen. Um doesn't qualify me. You learned how to fold a T shirt. I did. A lot of T shirts, which is ultimately why I quit. You know, I remember telling my dad over dinner one day I was like I have this idea for the sock company and he was like

Funny enough, your godfather was in the sock business. Turns out he was the president CEO of a company called Gold Toe. Like Sure. Yeah. I mean most people know it's the one with the little gold toe over the sock. He was that in the late eighties, early nineties, and then started a private label sock manufacturing company Which he grew to like, you know, a couple of hundred million in revenue and had brands like Tommy Hilfiger or Calvin Klein. He was doing all the socks for the big department store brands that They just license that product out. So

We met with him and he was like Tell me what you wanna make, and I will help connect you to the best factories in the world. And so that was a certainly one of those like luck moments, right? Where Well let's also be honest. He said, Don't do it. Wha why?

He said. You're looking to do something Nobody wants good socks. They want cheap socks. They're sold by the dozen pennies per dozen. Like you're talking about all these high-end features and bringing these niche ideas into a mass product. He was jaded by years of experience and he's the first of many people, let's be honest, who told us don't do it. But we said, All right, make the introduction, like we hear you Steve, but respectfully we're excited about this. Well what what kept you going in the face of someone so experienced saying this is a terrible idea?

I mean, I think it's just the entrepreneurial drive, right? Like we were I think more motivated by creating something. And we had this mission underlying too, which I think was, you know, a big fac we were like, If we get this right, this could actually help a lot of people. And we didn't have much to lose at the time either, you know? It was a trust your gut. We feel this. We're gonna keep going. This this wasn't something that we were like, Oh my God, we need to quit our jobs tomorrow and raise fifty dollars to go like we we were like we can Go at this at a snail's pace and you know, if it turns into something, it turns into something. And if it's not, then it's a fun project that I get to work on with one of my best friends and, you know, see where it goes.

So what was the inflection point from the godfather saying, Don't do it, you're gonna regret it? to getting to the starting line to actually having a product in market. It took two years. Because we were obsessed and we would test, for example, a hundred and thirty seven different tension levels on a calf's ox. It would stay up and not fall down, but wouldn't leave a mark on your leg. We just got really into the details. And

We knew at that point that putting on a good pair of socks could change the way you felt for the day. You'd bootstrap this, you're spending your own money. You'd yeah, barely any. Yeah. I mean yeah. And so when you get that Soc where the tension level is right and the padding is right and the feel is right and you're like okay we've got this good enough we're ready to go What happens then? How do you actually get

the product and market. So We knew that we wanted to be a digital brand. And we knew that we wanted to try to get some validation in market in the most capital efficient type of way. And

Ten years ago, maybe a little bit longer, twelve years ago. The high point of crowdfunding? Right, like everyone's oh wow, there's this new model. You can go on Kickstarter or Indiegogo and put up a three minute video. And people may or may not buy your product sight unseen, but there's no commitment to making it unless you hit a certain milestone. And we're like

We're good storytellers. We knew that. And so we're like Why don't we put this out into the world? See if we can tell our story and see if people will care within a pretty low risk. I think it costs us like four thousand dollars to produce a video. I think we had a goal of fifteen thousand dollars in thirty days. Thirty days. We did over twenty thousand dollars in our first day. Amazing. Hundred and fifty thousand dollars in our first thirty days.

And I think at that moment we were like Okay. Like Way more people seem to be interested in this than we thought. Was that terrifying on some level or was that No, it was exciting. What would have been terrifying is if we had actually just hit our goal and we had to manufacture for fifteen thousand dollars worth of socks and it didn't feel like a win and we w You know, this felt like a very big vote of confidence.

I think another part of our like product validation story that I think gave us a lot of confidence in the product that we were actually producing, you know, Randy and I we would like Go to our local gym and it'd be that weird Like sock guy at the gym that would like interrupt people's workouts. It'd be like, Hey, take your headphones out. I saw you wearing these Nike socks. Can I give you a pair of these? Tell me what you think. And they're like, All right, bro. But then the next day they come back up to you and they're like, Yo, those things are amazing. Where can I get more? And you're like, that's a validating proof point that the product this This guy doesn't owe me anything. He doesn't know me, but he wants more of this product now that I've given it to him. So I think

validating that like we knew the product was gonna be good and then go out to a digital audience who wasn't going to touch and feel it, but was going to resonate with the mission and the product story, we knew that once we sent the product to those people that they were going to love it. So at some point Shark Tank comes into the picture. Why shark tank? We got an email.

from Shark Tank that said, Hey do you want to try out For Shark Tank and they discovered you through Indiegogo. Yeah. They actually send you an email fr it was like a producer who had a Gmail unrelated to the show. We thought it was a prank. Sure at first. Yeah and you know it's like Shark Tank casting one three. two seven eight at gmail dot com. You're like, I'm waiting for this person to ask me for my banking information. Right. So you get the email, you validate that it's actually Shark Tank, you come out to LA and you get on set, and what happens? It's a pretty wild process. I mean, the legal alone is

Daunting. But for us, once we decided that we wanted to do it. And that we thought that's the same. It would be good for us and good for our brand. We treated it like a full time job. And it's a actually a pretty good process for a young business to go through because

They don't tell you what they're gonna ask you. They can ask you any question about your business on national television and you have to have an a good answer prepared. So we knew we had to sit down and answer every question that we were maybe avoiding answering at that time about our business. And then we just did all the research. We looked at every single episode. We compiled a list of questions. I mean, we treated it like we were gonna win Shark Tank, like it was a game show and like the the prize was not embarrassing yourself on national TV. Did you think you would actually raise money or did you think of it more as a this is incredible marketing exposure for us and if we raise money, fine. I think we were open, right? We obviously saw the sharks all had tremendous success in what they did. We had a hierarchy of sharks that we thought were better fits for us than others, you know, ending up with Damon, you know, built a billion dollar apparel brand, New York based, obviously was our our number one choice. It's who we ended up with, but we had a strategy for every single shark, every type of offer.

And yeah, I mean it was a very exciting proposition, but we still operated the business like it wasn't gonna happen. Right. We said like we need to continue to fundraise, we need to continue to market and build this brand. Because Every step along the way, including the day that you are filming in front of the sharks. They're like Just because you are here filming in front of the sharks, and just because you get a deal does not necessarily mean that you are gonna err. So like you cannot bank.

At any moment until they call you and say, Two weeks out, your episode is gonna air. You have to act like business as usual. Right. So how big was the response after the Shark Tank episode? The first weekend we did like three hundred thousand in sales. And our website crashed. Yeah, up until that point.

from August, including the Indiegogo, through September when the episode aired. So roughly thirteen months we've done about nine hundred thousand in sales, all organically bootstrapped, you know, some press here and there. And then night of weekend of three hundred thousand in sales Two months after, collectively, two million in sales. They re aired our episode on Black Friday, uh that same year site crashed again. Two weeks before Christmas, we've completely sold out of every piece of inventory that we had. So how did you end up solving the inventory problem? I mean, this is incredible demand, but it's not linear. It's not consistent. So You know, at the time.

you think these things are gonna sink you. Your site crashes in the mo biggest moment for your company and you think we blew it. You know, you run out of inventory, you think we blew it. But you work your way through everything like like every other problem. And we had to get smarter about inventory planning, raising money. was a part of that, you know, having funding to be able to buy more product. Also having a strategy of our product early on where everything was sort of core. And we weren't yet designing seasonal product allowed us to buy more inventory. If we could afford it, we could buy it and we knew we could sell it.

If one color sold out, we were pretty good at selling the next color. There was a lot working in our favor that we didn't know when we entered the category. but it really helped us with that piece of it. Still ahead, we talk about how Bombas has kept to its core values amid rapid growth. And how they built a nationwide network of giving partners. Stay with us.

When you build substantial wealth through your business, it's often tied up in a single equity position. The upside is real, but so is the risk, and knowing when to act isn't always obvious. Creative planning works with business owners to build a strategy around concentrated equity. When to diversify, how to manage tax risk, and how to protect what you've spent years. Building.

Creative planning where wealth works together. Learn more at creative planning dot com slash masters of scale. The Wired Newsroom is known for award-winning reporting on how technology shapes our world. On Wire's Uncanny Valley, we take that curiosity even further. Each week, journalists from Wired break down the biggest stories in tech while speaking directly with the people building, challenging, and reshaping the future.

Is the AI boom sustainable? How do you protect your privacy in an age of constant surveillance? Uncanny Valley tackles the questions driving today's tech debates and lighting up your group chats. Listen to new episodes every Thursday. Wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey listeners, Bob here. If you listen to Rapid Response on Masters of Scale, you may be missing half the show. Because every Friday we release a second rapid response exclusively in the Rapid Response feed. The guests and topics are just as compelling and timely from Ford's CEO to NASA's administrator to the lessons from The Devil Wears Prada. It takes about 10 seconds to find, just search rapid response wherever you listen to podcasts and hit follow to make sure you never miss an episode. I hope to see you there. Welcome back to Masters of Scale.

You can find this conversation and more on the Masters of Scale YouTube channel. You will have to figure out distribution two times. because you're distributing to your customer who's purchasing the product, but you're also distributing customers to whom you're donating the product. So you can talk about how you all developed those systems and made that work. When we first started, we had the idea and we said, Okay, we've got to make the best socks in the history of feet so that we can donate as many products as we possibly can. And we set a goal to donate A million pairs of socks in ten years.

And we're Over a hundred and forty million items donated. But in the beginning We didn't know how to make a sock, we didn't know how to donate a sock either. The making part we figured out and it took us a couple of years. The donating part I mean listen, we just

Good. That was our strategy. Like this was the beginning of Who's donating sucks? You found a organization in Ohio called Hannah Sox, still one of our giving partners. It was started by a girl, I think she was seven at the time. And she was serving dinner at Thanksgiving at a homeless shelter.

And she saw somebody who was wearing tinfoil around his feet. And she asked her mother. Why is that man wearing that? I mean, she's seven, right? So she started an organization where she's donating socks to shelters in her local area. We called this organization. And in the same way that we kind of thought

Shark Tank was a prank. They were like, Wait, you just want to give us all the socks. And we were like, Yes, can you take them, please? And that was our first giving partner and we would send them Socks. When we made sales, we created a schedule. We'd send them product. And eventually we started talking about the needs of the community.

And how we could change the product. to I don't know, make them more Technical and specific to serve the needs of people facing homelessness. What what are the different needs? So we had an antimicrobial treatment. To prevent the growth of fungus.

We use darker colors to show less visible wear. And we reinforce the seam. So on our core socks for our paying customers, we tend to use a seamless toe. Which is really light, but less Durable over time. Then reinforcing the seam. So things like that. The same base yarns.

We're trying to make really smart products for our nonpaying customers and do research, market research, having conversations with that customer the same way we do with our paying customers. So we adjusted and adapted those products over time based on the conversations we're having with this organization. And then we started to add more organizations. And eventually we said, our customers are in all fifty states, we need to be donating in all fifty states. So we started to add giving partners everywhere across the country. And then we started to let people apply to be a giving partner. And organically over the years We've built up an infrastructure of giving and We have a pretty advanced network of four thousand Partners across all fifty states.

And our same fulfillment partner that we send to our customers is sending product to our giving partners in the shelters all over the country. And we have this logistical expertise that we've built up for donating product as just a natural extension of how we've run the business. Wow, and how many socks donated today? So that includes socks. Underwear, slippers, and t shirts are forecast. Socks is the bulk of it, but the last three years we've introduced other product. So Yeah, incredible. I mean a hundred and forty million. It is. I mean and and an extraordinary thing. I mean, think about all the lives that have been changed by that decision and by the focus on that. It's extraordinary. So thank you.

One of the challenges that we talk about a lot is especially in the gravel road phase. You start out a dirt road and hopeful you get to a paved road, but in that gravel road phase is You know, companies literally create you call them departments, but they call them divisions in a lot of companies. It's kind of a terrible word for and managing culture consistency, keeping those values front of mind is really hard in that phase. You all seem to have done an incredible job of that with your values deeply infused in your company. As you've scaled, how have you kept that front and center for your team? Well I think We talk about it and prioritize it. And we don't always get it right either. We survey the company every year and ask how we're doing on these things. We work on the areas where we need to improve. We have to shift and be honest about that we're not fifteen people in sitting around one table anymore and you have to adapt things, but you have to decide

what those core values are, like Dave was talking about, right? What are the things that you're just unwilling to compromise on? How do those shift over time? And what makes sense for a company at your scale? What can you actually do? How do you serve the good of the company and make people You know, it's the balance of having people come to you a little bit with the things that you believe in and also listening to where people are and what the world looks like and how people want a company to serve them in their careers and finding that balance and being open with people and listening. It's not Rocket science, right? It's just making sure.

That it's an important thing that you talk about. We sit around at our executive meetings, we talk about these things. I was just saying from day one. Uh Core values have been a lar it's seventy five percent of our interview process. Like every person who's interviewed is given a core value to test the person against. And so it becomes this filter of people. I think naturally Our brand and what we stand for attracts a certain type of person.

But then this becomes the you know, the filter by which we say Are these people legitimately here because they wanna be a part? Everybody shows up and say, Oh, I wanna give back. But The people that we have working for us, like Yeah. They all participate in volunteer activities every single month. And part of the work that they're doing, they see the value, you know, end to end of how their work contributes to actually helping people, you know, so

this has become this kind of filtering mechanism that has inevitably Built this. very like minded community of people who similar to the four co founders share the same values in the types of places that they want to work. You did expand beyond socks.

not always easy for companies that are in a single product line to expand. How did you make that decision? I think it was a series of a number of bad decisions leading up to that decision. I think our heart was in the right place. Yeah. I think Yeah.

In year three. We had done five million in sales. And I remember, you know, talking to one of our our mentors and we were like We're unstoppable. We went from like a million to two million to five million. We're like, Oh my God, this is unstoppable. We're gonna start producing underwear and sweatpants and sweatshirts. And

They were like most of the best brands stuck with one product. The Nike started with sh running sneakers, Under Armour started with base layers, Lulu with yoga pants. Most of these brands became hundred plus million dollar brands before they ever expanded into other product category. And they're like if you're core product is growing at like three hundred percent year over year. Why are you gonna add complexity to your business? Stay focused and just you've so much demand there. Wait till you start to see that demand dwindle before you would add anything additional. That was great advice. So Fast forward year five, hundred million of revenue. We're like, Oh my God, we're even more unstoppable than we thought.

And we started very rapidly, you know, making other product underwear t shirts, sweatpants, sweatshirts. Um And We had made the product'cause we were like, Well, of course, people love our brand. They love what we do. If we kind of if we make it, they'll buy it type of thing. And so we went through this process. And you know, we produce sweatpants, sweatshirts at first. Underwear development takes a lot longer. It's much more complicated of a product. We end up

Launching. This product. And we hadn't thought through Things like well, what are we gonna donate and how are we gonna Talk about

Sweatpants and sweatshirts aren't even like number 10 on the most requested items. We were like we just ran so fast to just make something. This is adding complexity to the warehouse and all this other stuff. And so we made the hard decision. We're like, look, we've already made it. We'll sell it. And then we're gonna pull it and we're just gonna go back to focusing on socks. We had one season where we sold un uh sweatpants and sweatshirts. Uh and then we didn't end up launching underwear until year eight. Collector's items. And I think by that point we were two hundred and seventy five million of top line in socks. And we're like, okay.

We now have to do it. feel comfortable to start planting the seeds. And Intentionally keeping those businesses small to begin with and not trying to make them twenty percent of the business on day one. We're like, it's gonna be two percent of the business. We're gonna learn and we're gonna take the same amount of time that we took to Perfect the sock.

with a much larger customer base now to get the feedback. And just go slow and having this amazing core business that was incredibly profitable, still growing like crazy. Give us confidence and the leeway to be able to say we're gonna go really slow at this other thing. And so we've developed these other products and today socks is still like eighty percent of the business. Funny enough, our footwear business is our second

largest category despite launching a little bit after our underwear. It's like fifteen percent of the business. And we're just trying to follow where the customer is telling us, you know, they want to go. Yeah, there's high share of foot here. We're still producing Ts, but now we're we've very quickly validated through the consumer that that's actually what they want from us. So we're going further down into that direction. Yeah. On homelessness, which is obviously It's a human rights issue, it's a public health issue, it's a public safety issue. I mean, and we have a lot of work to do in this country to abate homelessness. What have you learned and where are the opportunities to do more beyond what you guys do? Cause you you all do a lot, but where can we make real change on that front in this country? Listen, I I think that a lot of that starts with getting a little bit smarter on an individual basis and trying to find some compassion. A lot of the people who are experiencing in this

country are experiencing it for less than a year. Ninety percent of people it's transitional. You know, you don't have the support network, something unexpected happens, maybe you're couch surfing, maybe you spend a couple of nights in a shelter. I don't wanna blanket over everybody's experience. Each experience is very personal, but we meet a lot of people and we volunteer. We have a lot of giving partners who share a lot of information. And we talk and interview a lot of people who have lived experience with homelessness. And they all say the same thing. Let's start with a little bit of compassion.

Understanding that I'm a human and that I'm in a situation that I don't want to be in. Of course we are all confronted with ideas of what homelessness looks like to us. And I think a lot of those are misleading. And

You know, in the same way that you don't want one example of something to color an entire issue. Like I would say the same. This is this is about people and people in this country. And it's really a lot of other issues showing up in this one word, right? This is about, like you said. Mental health. This is about the healthcare system. This is about

wage increasing. This is about the housing market. There are so many related and complicated things. It's a very nuanced Very tough topic. We all have some sort of experience with it. These are people who live close to us. In all of our communities. And I think there's some responsibility.

to try and have a perspective and be a little bit smarter on it because it's a representation of a lot of the things that we all care about. So the thing that I've learned the most in talking to people is Human connections. People understanding that there's somebody who is thinking about them or cares about them more than what's expected matters. The organizations that are working in this every day are doing incredible work. They're strapped, they don't make a lot of money, they're out there just trying to help people.

and just a little bit of extra care and a little bit of shifting perspective, potentially in a conversation that you're having because you've learned a little bit more or because you've had an interaction, a personal interaction with somebody. If that happens millions of times over. It can make a difference in the same way that us donating a product seems like a small thing. If I give somebody a pair of socks, You're like Uh you're not giving him a home. We hear we hear people say things like that to us all the time, right? Like how about uh homes are the most requested thing in homeless shelters. Okay, like we understand, but

You've had tons of conversations with somebody where It's a opportunity to start a connection, an opportunity to establish trust. That's what our giving partners love. They're giving somebody something free of charge. There's no bureaucracy, there's no strings attached, and they're using that as an opportunity to say, I care about you, I'm here to help you. And it's an amazing thing. And you can talk to any of the organizations that we work with and they'll say this. And I think there's a personal version of that where you're just trying to have a little bit more understanding about something that we all have to think through and try and help solve. I don't have all the answers. We're not pretending to be a political organization where we're influencing things on that level. We're just trying to continue to make new products for people who Don't often get new things or don't have a lot of choice.

And show them that there's a company out here that's thinking about a small part of something that seems and that they're telling us is important. Guys, thanks for being here. Thank you so much. Thanks for having us. With more than 140 million socks, underwear, and shirts donated, it's undeniable that Bombas has scaled on Moldmeet's business, but its impact on communities in need. For some leaders, there might be a temptation to cut corners on core values for the sake of blitz scaling.

But for the Bombas founders, their commitment to the company's social mission has helped accelerate their growth. A reminder for all of us that when you set your foundation properly. You can do good and do well at the same time. At that extraordinary scale. I'm Jeff Berman.

Thank you for listening. Humans will never be more intelligent than AI. Those are great at AI and those that went out of business because they weren't. How do we build a future? That is human centered. I'm Rana El Khalyubi.

And on my podcast, Pioneers of AI, we answer that question and so many more. As an AI scientist, entrepreneur, and investor, I know what it takes to build AI that works for everyone. Every week, I sit down with the pioneers shaping our future. And we take you behind the scenes of the AI that's transforming our lives. Find pioneers of AI wherever you tune in. Masters of Scales await what original.

Our executive producer is Eve Tro. Our senior producer is Trisha Bobida. The production team includes Tucker Legurski, Masha Makatanina, Brandon Klein, Timothy Lou Lee. Our senior talent executive is Stephanie Stern. Mixing and mastering by Aaron Bastanelli and Brian Pew. Original music by Ryan Holiday.

Our head of podcasts is the tall Malad. Visit mastersofscom to find the transcript for this episode and to subscribe to our newsletter.

What you see above is a preview of the first minutes. One unlock costs 3 credits and covers this episode forever: full segment and word-level timestamps on this page, plus .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like.