The Entrepreneur's Journey

We went from 0 to over 100 Nordstrom doors in 16 months. Your success as a founder is not how good you are at the business. It's how good you are at running the team. We were laughed out of every trade show when we started, and today we are wall-to-wall every single trade show, you know, open till closed and then meetings afterwards. Appropriately blunt and said, what are your expectations of me as an investor? I said, zero. If we can do what we set out to do, we will fundamentally transform millions of lives.

Welcome to Deal Table. I'm Ryan Harver.

I'm Lane Carrick.

On today's episode, we have Kevin Lavelle of Harbor.

Kevin, founder of Mizzen and Main, serial entrepreneur, SMU grad, a Renaissance man. We talk about the entrepreneurial struggles of running a business, whether that's Mizzen and Main or Harbor. It's challenging, and it was great to hear Kevin's thoughts and takes on that journey.

And then also his stated mission now of helping families stay Save Sleep.

Sleep's important, and he's helping young parents monitor their children without giving up a good night's rest.

Looking forward to sharing this episode. Hope you enjoy. So Kevin, thank you so much for being here with us. Two amazing companies. You've got Mizzen Main, now you've got Harbor. There's so many things that I know Lane is prepared. I'm prepared.

I got two pages.

I only got a page and a half. I just want to start with lessons that you learned because we were talking about before we started on the cameras, like raising capital and whatnot. One of the things that I think is fascinating to me is like when I look at you and I see Mizzen and Main, I see this massive success story. I would think that when you're raising funds for the next venture, people would immediately see your track record and just throw capital at you. Is that how it is?

No. No. So I think it, it might have been how it was a few years ago. And indeed, when I started down the road of wanting to build Harbor in early 2022, I talked to a lot of folks with a lot of experience as founders, repeat founders, investors. And in early 2022, the general feedback was, with your track record and what you're trying to do, you should probably be able to raise many millions with a PowerPoint. Just get off and get to it. Ultimately, that VC kind of enthusiasm and speed hit an absolute wall in mid-2022. Summer of 2022 was the end of the fundraising mayhem, for better or for worse, because there are problems when money is that fast. But the benefit of my experience with Mizzen and Main is when I started Mizzen and Main, most people wouldn't take my phone call. They wouldn't really have any interest in meeting with me. It was 100 phone calls to talk to 2 people to get 2 nos, and then you keep going and eventually get 1 yes. With my experience with Mizzen and Main, people would talk to me, but my experience over the last couple years really is VC has changed a lot, and I'm building something for venture scale. And then also consumer, and especially if you're building something with, I say, atoms instead of bits and bytes, then these categories are really out of favor right now. And look, there have been a lot of really bad companies and a lot of bad investments in consumer and in hardware, But that doesn't mean that all consumer investments and all hardware investments are bad. You know, I think the, the most poignant thing I've learned over the last 2 years is every VC's webpage where they talk about how they invest is their own marketing materials for their LPs. It's not actually how they invest or how they work with founders. And I talked to some VCs that just said, hey, we just don't do consumer anymore, or hey, at this point in time, I know it says our website says we do pre-seed, but we'll do 1 or 2 every year or 2. All right, that's, that's just kind of the nature of it. But when the website says, you know, we back entrepreneurs with a crazy idea to change the way the world works as first-check investors, and you come to them and you're like, hey, I have a history, I have a track record, we've got a prototype, we've got a team, we're rolling, and they're like, oh, really? It's more like, you know, $15,000 in MRR, and you have to have at least, you know, some level of understanding of your customer acquisition cost and cohort retention. Cool, that's not what your website says, but thanks so much. So that's been a little bit of the kind of truncated journey over the last couple years.

It's got to be incredibly frustrating considering most of the people you talk to probably own 2 or 3 of your own products in their closet.

Well, again, they'll talk to me, and look, there's, there's a lot of frustrating aspects of raising capital. There are very few people who've ever done it and said that was an easy process that I really enjoyed. It's not supposed to be easy. That said, you just keep going. Just keep putting points on the board and keep giving people reasons to say yes. And I've had some folks that I talked to over the years that passed on Mizzen and Main and came in and Harbor, and some people that said, look, I know I'm going to regret it, so keep sending me your updates and, you know, tap me on the next time. And you just have to do your best, smile, and, and keep going.

Thinking about raising capital for Mizzen and Main, and you said nobody would return your phone calls. And if I remember your bio correctly, you were 4 years out of college.

Yes.

So you're very, very young. You had no entrepreneurial experience.

Yes.

When did that idea come to you? Because 4 years out of college to start a business from scratch is a bit unusual from my experience. So I'm impressed that you were able to raise money at all at that age with that lack of experience. How did that play out? When did you come up with the idea? How did you raise that capital?

So I was a summer intern in D.C., worked for a political organization, which taught me I never wanted to work in politics and largely never wanted to be in D.C. But I watched a congressional staffer run into a building soaked in sweat. I grew up playing golf, watched performance polos take over on the golf course, and wondered why no one had ever made a dress shirt out of performance fabric. I played a bunch of different sports, and you feel all the different types of synthetic fabrics, and you wonder, Could someone make a dress shirt out of this? But for many years, the old adage, if it was such a good idea, someone would have done it, stopped me, and I know has stopped a lot of other people and a lot of good ideas from progressing. I didn't really tell that many people about it, 'cause I was really scared someone was gonna take my idea, which I've learned is, that's not how the world works. Plenty of people had the idea. It's all about actually going and building it. But those that I did talk to largely said, nah, it's not gonna work. No one will ever wear it. It can't look right. Um, and in a very long journey, um, recapped very shortly, I ended up starting in mid-2011 just making phone calls and doing research and trying to figure out how do I get fabric. I got some fabric swatches, I ended up ordering some yardage, I had a seamstress make me a shirt, and I had this aha moment where I came home from work and had the first prototype on. I worked for Hunt Oil here in Dallas, and everyone wore a suit and tie every single day. And I picked my prototype up when I was on my way home from work, and I walked in the front door, and my wife didn't realize I wasn't wearing a normal dress shirt. And when she didn't look at it and go, why are you wearing a basketball jersey with a tie? I knew that, okay, I could do this. There's a lot more work to do. I have to go figure it out. But that said, it's worth pursuing. I should give this a shot. And, you know, you said 4 years out of school, Yes, in many respects it is very young to start a business, but based on the way that the entrepreneurship wave in kind of the late 2000s and early 2010s, I felt like I was already missing the wave. And I remember one of my mentors told me in the late '90s everyone around him was starting a company and becoming, you know, fabulously wealthy on paper, and that all mostly crashed. But I, I worked for two great organizations, I learned a lot, and I just had this really burning desire, I just sort of said, if I'm going to try to do something myself, I'm in my 20s, now is the time to do it. And now starting my second company with two kids, the stress level's different, the demands on your time are different, the risk factors are different. But I also, having worked for two great organizations with great people, I just felt like I, I want to try for something more. And if I fail, I will be more valuable as an employee than anything else that I could go do. I didn't really have an interest in going back to school. I did well in school and I liked it, but I didn't really want to go back. For some people, that's a great transition. It didn't feel that way for me. And ultimately, I wasn't able to raise any money to start. I used all the money that I had to buy the first inventory runs and kind of take a couple steps forward, which enabled me to go raise $100,000. And then another $100 million, and then a year later, $1 million. And unlike a lot of the consumer startups in the early 2010s, we never raised enough money to lose a lot of money. You know, we were growing multi-hundred percent year on year and losing about 10% or less on an EBITDA basis. And so these companies, and I won't name names, but, you know, I remember a very high-flying consumer startup that got lots of press, lots of adulation from the press, Fast Company and all these things. They did $40 million in a year that we probably did $20, but they lost $20 million, and we lost like $1.3 million. And so I just knew we're doing something right. You just got to keep going. And it was a lot of phone calls, and a lot of the people that I talked to along the way were like, you don't, you don't really have an investable business yet. But they were, they were angel investors who were used to investing in apartment communities or kind of middle market type of stuff that's very predictable. And I'm saying I'm going to change the way that the apparel market works, and I'm going to try and go from $2 to $8 to $16 to $30 million in revenue. And that's not what most angel investors, especially at the time, were looking for.

Those early angel investors, were they investing in Mizzen Main or were they investing in you exclusively?

In me. And these were relationships that I'd had over the years The first angel check that I had received was from a guy named Andy Shaw. We worked together in Oliver Wyman in Dubai. He brought two of his friends in. Rogers Healy here in Dallas was a friend from college. Well, he was older than me, but we knew each other through SMU. He put one of the first checks in. And those were people that said, look, this is a flyer. And thankfully, a mentor of mine had really kind of sobered me going into it, which was his first business they went under and everyone lost everything, and it really crushed him. And he said, you know, anytime you take a check from somebody in this type of environment, very early stage, you need to tell them, when you write this check, you need to think you'll never get a dollar back from it. It needs to be gone forever. And when I call you in 3, 5, 10 years and say, hey, I'm giving you money back, what a great bonus that will be. And so that was the way that I had all of those conversations. Clearly I believed in where I was going, but it was mostly people saying, I believe that you can do something, And I want to be a part of it.

You made a, you made an argument that's so rational for why you became an entrepreneur at that age and why it made sense. But really entrepreneurism is a mindset. And I imagine a lot of people you went to school with would never dream of leaving the security of a paycheck from Hunt Oil, um, to go out on their own and start a business. Um, I grew up in Memphis, Tennessee. My father was one of the first Holiday Inn franchisees. And he quit a job and pledged my mother's wedding ring and the cash value of his life insurance to buy a franchise in the 1950s. And I grew up at the table. This was a day and age that, that probably the current generations don't recognize, but we sat at the breakfast table every morning and at the dinner table every night, and I listened to my father talk about his business and his challenges. So for me, when I grew up, that sort of path to entrepreneurism was a natural for me because it was something that came from my environment. Was that something that was part of your youth? Did you grow up with that mindset?

So I'll say absolutely not, but in a different way, yes. My dad was with several companies over the course of his life and built great teams and great organizations, and I saw his success. He put himself through school and got an MBA and worked very, very, very hard, traveled for most of my life growing up. And I saw really hard work and, and what, you know, what dedication and hard work can, can bring you, but not on the start something yourself or buy a business in that regard. Um, on the flip side, my parents just instilled in me an unwavering belief that if there's something that I want to do, that I am capable of achieving it. Um, now I didn't have any, um, mind-blowing success in sports. I was, I was very good at school and got a scholarship to go to SMU, but there wasn't something that I was sort of building from to say, you know, I'm an Eagle Scout and look at all the things I've done. It was just lots of little things along the way. And then when I told them I wanted to start a business, they were perplexed, but also very excited and said, you know, we believe in you and go get it. And so, you know, I definitely feel, and I've said many times, I won the parent lottery 'cause I had a very supporting, loving family growing up. And there's different ways to entrepreneur— entrepreneurship. Some people, it's the chip on their shoulder, and they had a really tough upbringing, and that's why they're so driven to succeed. And some people have really supportive parents and then never really know how to leave the nest. And somehow I got, I feel like, the best of all worlds because I had that supportive environment, which also made me feel the confidence to go take a big swing. And I have not had to pledge, you know, my wife's assets. Um, although I did ask her to just, hey, sign here. And it was when we signed a personal guarantee on a loan. Uh, very humorous aside on the entrepreneurial journey. When I sat, it was the first time I'd ever signed a PG. I sat with the banker and said, you have all of my records, all of my everything. You know, I have nothing, right? Like I have a minuscule amount of equity in the house that we live in. I was like, why am I— like, what are you going to do with this? And he said, oh, well, this just basically obliges you to do everything you can to help us recover as much as possible. And I looked at him, I was like, well, that's just doing the right thing. And he goes, yes, but you still need to sign the papers. So that was the closest that I've come. And those were very sleepless nights signing those PGs and living on the edge for a long time, which changed when Caterton invested because now it wasn't exclusively me on the line. We had a multitude of investors. A private equity firm, which then also very importantly changed the nature of— we were able to get lenders that were interested in working with us now. Because prior to a PE coming on board, lenders really were not interested in working with us.

Now, when they came on board, were you still out of your garage?

No, no, no, no, no. We were, we were much, much more formal and official. There were still some garage-like aspects to our business, and when they came on board, we were growing, things were going great. We expected when they came on board to sort of get like, they would take us into the back room and show us like, this is the playbook by which businesses are successful. And that didn't happen.

I'm still waiting for that as well.

Yeah. They said, you know, we're betting on you and your team and what you've done. And they have been unbelievably helpful in so many regards. Things like recruiting a board member, where we've been able to access incredible board members that, I don't know, they may have been excited to be a part of Mizzen and Main, but when it's an Elkatterton-backed company, being on that board looks a lot different for the long term. And so there have been many wonderful aspects about working with them, but just the access to talent, the ability to access banks and debt, just is very different once you reach that scale.

So I bring up the garage just because recently I was thinking about you because my neighbors, they have a hat company and they recently just moved out of their garage into a store or a warehouse. And I was talking to them maybe 2 or 3 months ago, and I immediately thought of you just because the conversation we had in the past about how you and your wife would pack every shirt before you ship it out. And it just blew my mind that they had thousands and thousands and thousands of products in their garage, all these hats. And I was just thinking about you in the early stages of Mizzen and Main, and now fast forward to Harbor.

Yeah.

Is there any sort of manufacturing or product placement or, uh, packaging being done in your current garage?

No, no garage this time. Uh, and so actually with, with Mizzen and Main, it was very much like startup out of the garage, except for, um, living in Dallas with the, the swings in temperature, it Actually, all the inventory, I think for the first 2 years, was in our bedroom. And the way that our room was set up, it actually, it had to be on her side of the bed. And so she had like this much room between her, you know, getting out of bed and the wall of shirts. So many a time woke up to her slamming into the boxes. And so for Valentine's Day, I think in our 2nd year of business, I gifted her, I went out and got a storage unit, and I kept a lot of it in air-conditioned storage unit. With, with Harbor building very complex electronics and with the goal of building a venture-backed business that's going to grow very quickly, we have worked with a professional 3PL from the very beginning. 3PLs are just a love-hate experience in every sense of the word because it's difficult. It's a very difficult aspect of the business, and from the very beginning, we're working with a very sophisticated 3PL. So this is Very different experience than the early days of Mizzen and Main in that regard. You can't really store hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of inventory in your house. It's thousands of shirts or hats is one thing. Thousands of tablets and cameras, very different.

Yeah, I would imagine the risk of theft or anything or explosions would be very— especially when you have little ones in the house as well.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You've had sort of two significant events along this journey. One was you stepped back and brought in a CEO. You became chairman of the board. That's a meaningful transition. I'm sure there was a lot of emotion attached to that decision. And, and then you brought in Elk Adderton, who you mentioned as a private equity strategic partner.

Yeah.

Talk about the decision to step back as CEO. That's got to be a tough That's gotta be tough to do.

Yes, and it was totally out of the blue. And so very briefly, Caterton came in in early 2017. We'd raised from angels along the way, and we were growing still very significantly. And I sort of looked at my options, and raising more angel capital felt like I just, I mean, it was a very, very difficult and awful process to raise that much money from angels. And what I saw, I had one or two conversations with VCs and immediately just said, not pursuing these anymore. One very memorable conversation, one of the folks I talked to said, I just don't see how you 10 to 15x your revenue in the next 12 months. No, I do not see that either. We are not aligned in how we see the path forward. And so I started poking around. I had some network within the PE world and Very fortunately had a great deal come through with Caterton. About 18 months later, things were going great. I was very fortunate. I'd heard so many good things about executive coaches, and at a certain point in time, your success as a founder is not how good you are at the business, it's how good you are at running the team. And every great— almost every great entrepreneur finds a great coach. Every great athlete finds a great coach. So Caterton introduced me to a coach. She was wonderful, and it exposed very significant weaknesses in how I saw the business and how I ran the team. And we made a lot of good changes. And, you know, one of the, one of the things that it really opened up for me is I— and I knew this about myself to an extent— I wanted to go sell the next $10 million worth of product, not be knee-deep in the weeds of how do we save 10 cents on a 3PL transaction, or Do we make 10,000 of these or 12,000 of these? Do they drop in February? Do they drop in May? And I had secured multiple major celebrity endorsements. We had a great partnership with Nordstrom. That's where I wanted to spend my time. And so through that, I started to go down the road of hiring a president. We were growing like crazy. Mistakes in the early days— I made a lot of them— we could recover, right? If you make a mistake on a 1,000-unit purchase order, you can kind of wash it away. You make a mistake on a 100,000-unit purchase order, you have a very serious problem, and you may not survive. So I thought, let's get someone in here who's seen this next phase, because we're backed by private equity. When you get backed by private equity, that means at some point in time you will sell the company. Somebody who's seen, you know, what's ahead. And at almost the same time that that process started, I was asked by a philanthropy that my wife and I were very small donors to, but we were very meaningfully engaged with, to come help them build— the easiest way to describe it is it is a tech accelerator for nonprofits and recruit the next generation of entrepreneurs who want to use their businesses in their lives to help make a positive impact on society. With those two things happening together, and there were a lot of emotions in the what do I do next, I ultimately said, you know, I don't want to leave, but I was ready to bring in a president. Maybe I'd just bring in a CEO. And my focus was what's in the best long-term interest of the business. And ego aside, I'd rather be the founder of the very successful business than the one who stayed with it maybe too long. I wasn't quite sure. And so through a lot of reflection in a very monumental time, because we were delivering— my wife was delivering our second child at the time— ultimately said, let's give this a shot. And especially backed by private equity, on this rocket ship, I thought, we're likely to sell the company in the next few years, and then what am I going to do? I'll be in my mid-30s. Let's let someone else take it to the next level, and I'll go help make the world a better place. Um, ultimately, I spent 3 wonderful years with the philanthropy, had a couple different awesome roles. Um, I, I— when you spend that much time assessing the challenges in society, it can lead to more hopelessness and also a greater sense of hope because you see great people working on these issues and you believe in the art of the possible. And so I spent 3 years with the philanthropy, ironically moved back to DC, which was where the original idea for Mizzen and Main came from, but was grateful to stay far enough away from politics.

So when you, when you hired the CEO, how much did like Carroton come in and say, hey, we want you to hire this guy versus hiring internally and hiring somebody that you knew and trusted?

It was a very collaborative process, and we worked with a great recruiter. And, you know, I look at recruiters, and I've got very good friends who are recruiters. It's one of those unique skill sets that's very expensive to bring in but can make a very significant impact. And we had a very collaborative process and ended up doing a lot of vetting and Caterton was wonderful through the process. When I called them and told them, hey, this is what I've decided to do, I wasn't sure if they were gonna protest or celebrate, you know, who knows? And John Owsley, who's one of the managing directors, was so thoughtful and just said, you're one of the more thoughtful people that I know. I know that you've already spent a lot of time wrestling with this, and I'm not gonna try and unpack any of it. You know, obviously, I want to make sure the business is taken care of. And I had already said, I'll stay as long as we need to. We'll work through the whole process. Obviously, I'm very personally invested in the success of the business. And, you know, ultimately learned, learned a whole lot through that journey. Yeah.

At Optimum Mergers and Acquisitions, I work with middle market businesses. A lot of times they think they want to sell because they've taken the business about as far as they think they can. And ultimately they decide they really want a strategic partner and step into that other role, their best role. And so I'm curious about how you approach that process. Did you wake up one day and say, I need a strategic partner, or this is unsustainable? And how did you choose Alcaterton, or how did they choose you? Did you have a beauty pageant? How did that work?

Yeah, so ultimately it was we needed to raise more capital, and I, through a lot of analysis, said I can't do this through angels anymore. Just the sheer volume of time to get to a decent check size. And I did talk to several PEs that I had met along the way. Being at trade shows every single year, I ended up learning, apparel trade shows, I ended up learning that a lot of the PEs would send basically scouts and see, okay, I'm not interested in any immediate conversations, but does that brand show up again? Does their booth get bigger? Are there more people stopping by? Very, very, you know, qualitative data points mixed with the quantitative of being there in person. It's a very unique experience to see some of these folks that kind of came around once, twice, said hello, didn't talk to me for 18 months, and were like, oh wow, really excited to see how much you're growing. And so I stayed in touch with them, and then when it was time, I reached out, and some just said, look, we only do buyouts. And it's like, well, I'm not interested in selling the company. And, um, I, through the process of talking to a few investment bankers, we were very early but on a rocket ship, and a lot of the bankers that I spoke to basically didn't believe that I could get what I wanted out of a transaction. So I just said, no thank you. Um, and then, um, I was actually very fortunate that through the journey of starting, um, Mizzen and Main and bringing in angel investors, I accidentally brought in the CEO of Elkatterton as an angel investor. I met him at an event. He said, "Oh, I do private equity," and every other person I spoke to did private equity, so I didn't probe, and he wasn't really offering many more details. He put a small angel check in, especially for what he is capable of, but we just stayed in touch, and I asked him for advice along the way. And once we got to a point that we were looking to bring in more capital, He said, let me introduce you to our growth team because I don't have anything to do with this. And then it was an interesting transition because he was so helpful in advice along the way, but as soon as I started talking to his team about investment, he actually couldn't continue to give me any advice or really be a part of any of the discussions because he was conflicted out, even though his check was so small. There were times I thought about, like, can you just take it back? Because I would love to have your guidance through this process. But the growth team was great to work with and they've been amazing partners along the way.

Excellent. So you were, you've been involved in charities. You mentioned earlier, I noticed the Travis Manion Foundation. I ran in their 5K here in Dallas a couple of years ago. Great organization. The Navy SEAL Foundation. Has your ability to gift and pursue philanthropy changed now that you have a private equity partner?

Yes and no. Ultimately, we have not, I've not sold any companies yet. And so from a liquidity perspective, I haven't been able to be a substantial donor. But ultimately, from the very beginning with, with Mizzen and Main, I wanted to have Mizzen and Main have an impact. And as I thought through what made sense for the type of business that we were and our passions as a family, we decided that our focus with Mizzen and Main would be giving back to the veteran community. And those were small checks to start with. We were a small business, not profitable. And then we had some really cool partnerships along the way. One of them was we ended up for many years doing all of the shirts for the Navy SEAL Foundation Gala as a gift. And we did it for them basically at cost. Where through all the logistics and all the things that we had to do, we probably saved them over the last couple years, I don't know, maybe over $100,000. Helping them through the gifting process. And it was a great branding because the inside of the shirt we tagged Mizzen and Main. I've seen Dana White wearing the Navy SEAL Foundation with the Mizzou Mane on it, which is, which is very cool. And ultimately it was like, how can we use what we have to make an impact greater than the checks that we can write? We've certainly hired many veterans as a business, and our, our now longest-standing partnership is with Adaptive Training Foundation here in Dallas. It's a group David Vobora started. Initially they had a pretty big focus on, on veterans almost exclusively, and then it ended up merging into helping individuals with physical handicaps sort of regain their independence and movement and capabilities back into life. And so that was law enforcement and also civilians, people who'd been in car accidents. And Dave is an unbelievable speaker and human, and I encourage everyone to go check out Dave's work and Adaptive Training Foundation. But he explained to a group one time that part of the move on from exclusively veterans to between veterans and civilians is when veterans come back into the real world out of service, they live amongst civilians. And civilians have a disconnect from veterans in a way that they just haven't for most of American history. And so having veterans and civilians basically battle together to regain independence and get back, get their lives back together, helps build a bond that he's particularly proud of and I think makes a very big difference, especially, and again, that civilian-veteran divide that is its own problem.

Excellent.

Earlier you were talking about executive coaching, and you were talking about all the flaws and all the failures or the, the things that you lacked as you were getting these lessons from your executive coach. How did your team— were they receptive? Were they resistant? How did you overcome that, that transition?

Really, I don't think there was any resistance. There were things that were good to shine a light on in terms of, you know, my focus again is how do we go sell the next $10 million worth of products? And that means that we needed to have really great processes and controls to make sure that we were focusing on negotiations with vendors and the right timing and, and the right cash flow management and the right accounts receivable and accounts payable, all of those things. And so we had a great operations and finance team, and, you know, I'll never forget One of the first meetings I had with my coach in person, I was talking her through some of the systems that we'd set up over the prior 3, 6, 12 months and how we were tracking things and the meetings I had with my CFO. And she looked at me and said, I'm very glad to hear these things are in place because if they weren't, I would be gravely concerned because your problem is you think you will not fail. And 95, 98, whatever the percentage is of startups, fail. And oftentimes it's not because they didn't have a great product or they didn't have great distribution. It's something behind the scenes ends up tripping them up. And so I was relieved to hear she was pleased with, you know, the way that I'd started to kind of morph the business now that we'd crossed into this very significant revenue threshold. But otherwise, I think it really helped to reinforce the org that we had set up and the imperative of the leadership team. Because the best companies in the world are the best that they are because they have great leadership teams and they instill this sense of like managers of managers are the ones that drive great success at scale. And I think that we had started to do that and it helped us better understand how important that was moving forward.

And as far as those lessons that you learned with Mizzen, do you ever say Mizzen or is it Mizzen and Main? Is that offensive just to say Mizzen?

Thank you for asking. No, it's just kind of natural.

Okay, well, I just didn't want to be like, hey, that guy, what an idiot, he calls them business.

No, I do still chuckle when people call on us for business. You know, they want to sell us something or they want us to buy something and they say, you know, just love what you're doing over there at Mizen in Maine. Like, well, try Googling it first. I have said this word out loud probably 2 million times.

But as far as the lessons and all the trials, tribulations of Mizzen and Main, how has that been able to fast-track Harbor? Because the way you talk about Harbor, it sounds like you expect that to be much bigger than Mizzen and Main.

Not to short-circuit anything we're doing at Mizzen and Main. I hope it continues to be. Absolutely not.

Yeah.

But I think that there is an opportunity to do something even greater and even larger with Harbor. And it's part of why I've set off on, you know, somewhere along the lines of at least a decade-long journey, because if we're successful, it'll be at least that long of a journey. And so, um, you know, the, the idea that I had for Mizzen and Main felt like a game-changing idea, and if I did it right, could have an impact. And it unequivocally has. We were laughed out of every trade show when we started. Today when we go, we have basically— like, I couldn't I was begging people to meet with us at trade shows. And today, we're wall-to-wall, every single trade show, you know, open till close, and then meetings afterwards. And every business has copied us in some way, shape, or form that's in the industry. And some have sprung up and copied literally every single thing that we've done. If you look at their website and you look at our website, it's basically a carbon copy. That's great, and I'm really proud of what we've done. The idea for what is now Harbor, and I've gotten good feedback along the way that's helped it morph, I think will become a defining company in the parenting space. And parenting, don't get me wrong, clothes are amazing. I'm really proud of what we've done, and we've built a great business which has a lot of impact. But our focus with Harbor is changing parents' and kids' lives, enabling parents and kids to get more sleep and sanity in their lives in a time when there is almost zero. And the market is so fragmented with such absolutely atrocious products in the baby monitor and sleep space. It's just all the more amazing having had 2 kids myself. When you look at the baby registry process and the recommendation process and how passionate parents are, whatever the best is, parents want that for the kids, for their kids. And the best baby monitors today are terrible. They're still terrible. And it's— the idea came for me 8 years ago when I had my first child. And ultimately, when it comes to sleep, there's so much bad information out there, and so much fear and uncertainty and doubt that drives up postpartum depression and parental anxiety. If we can do what we set out to do, we will fundamentally transform millions of lives, and give parents and kids billions of hours of sleep back. There's, I'm very happy to see, a very serious focus on sleep today in a way that hasn't been for years. When I started Mizzen and Main, I remember reading blogs of people saying, like, "I want to hack sleep," and, "Who needs sleep?" and, "You'll sleep when you're dead," and, "100-hour-a-week startup, that's the only way to succeed." And that's absolutely terrible. In every possible way, short-circuiting sleep is one of the worst things that you can do for your health across the board. And when it comes to kids, there's so much bad information out there with how you help kids learn the skill of sleep. That when it comes to a child's health, they have to be able to get enough calories in a day. Babies just fundamentally cannot last that long without calories, and they need sleep. Everything else is like fifth down the list, and it gets a lot of focus when really you should just say, are they eating enough and are they learning how to sleep? And I think that's how we can help change the world.

Tell us about the technology.

So, um, very critical backstory as to why I decided to go do this again. Um, and Ryan, I'll circle back on kind of the lessons learned and how I'm incorporating them. But when my son was born, I did a lot of research. Um, I was not the person who chose many of the baby things, but when it came to the baby monitor, I'm more of a tech guy. I said, I'll go do the research. And a company called Nanit got all the tech press, they got all the love, they got all the articles written about them. It was a Wi-Fi camera with an app on your phone. And I thought, "Oh, that's convenient. I like that." And the first night I used it, I realized I don't really like that, 'cause you have to sleep with your phone next to you, and that's bad for, that's bad for people on a whole host of levels. It's really not a good idea to sleep next to your phone, but that's fine. That's what I'm doing. And it was a couple weeks in, I woke up and the app on my phone had just crashed overnight. And as it turns out, I learned apps on phones are not baby monitors. Because apps can crash. That's just the nature of it. And if an app crashes, it cannot then force your iPhone to alert you that it has crashed. If you forget to plug your phone in at night, and how many of us have thought we plugged it in, you fall asleep, especially when you're sleep deprived, or the plug that you plug it in, you know, the light switch isn't on, if your phone dies, your app can't tell you your phone is dying. And when I woke up and realized that I hadn't been monitoring my son all night long, I sprinted across the house, Of course he was fine. Kids are more resilient than we give them credit for. But it really shattered that sense of peace that I had, because you think you're listening to your kid and you'll hear them if something is wrong. So we went out and bought an old-school camera and an old-school monitor, Motorola. No offense to Motorola, but they're really good at building cell phones and they were really bad at building baby monitors. It's just cheap plastic junk from China that, you know, they broke multiple times across our multiple kids. But the important part is it only exists to broadcast video and audio from the camera. And so if there is a loss of connection, it will beep at you. If you forget to plug it in, it will slowly beep at you to tell you to plug it in. If there's a power outage, it will alert you that you're no longer monitoring your kid. But then we kept a Wi-Fi camera. We threw away the Nanit but brought in a Nest camera because we had a nanny that came. My wife and I worked together at Mizzen and Main, and you kind of want to just be able to check in, just feel confident that things are the way that they're supposed to be. And then when we had a second child, we had two Wi-Fi cameras, two, uh, Radio Direct cameras, and then two monitors. Because if you want to listen to two kids on one monitor, the audio can only cycle back and forth, and that is terrible to listen to. One kid screaming, one kid's not, you get screaming, silence, screaming, silence. And so That background is really important because when it comes to, you know, strollers and car seats and the baby Bugaboo, the bouncing things, there are so many great options, really high-quality products. And for baby monitors, it's just not. And I hacked together multiple systems for years, and I learned so did a lot of other parents. And when you talk to parents, when you first learn you're having a kid, everyone's like, you gotta get this, you gotta get this, you gotta get this. No one feels that way about a baby monitor. And now having interviewed thousands of parents, there really isn't a love of that product. And yet it's a central product that you use for 3 to 4 years per child across multiple children that is your monitoring of these kids overnight. This is really central. So with that, Harbor solves all of these problems. It is a camera and a monitor that connect directly to each other without internet, and both devices also connect to the internet. So you have a dedicated failsafe monitor that alerts you if you lose connection, and then you also have all the benefits of Wi-Fi: remote access, an app, you can record, you can rewind. And then my co-founder and I did a lot of really intentional things, such as putting the AI chip and the memory chip in the camera itself. So we as a company do not store or process any of our users' footage. All the other Wi-Fi companies They send everything to their cloud, they store it in their cloud, they process it in their cloud. I don't know how many of them are using users' footage for, you know, models or learnings or other things with or without people's permission or buried, you know, deep in 32 pages of, you know, user consents. And so from a security perspective, with end-to-end encryption, there really is nothing like Harbor relative to any of the other products in the market. It today. We also just designed it from our own experiences. So with a 10-inch monitor, you can watch up to 4 different kids on one monitor, or you could do 3 kids and a playroom. You can control the zoom and the volume of each feed independently. You can reorder them and resize them. Just very convenient things that as a parent, we thought, why has no one fixed this problem? And then very importantly, and we can talk more about the technology, We did two things to help parents and kids get more sleep. One was we created smart audio. If your child is 2 years old and coughs in the middle of the night, you do not need to hear it. But with every other baby monitor, you either hear everything or nothing. And so we created something where you can control the level of noise or interaction that you want to be notified of. So you can say, unless it's a loud cry or lasts longer than 5 seconds, I don't want to hear it. Because you don't need to hear it. When they're very young, you need to hear everything, but when they get older, kids make a lot of noise for a long time. And then the second thing is we've created a remote night nanny, and what we're doing is democratizing access to sleep expertise. An in-home night nurse can be $300 to $700 a night depending on where you are in the country, if you can even find one. And there are plenty of horror stories of nurses who fall asleep on the job because night shift work in other people's home is really tough. And so what we've done is because we've built the camera and the monitor, you can hire our professionally trained night nurses to, when you opt in, to control the zoom or to control the audio from afar. So when you hire us and you turn over the system to us, we turn the volume down to zero all night long, and we only wake you up when a professionally trained night nurse says it's time for you to go in. And that has transformed the lives of the parents that we've been working with so far.

What came first? And because it sounded like you bought a lot of products and you test a lot of products, was that a journey to solve your personal problems, or did you have the idea early enough that you're like, hey, this— there's a problem here, let me fix it, but let me first see if there's other products that fix it beforehand?

So, um, from basically day one of Nanit failing on us and having to hack together my own system, I thought someone like I was like, someone should make that. And I did a lot of research, and still, 8 and a half years later, my son turned 8 a little while ago, no one has, no one else has done this. And we can talk about a whole host of reasons why. You know, if it was such a good idea, someone would have done it is one of the things. We tried a bunch of different things. I interviewed, I've interviewed thousands of parents, and obviously, deciding to start the company, I scrubbed a ton of, research and tried to figure out, is someone doing this? And then a big part of the journey to starting it was, I'm not the technical person. And if it's such a good idea, someone would've done it. Maybe there is literally a technical reason why no one has done this. And so in 2022, I talked to 300 to 400 people in VC, founder, you know, tech, camera, just everybody. And you know, if you and I were talking about it, you'd go, you know, I know somebody who built a security camera company. Let me introduce you. And I talked to that person. He'd say, let me introduce you to the person who ran our manufacturing. Then I talked to that person. They'd say, let me introduce you to the people who built our chips. And I just built this web of network connections that ended up making it possible for us to build this. But along that way, I talked to a few technical people who said, there's absolutely no reason why this can't be done. And that, that resolved for me. And look, we filed a patent. I think we have some really novel technology. But there wasn't a technical reason why no one had done this before. It was a business model reason and, you know, a focus problem from other companies.

It almost sounds like it's like that book Innovator's Dilemma.

Absolutely.

Where it's like, hey, we're already making money. Why do we need to shift?

Absolutely.

One of my favorite stories in that realm is Kodak invented the digital camera in the '70s and sat on it because they made all this money from film. Yes.

And you know what, if you're a VP or a senior VP, you don't lose your job if you grow your business line from, you know, 2 to 12% each year, but you might lose your job if you try and go in a totally different direction and waste a lot of money or tank your own business. And, and that is why a lot of innovations don't happen. I thought when I started Mizzen and Main that I was some genius who was the first person who ever really thought of this. And as it turns out, every major apparel company had looked at this idea and said, "No, not interested." And in some cases, they just generally thought, "We just don't want to do that," and in other cases, Brooks Brothers is the example that I've used for years. When we introduced Mizzen Main, we're better in every way than traditional cotton. You're gonna look better, you're gonna feel better, it's easier to care for, it's easier to travel with. Why would you ever buy a cotton dress shirt ever again? That's real hard for a business that's doing many hundreds of millions of dollars a year in cotton dress shirts to carry that message. Even to introduce it in a subtle way, it took them, I think, 5 years of Mizzen's meteoric growth before they started to introduce somewhat of a competitive product. And now they have something. But that's a hard thing for big, big companies to do.

Well, it also reminds me of the, just being around Lane and Andy and around here, talking a little bit more family office people, but rule number one of family offices is don't lose money. So it's like, VCs, they don't want to lose money. Big businesses don't want to lose money.

So that said, VCs are geared towards, we're going to make 10 investments. One is going to return the fund. One will do okay. And then the rest will probably not make it. We talked a little bit at the beginning of the kind of journey of of investing. As I've built this and talked to a lot of other founders, I don't know how many I've talked to that just, if I could just find a family office that believed in my vision. And my counsel to them, we've had a lot of family offices invest in Harbor and in Mizzen. Every single one of those was because I knew one of the principals who said, I believe in this and I want to be a part of it. Because largely family office infrastructure is designed to say no to these things as fast as possible. And in some cases, it's, you know, the family principal goes, oh, let me have you talk to my office, and then inside they're going, find a nice way to say no. And that's okay. That's their own money, that's their own investing strategy, but, you know, there are different risk profiles for different reasons. And, you know, coming full circle back to big companies, Amazon bought Ring for $1 billion. Amazon has every engineering prowess and marketing capability in the world to just build what Ring built. But they built, they bought Ring because they needed the distribution and the brand name and the customer satisfaction and the customer love. There's so much more to a business's success than is the product good? And that's one of the things that really I feel like was a huge lesson from Mizzen and Main. Anyone could have made the shirt. It was not that technically complex. Took me a long time to figure it out. And with Harbor, anyone could have made a camera and a monitor that have the same functionality., but it's can you build a product that people love and they tell their friends about?

Well, on the, the Mizzen and Main, to me it's a fascinating case study because it's like from the outside looking in, it's like you got a foothold in the CrossFit athletic community. Then you had, um, I almost said JJ Abrams. You got JJ Watt. Yes. You get all these celebrity endorsements, the, the massive athletes who probably have never worn a traditional shirt ever because they can't fit into it.

Yeah.

And all of a sudden here they are looking good in your product. Like, what lessons did you get out of that? Because almost like you went the culture route versus like, let's just make a good product.

Some of that was intentional and some of it was accidental discovery, and things really started to, to snowball for us. In terms of the lessons for how we're building Harbor, brand is first. Spent a lot of time making sure that the brand resonated, and when people see it and they hear us talk about it they understand exactly who we are and why we're doing it. We have worked with several very great momfluencers, one dadfluencer. You know, when I started Mizzen and Main, the idea of an influencer was just sort of starting, and people made a lot of fun of them for a while. And now, you know, you talk to some influencers that they command $40,000 to $80,000 per post. And these are not celebrities. It's just because of the following that they've built. And so with Harbor, a big part of our focus has been partnering with moms largely on Instagram because people need to trust who we are. And so, you know, I, I have jokingly bought 2 billboards so far, largely as a PR campaign, but nearly all of our marketing spend has been with influencers and on Meta and Google. As opposed to how anyone would have started a business 10 to 20 years ago, that would have not even been a consideration, right? And so in terms of kind of brand and culture, for us, our story is very real. It's central to why I started the company, and it resonates with people when they hear it. The other critical piece is partnering with folks who can tell our story and not just sending them a check, but that they use the product, you can see it being used in their lives, and they are telling other people, I'm excited to partner with this business because look how much it's helped me. That is, again, not hardly in the realm of possibility in the early days of building Mizzen and Main. But over the course of building Mizzen and Main, working with those pro athletes, they did have shirts, but they were 100% custom. And when they put on our shirts, they fit better than custom because they stretch in all the right places. Um, and they feel better, they wash better. And so when pro athletes started wearing it and telling people about it, whether or not we were paying them to, um, it really took off like wildfire. Excellent.

Moving on to, 'cause you said something earlier that I, I wasn't aware of, like, 'cause I understand Harbor, you have this baby monitoring device. But then you're also offering, you know, my, uh, the nanny services, the nursing services. Yes. What led you to go from, hey, it's more than just a, a tangible product, or like a— I don't know the words you say, but something that you can hold, can touch, and now you have software and you have all these other aspects. Is it just you being a brilliant businessman going, oh, there's a lot of ways to— that we can market this thing, or was it— I'd love to.

Say how brilliant I am, but no, it I had the privilege of working with Hunter Hunt years ago, and he gave a commencement speech at SMU. And I remember him talking about one of the most important things that he learned, especially from his dad, who's an exceptional businessman as well, is, is to listen and to hear what other people think and are doing, because it will expose you to new ideas and certainly new opportunities. With Mizzen and Main, I mentioned earlier, I told almost no one about what I was doing because I was really scared someone was going to take my idea. And when it came to starting what ended up being named Harbor, I talked to every person who would give me a minute of their time. I would stop moms who were at Starbucks and I would say, I could see they were pregnant, and I would make sure that they were. And then I would, and then I would, you know, say, what kind of baby monitor are you using? Why did you pick it? And just trying to absorb as much information as I could. In that process, I knew that I could build a great business with the baby monitor, and there's lots of business questions and cogs and profitability ability that you have to solve, but I, I knew that I could solve that. But with the idea for what has now become the remote night nanny, one of my friends who ended up being an investor sent me an article from one of his friends, a guy named Jonathan Swanson. He started Thumbtack and now has an executive assistant company in the Philippines called Athena. They've gained a lot of publicity for that as well. He was using executive assistants in the Philippines before everyone started doing it. And he basically has a life hacking approach, and he writes about his life hacks every year that he tries. And one of them was, I have this assistant in the Philippines who is working for me during my nighttime. It's her daytime. And I think it was his second, maybe third child, so he was very comfortable. And he said, I just gave her the login to my Wi-Fi camera that I had pointing at my son's bed, and I set her phone number up to be the only one that would wake me up in the middle of the night. And he said, unless my kid's crying for more than 10 minutes, don't wake me up. And it is, that is not a scalable business. There's all sorts of security risks. There's all sorts of issues. But that idea, my friend sent it to me and he said, this seems pretty interesting. Could you do this? Because with your hardware and what you're building, you could build something scalable that's never been possible before, not calling tens of thousands of people at the same time, but with your hardware and appropriate backend engineering? I said, I think we could. And so we ran our own very low-fidelity trials of that over about 18 months to show that we could do it. And then when we had our own hardware, we started layering in our own hardware to prove that we could do it. And now we've worked with— we're recording this in early January of '25— we've worked with 50 or 60 families. The results have been life-changing. And that coming full circle back to like, where did this come from? In talking to so many people, the ideas to improve the product and the experience in the company have really grown. And part of our long-term vision has morphed into we want to transform kind of sleep and wellness for the pediatric and postpartum years. So we also offer on-demand virtual lactation consultations with certified lactation consultants. Because from our own experience, my wife had an issue with breastfeeding and it was, you know, Friday at 7:30 PM. OB's office is closed, pediatrician's office is closed, it's not an emergency room visit. Man, if I could just open an app and press a button and get some help, I would really love to do that. And so we see an opportunity to become a central part of parents' lives and kids' lives over many, many years. There are a lot of investors who don't like touching or investing in something that you can touch, but I think that's a very short-sighted view because if you have something physical in people's lives that they interact with and touch every day and rely and depend on, they will give you an opportunity to expand that relationship. And so we, we have described this as product as a wedge. We have an unbelievable product in people's lives that makes their lives better every day. Some people won't want to access the remote night nanny, but they would really love to be able to talk to a pediatrician at 3 o'clock in the morning. And so we're not doing all of that yet, but it is a part of our long-term roadmap.

So Harbor, even though right now is a baby monitoring device, if I'm reading between the lines, you want Harbor to be basically all things, you know, early development of children?

Maybe not all things, but there's certainly a lot of things that we would not do, but all the things that we can do by layering onto our existing infrastructure. And yes, it is expanding the lifetime value of the relationship that you have with your customers, but it's also expanding the lifetime value that you create for your customers. I just know there's so many things that we can end up helping parents and kids with over time, and I've seen it. There are other businesses tackling these types of problems, but we think I think in time we will be able to be that central hub that will make it easier to be a parent. And, you know, I can zoom way out here and say 3.6 million children born in the United States every year, and that number is declining. That is a huge problem. And part of the reason it's declining is it's expensive to have children, people are making more selfish choices, they don't want to be— whatever that— you can wax lyrical all day long. But if I can make it easier to be a parent, And one of the moms that we worked with in one of our early studies, she's a second-time mom, she's a nurse, they have lots of help, but through working with Harbor, in 5 nights we were able to help get her kid not totally sleeping through the night, but enormous progress in even just 5 nights. She said, you know, I thought I had it all figured out, but as it turns out, I just needed a little bit of help. And she didn't want to hire somebody to come into the house and do that whole thing. But just this very light-touch help, she said, "You've given me hope to have a third child." Her husband was like, "Hold on, we just had the second." But man, if we can, if we can make it easier to have children and we can help children sleep better, that is society-wide impact.

It is life-changing. I can speak from experience as a father of 3 children. My wife and I raised— after our third child was born, my wife had some health issues and we couldn't get.

Them resolved in our local community.

So we went to the Mayo Clinic, which is a fabulous facility and resource, and they interviewed my wife and ordered some testing. And we came back and sat down with them, and they said, look, these are the issues we're dealing with, but the primary issue is sleep. And so we got to get you sleeping before we can even attend to the other things. It was the first time that message had really resonated with us. And from a societal standpoint, you can still go to LinkedIn and start scrolling and see all the messages about working endlessly, tirelessly. And so it'll be interesting to see how people fall out on that ideology.

Sleep is as foundational as it comes. Children need formula or breast milk and sleep. As an adult, you can go a short period of time without water, you can go a long time without food, but sleep deprivation is literally a form of torture in warfare. You just really cannot function after a short period of time of a lack of sleep. And there's just so many people that think, "Ah, I can get by on, you know, 5, 6 hours of sleep." You really can't. Statistically, a lot of people think that they can, and it's actually like a very small fraction of even those people. And when it comes to postpartum, it is already a very difficult time in people's lives, the flood of hormones, and when you then layer in extended weeks without sleep, It is a very serious issue. And some of the moms that we've worked with said just literally getting one night of sleep, I feel like I can get dressed, I can go to the grocery store, I can go to Target. One of the moms said, it's the first time my child and I have both put normal clothes on and gone to get something outside the house because it was just too overwhelming with how exhausted I was. Life-altering, it is.

We did have a funny— not at the time— situation with a monitor. My wife was addicted to the monitors. Monitors, and she would listen, and she listened to every little sound, and one of us would be dispatched up the steps to attend to the child. But we had a situation where another family whose house was in proximity had a monitor that was apparently on the same frequency, and she started hearing the other child, and it was like a scene out of The Exorcist. You know, we finally realized what was taking place.

Thankfully, we do not have that problem. Yeah. Does not rely on that, for sure.

Yeah, that's problematic when there's a child crying and it's not yours. Yes. So with Mizzen and Main, you are in 200 retail locations, 40 states. Where are you with Harbor? What part of the cycle are you now?

We're actually in almost 1,000 retail locations for Mizzen and Main. We've got 11 of our own stores. I don't actually know the state count. That's a good one.

So obviously, my data is old.

It's OK. It might be my fault. So with Harbor, we just started shipping mass production units in September. We are, as of right now, just on our own website, but have just launched Amazon, and come middle of January, end of January, we will be live on Babylist. Babylist is the number one registry for all things baby. Huge win for us to already be on their site. It took me 5 years of relentless pursuit for Mizzen and Main to be stocked in Nordstrom. That was our kind of Mount Everest. And I remember every aspect of that journey of getting in there. Once we got in, it was an absolute tear. We went from 0 to over 100 Nordstrom doors in 16 months. Wow. And became a category king for them. And so with Babylist, for us right now, it's all about exposure. We just need people to know that what we are selling exists. And the number one company on the market today is Nanit, and they've gotten a lot of press. They've really been alone in the space. They do not have much competition. It's kind of fragmented otherwise. And so one of the things that we've done is actually launched the Great Baby Monitor Buyback Program, where we will buy your Nanit back from you and then upcycle it. It'll be cleaned, sanitized, wiped, and then we will— we have a partner that ends up upcycling them. And we do that because for some people, for most people, you get your baby, you get your baby stuff through a baby registry. So a lot of parents don't pay for most of what they get for their child. And we hear from a lot of parents they really don't like their Nanit. And so the question is, how much do I want to buy another product? And we've just made it easier. And if you have your Nanit and you don't like it, we'll we'll, we'll buy it back from you and we'll give you a credit towards buying a Harbor. We launched that program a couple weeks ago. We've had dozens of people already participate, and that's, that's a lot of fun.

I believe I saw a podcast with you a while back where you talked about the impact of sponsoring, I believe, Tim Ferriss's podcast, and how overnight— or one, it was at that time for you your most significant marketing expense you've ever down at that time, but overnight transformed Mizzen Main. Yes. Have you identified that similar moment for Harbor yet?

We have not had that moment yet. Um, very thrilled to share that Tim actually invested in Harbor, which is great. Um, Tim as an endorser of the product doesn't necessarily fit because he doesn't have kids. Um, but having him actually invest in Harbor was amazing. Um, I, I think that I'd shared this before, but just very briefly, When I started actually selling Harbor, I texted, I went through my phone and texted just about everyone that I knew. In some cases it was, hey, would you buy it? Would you post about it? Would you share it with a friend? And it was tailored towards the person. So, you know, some of the pro athletes that I worked with, I just, I didn't, I didn't send anything to them. You know, we did something a long time before. It didn't feel like I had enough of a relationship to ask them for anything. When I got to Tim, I just, If you've read anything about Tim or listened to him, you know he doesn't, he's very guarded with his time. I hadn't talked to him in a couple years. And I just said, hey, I just launched this new company. I don't think I would've been able to do it had I not had that partnership with you forever ago. You changed Mizzen and Main, and I'm so excited about Harbor. I just wanted to tell you I launched it, and thanks for everything that you were able to do for Mizzen and Main. And he responded back a couple minutes later, said, this is really cool, tell me more. And I shared a little bit more. And, you know, Tim has shared this before. I remember a podcast he had with Jocko. Tim's thing is, I don't want to talk to anyone ever. It's, I only want to talk to people that I want to talk to when I want to talk to them. Right? Like, it's, it's not say no to everything. It's say yes to only the things that I decide that I want to say yes to. We had a couple back and forth and then got on the phone and chatted a little further and he actually invested and he forsoor consumer investing a few years ago, and over the last year he started to make some investments again. Great to have angel investors like that on board. When he invested, he was appropriately blunt and said, what are your expectations of me as an investor? I said, zero, like, you're investing, thank you. He said, good, I just wanna make sure you're not expecting me to just, like, talk about you all the time, 'cause he's invested in hundreds of companies. And I think he said something along the lines of like, if I only posted about the companies I was invested in, I would never post anything else. And I'm just thrilled to have him as an investor. And he knows, and it's been a very transparent thing. I get to say he's an investor and that's a good thing.

Earlier you talked about you haven't done the exit side of things. Have you done any acquisitions or have you been in the process of like, hey, as Harbor, grows, I want to build, I want to buy Nanit, I want to buy these things.

And then, well, I would never buy Nanit because I hate their product.

But, you know, buy it and throw it in the garbage.

I don't know. No, I, I, I look at that as when an opportunity comes along to always be open-minded. We are so early, early innings that if I were focused on that, I think I'd take my eye off the ball. But you never know. With Mizzen and Main, there are companies along the way that we thought, ah, this would be interesting to kind of put together, and none of them ended up shaping up. But that was frankly one of the reasons that I looked at partnering with Elkatterton when you asked why we did that. They're the best in the business, and also they see everything, whether it's shared directly with them or someone of someone shares it with them. They just have a good sense of the landscape, what's working, what's not working, how are other M&A opportunities coming together. And so with them, we've looked at things along the way on the Misen side and I mean, obviously none of them have actually come to fruition, but it's been a very interesting journey, especially to get their perspective on how these things come together, where the opportunity lies, and also just thinking through what does the M&A landscape look like for Mizzen and Main down the line if we were to do M&A ourselves along the way. All been educational so far, no, no action yet. And with Harbor, We got enough on our plate just trying to get as many baby monitors out there as we can.

As we come to an end, one of my favorite questions is more self-serving than anything, is like, what do you think is the most impactful, like, readings or books that you could— that actually are more than just entertainment, that actually.

You can actually take action on? So non— business-specific, but the ones that I will continue to shout from the rooftop. Tim Urban has a blog called Wait But Why, Wait But Why, and he wrote a piece called The Tail End, and it's, I think, the most impactful thing I've ever read. And in that vein, there's a book, 4,000 Weeks by Oliver Burkeman. I recommend it to every person that I know, and he's got a follow-up to it called Meditations for Mortals. Those are some of my favorite books. I'll also throw out 12 Rules for Life. It's one of my favorite books I've ever read. It's very dense. 12 Rules for Life was one of those that I had to stop and reread pages multiple times 'cause I didn't know what I had just read. On the business side, The Hard Thing About the Hard Things was the most important business book that I'd read, especially early days of building a company where you just feel like, is it me, or am I getting kicked in the head every minute of every day every day of every week? It's gotta be just me. And then it's like, nope, that's everyone. That's everyone. Related specifically to Mizzen and Main, Shoe Dog was just so wildly eye-opening as well. I actually got to meet Phil Knight at an event and have him sign a copy of the book, which was legendary. And you think raising money and building a startup is hard today, in the '70s and '80s, it's just mind-blowing to think about what he had to deal with and how many times his business just nearly came totally apart. So those would be some. In terms of actionable insights, honestly, I don't have any where it's like, oh, this is a really good playbook. For me, when I read, I like biographies, especially founder biographies, because it really sets the context for you're not crazy, it is this hard, and it's this hard every day until one day, someone acquires the company or you're no longer a part of it or you shut down. That's when it stops being hard. And until then, it's hard every single day. I listen to, I try to listen to audiobooks as well, 'cause you're just in the car. And Founders, the PayPal Mafia story, was, I think, as a modern-day founder, the most eye-opening book that I've read/listened to. 'Cause you think about Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Jack Selby, and all of the people that came out of PayPal, and you read PayPal was on the brink of collapse for most of its history. And then you think about, you know, Jack Selby helped finish up a fundraise like 2 weeks before the dot-com crash. 2 weeks. Like, you could have a lawyer forget to do something and delay something by 2 weeks and a day. And we look today, obviously, at Elon and Peter and some of these others as the most meaningful entrepreneurs and investors maybe the world has ever seen. And they were just a blink away from potential obsolescence. And so when I read those, I'm like, okay, on the brink of survival yet again. And it's like, you just gotta figure it out.

Well, that's— you're talking about Elon Musk. Have you gone through his biography?

I read Ashley Vance's. I have not read Walter Isaacson's. It's, it's next on the docket list.

So I did that one, and it's funny because you talked about I was on the brink of disaster. That's literally all of Elon Musk's career. Yes, like Tesla, SpaceX, PayPal, all of them. And then, and then all of a sudden you look up and you're like, oh, he's worth how many trillions of dollars?

It also explains I, I, we could probably spend an entire podcast on people's hatred of Elon. I don't, I get it and I don't get it. It explains his decision-making when you look at what he has been through throughout his life, because he doesn't make decisions the way that any other person that really I know makes decisions. And so he is capable of creating outcomes that no one else in all of human history has been able to make. Because just about every person in the world who has a $100 million exit, well, you know exactly what they're going to go do, and it's go skiing, buy a boat, you know, just— they're going to just enjoy their life. And for him, it was but a mere stepping stone for his life's mission, missions. And now you can understand why he does what he does.

One of my favorite things about being a consumer of biographies is being able to take the lessons of this guy and pair it against this guy. And case in point is Sam Walton versus, uh, I forgot the guy's name, but the guy that did the Trader Joe's. Oh yeah, you know, because Sam Walton, he, he paid his, his original staff in stock shares and shares. Yeah. And Trader Joe's, they just paid him well. Yeah. And it's like two different philosophies. Sam Walton, you could say he, he underpaid his people, and Trader Joe's, they overpaid. But Walmart has made more millionaires of their staff than any other company ever. Yeah.

There's no right answer. There's no playbook. You know, I think make sure that you're always doing the right thing, right? Not just legally, but morally and ethically. And the playbooks that built incredible consumer businesses 20 years ago are almost irrelevant today. But there are some very true— I think first principles is an overused term, but there are some very true things that no matter what you do, right, if you want to build a consumer brand, your brand has to be exceptional. And there really is no great brand that didn't have that at the core of its ethos over time. You want to build a great thing that people want to buy and wear or use every day, the product has to be great. If you don't do that, then you don't get the light, you don't get the right to continue to do it. But, you know, should you use more influencers, or should you use more non-traditional advertising? Should you follow old-school ad playbooks? It's going to be different for different businesses.

Lane, final thoughts? Thanks so much for sharing your time. This has been fascinating for me. I read two of the books, Shoe Dog. I agree with you, what a great story. And one of my takeaways was working capital just about bankrupted Nike throughout their history. And 4,000 Weeks, a great story. Sort of insight into how to use your time, how to allocate your time given the finite amount that you have. Yes. Congratulations on your great success with Mizzen and Main. Great cheerleading on our part for Harbor. I will be a grandfather here in the coming years, and I will make certain to consume your product on behalf of my children so they can get some sleep. Thank you. I did receive my first Mizzen and Main shirt as a Christmas present.

I love it.

Welcome to the team. Yeah, shout out to my future son-in-law Jake Heckman, who loves your product.

Awesome.

Uh, it is a logo for SMU, which we all three are connected to. So I have an official Mizzou and Maine, uh, SMU shirt, and glad to be part of the family now.

Thank you. Thank you so much. It's— look, I, I've enjoyed getting to share new aspects of the journey, and part of the reason I've done a lot of podcasts over the last year is I get to tell the story and share what I'm building, but also hopefully something that I've shared helps someone along the way. Just even including, you know, you're not alone. You are getting kicked in the face every single day. And so, you know, make sure that you're getting sleep and taking care of yourself and, and just keep your eye on the long term.

Well, thank you once again, and look forward to seeing the future of both Mizumine and Harbor. And I look forward to seeing Harbor, you know, overtake the entire industry.

Yeah. Thanks so much, Ryan. Appreciate the invitation.