John Replogle / Seventh Generation

Start Here Podcast | EPISODE #17 | 10/04/17

How can we use environmental consciousness to create profitable business cultures that solve problems… sustainably? Today we sit down with John Replogle, CEO of Seventh Generation.  http://www.seventhgeneration.com/about-seventh-generation

#StartHere PODCAST: Episode 17 with John Replogle of Seventh Generation
John: So go anywhere where there’s a bad buying experience and transform it. Go anywhere where convenience is critical and transform it. Go anywhere that there’s like a monopoly or a duopoly and transform it.
Sam: From Vermont Center for emerging technologies, and start here, podcast sharing the stories of active, aspiring, and accidental entrepreneurs. As a leader for global brands like Guinness, Burt’s Bees, and Seventh Generation, John Replogle is an immensely likable rockstar who joins us today to share lessons learned on building values based product companies that matter. Welcome, this is Sam Roach Gerber.
Dave: And Dave Bradbury.
Sam: Recording from the Fairpoint Technology hub in downtown Burlington, Vermont.
How’s it going John?
John: Great, great to be with you both.
Dave: Thanks for coming by John. It’s a thrill to have you here.
John: Well wonderful.
Sam: We know it’s an uphill walk, so we appreciate that.
John: It was a beautiful climb today.
Dave: No one has arrived here out of breath yet.
Sam: It’s amazing.
John: Breathless at the end.
Dave: Breathless at the end, maybe there’s a segue in our future.
Sam: Totally. So John, this month marks your last with Seventh Generation since that
you’ve led since 2011 I believe, through the sale of Unilever in 2016. Obviously that’s a huge change, what do you think you’re going to miss most?
John: Very big change, in fact it’s a year ago today that we sold the company to
Unilever and announced the sales.
Sam: Wow. We planned that, right?
John: Pretty crazy, here we are.
Dave: We’re that good with our research.
John: Haha, bingo. I’ll give you full credit. What am I going to miss? We were talking a
little bit earlier, a profound sense of place. Burlington, Vermont is just an extraordinary place and I will miss it dearly and deeply. I’m a New Englander at heart, and I love coming here, and right up there with places, people, we’ve just got a purpose driven passionate amazing team and culture at Seventh Generation, some of the greatest people I’ve ever had the pleasure to work with at my career. Going to miss that profoundly, and the brand. The brand is, you fall in love and it’s a love brand. I’m in love with Seventh Generation, and the good news is I’m going to remain part of the company. I remain as the chair of the social mission board, and so I’ll stay connected. But there’s a little difference in terms of that daily ownership and connection and drive.
Sam: Totally.
Dave: What are you most proud of from 2011 to today with the company?
John: I think it’s a couple of things. One is, I joined the company at a little bit of a
turbulent time. We went through a change in leadership, and in such great DNA and history in the company, but we were a little bit lost when we joined and I feel like we gave the company it’s pride back, it’s history back, and as well as it’s future, clarity of direction. We really got well aligned, well focused, we got
back to core, we got back to purpose. Today, and I’m always most proud of people, we’ve just got such great people, working with such clarity of purpose.
One of those manifestations just occurred last week in California. We had been working in California and across the nation for the last five years, well much longer than that, but I personally have been involved for five years, trying to change legislation on ingredient disclosure. Your food has ingredients, your personal care has ingredients, but you’re not required to put ingredients on the label of home care products.
Sam: That’s absurd.
John: Isn’t it amazing? Some of the most toxic products in your home, right? You don’t have a right to know as a consumer. So we’ve been working this from all angles. Last year we finally got Target to agree to make that a requirement. That was a big day for us last year, it was actually January of this year. Now California has come forth with legislation that we sponsored, we built a coalition around, and California is going to require …
Dave: And when the fifth or sixth largest economy in the world that is California
moves, people notice.
John: They change.
Dave: Same with solar, different other food products, trends.
John: Exactly right.
Sam: Thanks California.
John: You know tipping points, so California moved, we’re working with New York,
New York’s been waiting. Now that California moved, New York likely will follow. Now when you have the two biggest economies go, we are going to see a change for the good of the consumer, and I’m so excited.
Dave: You know, in Vermont we get a little paranoid when companies sell to the big
bad unknown, and I know there was commitments to the social mission, but to Vermont is that sort of a given as well, in the Unilever world you think?
John: Yeah, I wouldn’t call Unilever big, bad or unknown. Obviously they’ve been here
in Vermont for a dozen years with Ben and Jerry’s, first couple of years of that relationship were rough and rocky. I think Yostin Soleheim who was the CEO has done a brilliant job leading that organization and has had a great impact within Unilever. So much so that they are really a purpose driven corporation now.
Dave: Amazing, they’re competing with Denone I think for the top spot for who would
have thunk is leading the world, right?
John: That’s right, yup.
Sam: So cool.
John: They are competing to be the first multinational benefit corporations, they’re
trying to live it in practice, in fact I’m spending the better part of the afternoon today with the Unilever sustainable living plan team to help them shape the way forward beyond 2020. It’s really frankly exactly what we were set up to do. We talk about transforming commerce as a company, and we’re going to have a great impact on a company with 177,000 employees, global reach, and so we’re changing them from within and that feels great. They’re going to give us a platform to reach not just millions but billions of consumers over time. I would say that Unilever is the ideal partner for Seventh Generation, we’re coming up on 30 years, we started in 1988 so next year is our 30th anniversary. It’s about time we grow up, move out of the house, and go global.
Dave: Well you’re not selling out, you’re selling up, right? Up into that global framework and I think it’s really exciting, quite frankly.
Sam: Yeah, and I think it’s just great to kind of know that you have that security and
know that this is something they’ve done before, I think Ben and Jerry’s is an awesome example, that they’ve stayed in Vermont and been really good to us. So I think what Dave and I are both dying to know is, what’s next for you?
John: Yeah, well I’m first and foremost excited to, I live in Raleigh, North Carolina
and I’ve been commuting for six and a half years. Nothing matters more to me than my family, and I’ve got to put the focus on family first so I’m really excited
about having more time with my wife and my kids. I’ve got a ninth and an eleventh grader, so I’ve got a finite period.
Sam: They’re on their way.
Dave: Mine are seventh and ninth grade, boys, so yeah it’s a great age to be around.
We’re relevant.
John: It’s an awesome age.
Dave: As a dad you’re relevant, this is the sweet spot.
John: Some days better than others yes, but I’m excited about that. I’m also starting a
new business, I’ve always been an entrepreneur at heart and it’s time that we start something new, so I’m working with a few partners to create a company called One Better Ventures. The whole idea of this is to share our wisdom and our experience, and to consult and advise with mission driven high growth consumer goods companies. We started this as an idea, something we felt we had passion for, and what’s become immediately apparent is how much demand there is. I haven’t even put down the reins yet at Seventh Gen, and we’re over sold at One Better Ventures already.
Dave: Fantastic.
Sam: I would say you’re qualified for that.
Dave: Well that was my question, I wanted to make sure you thought of yourself as an
entrepreneur. You’ve seem to come into some of these companies like Guinness or Burt’s Bees or Seventh at a scaling moment, but do you sort of act and behave like a small company guy?
John: Absolutely, even when I was at Unilever and running a very big division, the
whole idea was to think like an owner and drive an entrepreneurial mindset. I didn’t call myself an entrepreneur at that time, I called myself an intrepreneur.
Dave: It wasn’t too long ago you couldn’t really use the word entrepreneur in a
corporate setting, you were sort of this outlier, right?
John: Yeah, but I guess I’ve always been attracted to mavericks.
Dave: What was your first business growing up? Paper route?
John: I had a paper route, carried the Globe and the Herald, so had two papers. I
actually had 36 papers.
Dave: Cats and dogs living together in the same bag, there you go.
John: It was amazing.
Dave: Sure was.
John: Sunday was tough, especially big bag.
Sam: Those are heavy.
John: In the winter, we had a big neighborhood, so we had a lot of ground to cover. I
love that, then started a lawn business and a painting business so with a guy named Bill Reilly, so we had R & R, started as landscape, became services and we painted homes and cut lawns and we hired other kids. Then I went to school down the road at Dartmouth and I had some businesses there as well.
Dave: Got the itch. You’re a glutton.
John: I’ve been an entrepreneur, exactly.
Dave: I think that’s important to know, so often these serial or habitual entrepreneurs
are a little bit hidden. Their visibility, at least up in Vermont, is not quite as high as we’d like to see because it is inspiring. You’re able to reach out and say, okay, I’m thinking of this, help me. Actually you’ve helped one of our companies in the past, reached out just to try to get some wisdom. They ignored it entirely, and they’re no longer here, but cest la vie. It happens. You mentioned that you had worked in North Carolina in a coworking space, we’ve got three here and there’s probably another three or four here in our area. What attracted you to that sort of environment, and particularly I think you had a team there as well that was doing some sort of product discovery and the like?
John: That’s right, and I do believe that coworking is really the design of the future.
That’s how people will collaborate. It’s the space in V set is extraordinary, I work in one similar called HQ Raleigh, and HQ now has offices across North Carolina. We moved in there to create Seventh Generation Ventures, so it had
been my dream to have a venture arm for Seventh Generation to take all the capabilities we had and to acquire a new brand that were mission driven that could leverage those capabilities. So we set that up in Raleigh with a small team in HQ so we could be in a very agile nimble energetic environment, right downtown and it proved to be a wonderful place to be.
Dave: That whole sort of, with the advent of crowdfunding and Kickstarter and
IndieGoGo, there was no barrier to throwing out a product idea and to test it and see if the market would buy it and if they were going to buy it you built it. What an awesome time to try stuff.
John: It is, and yet we have a real issue out there. Steve Case talks about this, about
rise of the rest, is over 90% of the venture capital is in three states. So it’s in primarily California, New York, Massachusetts, and then the other 47 states compete for the remaining 10% and so part of what we’re trying to do in Raleigh and the research triangle is create enough of a kind of a critical mass if you will to attract capital as well, and that is growing and that’s good news. I think it’s ultimately the fuel, the ideas are the catalyst but we need that fuel to build further and it comes down to capital.
Dave: Yeah I think we went through that evolution here in Vermont and our model evolved to be people, our networks, our 10 colleges, our corporate ties, the folks that visit, places that you can get density. I don’t care if you call it a maker space, cowork space and accelerator even a coffee shop. Get people together that will share ideas and expound upon them, and then capital. Setting up this small seat fund in 2010 we made our first investment, a Dartmouth company that was located in White River Junction and gosh, I think we’ve put $4 million dollars out so far and those companies now have raised over $120 million in cumulative fashion. Both in Vermont and for their expanding offices. It’s time to scale that, it seems to work, lot of partners, and once you get again that tipping point.
John: I’m trying to do that down the road at Dartmouth too, I’m on the board down
there and been an active part of something called Green D ventures.
Dave: Okay great.
John: Early investor and advisor to Green D and just trying to create that critical
mass in the upper valley, which frankly needs it but there’s so much great talent.
Dave: I lived in Queechee for years and years and, is John Collins, is that still who’s
doing?
John: Mike, Mike Collins.
Dave: Mike Collins, okay. Well good I’m glad you’re doing that, I’m glad you got to
spend time up here still. Okay, Al Gore. He made an investment in Seventh Gen through his company a bit, just between us, any dirt on Al Gore?
John: He’s a vegan.
Dave: Vegan. That’s probably why Florida didn’t go his way. Right, that’s beef country
still down there.
John: Yeah, I mean so Al’s, there’s a scoop, that’s not dirt, but you get to know a
person pretty well when you break bread with them. I didn’t see that one coming.
Dave: That’s walking the walk though.
John: Yeah out of principal.
Sam: That’s good to know if I’m ever in a position where I’m making him a sandwich
or something, now I know, he’s more of a baked tofu kind of a guy.
John: He is, yeah.
Sam: Perfect.
John: If he comes visiting. He’s a super person. Did very well in his investment in
Seventh Generation, but was an incredible supporter. Obviously came up here and did a presentation on the UVM campus, he’s been an incredible resource to our team and he’s been very accessible for me and has actually invited me to different conferences in California and in London and elsewhere to allow us to really intersect with some of the leading thinkers in sustainable business. He’s used his position really generously.
Dave: More than just a Rolodex.
John: Oh yeah.
Sam: That’s awesome. So John, I came across the awesome article that just came out
as an interview with you, and I’m just going to totally steal the quote of what you said to them and just have you talk a little bit more about it. You said “in a post competitive world where there are new rules to the game since hard business school 25 years ago, we’re not trying to maximize value, we’re trying to maximize values. We’re not trying to play zero sum, we’re trying to play win win. We’re not structured to compete, we’re structured to collaborate.” We just loved that, and our question was how can start ups and scaling firms position to participate and contribute?
John: I think so many of them today start with that fresh mindset.
Sam: Awesome.
John: I had dinner last night with Matt Slaughter who’s the Dean of the Tuck School of
Business and was talking a bit about that and how it literally took me two decades to unlearn what I learned at the Harvard Business School. With all due respect to Harvard, it was a different time and age. In the 80’s they were teaching me the principals oft he 50’s.
Dave: Live forces.
John: Not of the new millennium. And even Michael Quarter now has a very different
philosophy. In fact, Porter, I find him a great inspiration still. So I think businesses today, there is a mindset. I think the younger generation you can say what you will about millennials, I think they’re often maligned, I think it’s entirely a false narrative. I think there’s a consciousness about millennial leaders, they’re looking for different things, collaboration matters, connection, community matters. If we’re really going to do something great with business, those are the principles we need to hold dear. It’s not about how much money you drive to the bottom line or make for your shareholders, it’s what you do with the power you have and how you make good for your stakeholders. I think entrepreneurs are getting it, and I’d encourage everyone, anyone starting a business, start with the beat corp impact assessment. There is now one for new companies, a pre certification. It is a great tool, in fact we used it at One Better Ventures to help guide us as we set up the principles of our company. I think there’s a lot of help out there if you’re trying to find your way, and if you have a question just call me.
Sam: Awesome, there’s no real reason not to at this point. As a millennial, I was
lucky enough to grow up with Seventh Generation under my cabinet, as the normal go to product and never thought it was out of the ordinary, so I think that’s a huge part of what makes millennial entrepreneurs a really, a force to be reckoned with.
John: I think we’ve yet to see the total impact of this next generation, but its flowers
are blooming.
Dave: It is. Can you give one or two examples of sort of industry partnering or
collaborations that you couldn’t have imagined would have occurred five years ago, all around this, hey we’re on this shared planet, we’ve got one of it.
John: Yeah, I’ll give you two quick ones. One is, a great joke that gentleman Eric Ryan
and I have together. Eric was the co-founder of Method. He has become one of my closest friends, and we call each other frenemies because we compete and yet we understand that collaboration is more powerful than competition. Together, Method and Seventh Generation have less than three share of the market, so we always said when we get to 97% we can begin to compete.
Dave: We can dissolve.
John: It’s been great, we’ve sparked each other and their culture and business is
much like ours and we do some things that inspire them and vice versa. Then another one is this effort and energy we put into passing this legislation in California. We had over 30 companies we were working with, including Method, The Honest Company, Earth Friendly Products, all of our leading competitors we collaborated with, and then a whole handful of other companies kind of beyond household cleaning.
Dave: It’s like this conscious company cartel. You know you’ve arrived when they refer to you as a cartel, right? That’ll be the tipping point. We have market power. I’d like to ask you, next to auto buying, selecting a mattress is one of the more miserable experiences in life. I was thrilled to see of your participation in a chair role with the B to C direct mattress company Liza. Could you just talk about that company, what attracted you to it?
John: Lisa Sleep is a wonderful high growth business. This is exactly the kind of company that One Better Ventures is looking to work with.
Dave: You’re going to be slipping for weeks here.
John: Maybe years.
Dave: Turn it off.
John: I sat on the board of Sealy years ago, so I know a bit about the mattress
industry, it’s a huge industry, $15 billion dollars a year. People typically purchase mattresses about every eight years, so there’s a long purchase cycle, and it’s one of the worst things to buy. People do not like shopping for mattresses. So you’ve got new consumer behavior. People like, we’ve got digital natives who like to go and search online and buy online, so why not a mattress? Well it’s the perfect setup. These are wonderful mattresses, highly engineered, deliver great sleep, and it’s guaranteed for 100 days or your money back. It comes in an incredible vacuum sealed pouch in a box, so it comes right to your home, you put it in place, you open the pouch and it inflates and there you are.
Dave: Voila. We bought a Casper for my son probably six months ago, mostly because
we thought that was a little bit greener than yours or the other ones.
John: Well Lisa is a B corp, and for every 10 mattresses we sell, we give one to
homelessness or bedlessness, and one of our goals is to eradicate bedlessness. For example in Raleigh alone, 5,000 kids go to bed every night without a bed. We can change that. Those are numbers that are manageable. If we capture a decent share of the US mattress market, we can actually give away enough mattresses to make a material difference.
Dave: I think it’s outstanding, just from a buying experience, opening it up. It reminds
me of when I bought a Mini Cooper years ago. It was joyful. The same thing with this sort of mattress experience. Where else do you see this direct to consumer furnishings? Obviously you see a lot of Joybirds and different Warby Parkers of the world, and what’s left out there? We must have thousands of entrepreneurs listening to this podcast, so assuming you’re all full up, where do you see some opportunity that a couple hundred folks might look at?
John: There are tons of spaces, and they tend not to be sexy. Go to the most
mundane, dry, boring space and chances are you’re going to find something great.
Sam: So true.
John: Then follow the consumer, so go anywhere where there’s a bad buying
experience and transform it. Go anywhere where convenience is critical and transform it. Go anywhere there’s a monopoly or a duopoly and transform it. Think about mattresses, you’ve got really two big companies, and they’re asleep at the switch, so go to places where innovation can make a difference and your form of delivery and your consumer experience, those are places to do it. I’ll give you a good example of that, another company that One Better Ventures is working with is called Filter Easy. They replace your home air filter every three months, so it ships directly to your home on a quarterly basis you’re supposed to replace your air filters every quarter.
Dave: Everybody has that in their calendar to remind themselves.
John: Yeah right. We forget, it’s key to indoor air quality, it’s key to maintenance of
your system, it’s key to fuel efficiency. Really important not to get clogged filters as well, so there’s economic, environmental, and health benefits to doing that regularly, but it’s a pain in the butt. Most people have different size filters, they can’t remember, so you put it on a subscription, you don’t forget, it shows up at your house, it’s cost competitive.
Dave: Throw the dirty one in the box, return it probably.
John: That’s it. Well the great news what Filter Easy has come up with, is they’ve
developed and just about to launch a filter system that has a permanent frame and all you do is replace the membrane. So much more sustainable, much easier to ship, much better for everyone, and this is real innovation into an old industry that’s dominated by two big players who frankly just got lazy.
Sam: It’s an exciting time to be a consumer, it’s like all these things are changing
around us and I’ll never buy a mattress in a store.
Dave: Well you just bought a house last Friday.
Sam: I did. I have a lot of choices to make here.
John: I can help you with a mattress. This is frankly the golden age of
entrepreneurship though, if you really think about it. The landscape is wide open and changing. I think we’re going to see a lot of the old category norms, competitive norms torn down over the next two decades and we’re going to see a lot of great benefit for consumer, for environment, and a lot of value creation as well.
Dave: It’s awesome, we have almost 300 startup teams a year come through our doors
and it’s stunning where they’re at. They’re in space, they’re in medical labs, they’re in direct to consumer businesses and we usually tell them listen, it’s either got to be free and fabulous or address some friction in the system or frustration. Look for those things.
John: The F’s, I like that.
Dave: I have to have alliteration or the other startup device is you need a hustler, a
hacker, and a hipster. You can’t be all three, Mr. Rockstar, Mrs. Rockstar, solo entrepreneur but those are some conditions that seem to get you off the starting line today. Can we talk about the F word real quick?
Sam: Sure.
Dave: We use the real F word a lot here too, but failure. Give us a failure.
John: How long do we have?
Dave: Not that long, that resulted in some sort of …
John: Lots of them.
Sam: A learning opportunity perhaps.
John: There have been different moments in my life where failure has been the best
learning experience I’ve had, when I came into Seventh Generation I felt the need to really get the company moving from an innovation standpoint, so I loaded it, pushed it hard, most of the products we launched failed. But I had to get the energy going. Now I look back and I know why we failed, we’ve learned from it, we’re better for it. I had a pathway despite what might have seemed like great success when I was President at Guinness, living in Connecticut, wife and two kids, the whole thing was going great, and yet I came to realize that what I was doing for a living didn’t fit with my personal mission and values, and I had what they call a spear in the chest moment. My friend Ray Anderson, my mentor, taught me that and it was an epiphany where I went in shortly thereafter and said to my wife, “I need to change my life.” And with that I quit my job and moved on to Unilever to do something more purpose driven and that led to the Dove Campaign for real beauty.
Sam: Really cool. John we did want to ask you, you have some experience taking over for founders, a CEO. Can you talk a little bit about what that might be like, for some of our younger companies, when should a founder look for maybe an outside CEO?
John: I thought that was the F word we were going to cover a minute ago. This is a really difficult transition to get right, and often founders stay beyond where they should, and they really ought to think about succession planning sooner because it’s not just about replacing yourself, it’s about a huge organizational shift, it impacts everyone. Really thinking about that founder transition is key. If you are coming in behind a founder, I think it’s incredibly important to respect the past as you build the future. You have to really get into the history. Why does the company exist, what makes it great, how did it get where it is, what is the core DNA, how do you unpack that?
Sam: Why do people want to work there.
John: Exactly. Then, stretch that to the future. Create an inspiring and profound
vision that holds these truths about the historic past, that’s the foundation, but build up on it. Go, move, shift. That’s so incredibly important, so it’s keeping these two tensions is I think what makes a successful founder CEO transition.
Dave: I had a lessons learned panel with founders years ago at UVM and I asked one of
the doctor founders, I was like “When did you know it was time?” And without missing a beat he was like “When I wanted to lie.” He goes “That was my litmus test, I didn’t want to reflect accurately what was going on with my board. At that point I knew I needed to step aside.” It was one of those profound little statements that has stuck with me now probably 9 or 10 years.
John: That’s great self insight.
Dave: It was, he said it in a room full of 600 people, so good for him. Any other
companies in Vermont that you sort of go, boy they’re just about to hit the big time?
John: I think there are a number of companies that are really doing remarkable work.
King Arthur Flour is an amazing 200 year overnight success. Think about it, we all take it for granted, but most consumers still don’t know King Arthur, and I think they’re onto something big. I’m a big believer in them. I think there are some amazing companies here from an innovation standpoint. We work closely with Twincraft right here, in terms of co-production. Some of the R&D and technology that they’re creating is superb. I’m a big fan of anyone who is out there to create some material good in the world, and we’ve partnered with Mamava, the breastfeeding…
Dave: Yup, love Mamava.
John: They’re on the roll, I could go on. There’s so many good brands and businesses.
Dave: Are those connections between young companies and the more established
ones as common elsewhere than it is in Burlington? We’re so tiny, I always tell folks you can’t afford to be a jerk because we’re going to have to push one another out of a snowbank at one point. There’s basic decency.
John: I think this is a unique place, I really do. I think there’s something about the
intimacy of the community, where people do help out, lean in, collaborate and share, more than bigger places, so I think there is something special about being here in business in Vermont.
Dave: Great, then before Sam wraps it up, I know one of your other companies now is
TB 12, can you just put a plug in for that?
John: Sure, today’s a big day, Tom Brady has launched his new book called the TB12
method, so if you haven’t bought a copy, run out and get it. It is fundamentally Tom shares why he is one of the most durable athletes in any professional sport in history, it’s all about sustained peak performance and a total system of strength and conditioning and pliability, a really important notion of long lean muscle and doing that through stretch and massage and deep tissue manipulation, but also about healthy diet and eating a 70% or better plant based diet, hydration, drinking half your body weight in water per day, using electrolytes, and great sleep being a foundation. Those are the pillars of the TB12 method, and people will learn a lot about it.
Dave: We tried out the meals, my wife and I did this spring, and I really liked it. I just
wasn’t working out enough to expend all the extra calories I was consuming. I will attest, I had a morning surf session on the same beach in Santa Theresa, Costa Rica with Tom and Gisele, which was one of the highlights of my life to be that close to my quarterback idol. He nearly ran over my wife, which I’m pretty sure she was taking a dive, she just wanted Tom to hit her. They’re ripping surfers.
John: So he’s as great a guy as he is a quarterback.
Dave: That’s super.
Sam: Awesome.
Dave: Maybe we can get him in for a podcast.
Sam: Let’s get Tom Brady up here.
Dave: We’ll just start shaming people. Alright, let’s wrap this up because John is way
too busy for us.
Sam: We’ll get you on your way John. So is there, our magic wand question, if you
could change one thing about Vermont today, what would you change?
John: And it has to be Vermont. First of all I’d go nationally, there are things in Washington I’d change with my magic wand that would …
Dave: Well you have the time, why don’t you run for US Senate in North Carolina?
Endorsement, right here.
John: Well thank you. I’m actually contemplating running for governor.
Dave: Awesome.
John: That may be in the cards in the future, but that’s still some time away.
Sam: Make Vermont and North Carolina closer together, that could be an option.
John: Yeah, fuse them. That’d be great. I think this is between the incredible place
that this is, I think we always have to be conscious of the environment. For me it definitely revolves around climate and what’s going on with climate change, so if I had a magic wand what I’d love to do is bring all the business leaders together with our political leaders, and really hammer away that Vermont can lead the nation and the world with responsibility around climate. We had a great coalition and meeting here two weeks ago up in UVM, there was tremendous energy, we need to catalyze that into real difference. Vermont can lead, Vermont should lead, and I think that would be wonderful for everyone in the state of Vermont. It’s a call to action for our political and business leaders to come together around climate and lead the way for the nation.
Sam: Love it.
Dave: Love it.
Sam: Awesome.
Dave: John thank you very much, this has been Start here with Sam and Dave,
podcast sharing the stories of active, aspiring, and even the accidental entrepreneur. Series made possible by the Vermont Technology Counsel and Fairpoint Communications. Follow us on Twitter at VCET, that’s V-C-E-T. Thanks for listening, now let’s get back to work.
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