#66: Kara Goldin on How to Build a $220M Business from Scratch

In this week’s all-new episode of THE IDEALISTS. podcast, host, and entrepreneur, Melissa Kiguwa, speaks with Kara Goldin. Kara is the founder and CEO of Hint, a $220 million beverage producer of fruit-infused waters and lifestyle goods, offering a healthy alternative to sodas and artificially sweetened drinks. 

Melissa sits down with the former AOL executive and current “accidental entrepreneur” to glean her insights on what it takes to start a category-changing business from scratch, as well as to learn how other dynamic female executives and would-be entrepreneurs can tap Kara’s pragmatic leadership wisdom. 
In this enlightening conversation, Kara and Melissa explore how process, persistence, and the ability to have patience with one’s inner knowing, can help you ultimately make the right decisions.

Highlights:

• Kara leads off the conversation with the need for training, process, and stability and what it means when an entrepreneur hasn’t experienced that grounding before building a company. “Process” may sound unsexy but there are so many ways it can prove empowering as you scale. As Kara reminds us, it’s not enough just to be a room full of visionaries.

• Next, she relates how a company’s culture is often set from the top and infuses the whole experience not only within the business’s internal culture but also as the organization attempts to build partnerships. People can tell when there’s an alignment of mission and culture.

• Building on that, she discusses how getting involved in the PFAS conversation became an unexpected turn into politics and raising awareness around water safety with Congresswoman Jackie Spiers and Vice President Kamala Harris.

• Lastly, she shares her parting wish, gained from her time at the Fortune Women’s conference and the Young President’s Organization (https://www.ypo.org). She hopes for younger leaders and would-be entrepreneurs to have greater access to stories, like those in her book, and to c-suite networks—so they can be emboldened to solve their own problems in building their businesses.

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