Framing the future of eyecare with Neil Blumenthal and Dave Gilboa of Warby Parker

Hello and welcome to how I built this lab. I'm Guy Roz. So I think it's fair to say that Warby Parker has transformed the way Americans buy glasses. When the company launched back in 2010, The industry was dominated by just a few legacy manufacturers, and getting a pair of glasses for under a hundred bucks was virtually unheard of. The co-founders Neil Blumenthal and Dave Gilboa were actually some of the first guests we had on how I built this back in 2016. And if you haven't heard that episode, it's worth scrolling all the way through the podcast cue, it's towards the bottom, to check it out. It is such an inspiring story.

Anyway, fast forward to today. And Warby Parker is no longer the scrappy startup it was back then. It's a publicly traded company with more than 200 stores across the US and Canada and more than 3,000 employees. But getting to that point hasn't exactly been smooth sailing. The social media landscape that helped Warby Parker reach so many customers in the 2010s has completely changed. and competitors have entered the space, offering similarly sleek and stylish glasses.

at even lower prices. And maybe the biggest change of all, artificial intelligence, which Neil and Dave says It's one of the main things that keeps them up at night today, but we'll get there. From the beginning, Neil and Dave have led the company as co-CEOs. An arrangement that's still in place today that

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