Speaker 1:
From the Library of the New York Stock Exchange at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in New York City, you're inside the ICE House, our podcast from Intercontinental Exchange on markets, leadership and vision and global business, the dream drivers that have made the NYSE an indispensable institution of global growth for over 225 years. Each week, we feature stories of those who hatch plans, create jobs and harness the engine of capitalism, right here right now at the NYSE and at ICE's exchanges and clearing houses around the world. And now welcome inside the ICE House. Here's your host, Josh King of Intercontinental Exchange.
Josh King:
I think I've talked on this show before about how one of the most important parts of my education in the 1970s and 1980s came on Tuesday afternoons when the mailman would deliver that week's issue of Time Magazine. The world, Washington, essays by Hugh Sidey, culture, movies, television was always there with a writing style that taught me how to form sentences and paragraphs with a bit of alliteration and dash, not always to the liking of my English teachers. Time is still hanging around far from its golden age. I've got shelves of Spy and M Magazines from the last century and Brill's Content and Men's Vogue, which published me at the beginning of this one.
Josh King:
Magazines have always played an important part of American history. The first one was called the American Magazine, published back in 1744, and other early titles that espouse the ideas that would foment revolution. Over the centuries, they've covered markets, fashion, news, science, and more niche topics like aviation, home restoration, and even one published upstate near where I live called Modern Farming. Capitalism and publishing have always been long intertwined as coming up with stories, sending reporters around the world, printing and distribution have always been costly endeavors. The relationship between the two has also captivated our imagination like Citizen Kane, which focused on media barons of the 20th century, vaulting 25-year-old Orson Wells to the pinnacle of that century's movie makers.
Josh King:
Everyone loves a good story and well, the original Hearst, Pulitzer, Insull and McCormick tycoons are long gone. Those who took their place making money at it in new ways are equally intriguing. Our guest today is one of them, captivating readers with her writing, her editorial vision worldview. She's helped reinvigorate and bring storytelling into the digital world and reshaped what stories get told and whose voices get amplified. Joanna Coles has created content that captured imaginations, illuminated parts of the world that needed light shined on it, informed her readers of events both far away and close to home, and found ways to entertain and inform all of us.
Josh King:
In recent years, she's used those skills and pivoted into the world of finance and now serves as the CEO and chairwoman of several SPACs and as a trusted advisor and board member to multiple public and private companies. Our conversation with Joanna Coles is coming up right after this.
Speaker 1:
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Josh King:
Our guest today, Joanna Coles, is CEO and Chairwoman of Northern Star Acquisition Company and a board member of several public companies, including the original Bark Company, that's NYSE ticker symbol BARK; Snap, that's NYSE ticker symbol SNAP; Sonos as well as private companies Density and Klarna, and the nonprofit Women's Entrepreneurs New York City. She's been immortalized in ABC Freeform's highly acclaimed The Bold Type, and serves as an executive producer for projects across ABC Studios. Joanna has served as the chief content officer of Hearst Magazines and the author of Love Rules. Welcome Joanna inside the ICE House.
Joanna Coles:
Thank you. And I loved your introduction about magazines. I'm so anxious that an entire generation coming up now won't know magazines and won't understand the vehicle of discovery they were. To your point on Tuesdays as you waited anxiously for time to come, I would lie on my bed throughout the month waiting for magazines to arrive and they really felt like a finger beckoning towards the future. They were a crush of extraordinary ideas and people and books and themes that we were going to be thinking about over the next few months. It felt so exciting. Now, of course, nobody buys magazines anymore. It's hard to compete with the smartphone and I'm sad that people don't get that moment once or twice a month when their favorite friends arrived with ideas to come.
Josh King:
It's so true. In the digital age, Joanna, everyone with an internet connection can be a content creator, but that wasn't the case when you were growing up. You created your own magazine with a friend as a hobby incentive, of all people Queen Elizabeth for her approval. What was that first magazine about and was this your first foray into writing and creating content?
Joanna Coles:
Well, I think I was about 11 at the time. I did it with my favorite neighbor, Anna. The two of us really put together a collection of poems and little essays that we wrote, some rather bad drawings. It was called Your Choice. We did send it off to Buckingham Palace to the Queen because we really wanted her approval because culture and society then felt so much smaller and there was this woman sitting at the head of it and we wanted her attention. What was incredible was we got a note back from one of her maids and waiting saying how much she'd enjoyed it and how she was looking forward to future additions, which really was all the encouragement we needed.
Joanna Coles:
I still have the letter because it was a beacon of encouragement to me. I think the magazine sadly ran out of steam pretty quickly actually, but I went on to do other things, but I was an early contributor and I'm a huge believer in getting kids involved in things. So I think it's good that young people are involved in these enterprises and I would write the occasional column for the Yorkshire Evening Post, which on Saturday had something called The Junior Post, which was for kids and had content by kids. They paid me £2 a week, and I thought this is absolutely marvelous. I'm going to make a living through writing, which for some time I did and then I moved into editing.
Josh King:
With that beacon of encouragement from Her Majesty, you moved to New York in the late 1990s and also served as the bureau chief for The Guardian, and also worked for the Times of London. What drew you from that first magazine into serious journalism and what are some of your great memories from this city, New York, at that time?
Joanna Coles:
Well, I moved to New York I think because subliminally when I was a child, I watched Mary Tyler Moore and she seemed the most extraordinarily interesting, funny, glamorous, independent woman I could think of. I had no idea the show was set in Minneapolis. I just assumed it was set in New York because it was surrounded by skyscrapers. So I moved to New York in 1997 for The Guardian as The Guardian Bureau Chief, and pretty much arrived at the time of the story of Louise Woodward actually who was the British nanny who was unfortunately an au pair in a home where a child died and it was an extraordinarily dramatic court case. I'll never forget the moment where she was found guilty of Matthew Ethan's death and collapsed in the courtroom. It's still one of the most dramatic things I've ever witnessed actually as a reporter.
Joanna Coles:
And there were 12 security guards standing in front of the public gallery, each of them with their arms crossed across their body. She just collapsed. And of course she had Barry Scheck as one of her lawyers from The Innocence Project who had been so involved and visible during the OJ Simpson trial. And then four months later, you have this extraordinary judge, Hiller Zobel, overturn the sentencing and give her time served, which was almost a year at that point she'd spent in jail and she went back to the UK where she's now a lawyer. But that was an extraordinary British versus American case if you like and that was the first story that really made an impact on me.
Joanna Coles:
Shortly after we then had the Monica Lewinsky Bill Clinton story, which was another story which was just extraordinary. And again, covering it from a UK perspective where we had been through many affairs and many kind of stories of politicians and that extra curricular activities, hard to believe it took up as much energy as it did in American politics. But again, an extraordinary story to cover.
Joanna Coles:
I then moved to the Times of London, which gave me the opportunity to travel across America, which was just an extraordinary gift. I mean, to be able to spend four years traveling across a country really to follow stories in the news but also to find stories, it was just the job of a lifetime.
Josh King:
The Lewinsky story is certainly a far away from the Profumo affair. Moving from being the writer to the editor, you served as the editor or editor-in-chief across some of the most storied names in this magazine world that we've been talking about, including New York Magazine, Marie Claire, also Cosmopolitan. Editors are critical to the public's perception of that publication. They decide what gets assigned and published and are responsible for managing it as a business. What skills are essential to being a good editor?
Joanna Coles:
Well, I just think the first primary skill is just being fantastically curious. You just have to be able to ask questions. You have to be interested in everything. You have to read a lot. You have to talk to people a lot, or at least I found my best ideas came from talking to people. And then the more people you talk to, the more you begin to hear things and you can put trends together and you're looking at what's coming out and what are people going to be watching on TV? What are they going to see in the movies? What books are coming out? What are the themes that are going to be pervasive in the culture that we haven't yet thought about? And that's the fun. What you're trying to do is look into the future and help people think about the new stuff coming at them. It's such a fun job.
Joanna Coles:
And then you're getting to talk to, you've got celebs on the cover. You've got stories around people that interesting things have happened to. You're trying to alert people that they're not as alone as they might feel. And women's magazines in particular have always been crucial arteries of information for women, but more traditional media left out. And actually one of the great things about social media is that we've now got this avalanche of different voices and different people stories and you realize that for so long, our culture was held together by one really central narrative that was run by a really privileged group of white people. So it's great to hear different voices and realize I know the world was never actually like that.
Josh King:
The world was never actually liked that. And the fact that it was a very different world is so much attributable to the movement into digital, Joanna. You spotted this trend early on in the publishing industry. You're an instrumental player in taking Marie Claire and Cosmo online. What now seems like an obvious decision was actually incredibly bold at the time, thinking about your advertisers and the way they wanted to see their ads displayed on paper and be able to put the perfumes in the little sample. I mean, what did you see in the tea leaves that convinced you to start making that move?
Joanna Coles:
Well, first of all, you're just looking at the decline of sales of magazines. So you're thinking, our readers' behavior has changed and they were spending much more time online. I was pretty early on to Twitter and the thing I found really compelling about Twitter was that 3s that appears after a tweet that's just dropped and you realize how much people want to live in the present and how much digital connection is about what's happening right now. And suddenly magazines began to feel old and that it felt less relevant to read something which you knew had been put together three weeks or a month or even six weeks ago. And that we were all suddenly expecting media to be completely up to date and it's very hard to compete against that.
Joanna Coles:
So when we, for example, put Cosmopolitan as one of the first media brands on to Snap, on to The Discover Platform, what we were trying to do is create a daily habit so that people who now of course wake up and immediately reach for their cell phones, if they reached for Snap and went on to The Discover Platform, which was their first way of connecting with the world, the first thing they would do is see Cosmo. And as we were putting that together, we were very conscious that she was reading it in a different way than she was reading it when she actually got the magazine, which she would buy from the news stand or she would get a subscription to.
Joanna Coles:
We envisaged that she was probably waking up, her hair was all over the place. She was probably a little hung over, couldn't entirely remember what she'd said the night before, and that she was going to connect with millions of other women who also felt like that when she went on to Cosmo on Snap. So it felt more informal. It was casual. It was funny. It was kind of like we got you in the way that the magazine was slightly more distanced.
Josh King:
I mean, Cosmo and Marie Claire are just two titles, Joanna, but as the inaugural chief content officer at Hearst, you were responsible for more than 300 titles globally. Can you walk us through what that role entailed and how you manage content that really span from men's health to the pioneer woman, to town and country?
Joanna Coles:
Well, what was really fun was working with an incredibly talented bunch of people. I mean, Maile Carpenter, who did Pioneer Woman and who was the launch editor of the Food Network Magazine was just a terrific, an unbelievably talented editor to work with. All the editors were pretty talented actually. And then you were working with teams abroad, and I always enjoyed working in particular with the UK team because I'd grown up reading those titles, Good Housekeeping in the UK, certainly when I was growing up and still remains an extraordinary magazine. It's full of information and full of great... It was full of medical information as well as how to run the house. I mean, it did all the things that now Marie Kondo does. That's what appeared in Good Housekeeping 30, 40 years ago.
Joanna Coles:
So it had all sorts of medical advice that's come out now; exercising, eating properly. All that stuff was in Good Housekeeping 20, 30 years ago, and I remember those brilliant editors that really were educational for huge generations of women. And it was exciting to see what magazines did in other countries, in particular Cosmo which had to negotiate the complexities of sex, sex without marriage, sex within marriage, in countries that were much more religious. In Indonesia, they covered girls who all had to wear headscarves. In the Middle East, you had to talk about sex differently than you did in the West. So there were all sorts of cultural nuances that you needed to pay attention to.
Joanna Coles:
But the most fun was working with really talented editors who wanted to do new things. And I think one of the most enjoyable and challenging things was actually creating a magazine with Airbnb that the founder, Brian Chesky, super thoughtful, interesting guy sitting on this company that was just growing property after property. I mean, it was so much fun spending time with that team and thinking about what does a magazine represent, and his feeling was that one of the downsides of Airbnb was that it's an inconsistent experience. You can rent one person's home and you have a great time. You can rent another person's home and it's not quite as nice. And what they wanted was the welcoming physical magazine in every single property to say, these are our values. This is what Airbnb stands for. Here's a physical, tangible asset that represents Airbnb, because otherwise you just have the experience of the app on your phone or your laptop.
Joanna Coles:
And so that was very exciting to create a physical representation of a brand, and it's been very successful. They've had fantastic writing and a wonderful, wonderful imagery. And that was a modernization of a magazine with a digital brand first.
Josh King:
I mean, the first thing Brian Chesky would probably say on his road show and even today is, Airbnb brings us to these incredible places in all of these niche corners of the world, but they are at their core a technology company. You were a huge proponent of injecting technology and multimedia into the titles that you managed. Why was that decision so important to you?
Joanna Coles:
Well, it was clearly where the business was going. The really difficult part, which you alluded to earlier, was getting advertisers on board. In particular, beauty and fashion advertisers were very anxious that at the beginning of the digital media revolution, that brands weren't going to be well-represented. I mean, I remember talking to the CEO of Saline who said to me, "We will never sell our clothes online." And I was just thinking, "Oh, you have no idea what's coming." There were people whose backs were just set against digital media and digital technology, and those who saw it coming and knew they had to get on board and were frantically scrambling.
Joanna Coles:
It was quite difficult. There were a lot of resistance at the beginning and also you're trying to do this at the same time as not losing energy around the legacy brand, which is the physical print magazine. So you're frantically trying to keep up the financial benefits of that while expanding with the same advertiser base into digital and it's very complex. It's the innovator's dilemma, how do you transfer to the new medium without killing the old one?
Josh King:
One of your strengths is your ability to take the skillset of storytelling basically, of writing, transpose it across all of these various different fields. And you've recently embraced the ability and transitioned into the world of finance. What attracted you to markets, investing in the economy and really the engines that are driving all of the brands and names that you and I have been talking about so far?
Joanna Coles:
Well, I've always been interested in business. If you're in the media and you want to be successful as an editor, you really need to understand the bottom line of where the energy is coming from and how you can create more money around your brands and how you can create more new products. So it wasn't that I woke up and suddenly thought, ooh, goodness, I'm now interested in finance. I've always been interested in it and I've always been interested in the context of media. Where does the money come from and how do you keep it growing? And in particular, when you were involved in old traditional media as I was, when you were looking at suddenly Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and Google suddenly coming along and taking, I think 75% of the digital advertising is now split between Facebook and Google, you suddenly realize this extraordinary financial vacuum cleaner sucking up all the finances. So you couldn't not be interested in the business of it if you wanted to be successful.
Josh King:
The Wall Street Journal reported at the beginning of this summer that SPACs had raised more than $105 billion in the year alone, in the first six months of the year. A large portion of your current role, Joanna, is focused on the segment of the market. Why are you so excited about SPACs and why do you think they offer a new idea for market participants?
Joanna Coles:
Well, I think any kind of new asset class is always interesting and the speed and the velocity with which SPACs have really taken off over the last year I found very interesting because I'm attracted to new things, even though SPACs have been around for some time. And actually my partner, Jon Ledecky, has been doing SPACs for 15 years. So I was lucky enough to partner up with a SPAC veteran who really understands the market, learn a lot from him, but also bring to him the idea of businesses that were more involved in e-commerce. We've been very interested in businesses in the e-commerce or the tech enabled commerce space and my understanding of audiences and consumers, which he was interested in branching out and looking at different kinds of businesses and we're a good partnership and that we have very different strengths and skills and experiences.
Josh King:
I mean, talking about Jonathan Ledecky, greatness runs in that family. Besides being a successful entrepreneur himself and co-owner of our New York Islanders, he also happens to be the uncle of gold medal Olympian Katie Ledecky, who he welcomed on the New York Stock Exchange floor just a couple of weeks ago to ring the closing bell. How did you meet Jonathan and what convinced the two of you that you'd be a good team together?
Joanna Coles:
Well, Stephanie Ruhle introduced us actually, the business correspondent at NBC, and of course she has her own terrific show on MSNBC. She knew that Jon was looking for another kind of partner. I had left Hearst Magazines three years ago to be more entrepreneurial. I was getting a lot of offers I wanted to do. I wanted to have a wider portfolio of things and I no longer wanted to work for one company alone. And so I wanted to join more boards and try new things. My kids were going off to college, so I suddenly had a bit more flexibility. A couple of people had mentioned SPACs to me when I left Hearst and I was exploring other things, but I met Jon at the beginning of COVID. He told me what he was doing.
Joanna Coles:
I read up a little bit about it over COVID and then about four or five months after we first met, I was staying in East Hampton actually or living in East Hampton during COVID in a house full of young people. Jon texted me and said, "I'm coming out to play golf. Do you want to meet up for coffee?" And as we sat and had coffee, he suddenly suggested that we try doing a SPAC together. And so we raised the first one and then very quickly we raised three more and it's such an efficient way for younger, fast growth companies to get into the public markets. I had gone through the traditional IPO process with Snap, which was a great learning curve but an incredibly long process without much visibility into how much money you were going to raise, and SPACs felt like you had more control.
Joanna Coles:
I read Bill Gurley's seminal essay in which he talks about going public as a direct listing IPO and as a SPAC, and came down firmly on the side of SPACs. And so I thought it was something I was really interested in trying, and I love talking to founders. I work with lots of founders. I love new companies, and it felt like a really interesting and useful thing to do. And in terms of how we think about the current disequilibrium and the inequality in our culture, getting more companies into the public markets makes an enormous amount of sense.
Josh King:
We're going to get into the Bark deal in the second part of the show, Joanna, but on the other side of the table from you and Jon, what should private companies looking to go public via SPAC be looking for in their partnership? What's the calculus that should be part of their decision-making process?
Joanna Coles:
Well, clearly you want people that you like because it's a complex and fairly intense process. I mean, Jon and I offer a particular set of skills. We've both been operators. Jon has a lot of financial knowledge and I have a lot of knowledge around storytelling and branding and understanding how to position companies. We like to say that we don't SPAC and pack, that we are here to help you get through the first couple of years if you want to tap into our resources. We have terrific people on our boards.
Joanna Coles:
We've got James Vinson who set up a media arts lab inside of Apple and worked with Steve Jobs regularly for 11 years. We have Jonathan Mildenhall who was the CMO of Airbnb and now has his own company, Twenty First Century Brands. We have Kirsten Green who's probably the best consumer VC out on the west coast. We've got Justin Chang who's a private equity queen. So we have a really experienced good group of advisors that can come in you can tap into, and we're happy to join the board if that's useful to the team. It's absolutely not required, but we bring a level of expertise and I hope humanity that makes the process as unpainful as it can be.
Josh King:
Expertise and humanity. After the break, Joanna Coles and I are going to dive deeper into her board involvement, her work in the media today, and what's coming up in the future. That's all coming up right after this.
Speaker 5:
Whether it's markets, exchanges or networks, connection makes everything possible. The connection between data and technology, innovation and expertise, and most of all, between people and opportunity. For over 20 years, ICE has transformed markets, products and processes to make things work better, faster, smarter from modernizing energy and commodity trading to revolutionizing the bond markets. Whether it's the world's largest stock exchange or the dream of home ownership, we do more than see the big picture. We create it. You may not know our name, but we bet you know our network; ICE, make the connection.
Josh King:
Welcome back. Before the break, Joanna Coles, the CEO and chair of Northern Star Acquisition Company and the former chief content officer of Hearst and I were discussing her background, her eye for trends and her work in SPACs. Joanna, in December, 2020, Northern Star Acquisition Corporation announced that it had entered into a definitive agreement to merge with the original Bark Company, that's NYSE ticker symbol BARK, the parent company of BarkBox, Super Chewer, and Bark Bright. You and I met on Experience Square the day that the company was listed. The company serves more than 1 million dogs monthly with food, toys, medications and more, all through an integrated data-driven platform. We recently had the honor of welcoming you all here to celebrate the combination. What is the thesis behind the merger and what made BarkBox such an attractive opportunity in your and Jon's eyes?
Joanna Coles:
I think BarkBox is an extraordinary company. It's got the most amazing connection with its customers. It's got 1.8 million subscribers to the bot Fox, which comes every month packed with theme toys for your dog, and they're hilarious. They're modern. Dog toys and dog stores for the most part tend to be pretty banal, and what they came up with was very funny themes. It's everything from Joe Bitin, which is a dog toy obviously of our current president, the Dognald Trump noise, which grunts instead of squeaks. They did a hilarious Bernie Sanders mittens toy when Bernie turned up at the inauguration in those hilarious mittens, very Vermont mittens. They do all sorts of themes with movies and TV shows. We're doing a Netflix and chill dog toy, which is such fun.
Joanna Coles:
So it's a very funny contemporary modern company. But what we were excited about in particular is that with all the data that they have about customers and their dogs, and it really is a company that serves to make dogs happy, they have now the opportunity to create dog food. Not something I ever thought I would get excited about but I'm so excited about dog food, which we can now personalize to your dog. Not all dogs are the same amazingly, and yet if you go and buy pet food, you would think that basically all dogs liked eating the same stuff. And in fact, according to the size of your dog, the breed of your dog, the age of your dog, the gender of your dog, your dog should actually be eating different products and having different kinds of nutrients in that food.
Joanna Coles:
So we have the ability to create utterly personalized dog food for your specific dog and to titrate that dog food over the life of the dog so as it gets older, it gets more of certain nutrients, less of other things. And interestingly, 60% of dogs, like 60% of Americans, are overweight. So we can push and control it to you. It comes in a packet. You don't need to give your dog any more or any less, and that's the right amount of food for your dog. And of course we all know, I have a dog called Phoebe, that she looks at me with her beseeching brown eyes and the thing I want to do is give her more foods as an expression of my love, but actually keeping your dog overweight is not an expression of love, but it's hard to say no to those besieging brown eyes.
Josh King:
You have Phoebe, I've a Rhodesian Ridgeback called Daisy. The pet industry is huge. Some estimate it's valued at about $69 billion and for so many people during COVID-19, it marked a moment to reassess their pet policies and welcome a new member of the family into their home. The New York Times reported that shelters across the USA had such an increase in foster applications. Professional dog trainers had been all booked up for months. You serve as the Chairman of the Nominating and Corporate Governance Committee for Bark. Talk to us about your work on the board and on that committee.
Joanna Coles:
I will, but you mentioned a really interesting phrase. You said welcoming dogs as members of their family. What we're also seeing is this fascinating trend of the humanization of animals, that dogs now far from being kept in kennels outside, which often they were 20, 30 years ago, now sleep in the bed with people. They're very much welcomed as members of the family. They're taken on holidays. They give an ice cream. I mean, they've become great members of the family. And if you have kids, dogs are fantastic for absorbing emotion and tension. They get people walking. You're healthier. You live longer if you have a dog. If you live on your own and you have a dog, you're less likely to be lonely. And they've really come to people's rescue, I think, during COVID, and we have come to their rescue too. I'm thrilled to be the chair of the Nom and Gov Committee at Bark. My job is to make sure that we do everything within the letter of the law, and that we're smart about how we run the company.
Josh King:
Different company that you work with, December, 2015, you're joining the board of Snap, that's NYSE ticker symbol SNAP, the parent company of Snapchat. We talked a little bit about it earlier, features these pictures and messages that are only available for a short period of time. The app has proven so incredibly popular. We've watched what has happened with the stock price in recent years after a pretty tough start, especially among Gen Z, those who are using it, and I know many of them use it as their main tool for communicating with one another. How did you become involved in that company and what does your work with Evan Spiegel look like today?
Joanna Coles:
Working with Snap and Evan Spiegel has been one of the most interesting things certainly I have done. My kids were very early adopters of Snap. So I was suddenly conscious of them spending a lot of time on an app and they would laugh a lot. So it was bringing them a lot of hilarity, and I obviously wanted to know what it was and was shocked actually to discover that my oldest son in particular had already sent 275,000 snaps before I even realized that he was on the app. That was how much time he was spending on it. I met Evan and his team and immediately realized that this was a team that we should be involved with through the lens of Hearst. Cosmo became one of the first of the rollout of media partnerships on Snap on their Discover Platform.
Joanna Coles:
It was enormous fun spending time with such a small interesting group of people who really had figured out a new way to communicate and it was just so obvious this was going to be one of the proverbial rocket ships. And you don't come across that that often in your career and it was very clear that this was something different and Evan was exceptionally visionary in his understanding of how people communicate and his understanding, but no, not every picture wants to be a trophy and you want to put it out in the world. In fact, most of the time on photos, people look terrible.
Joanna Coles:
In fact you walk around any street corner and you see people frantically trying to Instagram. They're taking 200 pictures to find the perfect one, or they're doing a TikTok video and they're repeatedly doing it and doing and doing it to make it look as if it just happened. The point of Snap is it did just happen and you look horrific and it doesn't matter, and it disappears, but it's funny. And in the meantime, you can share it with friends. So it's a very different way of communicating and that appeals to me more than the overproduced Instagram photo.
Josh King:
At the top of the conversation, Joanna, we also mentioned that you're on the board of several private companies, including Density. You're also an advisor to Klarna. How does your work with private companies different from what you're doing with the public ones that you've been a part of?
Joanna Coles:
Well, I think what one is trying to do is support the founder and CEO of these companies and try and see around corners, that you have been around before, that the founders might not yet have had that experience. And what you're also trying to do is harness your network to help them grow the business as fast as they can within what makes sense for the company. And so it's been a super interesting period during COVID to work with both Density and Klarna, both of which have seen enormous growth. Really that's been about thinking how they tell their story and how do you construct a brand narrative, how do you show up so people understand what the company is? And then introducing them to people that you think might be helpful either in terms of expanding the business or in terms of wisdom that they might have for these particular founders.
Josh King:
We recently celebrated World Entrepreneur's Day, which was established to create awareness for entrepreneurship, innovation, leadership, and celebrate female founders and builders across the world. You serve, Joanna, as a board member of World Entrepreneurs NYC, a public private initiative based out of the New York City Department of Small Business Services dedicated to helping women start and grow their businesses. Can you talk about some of the groundbreaking work that this organization has been a part of and the mentorship and funding opportunities that exist through the program?
Joanna Coles:
Well, Women Entrepreneurs of New York City is really a public private initiative that tries to get resources to women in underserved neighborhoods who are entrepreneurial but who may not think of themselves as entrepreneurs. These may be women that are running sort of informal daycare centers, or they may be baking and then a friend said, hey, can you cater to my wedding or can you cater this for a local business. They don't think of themselves as business women but in fact they are. There are all sorts of resources available for people like that. And so it's really letting people know these resources are available and it might be sort of tech upgrades, it might be access to people who can help you think about accounting in a more sophisticated way or in a more beneficial way to the business. It might be access to more funds so you can expand the business and hire people in ways that you hadn't thought possible. So it's a really exciting initiative and it's helped all sorts of women who are often by nature extremely entrepreneurial but don't get encouraged in the same way that guys do.
Josh King:
As we wrap up, Joanna, The Bold Type has just wrapped its fifth and final season. This acclaimed series was inspired by your life and centers on three young women living and working in New York for Scarlet affectional global women's magazine. The series explores these relationships that the women have with one another, their jobs, their romantic lives and the city itself. Why were you excited about this project and what was this foray into television like for you?
Joanna Coles:
Well, the foray into television was enormous fun and I was very excited about it because I think the show is primarily extremely entertaining but it also has a stealth feminist message. One of my great concerns is that there are very few popular culture representations of women who run things who are successful and who aren't bitches. Working women in particular have to contend with this idea that somehow the female boss is just horrible and out to get everybody and wants to devastate and scorch earth everything around her to make sure that no other women join her. I found that completely alien to my own experience. I had been encouraged by women and men. I've been encouraged by lots of people, but I didn't see positive role models of women on television, women bosses on television. It was really important to me to try and create that.
Joanna Coles:
What's been exciting about the show is not only have we had lots of young women in America responding to it, but it's now on Netflix internationally and I get outreach every day, particularly on LinkedIn from India. I got an email yesterday from someone in Myanmar saying how inspirational she found the show. It has three young female friends who support each other but aren't conflicted among themselves. The conflict is really outside of them and they are encouraged by a female boss who isn't perfect, who perfectly flawed as a character but who isn't trying to bring them down, is actually trying to encourage them and make their world bigger and give them more experience. So, that was the fun of the show for me to break some of the stereotypes of the bitch woman boss and to have fun and great fashion. New York is a character in the show and we tackle all sorts of very modern issues which I think a lot of shows were afraid of.
Josh King:
Talking about enriching all of our worlds and making them all a little bit bigger, Joanna, we've certainly noticed how active you are on social media and how much you post about the culture that you're consuming at that particular moment, whether it's television or books. What's in your current consumption rotation and what's sitting on your nightstand?
Joanna Coles:
If you haven't watched White Lotus on HBO, you absolutely must. Dave Bernard, who's the executive producer, was also the executive producer on The Bold Type. Mike White created and wrote the show. It's phenomenal. And the last episode has a scene in it in which I've never seen on television before. Hopefully we'll never see again, but it's absolutely brilliant. And Connie Britton is a standout in the show, but they've got such good performances from everybody. It's completely brilliant.
Joanna Coles:
What am I reading? I've got 30 books on my nightstand and I'm sort of 20 pages into all of them, but the person I've most enjoyed reading actually during COVID, and I went down a complete spiral of his books is Eric Lawson. I started with The Splendid and the Vile about the Churchill year and the Blitz, which everybody was reading. I sped off into The Devil in the White City, which is a fascinating book about a mass murder in Chicago. And then in the Garden of the Beasts, which is about the American ambassador in Remar, Germany, which is fascinating. And I've now just started his book about the I'm sinking of the Lusitania. So those are the books I've consistently managed to get through during COVID, but I have found, like everybody else, I've been very distracted and I've spent much too much time on Netflix.
Josh King:
You also are famous for your treadmill desk and you've been sitting down so generously and talking with me for the past hour. You've walked countless miles at 1.2 and 1.8 speeds while working. What's the next step for you and what does the future look like for BarkBox and Northern Star Acquisition?
Joanna Coles:
Well, one of two things you can't see because this is a podcast is that my left leg is wrapped in a bandage from overdoing it during tennis. I think one of the things that a lot of people have been doing during COVID is exercising frantically to deal with the whole stress of it all and then getting injuries. What I'm really enjoying about this moment is having the opportunity to talk to all sorts of interesting new businesses. And people say, oh, there aren't enough businesses to take public. I think that completely untrue. There are lots of incredibly interesting businesses, really smart founders and all sorts of trends that have been accelerated during COVID, because we've all been spending so much more time online.
Joanna Coles:
And now I think you are seeing really fundamental changes in the way people are making purchases, especially around the house. The idea that you can subscribe to cleaning fluids, that you can subscribe to dog food. I mean, our lives are changing in really fundamental ways and happily there are businesses set up to help us spend less time doing the boring stuff and to have more time with each other when we can all get back together again.
Josh King:
Heal up that leg and get back in the court, Joanna. Thank you so much for spending a little time with us inside of the ICE House.
Joanna Coles:
Josh, it was my pleasure. Thank you.
Josh King:
And that's our conversation for this week. Our guest was Joanna Coles, the CEO and Chair of Northern Star Acquisition Company and board member of BarkBox. If you like what you heard, please rate us on iTunes so other folks know where to find us. And if you've got a comment or a question you'd like one of our experts to tackle on a future show, email us at [email protected], or tweet at us, @ICEHousePodcast. Our show is produced by Pete Asch with production assistance from Stefan Prequel and Ian Wolf. I'm Josh King, your host, signing off from the Library of the New York Stock Exchange. We'll see you next week.
Speaker 1:
The information contained in this podcast was obtained in part from publicly available sources and not independently verified. Neither ICE nor it's affiliates make any representations or warranties, expressed or implied, as to the accuracy or completeness of the information and do not sponsor, approve or endorse any of the content herein, all of which is presented solely for informational and educational purposes. Nothing herein constitutes an offer to sell, a solicitation of an offer to buy any security or a recommendation of any security or trading practice. Some portions of the preceding conversation may have been edited for the purpose of mental clarity.
