From the course: Career Advice from Some of the Biggest Names in Business

Gwyneth Paltrow on asking lots of questions

From the course: Career Advice from Some of the Biggest Names in Business

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Gwyneth Paltrow on asking lots of questions

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(calm electronic music) - How do you know when to take outside ideas? What to adopt and what to push back on? - You know we're very collaborative at Goop. I love to hear everybody's ideas. You know we are fundamentally an ideas company. So I try to surround myself with incredibly creative men and women, mostly women but... Who inspire me and galvanize the process. And I think internally we get to a place that's good that I always feel good about. I really operate heavily on instinct. But I also like to ask advice. You know there are people in the world who are way way way way smarter than I am. And that have been doing their jobs for way longer and I have access to a lot of those people so I ask a lot of questions. - Have you gotten to a point where someone has said, Goop should do x and you think well, that's not what I would want to do. - People do that all the time and have historically done that all the time, especially before we crystallized really what it is we're doing. And you know when it was just this powerful news letter that was having measurable impact on businesses and people would say, like VCs would stop me and say like hey I invested in a company and then you wrote about it on Goop and x, y, and z happened and what are you going to do, what are you going to do? As we go it becomes clearer and clearer what the mission is and really it is me, but it's also we really are a collective and I didn't name it Gwyneth Paltrow Life or whatever I named it Goop. I really want it to be its own company. And I think that's the real scalability comes when I'm not as inextricably linked with the company. And I think it's happening. - Who do you look to for advice, is there anyone that in the business realm or elsewhere that you say this is the kind of information I need to be able to run my business more successfully? - There's all kinds of, you know, the fiscal side which gets really heavy for me. And I read a lot and I ask a lot of questions. And I have friends who have built and sold variety of different businesses that I ask questions to. And for me it's not so much I need, like I don't need the, how do I stay inspired? Or how do I stay creative or it's more like how does this supply chain work? Or if I was going to develop this product where would I go, what's the best lab for that? Or how much is it going to cost to make this in organic cotton or those kind of things? I guess they're more tactical. I sort of feel like if you're a founder the whole point of being a founder is to be creative and to trust yourself. But I'm very inspired by people like Hedi Slimane and obviously someone like Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos. People who are building companies that and building brands in a stunning way. And I go back and study what choices they made and what they did. (calm electronic music)

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