Beth Viner

I've been a dreamer, but I've also been a doer at varying points along my own career journey.

And in my day job, I help organizations see and harness the value of both kinds of people to build new things.

How the zero-to-one dreamers can be just spiky enough that the organization doesn't reject that entrepreneurial talent, and how the one-to-end doers can support their move-fast-and-break-things counterparts

being their guides to the ins and outs of the organization.

Finding a way to bridge this tension, that's the key to organizations being able to both keep on keeping on while building and capturing new growth.

One of the easiest ways to bridge this tension, it's to get buy-in.

Not with gestures or words, but with cold, hard cash.

I was talking to my friend Alex.

She and Jordana, they're dreamers.

They co-founded Lola, a feminine health reproductive company.

And when they launched as a direct-to-consumer, they just had a single product, tampons.

And everything they did those first few years was focused on that, developing a product, packaging, marketing, pricing, distribution, building a site, a community, getting investors, hiring an incredible team of startup talent.

And they did that all to build a product that was safer for women to put inside her body.

They got great traction.

They found those incredible investors, also some endorsers, influencers, who all really liked them.

Women really liked them.

Somewhere along the way, they realized that in order to have the level of impact that they wanted in the world, they couldn't just be a single product.

After all, direct-to-consumer, it's a channel, not a business.

They had to figure out how to crack retail, how to get that box of tampons onto the physical and virtual shelves at Amazon, Walmart, Target.

And despite having this incredible team of startup talent, they did not have decades of lived retail sales experience.