Sammi Cohen
speaker
79 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Sammi Cohen’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I think you just hit on so many points that will resonate, especially what you said around the fact that these female founders were really...
stories onto themselves there was this lore around not only just themselves the companies that they were creating but everything that they stood for and number one that is a tremendous amount of pressure to feel like I am the female founder that's paving the way yeah and I think I
Another element that you didn't exactly speak to, but I think you're also alluding to, was from a financial standpoint, things were extremely different. And there was so much capital that was going into these companies, especially in the female-founded direct-to-consumer space. And so I think whenever you see someone who has this rocket ship success
As you said, it's an Achilles heel, but it's also a target on your back. The second that things turn, people are like hyenas willing to just jump out and attack. And I think now that we've had nearly five, 10 years from when the hype of this era happened in the first place, I think we can now start to see and almost do a postmortem on the why and how it even happened in the first place.
Yeah, I definitely think, and I agree with you, that the culture around all startups, not even just female-founded ones, there has been this collective, perhaps, agreement that the brand, the marketing of a company, that's all important, but ultimately important. The numbers of what is going to be driving the business, the profitability, your P&L.
Whereas before, that was almost like the sideshow of like, this is what we're doing. And it was very hand wavy. It speaks to the venture capital environment and the money in the space where it was okay to not be profitable.
And there was also no one that was telling you otherwise, right? It was all of these potential investors, your stakeholders, everyone who had something to say about the money that you took into the business, right? No one was probably saying, pump the brakes, let's get you to profitability, and then you can take on more money.
It was just, here, here's more capital, here's more capital, keep growing, open all these retail stores, continue to grow and expand. And I think now it's so easy to play armchair expert and say, oh, well, all of these companies just raised too much money when it was just... a state of the times, really. I want to talk about an article from The Cut that came out in 2023.
And this was a few years after you left Outdoor Voices, where you were actually very open about how you felt the brand had changed since your departure. And it seems like people were almost surprised that you were still thinking about the company that you had worked at and created. And I'm curious why you think people were even surprised by that.
I read that article last night.
Yeah. Just to get mentally prepared for the episode, of course. Yeah. It was shockingly unflattering for no reason. And I think clearly, and I actually don't even remember the name of the journalist, but I felt like it was an incredibly unfair depiction of your time and experience at OV. So I could understand from your perspective why you would read that.
And perhaps if it were me, I'd be infuriated because you've already gone through... Yeah. Yeah.
100%. I think it takes away other people's power when you share your perspective on how everything went down. Because truthfully, anyone who's going to write about it, talk about it, they weren't there. They weren't in the room. They don't know what it was actually like.
So when you own it from your perspective to the extent that you can and you're able, I think that that's where you actually gain your power back.
You alluded to the resignation, so I have to ask, what are those details?
I'm sure that sending that message, especially everything that was going on in your life at the time, you mentioned you had just had your first child. I cannot even imagine what all of that must have felt like at the time. So I'm curious.
Now that we are safely past bedtime and your experience at Outdoor Voices is thoroughly put to rest, I am curious to hear from you what the number one business lesson is that you take. And it sounds like there are many. Yeah. What is one business lesson that you take from that Outdoor Voices chapter?
I think that is an incredible takeaway for the audience, because if you do not have ownership, and I was actually speaking with someone about this the other day, but it's actually pretty crazy when you look at cap tables sometimes where you'll see a founder who has a moderately successful exit, but if they own a
100% of the company or even the majority of the company, the amount of money that they have at the time of the exit versus someone who raises hundreds of millions of dollars, but is diluted. And then there are potential liquidation preferences or drag along rights. And the investors end up taking almost all of the money. It is such a drastic difference. And you can have truly
The first exit where the founder owns the majority of the company, it can be a much smaller exit.
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