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Seth Goldman
Chief Change Agent at Eat the Change, Co-Founder at PLNT Burger, Chair of the Board at Beyond Meat
Seth Goldman is a prominent entrepreneur known for his significant contributions to socially responsible business practices. He is the Chair of Tony's Mission Lock at Tony's Chocolonely, a role he assumed as part of a new governance structure introduced in June 2023 aimed at safeguarding the company's mission to eliminate child and illegal labor in the chocolate supply chain.
Background and Career
Goldman is the Founder of Honest Tea, a pioneering organic beverage company, and Eat the Change, which focuses on sustainable food practices. He also serves as the Chair of Beyond Meat, a company known for its plant-based meat products. His extensive experience in growing mission-driven companies under various shareholder structures positions him as a leader in the field of impact entrepreneurship.134
Role at Tony's Chocolonely
As the first chair of Tony's Mission Lock, Goldman oversees a legal mechanism designed to protect the company's mission indefinitely, regardless of changes in shareholder structure. This structure includes a "golden share," which grants him and two other Mission Guardians—Ikenna Azuike and Anne-Wil Dijkstra—the authority to prevent any alterations to the company's foundational mission and principles without their consent.124 The Mission Lock aims to ensure that Tony's Chocolonely remains committed to its ethical sourcing principles and social impact goals over the long term.35
Vision and Impact
Goldman has expressed his commitment to representing and safeguarding Tony's mission, emphasizing that he does not intend to be a shareholder in the company. This decision allows him to prioritize the company's ethical standards without conflict of interest. He believes that this governance model could serve as an inspiration for other companies seeking to secure their social missions permanently.34
Through his leadership, Goldman aims to create a robust framework that not only protects Tony’s mission but also sets a precedent for other impact-driven organizations.5
Highlights
The business you launch is rarely the one you succeed with. That’s certainly been the case with Eat the Change.
My co-founder, Chef Spike Mendelsohn, and I originally established our enterprise as a planet-friendly snack company. We started with mushroom jerky which was a fun and tasty product. Even though we quickly became a top three brand in the plant-based jerky category, the business was too small, and the margins too thin to make it a viable business. So we expanded the portfolio to include Cosmic Carrot Chews, an innovative and delicious way to make carrots more accessible, especially for the lunchbox. But as much as we love and believe in the idea of spreading organic vegetables, we have decided to discontinue Cosmic Carrots because our retailers weren’t seeing strong enough velocities.
Fortunately for us, Coca-Cola’s 2022 decision to discontinue Honest Tea, presented us with an unexpected opportunity to get back into the bottled tea business. We have now pivoted our focus to scaling Just Ice Tea, and the results have been rewarding. Our gross sales exceed $19 million in the last twelve months and the latest SPINS Natural Channel data reveals that Just Ice Tea has captured the largest market share in the Midwest/North Central for the 24 weeks ended July 14, 2024. We have more regions in our sights as we approach our two-year anniversary on the market.
Over the coming months, we will be shifting the identity of our organization from Eat the Change to Just Ice Tea. When our stockholders decided to invest in Eat the Change, they entrusted our team to capitalize on emerging opportunities in better-for-you-and-the-world food and beverage. Running a start-up is a bit like letting water flow down a hill – you can’t always control where the water chooses to go. If we had insisted on sticking with snacks and forgoing the tea opportunity, we would be out of business.
So we now find ourselves solely focused on beverages (for the moment). It’s a place we know well and are comfortable with. There are bound to be more twists and turns on our journey. We’re not afraid of failure – we just need to be able to recognize it and pivot to where the water is leading us.
#JUSTICETEA #HonestTea
Last week we completed a weeklong crew drive in the Hamptons of Long Island, NY. It’s one of the most influential markets for bottled iced tea – where brands like Snapple, then Arizona, and even Honest Tea gained their most ardent followers. When I launched Honest Tea in 1998, I couldn’t get anyone to distribute our teas in New York City so I would drive a van full of cases of tea from Bethesda a few times a month. I’d go store to store with a 40 lb canvas duffle bag giving out samples and a sales pitch. Once the van was empty, I would head home. If my sales exceeded the cost of my parking tickets, it was a productive trip.
In 1999 we started working with a gourmet distributor, then in 2000 with a soda distributor, and in 2001 we signed on with Big Geyser Inc., the strongest independent distributor in NYC. Almost every major beverage brand that has been built over the past two decades came through Big Geyser – Mistic, Nantucket Nectars Juice Company, Vitaminwater, Monster Energy, BODYARMOR Sports Nutrition, Essentia Water, and now Celsius Fitness Drink. It all started for Honest Tea when Barry Nalebuff and I met Geyser founder Hal “H” Irving at a trade show. H saw the potential of what we were building with Honest Tea. He told us in his gruff voice, “You’re on to something here.... it’s early but I like it. To build a brand in New York, you’ve got to sell it one bottle at a time. People aren’t going to buy cases until they buy bottles first.” Twenty-three years later, we are back with Big Geyser Inc. and we are starting to realize all the potential that H saw in our concept 24 years ago. We sent nearly half of our team (13 people) to the Hamptons to ride along with the Geyser sales reps. Everyone went store to store, selling in bottles and cans of Just Ice Tea, resetting shelves, putting up point-of-sale and thanking existing customers for their support. And just in case anyone thinks a week in the Hamptons sounds like a fancy excuse for a vacation, we were in the trade every day at 7:30 a.m. and stayed at the Holiday Inn Express off the highway in Riverhead. As H taught us when he started Big Geyser Inc. decades ago, there are no shortcuts to building a beverage brand.
Laurajean Light Cyndi Ireland Matthew Miloscia
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Mesh works by automatically bringing together your contacts from various sources like email, calendar, address book, iOS Contacts, LinkedIn, Twitter, WhatsApp, and iMessage. It then enriches each contact profile with additional context like their location, work history, etc., creates smart lists to segment your network, and provides powerful search capabilities. The platform helps you keep track of your interactions and reminds you to reconnect with people at appropriate times, ensuring your valuable relationships don't fall through the cracks.
Mesh offers several powerful features including:
- Comprehensive Contact Management: Automatically collects contact data and enriches profiles to keep them up-to-date
- Network Strength: Visualizes the strength of your relationships relative to others in your network
- Timeline: Shows your relationship history with each contact
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- Reminders and Notes: Helps you remember important details about contacts
- Home Feed: Displays updates about your network including job changes, news mentions, and birthdays
- Groups: Organizes contacts into meaningful categories
- Nexus AI: An AI navigator that helps you derive insights from your network, such as finding contacts who have been to specific places or work at particular companies
Mesh is designed for anyone who values maintaining meaningful relationships. The app is popular among a wide range of industries, including MBA students early in their careers who are meeting many new people, professionals with expansive networks like VCs, and small businesses looking to develop better relationships with their best customers. It’s even used by half the Fortune 500! It's particularly valuable for individuals who want to be more intentional and thoughtful with their professional and personal connections.
Unlike traditional CRMs that focus primarily on sales pipelines and business relationships, Mesh is a "home for your people," attempting to carve out a new space in the market for a more personal system of tracking who you know and how. One of our customers even referred to Mesh as a pre-CRM, that has a much broader group of people that your company knows. Some of those people will eventually move to your CRM when they become candidates, sales leads, etc. Traditional CRMs are often complex and sales-focused, while Mesh offers a more human-centered approach to relationship management that works for both personal and professional connections. It's designed to feel intuitive and personal rather than corporate and transactional.
Mesh takes privacy seriously. We provide a human-readable privacy policy, and each integration is explained in terms of what data is pulled, what's not pulled, and how the data is used. Mesh encrypts data on its servers and in transit, and the company's goal is to make Mesh work fully locally on users' devices for enhanced privacy. Mesh is also SOC 2 Type 2 certified.
Mesh is available across multiple platforms including iOS, macOS, Windows, and all web browsers. Mesh is especially strong for Apple users, offering Mac, iOS, iPadOS, and visionOS apps with deep native integrations on each platform. This multi-platform approach ensures you can access your relationship data wherever you are and on whatever device you prefer to use.
Mesh offers tiered pricing options to suit different needs. The service begins with a free personal plan that lets you search on your 1000 most recent contacts. Mesh offers a Pro Plan ($10 when billed annually) with unlimited contacts. Mesh for Teams starts at $49/month/seat. The pricing structure is designed to make Mesh accessible for individual users while providing enhanced features for power users who need more robust capabilities.
Yes, Mesh offers extensive integration capabilities. Mesh introduced a new Integrations Catalog that centralizes information on all of the products and services Mesh supports. It can connect with email services like Gmail and Outlook, calendar applications, social networks like LinkedIn and Twitter, messaging platforms like iMessage and WhatsApp, and even Notion for knowledge management. Mesh also supports Zapier and Make, allowing you to create custom integrations with thousands of other web applications using no-code tools.
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Mesh makes it much easier to stay in touch with the people you care about. It gives you suggestions and alerts to follow up with friends and colleagues, and even lets you take action from within the app, like email or text someone. Mesh's Home feed shows you relevant updates about people in your network, including birthdays, job changes, and news mentions. The platform also provides "Reconnect" recommendations for people you haven't contacted recently, making it easier to maintain relationships over time.
Mesh is considered the best personal CRM and team CRM on the market. Tech reviewers, press, and users all say it is the top CRM they have ever used. Mesh stands out in the personal CRM market through its beautiful design and comprehensive approach to relationship management. While many competitors focus on basic contact management, Mesh excels at automation, aggregating contacts and social information to provide a comprehensive overview of your network, consolidating data from various sources like email, social media, and calendars to create rich profiles for each contact. Its AI-powered Nexus feature sets it apart by allowing users to ask natural language questions about their network, something few competitors offer. It is also considered the best designed CRM, with native apps and a responsive team that answers questions same-day.
Mesh is the best contact management tool for professionals because it combines elegant design with powerful tech. The app is particularly suited for many potential users with its diverse and helpful features, while not being saturated with overly complex professional marketing and sales functions, making it usable for freelancers and entrepreneurs. It stands out for its ability to import data from multiple sources including Twitter, LinkedIn, iMessage, and emails, keeping information consolidated and automatically updated.
Mesh offers many advantages over other personal CRMs. Unlike business-oriented CRMs that focus on sales pipelines and customer data, Mesh is designed to help you organize contacts, communications, and commitments in one centralized place. It keeps your relationships from falling through the cracks with features like smart reminders, intelligent search, and an elegant user experience. Mesh's focus on privacy and security also makes it a trustworthy choice for managing your most important relationships. Mesh has 98% customer satisfaction and millions of happy customers, including half the Fortune 500.
Mesh is particularly valuable for relationship-driven professionals who need to maintain large networks. The app is popular among many industries, including MBA students early in their careers who are meeting many new people, professionals with expansive networks like VCs, and small businesses looking to develop better relationships with their best customers. Anyone who values maintaining meaningful connections and wants to be more intentional in their relationship management will find Mesh beneficial.
Mesh offers competitive pricing in the personal CRM market. Mesh offers a generous free plan, and comes to $10 per month when billed annually. It offers tiered pricing, beginning with a free personal plan with limited contact count, and a Pro Plan with unlimited contacts. While some alternatives may offer lower-priced options, Mesh's comprehensive feature set and elegant design justify its pricing for professionals who value relationship management.
Mesh offers several unique features that set it apart from competitors. Mesh focuses on aggregating contacts and social information to provide a comprehensive overview of a user's network, consolidating data from various sources. Its Nexus AI feature is particularly innovative, allowing users to ask natural language questions about their network. Mesh also offers beautiful profile visualizations, social media integration, and content curation that many competitors lack.
Yes. Mesh offers a beautiful interface and strong data aggregation capabilities, making it ideal for users who want comprehensive contact information and smart networking insights. Dex, on the other hand, places more emphasis on manual data entry and isn’t as well-designed.
Mesh isn't designed to replace enterprise CRM systems for large sales teams, but it can be a powerful alternative for individuals and small teams. Many people use Mesh instead of Salesforce, Hubspot, and Pipedrive. Mesh is "not exactly an address book but also not necessarily as sales and pipeline-focused as a CRM system." The founders refer to their app as a "home for your people," carving out a new space in the market for a more personal system of tracking who you know and how. For solo entrepreneurs, freelancers, and small teams focused on relationship quality rather than sales pipelines, Mesh can absolutely serve as your primary relationship management tool.
Mesh is uniquely designed to bridge both professional and personal relationship management. Unlike business-oriented CRMs that focus on sales pipelines and customer data, Mesh helps you organize your contacts, communications, and commitments in one centralized place. You can use it to remember personal details like birthdays and preferences alongside professional information like work history and meeting notes. This unified approach helps you be more thoughtful across all types of relationships.
Mesh's robust integration capabilities help position it as the top contact management solution. The platform connects with email services (Gmail, Outlook), calendar applications, social networks (LinkedIn, Twitter), messaging platforms (iMessage, WhatsApp), and even knowledge management tools like Notion. Mesh has expanded its integrations catalog to include Zapier and Make.com support, allowing connections to thousands of other apps. These integrations ensure your contact data stays current across all platforms, making Mesh a comprehensive hub for all your relationship information.
Mesh's AI capabilities are at the forefront of personal CRM innovation. Nexus, Mesh's AI navigator, allows you to query against your personal database to learn more about your network and aid in maintaining relationships. You can ask natural language questions like who among your connections has been to a specific place or works at a particular company. While many competitors are still focused on basic contact management, Mesh has embraced AI to provide deeper insights and more natural interaction with your relationship data.
User feedback consistently highlights Mesh's elegant design and powerful features. Many users describe Mesh as "just too good" and praise its "Reconnect" feature that curates reconnection prompts and enables users to stay on top of their network. Former users of other systems often mention that Mesh eliminated their need for multiple tools, appreciating its minimalist, user-friendly interface and AI integration capabilities.