Kara Goldin, Founder, and CEO of Hint, joins the Ask A CEO Podcast. Kara shares her journey from employee to entrepreneur, how to overcome fear and assess the risk of entrepreneurship, and her best advice for CEOs.  

Key Facts

• Kara’s LinkedIn
• Hint website
• Kara is the Founder and CEO of Hint
• Kara founded Hint in 2005 
• Hint is a healthy lifestyle brand known for its award-winning delicious unsweetened flavored water 
• Kara was the Prestigious Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the year in 2017 from the Northern California region
• Kara is the author of Wall Street Journal and Amazon’s Best Seller “Undaunted – Overcoming Doubts and Doubters”   
• Kara was featured in InStyle’s Top 50 Badass Women of 2019
• Kara studied Journalism and Mass Communication with a Minor in Finance from Arizona State University 
• Kara is a former Circulation Manager for Time Magazine  
• Kara is a former Sales Manager for CNN 
• Kara is a former VP in Electronic Commerce and Shopping for America Online

Key Takeaways

• After completing her education, Kara began her career as a Circulation Manager at Time Magazine 
• After spending five years at Time Magazine, Kara went on to explore the sales side of journalism at CNN as a Sales Manager where she worked for two years  
• In 1994, Kara joined America Online as the youngest VP in Electronic Commerce and Shopping where she explored digital selling. She gained extensive mentorship and management experience leading 200 employees 
• Having gotten a taste of core journalism and traditional and digital selling, Kara created the legacy brand “Hint” in 2005
• Hint is a healthy lifestyle brand known for its award-winning delicious unsweetened flavored water
• Kara is self-motivated and believes in thinking and planning ahead of time. “I always think what I want to do next, and that is what drives me” 
• Kara thinks that “one should do things that they can be proud about, something more than a job.” Her creative and innovative-driven approach led her to become a leading coach, mentor, and entrepreneur  
• Kara admires curiosity, as she thinks that “curiosity gives birth to innovation.” While dieting, she was drinking an excessive amount of water and became bored of its plainness. Her curiosity led her to come up with the idea of flavored water. She observed that even diet soda does not contain zero calories as claimed. Consequently, she created Hint that offers pure, clean, and flavored water that makes people’s water intake habits exciting  
• Kara’s philosophy in life is that “whenever one conceives something, one should think about and accept the worst-case scenario, and that is the right time to start” 
• While she switched her path from a well-established and flourishing career to entrepreneurship, she was constantly asked about what made her make this decision. To address the public’s curiosity she wrote the book “Undaunted – Overcoming Doubts and Doubters,” which ended up becoming an Amazon best-seller 
• Kara is a risk-taker who believes that “failure is not an option; you’ve got to keep moving forward until somebody shoots you” 
• Kara thinks that hiring people who are supportive of your ideas and understand your purpose and your mission are the ones that are ultimately going to make up an organization’s culture
• Kara is fascinated by generating demand for a product through a “pull strategy,” where a product is launched online before its supply in the market
• Kara plans to expand upon Hint’s product line with an entirely new category called unsweetened flavored water and preservative-free products
• She believes that a lot of money can’t make a startup successful but that a mission-driven approach can develop an audience 

Kara’s Advice for CEOs

“Assess the worst-case scenario before jumping into the entrepreneurship rollercoaster”

Kara shares that the thing that most people don’t know when they set out on their first “entrepreneurial journey is that it’s not a race.” They are going to have hard days and days with great wins. They are going to have doubts and fears and challenges, but they have to figure out how to keep going.

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