CEOInterviews.AI
Start App
Try: AI strategy tariffs earnings guidance layoffs interest rates growth

Neil Blumenthal

Co-Founder and Co-Chief Executive Officer, Warby Parker Inc.

Search every verified Neil Blumenthal interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Neil Blumenthal, co-founder and co-CEO of Warby Parker, has been active in discussing the company's strategic direction and product innovation. In late 2025, he described the company as entering a "third act" defined by AI-driven innovation, following its initial online launch and subsequent expansion into brick-and-mortar retail and vision care services. He stated that Warby Parker is working with Google and Samsung on AI-powered smart glasses, describing the technology as potentially "transformative" and emphasizing the company's goal to make such products accessible to a broad consumer base. He also addressed the company's financial performance, noting a commitment to "sustainable growth" over price-based competition and highlighting continued store expansion, with a third-party study suggesting potential for over 900 locations. Blumenthal has also spoken about Warby Parker's social mission and business philosophy. He reiterated the company's "Buy a Pair, Give a Pair" program and its status as a public benefit corporation, arguing that businesses can "do well and do good" without charging a premium. In various podcast appearances, he discussed the importance of company culture, the co-CEO leadership structure he shares with Dave Gilboa, and lessons learned from building the brand, including the value of focusing on quality and customer experience. He has also reflected on the company's origins, including its founding during the 2008 financial crisis and its early use of social media for organic growth.

Recent appearances

Notable quotes

“We've designed these products with privacy first in mind, and we feel really, really grateful to be aligned with our partners at Google and Samsung. And so the cameras will be off by default. If there's if they're ever recording, it'll be incredibly visible with LEDs that that can't be turned off. And we, we recognize that any, any technology creates change in behavior. And there's anxiety around, you know, how AI is”

“We think we're entering our third act. So if our first act was being sort of one of the pioneers of launching a lifestyle brand online and our second act was categorized by moving into bricks and mortar and scaling right the number of stores that we have to over 300 to getting into adjacent categories like contacts and eye exams so that way we could be a one-stop shop for customers and and patients sort of act Three ”

“There's this old saying that you get the investors that you deserve. So one is just communicating what we believe and how we're going to run the business. The second is are there certain legal structures and governance structures we can put in place. So we're a public benefit corporation. It's a legal structure that's a relatively new legal structure... We partnered actually with the founders of B Corp, of B Labs the”

“We've believe that you can have your cake and eat it too, that you can do well and do good. We thought it was an inherent good to make a quality product and provide exceptional value. So, charge $95 for glasses instead of 400. But we also wanted to sort of solve this issue of about a billion people around the planet don't have glasses. And we think that's crazy. Again, glasses were invented a thousand years ago. So w”

“There's over 45,000 optical shops in the US alone. So this is a massive market. There's certainly a lot of need out there. A few years ago, we hired a third party to do a study on how many stores could we open at similar levels of productivity that we currently have. And the target paybacks for our stores are 20 months. Target four wall margins are 35%. So great retail metrics. And they came back and said you could h”

“The whole premise of Warby Parker is to provide vision for all and we mean that literally and figuratively. Literally how do we provide the tools to enable people to see and figuratively how do we serve as an example of a company that does well and does good in the world and hopefully we inspire other entrepreneurs and other executives to run their business in a similar fashion. So we sell glasses and now we also hav”

Other executives at Warby Parker Inc.

  • Dave Gilboa, Co-Founder and Co-Chief Executive Officer

The summary and quote tags on this profile are produced with AI assistance from verified, first-person interview transcripts, then checked by our team to confirm the speaker's identity and the accuracy of every quote. See how we verify →