Interviewing Emma Grede

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Read time: 2.5 minutes

Hey!

On Tuesday I got to interview hands down the most impressive female founder of the moment right now.

Emma Grede.

Got the call a few weeks back and cut my holiday short for it. I should have been in France. There was nowhere I would rather have been!

I've never interviewed another entrepreneur before... and there's nothing quite like starting with the best, is there?

TODAY AT A GLANCE

• The best interviewers talk 20% of the time (the guest talks 80%).
• Great questions are engineered so a rehearsed answer is impossible.
• Interviewing is a key founder skill.

[the reflection]

Why I said yes in under an hour

Emma left school at 16. She went on to co-found Good American with Khloé Kardashian, which sold one million dollars of product on its first day, and became a founding partner of SKIMS. Her book Start With Yourself came out earlier this year and went straight to the top of the New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller lists.

I've been interviewed many times over the past seven years. Podcasts, panels, press. I know that side of the table well. But curating the questions, managing the flow, and making sure every answer is packed with value for the room is a completely different skill. I was less familiar with it, and the fastest way to learn a skill is to practise it at the highest level available to you. So when the email landed, the decision took less time than the flight home.

[the list]

How I built the question list

I wrote 12 core questions, 9 backups, and a quick-fire round. Here are the simple rules I wanted to follow:

The guest should be talking 80% of the time. You get 20%. And your 20% is not for your own stories or your own opinions. It exists to do exactly three jobs: set up the question, steer the flow, and follow up on the answer.

First rule: study. I watched over 12+ hours of Emma's interviews over the last week, to study the questions she was asked and the way she responded. I went through seven rounds of amendments on the question list and practiced them out loud.

Second rule: be as specific as possible. Vague questions produce vague answers. I made sure the questions were direct. So instead of asking "what's your view on AI", I asked what she is actually doing with AI inside Good American and SKIMS that other founders are sleeping on.

Third rule: mix longer form questions with short, snappy soundbites.

Fourth rule: ask the question nobody asks. My favourite on the list: what's something you've become deliberately less ambitious about? The answers are always more revealing than anything about their wins.

Fifth rule: have a back up list! I used all of the nine backup questions I thought I wouldn't use. Turns out we are both concise speakers and don't like to ramble!

The Key Interview Themes:

Here are the topics I covered on stage, just because I know you're nosey!

1. Old Thoughts: the inherited beliefs still hardest to dismantle
2. Aspire: the long-term ambition for scaling mentorship, plus dream guest
3. Money Talk: the financial conversations women are still avoiding
4. Investing: what gets her attention in first-time founders, and where new investors start
5. Conviction: whether the privilege of "complete conviction" can be learnt
6. Less Ambitious: what she has deliberately scaled back on
7. £50k: the business she'd start at 25 with £50,000 today
8. Obsession: what she's genuinely obsessed with right now
9. AI: what Good American and SKIMS are doing in-house, and the one decision she'd never delegate
10. Unfair Advantage: what she'd rebuild with if everything was gone tomorrow
11. Second Book Idea: the executive summary for men married to ambitious women
12. The Deathbed Test: what "I did it right" looks like at the end

[the lesson]

What this has to do with you

You might never interview anyone on a stage, but the art of thorough research, articulate question asking and active listening are essential skills to learn. As an entrepreneur, hiring is a form of thorough research and interview practice. Due diligence is interviewing. Customer research is interviewing. Fundraising, from the investor's side of the table, is interviewing.

TL;DR: the best piece of advice I can give you, is that thorough research will be your unfair advantage.

Have a good week!

Victoria