Sasha Siddhartha: Co-Founder and CTO, Thrive Market

Sasha Siddhartha

“Get used to the grind.” Despite saying those words with a smile, Sasha Siddhartha, Co-founder and CTO of Thrive Market, doesn’t sugarcoat it. The path to building a company is arduous, and Sasha unpacks how he’s built his company, Thrive Market, the online grocer dedicated to organic and natural foods, from an idea with friends to a national grocery with 1M subscribers across the US. Sasha recalls the uncertainty his co-founding team felt at launch and the hypergrowth that followed, highlighted by a serious spike over the last 18 months as Covid forced countless people to online grocery shopping. Thrive is proving to be more than just a ‘digital Whole Foods’: it’s a challenger brand and the next generation of grocery in a remote, distributed world.

Show Notes

1:40 - Embarking on the startup journey 

6:48 - How the initial idea behind Thrive evolved 

15:02 - Unearthing the gap in the market

20:12 - Keeping hypergrowth under control

23:58 - Learning from those early experiments that failed

31:07 - Designing Thrive for today’s consumer

36:15 - Sasha’s advice to tomorrow’s founders 

37:25 - The Sprint