Doing What You Love With Who You Love
Subscribe ? Apple Podcasts | Google Play | RSS
Imagine building a business with a heart, with the person who shares your heart. Scot and Jacq Tatelman are the founders of State Bags, a mission-driven company building on the 1-for-1 model for school kids in need. Why backpacks? Because they “represent where you’ve been and where you’re going.”
Their bags are ? and they’ve partnered with Chance the Rapper, Beyonce, Kevin Durant and the White House. The love, admiration, and pride they have for one another is truly energizing (note the episode’s “happy tears”). But they’re honest about the challenges of co-founding and co-parenting: how pre-emptive couples therapy helped realign their roles, creating boundaries with their two energetic young kids, and how the heck you achieve work-life balance when Beyonce’s peeps are calling while Jacq’s in labor.
More on Scot and Jacq
- State Bags Website (Special RADREADS15 code for 15% off)
- Jacq’s passion project: The Star Wars Collection …
- … and Scot’s #WhatDoWeTellTheKids Chicago Initiative
- Some of their Rad Partnerships: Chance the Rapper, Kevin Durant, Beyoncé
- Follow @StateBags on Instagram and Twitter (#GiveBackPack)
Books Mentioned
- Start Something That Matters, Blake Mycoskie
- The Partnership Charter, David Gage
- 7 Principles of Making Marriage Work, John Gottman
- Roots Documentary
Show Highlights
Why Backpacks?
“Your backpack carries everything that has your journey inside of it. It’s where you’re going and where you’ve been.”
On What Drives Them
“From Camp Power to Camp Northbound, our whole lives are around doing whatever possible to level the playing field for kids who are born with the odds stacked against. And that to me is unjust and that just drives us.”
Read More:
Can you be empathetic to a fault?
“[Scot] carries the weight of the world on his shoulders, he just wants everyone to be on an even playing field . That’s necessarily to a fault but he gets very emotional about it. Things that are out of our control and not in our day-to-day life. And honestly there’s so much to worry about in our day-to-day lives, not jut with our business and children, but the general state of the world. An sometimes I’m like “We have enough.”
Read more:
The Role of Therapy in their Lives and Business
“[I think many founders would] say that they weren’t too proud to seek help. We’ve never built something like this before, we’d crazy to think that we could do this on our own or that we were too proud to bring in extra help and to hire a therapist to help us the two of us.”