Before Gunnar Lovelace had a company to pitch, he had a food co-op to watch. His stepfather ran one on a commune in California. People pooled their buying power, brought the cost of groceries down and made a community out of a household expense. Years later, Lovelace would try versions of that arrangement with an internet connection, venture capital and, eventually, a banking app. The original proposition was small enough to fit around a kitchen table: perhaps the people paying the bills could get a better deal together.
For his mother, the bills were no abstraction. Lovelace grew up poor in a single-parent household before she remarried. He remembers her struggling with rent and groceries. When he talks about the businesses that followed, he repeatedly returns to what money allowed a family to do, and what its absence prevented. A shopping basket could be a fairly stern lesson in economics.
A co-op before a company
He grew up in Ojai, with an Argentine mother and a Spanish father. California supplied the co-op and its example of cooperation as something practical. Buying together could change a price. A family’s budget might stretch further because other families had shown up. That connection between individual constraint and collective possibility would become a recurring feature of his work.
His early career did not follow a tidy grocery aisle. He attended the University of California, Santa Cruz. His education entry includes Junxion, a pizza lounge and cultural center he founded there. Pizza and a gathering place make a recognizable first draft of his later interests: sell something people want, then give them a reason to congregate.
He also learned the less sociable side of entrepreneurship. In an early business, he recalls starting calls at five in the morning, contacting East Coast advertising agencies and following the working day west. Rejection occupied a substantial part of the schedule. A few accounts, cultivated over time, made the business possible. His congressional biography records two technology ventures, in educational software and natural language processing, that were sold.
By 2000, he was talking to a lawyer named Rich Roll about GoodLife, an early internet venture with a social conscience. Roll remembers the visitor’s sandals and a mason jar of mysterious green liquid. Business meetings have survived worse accessories. GoodLife fell victim to the dot-com downturn; the friendship lasted. Years later, Roll would interview him about a grocery company.
Jewelry, trees and the cost of an idea
Between the software ventures and the groceries came Love Heals, a jewelry business he co-founded. By 2018, its public biography described distribution in more than 200 retail stores and a workforce exceeding 75 people. It also credited the business with funding the planting of more than 1.5 million trees. Commercial sales and environmental commitments were already sharing space in his career.
The assortment of businesses can make Lovelace look restless. There is also a persistent question underneath them: how much can an ordinary transaction carry? A piece of jewelry has a price and a buyer. It might also pay for planting. The difficulty, repeated in different industries, is making the additional promise survive the everyday demands of running the company.
A club with a second door
Thrive Market launched in 2014 with four co-founders: Lovelace, Nick Green, Kate Mulling and Sasha Siddhartha. Its model joined online ordering to a membership club. Customers paid an annual fee to access lower-priced groceries. At the time, the fee was $60, a figure modest enough to explain in one breath and significant enough to exclude someone with no spare $60.
The founders addressed that second problem inside the model. Each paid membership sponsored a free membership for a family on a low income. The company could charge for access while making an explicit provision for people who could not afford the entrance fee. Lovelace’s childhood was present in the design, rather than reserved for the founder’s biography.
Buying power on one side. An additional entrance on the other.
Historical model, as described in 2016 interviews.
The first weeks supplied a more immediate test: could the warehouse keep up? In December 2014, Lovelace reported 500,000 page views during the opening week and said half of the warehouse’s more than 3,000 items had sold. He was already discussing larger premises and distribution on both coasts. The kitchen-table idea had acquired a rather demanding packing list.
The audience gets a seat
Finding customers required a different kind of cooperation. The early venture-capital roadshow produced repeated refusals. The founders turned toward bloggers, public figures and other people whose audiences already cared about the products. Around 200 influencers and celebrities became equity-holding investors. The first $10 million came through that strategic network.
These investors brought distribution as well as money. Katie Wells, the writer behind Wellness Mama, described becoming an investor and adviser because the service answered questions she heard from families. A recommendation could travel through an existing relationship. Lovelace spent time bringing those relationships into the company, giving people with an audience a stake in its progress.
That method helps explain why his language of community can coexist with a close interest in marketing. The company measured acquisition and built routes from recommendations to purchases. Affinity opened a conversation; the website still had to turn it into an order. Shared values did not relieve anyone of learning how a customer reached the checkout.
“Learn as ferociously as possible.”
Gunnar Lovelace, on entrepreneurship
The checkout goes to Washington
For some families, reaching that checkout revealed another barrier. People receiving free memberships through Thrive Market’s giving program could not fully use the service because their food benefits could not be spent online. A donated entrance had run into a payment rule. The problem was especially awkward for a company whose explanation of itself rested on access.
Lovelace and Green joined an effort to bring SNAP purchasing online. It took them into conversations with the Department of Agriculture and congressional offices. In 2016, Lovelace described a Washington briefing with Congressman Tim Ryan and Shailene Woodley that drew more than a hundred senior congressional staffers. In November, he appeared before the House Agriculture Committee.
He acknowledged the business interest: letting more people buy from an online grocer could increase sales. He also argued that a giving program could not meet its purpose if recipients lacked a usable way to pay. The two considerations occupied the same conversation. A policy change could help a company and its prospective customers at once.
It was a revealing extension of his co-op education. Organizing demand had helped produce a commercial model. Making that model useful required dealing with an institution outside it. The website could be redesigned overnight; a federal payment system had its own calendar.
An invitation to own the bank
Good Money took the participation argument into finance. In December 2018, it announced a $30 million Series A led by Galaxy Digital’s EOS VC Fund. Other backers included Breyer Capital and investors associated with technology and social enterprise. Lovelace arrived with the experience of building a consumer business and persuading people to help distribute it.
The proposal gave customers equity for opening an account, with opportunities to earn more through actions such as referrals or direct deposit. Half the platform’s profits were pledged to social and environmental projects. The founding team also pledged half its equity to philanthropy and impact. These were promises attached to a developing platform, with the attendant work still ahead.
of profits pledged to social and environmental impact
Customers would receive equity. The founders also pledged half their own equity to philanthropy and impact. These figures describe the announced design.
For Lovelace, the link to Thrive Market was direct. There, equity had helped align influential partners with the business. In finance, he wanted ownership to extend to the customers themselves. The club’s boundary would move again. People using the service would have a claim on the enterprise that provided it.
When the invitation outruns the machinery
Good Money closed. In May 2024, Lovelace published a retrospective about its failure, describing difficulties with third-party banking technology and the decision to rebuild. By the time the rebuilt product was ready, financing conditions had changed. He said approximately $13 million was returned to investors, while some backers, including himself, lost their investment.
His reassessment also addressed his own judgment. Success had encouraged too much certainty; the strategy needed more patient scrutiny. Banking exposed dependencies that consumer enthusiasm could not resolve. The story left an uncomfortable qualification beside the ownership idea: a welcoming invitation still needs an organization capable of honoring it.
There was no neat graduation from failure. He continued difficult conversations with former investors. What emerged afterward was a different vehicle for his interest in collective action, and a stated desire to be more deliberate about how he built it.
The next meeting might involve a prank
That vehicle was UNFK, short for United For Kindness. By 2024, Lovelace was describing a project that would use comedy, corporate pranks and participation incentives to pressure large businesses. Some collaborators had worked with him before. The audience was being invited to take part in the performance.
Comedy gives this phase of his career a different texture. A grocery service asks people to buy. A banking platform asks them to entrust it with money. A prank asks for attention and a willingness to join the joke. Whether that attention produces lasting changes in corporate behavior remains a separate test.
Lovelace keeps returning to the moment when separate people discover they have some power together. In Ojai, they could combine orders and reduce a grocery bill. At Thrive Market, they could support a membership system. At Good Money, he proposed a shared stake. With UNFK, he tried laughter. Across those changes, the practical question persists: once people have agreed to belong, what can the organization actually deliver?