Good CEO: ‘We’re Just Getting Started’

We spent some time this afternoon chatting with Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of Good Worldwide, in the company’s New York office. Aside from giving us a sneak peek at a couple upcoming initiatives (details TK when we can, we promise), Greenblatt discussed his first four months on the job.

Over bottles of water, although not Ethos brand — the company Greenblatt sold to Starbucks in 2005 — the CEO explained his job: “A lot of my focus has been to help the company as we have evolved from what was once a magazine [Good with a complementary Web site and some media events to a more diversified media company, to go from start-up to scale-up," he said. In the coming months, Good Worldwide will drastically "scale up" various branches of the media company.

To us, the multi-pronged approach sounds a bit like Tar Art Media, Blackbook's founder Evenly Schindler's start up media company cum magazine, except Good Worldwide seems more realistic about saving the world while making a profit at the same time. The goal is to "contribute to the bottom line [and] contribute to the greater good of society,” Greenblatt said.

That’s fine by us, but with all these other ventures, why even publish a magazine at all? Don’t you know those things are expensive.

“Digital will actually overtake the print side of the business in a couple years from a share of revenue perspective,” Greenblatt told us, before falling back on the old trope: “I think that there’s something powerful about print as a medium. There’s something rich and tactile about experiencing Good in your hands. And frankly, the newsstand is a lot less cluttered than the blogosphere.”

Greenblatt admitted the company was “exploring options now to bring some additional capital into the business to support our growth plans,” but the goal is not a quick flip: “In our case, selling our brand to a large, global multinational corporation would cut short our opportunity. We have a lot more growing to do.”

We’ll be back in a couple weeks with more details about the company’s upcoming partnerships. In the meantime, Greenblatt and Good Worldwide will be making the world a better place.

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