The Container Store's Tindell, left, and Whole Foods' Mackey in Austin, Texas.
Long, long ago--in what they are pretty sure was the 1974-75 school year--John Mackey and Kip Tindell shared a house with three other students near the University of Texas campus in Austin. They played a lot of poker--Tindell always won--but never became particularly close. After that year, they drifted out of touch.
Their lives, though, continued along parallel paths. Both men dropped out after long undergraduate careers ("I crammed a four-year program into about eight years," Tindell jokes). Then, in 1978, both started businesses: Mackey, with his then girlfriend, opened a health-food store in Austin; Tindell, with a guy he had...
