#186 Phil Knight (Nike)

What I learned from rereading Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike by Phil Knight. ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work. Get access to Founders Notes here. ---- [2:02] I had an aching sense that our time is short, shorter than we ever know, short as a morning run, and I wanted mine to be meaningful. And purposeful. And creative. And important. Above all...different. [6:18] So that morning in 1962 I told myself: Let everyone else call your idea crazy... just keep going. Don't stop. Don't even think about stopping until you get there, and don't give much thought to where "there" is. Whatever comes, just don't stop. That's the precocious, prescient, urgent advice I managed to give myself, out of the blue, and somehow managed to take. Half a century later, I believe it's the best advice-maybe the only advice-any of us should ever give. [10:32] They greeted my passion and intensity with labored sighs and vacant stares. [16:48] Carter never did mess around. See an open shot, take it. I told myself there was much to learn from a guy like that. [20:25] If I didn't, if I muffed this, I'd be doomed to spend the rest of my days selling encyclopedias, or mutual funds, or some other junk I didn't really care about. [27:45] Bowerman was a genius coach, a master motivator, a natural leader of young men, and there was one piece of gear he deemed crucial to their development. Shoes. He was obsessed with how human beings are shod. [32:30] Bowerman didn’t give a damn about respectability. He possessed a prehistoric strain of maleness. Today it’s all but extinct. He was a war hero, too. Of course he was. [32:49] The most famous track coach in America, Bowerman never considered himself a track coach. He detested being called coach. He called himself a “Professor of Competitive Responses,” and his job, as he saw it, and often described it, was to get you ready for the struggles and competitions that lay ahead. [35:40] In my mind he was Patton with a stopwatch. That is, when he wasn't a god. [38:17] "Buck," he said, "how long do you think you're going to keep jackassing around with these shoes?" I shrugged. "I don't know, Dad." [40:00] So why was selling shoes so different? Because, I realized, it wasn't selling. I believed in running. [1:00:57] My life was out of balance, sure, but I didn't care. In fact, I wanted even more imbalance. Or a different kind of imbalance. I wanted to dedicate every minute of every day to Blue Ribbon. I'd never been a multitasker, and I didn't see any reason to start now. I wanted to be present, always. I wanted to focus constantly on the one task that really mattered. [1:05:40] I spent a fair portion of each day lost in my own thoughts, tumbling down mental wormholes, to solve some problem or construct some plan. [1:10:40] More than once, over my first cup of coffee in the morning, or while trying to fall asleep at night, I'd tell myself: Maybe I'm a fool? Maybe this whole damn shoe thing is a fool's errand? Maybe, I thought. Maybe. [1:23:10] I told myself, Don’t forget this. Do not forget. I told myself there was much to be learned from such a display of passion, whether you were running a mile or a company. [1:36:50] When you make something, when you improve something, when you deliver something, when you add some new thing or service to the lives of strangers, making them happier, or healthier, or safer, or better, and when you do it all crisply and efficiently, smartly, the way everything should be done but so seldom is-you're participating more fully in the whole grand human drama. More than simply alive, you're helping others to live more fully, and if that's business, all right, call me a businessman. Maybe it will grow on me. [1:38:10] I asked myself: What are you feeling? It wasn't joy. It wasn't relief. If I felt anything, it was... regret? Good God, I thought. Yes. Regret. Because I honestly wished I could do it all over again. [1:40:32] Of course, above all, I regret not spending more time with my sons. And yet I know that this regret clashes with my secret regret that I can't do it all over again. God, how I wish I could relive the whole thing. [1:40:50] I'd like to share the experience, the ups and downs, so that some young man or woman, somewhere, going through the same trials and ordeals, might be inspired or comforted. Or warned. Some young entrepreneur, maybe, some athlete or painter or novelist, might press on. It's all the same drive. The same dream. It would be nice to help them avoid the typical discouragements. I'd tell them to hit pause, think long and hard about how they want to spend their time, and with whom they want to spend it for the next forty years. I'd tell men and women in their midtwenties not to settle for a job or a profession or even a career. Seek a calling. Even if you don't know what that means, seek it. If you're following your calling, the fatigue will be easier to bear, the disappointments will be fuel, the highs will be like nothing you've ever felt. [1:42:22] Sometimes you have to give up. Sometimes knowing when to give up, when to try something else, is genius. Giving up doesn't mean stopping. Don't ever stop. ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work. Get access to Founders Notes here. ---- “I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00David Senra?

  I was up before the others, before the birds, before the sun. I drank a cup of coffee, wolfed down a piece of toast, put on my shorts and sweatshirt, and laced up my running shoes. Then I slipped quietly out the back door. I stretched my legs, my hamstrings, my lower back, and groaned as I took the first few steps down the cool road into the fog. Why is it always so hard to get started? There were no cars, no people, no signs of life. I was all alone, the world to myself. That foggy morning, that momentous morning in 1962, I had recently blazed my own trail, back home after seven long years away.

• 0:45David Senra?

  It was strange being home again, strange being lashed again by the daily rains, stranger still was living again with my parents and twin sisters, sleeping in my childhood bed. Late at night, I'd lie on my back, staring at my college textbooks, my high school trophies, and blue ribbons, thinking, "This is me? Still? On paper, I thought, 'I'm an adult.' I graduated from a good college, University of Oregon, earned a master's from a top business school, Stanford, survived a year-long hitch in the US Army. My resume said I was a learned, accomplished soldier, a 24-year-old man in full.

• 1:28David Senra?

  So why, I wondered, why do I still feel like a kid? I would have found it difficult to say what or who exactly I was or I might become. Like all of my friends, I wanted to be successful. Unlike my friends, I didn't know what that meant. Money? Maybe. Wife? Kids? House? Sure, if I was lucky. These were the goals I was taught to aspire to, and part of me did aspire to them instinctively. But deep down, I was searching for something else, something more. I had an aching sense that our time is short, shorter than we ever know, short as a morning

• 2:10David Senra?

  run, and I wanted mine to be meaningful and purposeful and creative and important, above all, different.

• 2:21David Senra?

  I wanted to leave a mark on the world. I wanted to win. No, no, that's not right. I simply didn't want to lose. And then it happened. As my heart began to thump, as my lungs expanded like the wings of a bird, as the trees turned to greenish blurs, I saw it all before me. Exactly what I wanted my life to be. Play. Yes, I thought. That's it. That's the word. The secret of happiness, I'd always suspected, the essence of beauty or truth or all that we ever need to know of either, lay somewhere in that moment when the ball is in midair, when both boxers sense the approach of the bell, when the runner's near the finish line

• 3:06David Senra?

  and the crowd rises as one. There's a kind of exuberant clarity in that pulsing half-second before winning and losing are decided. I wanted that, whatever that was, to be my life. My daily life. At different times, I'd fantasized about becoming a great novelist, a great journalist, a great statesman, but the ultimate dream was always to be a great athlete. Sadly, fate had made me good, not great. I'd run a track at Oregon and had distinguished myself, but that was that. The end. Now, as I began to clip off one brisk six-mile after another, I asked myself, what if there

• 3:50David Senra?

  was a way, without being an athlete, to feel what athletes feel? To play all the time instead of working? Or else to enjoy work so much that it becomes essentially the same thing? The world was so overrun with war and pain and misery. The daily grind was so exhausting and often unjust. Maybe the only answer, I thought, was to find some prodigious, improbable dream that seemed worthy, that seemed fun, that seemed a good fit, and chase it with an athlete's single-minded dedication and purpose. Like it or not, life is a game.

• 4:30David Senra?

  Whoever denies that truth, whoever simply refuses to play, gets left on the sidelines. And I didn't want that. More than anything, that was the thing I did not want. Which led, as always, to my crazy idea.

• 4:47David Senra?

  Maybe, I thought, just maybe I need to take one more look at my crazy idea. Maybe my crazy idea just might work? Maybe? No, no, I thought, running faster, faster, running as if I were chasing someone and being chased all at the same time. It will work. By God, I'll make it work. No maybes about it. I was suddenly smiling, almost laughing, drenched in sweat, moving as gracefully and effortlessly as I ever had. I saw my crazy idea shining up ahead, and it didn't look all that crazy. It didn't even look like an idea. It looked like a place.

• 5:30David Senra?

  It looked like a person, or some life force that existed long before I did, separate from me, but also a part of me, waiting for me, but also hiding from me. That might sound a little high-flown, a little crazy, but that's how I felt back then. At 24, I did have a crazy idea, and somehow, despite being dizzy with existential angst and fears about the future and doubts about myself, as all young men and women in their mid-20s are, I did decide that the world is made up of crazy ideas. History is one long procession of crazy ideas.

• 6:11David Senra?

  The things I love most, books, sports, democracy, free enterprise, started as crazy ideas. So that morning in 1962, I told myself, let everyone else call your idea crazy. Just keep going. Don't stop. Don't even think about stopping until you get there. Whatever comes, just don't stop. That's the precocious, prescient, urgent advice I managed to give myself, out of the blue, and somehow managed to take. Half a century later, I believe it's the best advice, maybe the only advice, any of us should ever give.

• 6:56David Senra?

  That was an excerpt from the book that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is Shoe Dog, a memoir by the creator of Nike, and it was written by Phil Knight. So I originally read this book about four years ago. It was Founder's Number 10, one of the first books I've ever read for this project. And it's one of my favorite books. It's an absolutely fantastic book, and I believe that great books should be reread. They stay the same, but you change. And so now I thought, approaching almost 200 biographies read for this podcast, I should go back and see how the insights in this book have changed, given how much I've read since then. And I want to place it into, I would make the argument that it's the perfect biography. So there's a lot of ways you can think about different books that we've talked about. So I always say, if people ask me, okay, what's the most inspiring biography?

• 7:41David Senra?

  I would say that's the autobiography of the founder of Hyundai. The book is called Born of This Land: My Life Story. That's Founder's Number 117. Chung Ju-yeong goes from being so poor that he has to eat tree bark to being the richest person in Korea. And I think reading that book and realizing how much he had to endure and go through to succeed gives you strength in your own life. I would say the most insightful biography I've read so far would be The Everything Store. That's Founder's Number 179 and Founder's Number 17. That has probably the most insights per page out of every other book that I've read so far for the podcast. And then if you were to ask me, okay, if I could only read one of the biographies, which one would it be? I would say, okay, read James Dyson's autobiography Against the Odds.

• 8:26David Senra?

  That's Founder's Number 25. It's a book about determination, perseverance, and stubbornness. It's 250 pages about the value of those traits, or applying, the value of applying those traits, rather, to your life's work. But the reason I think the book that I hold in my hand is the perfect biography is because it starts in media res. It moves in chronological order. Every single chapter covers one year. There's no wasted time on ancestors or any of the parts that you, when you read a biography, you want to skip over. There's not too much detail and it's all about the struggle. It starts with a crazy idea and then it stops at the IPO. The last chapter is him writing as a 75, 76-year-old man, all about his life's regrets. And to read

• 9:11David Senra?

  this book is to really have a 15 or 20-hour, one-sided conversation with one of the greatest entrepreneurs of history. So hopefully, as I go through the book today, I'll convince you, if you haven't already read it, to read it. And if you have read it, to encourage you to reread it. It's definitely worth it. Let me start, 1962. This is the definition of what he kept referring to in the introduction about his crazy idea. And it's the fact that his crazy idea is met with indifference. "It was one of my final classes, a seminar in entrepreneurship. I'd written a research paper about shoes, and the paper had evolved from a run-of-the-mill assignment to an all-out obsession. Being a runner, I knew something about running shoes. Being a business buff, I knew that Japanese cameras had made deep cuts into the camera market, which had once

• 9:56David Senra?

  been dominated by Germans. Thus, I argued in my paper that Japanese running shoes might do the same thing. The idea interested me, then inspired me, then captivated me. It seemed so obvious, so simple, so potentially huge. I'd spent weeks and weeks on this paper. I'd moved into the library, devoured everything I could find about importing and exporting, about starting a company. I'd given a formal presentation of the paper to my classmates, who rejected with, or, excuse me, who reacted with boredom. No one, not one, asked a single question. They greeted my passion and intensity with sighs and vacant

• 10:38David Senra?

  stares. The professor thought my crazy idea had merit. He gave me an A, but that was that. At least, that was supposed to be that. I had never really stopped thinking about that paper." So two thoughts popped to mind when I read that. First one was that at least he got an A. If you remember, somewhere back in the 150s, I covered the biography of Fred Smith, the founder of FedEx. His company also started as a term paper, and he got a C. But the second thing I thought of was, one of my favorite ideas that I learned from Edwin Land, the founder of Polaroid, I've done, I don't even, what, five books? Five or six books on Edwin Land. I've probably done five or six podcasts on him. But anyways, he said something that was very interesting, and he says, "The test of

• 11:22David Senra?

  an invention is the power of an inventor to push it through in the face of staunch, not opposition, but indifference in society." And a way to reduce the thought or the main point behind Edwin Land's quote is that indifference is your enemy. And we saw the same thing in the presentation that Phil's giving. They didn't hate the idea, they just didn't care about it at all. So he goes for that run that changes his life in 1962. He's like, "I'm going to pursue the crazy idea." He doesn't have a lot of money, so he's got to get some money. He has this idea, he's like, "I'm going to go around the world. I'm going to do a trip around the world. While I'm on this trip around the world, I want to stop in Japan, try to convince some

• 12:04David Senra?

  Japanese shoe manufacturers to let me resell their products." So that is Nike, he doesn't start out with the idea of Nike. The first, his company's called Blue Ribbon, and for the first, I don't know, 10 years, we'll get to it today, of the company's life, he was reselling, no, it was less than 10 years, maybe seven or eight, but he's reselling other people's shoes. And there's a lot of lessons on the dangers of building a business that you don't control, which has been a main theme throughout the study of the history of entrepreneurship that you and I are doing, right? So he's talking to his dad, and something that, his relationship with his dad reminds me of something we learned from Warren Buffett. So the description of his dad, right here, he says, "He also worshipped another secret deity, respectability."

• 12:47David Senra?

  He had a beautiful house, beautiful wife, obedient kids. My father enjoyed having these things, but what he really cherished was his friends and neighbors knowing that he had them. He liked being admired. He liked doing a vigorous backstroke each day in the mainstream. That's a great sentence. Going around the world on a lark, therefore, would simply make no sense to him. It wasn't done, certainly not by the respectable sons of respectable men. So it was really interesting. There's also data in this book that I wasn't aware of. He said at the time he's taken the trip, I think 90%, he said, 90% of Americans had never been on an airplane.

• 13:30David Senra?

  He said the vast majority of people at this point lived and died. They were born, lived their entire lives, and died within 100 miles of where they were born. So this idea was like, I'm going to stop at 50 different countries and do all this thing. His scene was rather bizarre, especially to his father, who was really conventional. But the reason I highlight this point, and the reason I want to bring this to your attention, is the fact that he actually encourages his son to go, which is not what Phil expected. He says, "He said that he had always regretted not traveling more when he was young." And so the note I left myself on this page is that the outer scorecard leads to regrets. And that's this idea that we learned from Warren Buffett, where he compares and contrasts

• 14:12David Senra?

  in his biographies, the ones I've read so far for the podcast, the difference between his father and his mother. His mother was a terrible person. She scared him. She had an outer scorecard. She was very much like Phil's dad. Now, Phil and his dad wound up becoming closer later on in life, so they actually fixed their relationship. I don't think Warner fixed his relationship with his mother, but the same thing is like, what will other people think of us? What will other people think of this decision I'm making? Warren's hero was his father. His father had an inner scorecard. Warren, obviously, has an inner scorecard. I would say most of the people that we're studying on the podcast have inner scorecards, which means they decide, what is the best decision for my life?

• 14:52David Senra?

  And they're comfortable with the path they choose regardless how the external world feels about it. And so when you see these interviews done, there's people that interview people who are close to death, maybe they'll go to like a retirement home. And one of the most common regrets for people that are close to the end of their life is like, I wished I lived a life more authentic to myself. People that have outer scorecards, they're going to be filled with regrets. They do not live an authentic life. Phil Knight definitely lived, as we'll see today, he's a crazy person. He definitely lived an authentic life. So his father actually agrees to do this, to let him go and to give him a little money to do this. So Phil now needs a traveling partner and he picks, most of the people that he knows

• 15:35David Senra?

  are athletes because he ran track at Oregon and that's just his friend group. And so he picks, he recruits this, one of his friends named Carter. And there's a great line in the book that I'm going to read to you in a minute, but the line I left myself on this page is, we can all learn a lot from Carter. "Carter wasn't your typical jock. He read books, good books, and he was easy to talk to and easy not to talk to. Equally important qualities in a friend and essential in a travel companion." So he goes to pitch Carter on his idea. He's laying out, he's like, you know, we're going to go to Tokyo, Cairo, Istanbul, Athens, Jordan, I'm not going to list, there's like 50 countries, for God's sake. But Carter had a really interesting reaction. "He laughed in my face when I laid out all the list of places I wanted to see.

• 16:19David Senra?

  Mortified, I looked down and began to make apologies. Then Carter, still laughing, said, 'What a swell idea, Buck.'" I should tell you, everybody calls Phil Buck. His dad calls him, that's his nickname, so everybody calls him Buck. "I looked up. He wasn't laughing at me. He was laughing with joy, with glee. He was impressed. 'It took balls to put together an itinerary like that,' he said. Balls! He wanted in. Days later, he got the OK from his parents." And this is one of my favorite sentences in the book. "Carter never did mess around. See an open shot, take it. That was Carter. I told myself there was much I could learn from a guy like that as we circled the earth."

• 17:03David Senra?

  So the first stop on their trip is why they like it so much, they decide to stay, which is really surprising. It's like, okay, we're gonna go to these places. First place we get, oh my god, this is amazing. They rent like a little apartment by the beach. They went up getting jobs. They'd sell encyclopedias door to door. They went up selling like investments over the phone, doing all this other stuff. But eventually, Phil's like, alright, I need to go. We need to like move on with this trip. We can't just stay here. And Carter decides not to continue the trip because he met a girl. And so now, we see Phil, he's sitting on the beach, he's depressed. And this is, the North American South is, keep going, don't stop. That's the main theme of the book. And that's where I think is one of

• 17:47David Senra?

  probably the main benefit of reading this book, is because we see Nike now, wildly successful, great products, great marketing, you know, multiple, I don't even know what their market cap is, hundreds of billions of dollars. And yet, this book tells us the struggles that Phil had to endure to build a company. And that advice that he said at the very beginning, keep going, don't stop. It might be the only advice, looking back 50 years later, that we should ever give. And we see that you have to have control of your mind, though. It's gonna play mind games with you, right? So he's saying, "The last thing I wanted to do was pack up and return to Oregon, but I couldn't see traveling around the world alone. Go home, a faint inner voice told me. Get a normal job. Be

• 18:28David Senra?

  a normal person. Then I heard another faint voice, equally emphatic. No, don't go home. Keep going. Don't stop." So he continues on the trip alone. He goes to Japan, starts meeting with shoe manufacturers. And one of the great things about reading the book is that Phil's very well-read, and he's constantly learning from every experience, even if it's an abstraction, and then applying it to his own life's journey. And so he's sitting there, he's studying the environment in Japan, winds up reading some about the philosophy, learning from Buddhism and Shinto and all this other stuff. So I'm just gonna read a couple of sentences to you. "I marveled at the concept of Kensho, which was enlightenment that comes in a flash, a blinding pop."

• 19:14David Senra?

  I liked that. I wanted that. But first, I needed to change my whole approach. I was a linear thinker. And according to Zen, linear thinking is nothing but a delusion, one of the many that is keeping us unhappy. "Reality is nonlinear," Zen says. "No future, no past, all is now."

• 19:36David Senra?

  And I just liked that idea. All is now. Can't change the past, it's gone. The future's not here yet. All we have is now. It's one way to tame your mind, I think. So now we see the inner monologue as he goes to what he considers like the biggest meeting of his life. Remember, he's only 24 years old at the time. So he's got to convince a shoe factory in Japan to supply him shoes. And let me read my note to you before I read this section, because it was really interesting. What he, even at the very beginning, he was just, he always was focused on his goal. And if it meant some levels of discomfort, he didn't really care about that. So it says, "The satisfaction of achievement is worth the pain endured to get there. Stand for seven hours in a crowded train?" Question mark. "Sleep on a mat in a dingy motel?"

• 20:18David Senra?

  Question mark. Whatever. I'm unbothered. These are things that he had to do before he gets to this meeting. And he says, "Everything depended on my rising to this occasion. Everything. If I didn't, if I muff this, I'd be doomed to spend the rest of my days selling encyclopedias, or mutual funds, or some other junk I didn't really care about. I'd be a disappointment to my parents, my school, my hometown, myself." I want to pull out something from the meeting. They wind up agreeing to supply him. It takes him like a year before he gets the shoes. But I thought it was really fascinating, because they asked him, they're like, "Yeah, we want to sell to the United States." Remember, this is shortly after World War II. Japan's in shambles. The book goes into more detail about that. But they asked him, you know, "How big do you think this market is?"

• 21:03David Senra?

  And this is just a reminder, the markets are almost always bigger than you think they are. They asked me how big I thought the American shoe market was, how big it could be. And I told them, ultimately, it could be as big as $1 billion. I think Nike sold 24 billion, so that's just one company in one year in 2019, sold $24 billion worth of just shoes, not all the other stuff they sell too. So it's just really interesting to me. Another thing on the next page, which I love, is he's constantly studying great figures of history, right? And he'll constantly quote like maxims or aphorisms that he learned from them, and he'll repeat them throughout the book as it like come to like some kind of crossroad, and then lean back on some knowledge that he learned.

• 21:44David Senra?

  And he always puts it in italics, but he said, he's quoting, actually, let me pause there, he's quoting Confucius, and it's really about building Nike. But he complied with so many things. He says, "Confucius says, 'The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.'" So he secures a contract, he's ecstatic, he winds up going, now he's going to continue the rest of his trip, he's going all over the world. I think he's in the Philippines at this time, but one of the person he studied and constantly referenced is General MacArthur. It's funny that I'm talking to you about this today because I just started, in my opinion, if you ask me who's the greatest podcaster in the world, I would say it's Dan Carlin. His podcast Hardcore History has definitely influenced me a lot, but I was listening,

• 22:27David Senra?

  last night, I was listening to his episode Supernova in the East, Part Six. And he winds up referencing, last night, I got to the part where he talks about General MacArthur, and Dan was saying like, "This guy's just a crazy person." That he would talk about himself in third person, like extremely talented, but extremely just a crazy person. I guess there's no other way to put it like that. And so he's talking about what he learned, that the fact that he didn't lack for confidence, that he was a brilliant tactician, he's a master motivator. So it continues on and on, but there's a saying that MacArthur said, that Phil constantly references as he's building Nike. He says, "Of course, he was deeply flawed, but he knew that.

• 23:09David Senra?

  You were remembered," he said, "for the rules you break." And that's a line he'll constantly reference throughout the story of building Nike. You're remembered for the world as you break. He's moving on. Now he's in, he's standing in front of a 600-year-old Buddha statue. And again, I just want to bring to your attention the constant wondering about his purpose in life. What is my life going to be? The fact that he does not have the answers, like everybody, he does not have the answers. He's just wondering about it constantly. Standing before its face, I asked, I asked it, why am I here? What is my purpose? I waited, nothing, or else the silence was my answer. And so just a few more examples of these thoughts that he's having.

• 23:54David Senra?

  He actually journaled his entire trip around the world, which is why he knows what he was thinking. He talks about regretting, and I'll get to that more later, regretting not doing the same as he was building the company. Because he says, you have these thoughts that you, when you're living through them, they're so impactful at the time. You're like, there's no way I'm going to forget it. You're going to forget it. Write it down, document it. It would be advice from Phil Knight. So at this point, he's talking about work and craft and life's purpose. And he says, why was me work so hard, I thought? And yet, the first-century rabbi, not even going to try to pronounce this guy's name, said, "Our work is the holiest part of us. All are proud of their craft. God speaks of his work. How much more should man?"

• 24:37David Senra?

  Another thought for you, this time he's in Italy. And this really is going to echo, because a large part of what drove Phil Knight was his hatred for Adidas. And at the time, Adidas is a much larger company. And so in this, he's standing in front of the statue of David, and really, this is a metaphor for how he saw Nike, Nike's fight against Goliath, which would be Adidas. "I stood before David, shocked at the anger in his eyes. Goliath never had a chance." And this continued, these are not all on the same page. This goes on for a while. It was really fascinating how he drew these parallels from great people in history and applied it to his own, his own journey. Now, he's in France. I was thinking all the while of Patton.

• 25:21David Senra?

  "Don't tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results." That sentence right there, he repeats over and over again. That is Phil Knight's management style. "Don't tell people what to do," excuse me, "don't tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results." Now, he's in England. "I conjured up the great Churchill. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word. It is victory. Victory at all costs. Victory in the spite of all terror. Victory. Without victory, there is no survival." So, he's back home. He's got a job as an accountant. And I guess I should say Nike took, Blue Ribbon, which is going to turn into Nike,

• 26:03David Senra?

  took five years before he could work on it full-time, which is crazy. But again, here we find him again, wondering about his life. "My other consolation was lunch. He hates his job so much that he looks forward to his lunch day, or his lunch break. Each day at noon, I'd walk down to the street to the local travel agency and stand in front of the posters in the window. Switzerland, Tahiti, Moscow, Bali. I'd grab a brochure and leaf through it while eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on a bench in the park. I'd ask the pigeons, can you believe it was only a year ago that I was surfing Waikiki?" And then he starts talking about his inner monologue. "Are the best moments of my life behind me? Was the trip around the world my peak?

• 26:47David Senra?

  That is how I spent 1963, quizzing pigeons and writing letters. Dear Carter, did you ever leave Hawaii? I'm an accountant now and giving some thought to blowing my brains out." Okay, so eventually, the shoes arrive. Now, we're moved on to 1964. Phil Knight is the main character of the book. There's two, there's a series of other supporting characters. The first one, the second most important character in the book, is Bill Bowerman. He's the legendary track coach, his track coach, and the co-founder of Nike. I did an entire podcast based on a book I read of Bill Bowerman. That is Founder's Number 153, if you haven't listened to it. No objectivity here. I love this man, and you're gonna see why. And Phil loved him, too. I sent two pairs to my old track coach at Oregon, Bill Bowerman.

• 27:32David Senra?

  I did so without a second thought, since it was Bowerman-- I gotta pause here. There is, to be very clear, there is no Nike without Bowerman. Since it was Bowerman who first made me think, really think, about what people put on their feet. Bowerman was a genius coach, a master motivator, a natural leader of young men, and there was one piece of gear he deemed crucial to their development: shoes. He was obsessed with how human beings are shot. Bowerman was constantly sneaking into our lockers and stealing our footwear. He'd spend days tearing them apart, stitching them back up, then hand them back with some minor modification,

• 28:13David Senra?

  which made us either run like deer or bleed. Regardless of the results, he never stopped. He was determined. He always had some new design, some new scheme to make our shoes sleeker, softer, lighter, especially lighter. And this is a really, really important point. "One ounce sliced off a pair of shoes," he said, "is equivalent to 55 pounds over one mile." Lightness, Bowerman believed, directly translated to less burden, which meant more energy, which meant more speed. And speed equaled winning. Bowerman didn't like to lose. I got it from him. Thus, lightness was his constant goal. So I'm gonna interrupt

• 28:54David Senra?

  myself. I have no idea why these things pop into my mind as I read-- certain things pop into my mind as I read. But this whole obsession that Bowerman has with lightness, lightness as a way to achieve his end goal, which is speed, it is very-- it reminded me of Ernest Shackleton in that fantastic book, Endurance, because he had that same obsession. Let me read this quote from Endurance. "From studying the outcome of past expeditions," and I think this applies to not only track, not only to Ernest Shackleton's case of being an explorer, but I think it applies-- we've seen this over and over again. The best founders in the world are obsessed with speed. "From studying the outcome of past expeditions, he believed that those that burdened themselves with equipment to meet every contingency had

• 29:39David Senra?

  fared much worse than those that had sacrificed total preparedness for speed."

• 29:47David Senra?

  So Shackleton saying, "I studied the outcome of past expeditions optimized for speed over being totally prepared. Speed first. Bowerman's optimizing for lightness, which helps him achieve speed." All right, let me go back to Bowerman. "It is possible that everything," this is so important, "it is possible that everything I did in those days was motivated by some deep yearning to impress, to please Bowerman. Besides my father, there was no man whose approval I craved more. And besides my father, there was no man who gave it less often. Frugality carried over to every part of the coach's makeup. He weighed and hoarded words of praise like uncut diamonds."

• 30:31David Senra?

  This is exactly what Knight does as well. He thinks that might have been, like, he was trying to copy Bowerman, where even when somebody did something great, he just had a hard time praising people, going back to Bowerman. "I loved Bowerman and feared him. And neither of these impulses, neither of these initial impulses ever went away." So I'm not going to cover it. There's, if you listen to the podcast I did on the Founder Four Seasons, man, you get to the part where his son dies. I just lost, I can't, I couldn't read that. I had to pause and stop because you just think about the devastation that he had endured. So there's a part where the same thing happens to Phil Knight. I'm not

• 31:16David Senra?

  going to cover it. His son dies in a scuba diving accident when he's 30 years old. And I don't want to start crying on every podcast. I mean, I have kids, so immediately you put yourself in their shoes. But anyways, the part where he talks about, "I loved him and feared him and never went away," when Bowerman dies, Bowerman dies in 1999, and Phil talks about his reaction. And he talks about, like, he had to, just heaving and sobbing. And he talks about how athletes, you'll see them, like, they have to cover their head with towels. He went to the same way. He had a deep love and respect. And fear of Bill Bowerman. I would say outside of his family, Bill Bowerman's probably the most important person in his life ever. Sometimes the fear was less, but

• 32:01David Senra?

  this is why you also have to love this guy. Books take you on an emotional roller coaster, man. This, now I'm gonna laugh. Sometimes the fear was less, sometimes more. Sometimes, it went right down to my shoes, which he'd probably cobbled with his bare hands. Love and fear. So he talks about, I'm gonna skip over a little bit, talks about he's comparing and contrasting his love and fear of both his father and Bill Bowerman, and he's gonna tell us where Bowerman differs a little bit from his own father. Bowerman didn't give a damn for respectability. He possessed a prehistoric strain of maleness, a blend

• 32:39David Senra?

  of grit and integrity and calcified stubbornness that today is all but extinct. He was a war hero, too. Of course he was. The most famous track coach in America, Bowerman, never considered himself a track coach. He detested being called coach. He thought of track as a means to an end. He called him, this is so fascinating, because it's gonna relate to so many other ideas we've learned, right? He called himself a professor of competitive responses, and his job, as he saw it, and often described it, was to get you ready for struggles and competitions that lay ahead far beyond Oregon.

• 33:21David Senra?

  Okay, before I get back into Bowerman, there's a couple of things happening here that I want to tell you. First, this idea we've seen over and over again, how the people that are usually the best at what they do, think of themselves as teachers, Warren Buffett is a teacher, disguised as an investor. Sol Price, founder's number 107, who I would argue is the most, single most influential retailer to ever live, his ideas were used by the founders of Home Depot, founder of Costco. In fact, Jim Senegal wrote the introduction to that book. That's founder's number 107. Jeff Bezos, Sam Walton, Sam Walton says there's, he stole ideas from everybody. He's like, the person, I didn't, I, Sol Price was the person I stole the most ideas from. Anyways, he said something I never forgot.

• 34:04David Senra?

  He says, "You train an animal, you teach a person." And so he saw his job as running his company as just teaching his employees. And we're seeing Bowerman say the same thing, where he's like, "I'm not a coach, I'm a professor." And think about what Phil just said here, the idea that, hey, it's, my job is not just to have you run track. I'm getting you ready for the struggles and competitions that lay far ahead of Oregon. There's a quote in that book that I did on Founder's Number 153. It's called The Story of Oregon's, I think it's called Men of Oregon, The Story of Oregon's Legendary Coach Bill Bowerman and Nike's co-founder. But anyways, it's a quote from Phil Knight. And he says, "If you ask where Nike came from," it's going to relate exactly what he just said here.

• 34:49David Senra?

  "If you ask where Nike came from, I would say it came from a kid who had a world-class shock administered at age 17 by Bill Bowerman. Not simply the shock, but the way to respond. He attached such honor to not giving up, to doing my utmost. Most kids did not have that adjustment of standards, that introduction to true reality." All right, so back to this book. "Despite this lofty mission, or perhaps because of it, the facilities at Oregon were Spartan. Dank wooden walls, lockers that hadn't been painted in decades. The lockers had no door, just slats to separate your stuff from the next guys. We hung our clothes on rusty nails. We sometimes ran without socks. Complaining never crossed our minds.

• 35:34David Senra?

  We saw our coach as a general, to be obeyed quickly and blindly. In my mind, he was patent with a stopwatch. That is, when he wasn't a god. Like all ancient gods, Bowerman lived on a mountaintop. His majestic ranch sat at the peak, high above campus. And when reposing on his private Olympus, he could be vengeful as the gods. One story brought this fact pointedly home. There was a truck driver who often dared to disturb the peace of Bowerman Mountain. He took turns too fast and frequently knocked over Bowerman's mailbox. Bowerman scolded the trucker, threatened to punch him in the nose. But the trucker paid no heed. So Bowerman rigged the mailbox with explosives. Next time the trucker knocked it over, boom.

• 36:20David Senra?

  When the smoke cleared, the trucker found his truck in pieces. Its tires reduced to ribbons. He never again touched Bowerman's mailbox."

• 36:30David Senra?

  And so now he's driving up to Bowerman Mountain. And this is where they wind up becoming partners. He said, "I pulled up to Bowerman's stone fortress and marveled. Bowerman had built it with his bare hands. I wondered how on earth he managed all that backbreaking labor by himself. The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones." So there's that quote again. He says, next page, "I mulled over Bowerman's eccentric personality, which carried over to everything he did. He always went against the grain, always. For example, he was the first college coach in America to emphasize rest, to place as much value on recovery as on work.

• 37:12David Senra?

  But when he worked you, brother, he worked you. Bowerman's strategy for running the mile was simple: set a fast pace for the first two laps, run the third as hard as you can, then triple your speed on the fourth. There was a zen-like quality to this strategy because it was impossible. And yet it worked. Bowerman coached more sub-four-minute milers than anybody ever." Okay, so his partnership with Bowerman is secured. It's go time. He winds up getting a contract. The company he is reselling shoes for, they're called, the shoe is called Tiger. The company is called Anasuka.

• 37:54David Senra?

  And they give him exclusive, he's an exclusive distributor of Tiger shoes in the Western United States. And his dad, this is where if he listened to the advice that his dad's about to give him, it would cost him $50 billion. "He hadn't sent me to Oregon and Stanford to become a door-to-door shoe salesman," he said. "Jack-assing around, that's what he called it. Buck, he said, "How long do you think you're going to keep jack-assing around with these shoes? I shrugged. I don't know, Dad." And so while... He's having this conversation with his dad. His mom is overhearing, and it's not going well. Later in his life, he dedicates a building. Because at the point he's writing this book, he's giving away like 100 million a year.

• 38:39David Senra?

  He's giving away to colleges and all kinds of charities. But he dedicates a building, and the plaque at the entrance says, "Mothers are our first coaches." And I think this, what happens next, is part of the inspiration for that. "I shouldn't have been too surprised by my mother's next move, when my father accused me of jack-assing around. Casually, she opened her purse and took out $7. 'I'd like to purchase one pair, please,' she said, loud enough for him to hear." And so he talks about the fact that not only she buys them, but she wears them proudly. "It never failed to move me, the sight of her standing at the stove or the kitchen sink, cooking dinner or washing dishes in a pair of Japanese running shoes, size 6."

• 39:24David Senra?

  So now I want to tell you about his early sales strategy, selling them out of his trunk. So you go to where your customers are, and then he has this idea that belief is irresistible, which is fantastic. "My sales strategy was simple and I thought rather brilliant. After being rejected by a couple of sporting goods stores, they would say, 'The world does not need another track shoe,' I drove all over the Pacific Northwest to various track meets. Between races, I'd chat up the coaches, the runners, the fans, and show them my wares. The response was always the same: I couldn't write orders fast enough. Driving back to Portland, I'd puzzle over my sudden success at selling. I'd been unable to sell encyclopedias, and I despised it to boot. I'd been slightly better at selling mutual funds, but I felt dead inside.

• 40:09David Senra?

  So why was selling shoes so different? Because I realized it wasn't selling. I believed in running. I believed that if people got out and ran a few miles every day, the world would be a better place. And I believed these shoes were better to run in. People, sensing my belief, wanted some of that belief for themselves. 'Belief,' I decided. Belief is irresistible."

• 40:39David Senra?

  So he's excited, he's got a partner, he's got a bank, he's got a product. Then he gets a letter in the mail. And it's a letter from another guy on the East Coast saying, hey, he sent him this letter saying, hey, I have a contract with Onitsuka, stop selling the shoes. And he's like, what is going on here? And this is like the very first of many warning signs. If something's important to your business, you have to control it. That's a main lesson that we've learned by setting the history of entrepreneurship. He's at the whims of his manufacturer, right? Which is going to take him multiple years to get out from underneath this. And winds up, they try to screw him over, which winds up also, counterintuitively, being the best thing that ever happened to him. But he gets this letter, and he thinks everything is over.

• 41:20David Senra?

  And another main theme of this book is the idea of the entrepreneurial emotional rollercoaster. Mark Andreessen has a quote that I think just nails it. And at the time, he's running a startup with his partner Ben Horowitz. And he talks to Ben, he's like, you know what the best thing about startups is? And Ben's like, what? And this sentence is perfect. "The best thing about startups, you only ever experience two emotions, euphoria and terror." And I find that a lack of sleep enhances them both. So we're going to see constantly, as we go through this book, these alternating states of euphoria and terror, and nothing in between. So now we're in the terror part. Got this letter, now he's depressed. "I went into a deep funk. I became such a grouch, such poor company, that my girlfriend dumped me.

• 42:05David Senra?

  Each night, I'd sit with my family at dinner, moving my food around on my plate. Then I'd sit with my father staring at the TV. 'Buck,' my father said, 'you look like someone hit you in the back of the head with a two-by-four. Snap out of it.'" But I couldn't. So he takes the drastic step of flying back to Japan and trying to get some resolution of this. "The art of competing, I learned from track, was the art of forgetting. And I now reminded myself of that fact. You must forget your limits. You must forget your doubts, your pain, your past. You must forget that internal voice screaming, begging, not one more step."

• 42:44David Senra?

  And when it's not possible to forget it, you must negotiate with it. Yes, you raise some excellent points, but let's keep going anyway. See how he repeats that? Keep going, don't stop, over and over again. Whatever you do, don't stop. I told myself that I needed to summon that old skill quickly or lose. And I could not bear the thought of losing. So he's in the hotel in Japan the night before his meeting, and we see more terror. Now, there's gonna be terror followed immediately by euphoria. Now, pay attention to this part, because the same experience. It's interesting how perspective is so important. The same experience he's having, he can enjoy, because this is unresolved. Once this is resolved, he has that same experience, and it's just the most wonderful thing ever. Another fitful night.

• 43:27David Senra?

  I got up several times, went to the window. I watched the ships in the bay. Beautiful place, I thought. Too bad all the beauty is beyond me. The world is without beauty when you lose. And I was about to lose big time. So he winds up going the next day, meeting with the actual owner, Mr. Anasuka himself. He's a very passionate person, just like Phil is. Without preamble, he launched into a long, passionate monologue. Sometime ago, he said he had a vision, a wondrous glimpse of the future. Everyone in the world will wear athletic shoes all the time. He's saying this in 1960... What year are we in? 1964. Everyone in the world will wear athletic shoes all the time. They wind up having a connection.

• 44:10David Senra?

  He says, "You remind me of myself when I am young," he said softly. Then he gives the punchline of the meeting is, "Yes, all right, you can have all the Western states." Now, we see terror followed by euphoria. I ran all the way back to my hotel. Halfway there, I started skipping, then leaping through the air like a dancer. I stopped at a railing and looked out on the bay. None of its beauty was lost on me now. So he decides, before he leaves, he's gonna climb Mount Fuji. This is one of my favorite quotes in the book. He's reading the guidebook on Mount Fuji. There are many ways down the mountain, according to my guidebook, but only one way up. Life lesson in that, I thought, and another life lesson from the same experience.

• 44:52David Senra?

  Unlike the climb up, the climb down took no effort and no time.

• 44:59David Senra?

  Okay, so now I gotta... This is the third most important character in the book after Bowerman and Knight, and that is full-time employee number one. He's gonna start off as part-time employee number two, and then he's gonna be full-time employee number one, and that's Jeff Johnson. Probably the greatest first full-time employee you could ever have. He was absolutely obsessed with running. They knew each other. I think they were on the same track team. They wound up bumping into each other at a track meet when Phil's trying to sell his shoes, and eventually, he offers, he's like, "Hey, do you wanna come work for me?" So he says, he wrote right back, he wrote back right away, accepting the offer. "And then the letters didn't stop.

• 45:42David Senra?

  On the contrary, they increased, in length and number. At first, they were two pages, then four, then eight. At first, they came every few days. Then they came faster and faster, tumbling almost daily through the mail slot like a waterfall. And I wondered what in God's name I had done in hiring this guy. I liked his energy, of course, and it was hard to fault his enthusiasm, but I began to worry that he might have too much of each. With the 20th letter, or the 25th, I began to worry that the man might be unhinged. I wondered if he was ever gonna run out of things he urgently needed to tell me, or ask me. I wondered if he was ever gonna run out of stamps. Every time a thought crossed Johnson's mind, seemingly, he wrote it down and stuck it in an envelope.

• 46:26David Senra?

  He wrote to tell me how many tigers he'd sold that week. He's extremely good at what he does, though. He wrote to tell me how many tigers he'd sold that day. He wrote to tell me who warned tigers at which high school meet and what place they finished. He wrote to suggest that we open a new retail store in Los Angeles. He wrote to tell me that he was considering placing ads in running magazines, and what did I think? He wrote to inform me that he had placed those ads in running magazines, and their response was good. He wrote to ask me why I hadn't answered any of his previous letters. He wrote to plead for encouragement. He wrote to complain that I hadn't responded to the previous plea for encouragement. I always meant to answer Johnson's letters, but before I got around to it, there was always another one waiting." He wrote to say that he quit his job. He'd always hated it. He wrote again that now he understood himself and his destiny. Social work wasn't it.

• 47:11David Senra?

  He was put on this earth to fix people's problems. Excuse me, he wasn't put on this earth to fix people's problems. He preferred to focus on their feet, and this is the most important part of this entire section. That I'm reading to, "In his heart of hearts, Johnson believed that runners are God's chosen, that running done right in the correct spirit and with the proper form is a mystical exercise, no less than meditation or prayer. And thus, he felt called to help runners reach their nirvana." I'm going to pause in the middle of this. What did we learn from Jeff Bezos? You can be a missionary or a mercenary, and you can hire missionaries or mercenaries. Always pick the missionaries. Johnson is a missionary.

• 47:54David Senra?

  "I've been around runners all, much of my life, but this kind of dewy romanticism was something I'd never encountered before. Not even Bowerman was as pious about the sport as Blue Ribbon's part-time employee number two. Part-time employee number one is his sister, Phil Knight's sister, helping him with answering letters and admin work. In fact, in 1965, this was really surprising to me. In fact, in 1965, running wasn't even a sport. It wasn't popular. It wasn't unpopular. It just was. To go out for a three-mile run was something weirdos did, presumably to burn off manic energy. Running for pleasure, running for exercise, running for endorphins, running to live better and longer, these things were unheard of at the time. People often went out of their way to mock runners.

• 48:38David Senra?

  Drivers would, this is so crazy to me, drivers would slow down and honk their horns. "Get a horse!" they'd yell, throwing a beer or soda at the runner's head. Johnson had been drenched by many a Pepsi. He wanted to change all this. Above all, Johnson wanted to make a living doing it, which was next to impossible in 1965. In me, in Blue Ribbon, he thought he saw a way. I did everything I could to discourage Johnson from thinking like this. At every turn, I'd try to dampen his enthusiasm for me and my company. Besides not writing back, I never phoned, never visited, never invited him to Oregon. I also never missed an opportunity to tell him the unvarnished truth. Though our growth has been good, I owe the bank $11,000.

• 49:22David Senra?

  Cash flow is negative. He wrote back immediately, asking if he could work for me full-time. I shook my head. I tell the man, "Blue Ribbon is sinking like the Titanic," and he responds by begging for a berth in first class. So in the late, in the late summer of 1965, I wrote and accepted Johnson's offer to become the first full-time employee of Blue Ribbon. So let's go back to Phil Knight's main asset this time and the fact that you have Bowerman running all these experiments, completely obsessed with how people are shod. He's sending, Bowerman's taking notes on the tigers and sending them to Japan. And sometimes they don't respond. And so it says, "Bowerman wasn't me. He didn't take rejection at heart. Like Johnson, when his letters went unanswered, Bowerman simply

• 50:05David Senra?

  wrote more. Nor did he flag in his experiments. He continued to tear apart tigers, continued to use the young man on his track team as lab mice. Bowerman would note how the arches held up, how the soles gripped the cylinders, how the toes pinched in the instep. Then he'd air mail his notes and findings to Japan. He then handed these experimental shoes, so they would do some updates, and then he'd use them again, the updated product line. He would test it with his runners at Oregon. He then handed these experimental shoes out to all his runners, who used them to crush the competition. I once asked him how he fit everything into a 24-hour day: coaching, traveling, experimenting, raising a family.

• 50:48David Senra?

  He grunted, as if to say it's nothing. Then he told me, on top of everything else, he was also writing a book about jogging, he said gruffly." So Phil's like, who the hell's gonna read a book about jogging? Winds up selling over a million copies.

• 51:06David Senra?

  So the next thing I want to tell you is really interesting. This is on, he's, the influence of historical figures on his management style. "I look back now and wonder if I was truly being myself, or if I was emulating Bowerman, or my father, or both. Or was I adopting their man-of-few-words demeanor? Was I maybe modeling all the men I admired? At the time, I was reading everything I could get on my hands, I could get my hands on about generals, samurai, along with the biographies of my three main heroes: Churchill, Kennedy, and Tolstoy." I had no love of violence, but I was fascinated by leadership, or lack thereof, under extreme conditions. War is the most extreme of conditions. Business has its warlike parallels. Someone once said that business is war without the bullets, and I tended to agree.

• 51:51David Senra?

  I wasn't that unique. Throughout history, men have looked to the warrior for a model of Hemingway's cardinal virtue, which he's going to call pressurized grace, so grace under pressure. One lesson I took from all of my homeschooling about heroes was that they didn't say much. None was a blabbermouth, none micromanaged. Don't tell people how to do things, tell them what to do, and let them surprise you with their results. He's going to apply this to what his management of Johnson. So I didn't answer Johnson, and I didn't pester him. Having told him what to do, I hoped that he would surprise me, and he would definitely surprise him. One of the ideas, we just went through this, Cesar Ritz, August Sescaffier did what Johnson's doing here, and so did Izzy Sharp, founder of Four Seasons.

• 52:36David Senra?

  This is just the freshest on my mind, this idea that you constantly keep a catalog of customer behavior. This is what Johnson's doing. Each new customer got his own index card, and each index card contained the customer's personal information, shoe size, and shoe preferences. This database enabled Johnson to keep in touch with all of his customers at all times, and to keep them all feeling special. He sent them Christmas cards, he sent them birthday cards, he sent them notes of congratulations after they completed a big race or marathon. Whenever I got a letter from Johnson, I knew it was one of the dozens he'd carried down to the mailbox that day. He had hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of customer correspondence, all along the spectrum of humanity, from high school track stars to octogenarian weekend joggers. Many, upon pulling yet another Johnson letter from their mailboxes, must have thought the same thing I did.

• 53:20David Senra?

  Where does the guy find the time? Most wrote him back. They'd tell him about their lives, their troubles, their injuries, and Johnson would lavishly console, sympathize, and advise, especially about injuries. Few in the 1960s knew the first thing about running injuries or sports injuries in generals, and so Johnson's letters were often filled with information that was impossible to find anywhere else. Johnson then began aggregating customer feedback, using it to create new design sketches. One man, for instance, complained that Tigers didn't have enough cushion. He wanted to run the Boston Marathon, but didn't think the shoe would last for 26 miles. So this is the level of detail. Really, this is the main point of it, just like how, if you love what you do, you're going to care, not only are you going to care about it more than anybody else, it's hard for people to compete with you, but you're going to be obsessive about the details. So Johnson hired a local cobbler to graft rubber shoes from a pair of shower shoes

• 54:05David Senra?

  into a pair of Nike, or excuse me, Nike, into a pair of Tiger flats. Voila, Johnson's Frankenstein flat had space-age, full-length, midsole cushioning, which is today standard, but at the time didn't exist. Johnson's customer posted a personal best in Boston. So Johnson winds up convincing Phil to, to open the very first showroom. He runs, Johnson runs it in Santa Monica. And this section is going to remind me about a quote from Steve Jobs, which I'll get to in one second. "In all the world, there never been such a sanctuary for runners, a place that didn't just sell them shoes, but celebrated them and their shoes. Johnson, the aspiring cult leader of runners, finally had his church.

• 54:49David Senra?

  Services were Monday through Saturday, 9 to 6." There's a great speech, it's available on YouTube. It's Steve Jobs, right after he came back to Apple in 1997, and he's unveiling, here's the crazy ones. He's talking about how marketing is communication, how you need to, it's a busy world. We have limited time to tell people what, to tell people, like, what the important thing is, is about us and our company, right? And he, and he talks about the greatest marketing company of all time is Nike. Like, they don't even, their ads don't talk about their product. They celebrate great athletes. So he says Nike's ads don't talk about their products, they celebrate great athletes. We are going to do the same. And so in that ad, they celebrate great people, Einstein, Dylan, Martin Luther King, John

• 55:30David Senra?

  Lennon, Thomas Edison, Muhammad Ali, just on and on, there's a bunch of people in there. So I just love that idea that, that Steve noticed what Nike was doing, noted how effective it was, and then adopted that same idea for his company. I'm fast forwarding the story, his contract's up, he wants to see if they'll renew it again. He's constantly, throughout the whole book, he's constantly worried that he's building on top of sand, is the way I would think about it, because he does not have the control. That his contract would not be renewed and then so he has to fake it till he makes it. They're like, well, we don't know if we're going to give you the contract. Like we, the East Coast is really important. You don't have offices there. He's like, yes, I do. He didn't. So he winds up getting offices there, but basically he just faked it till he made it. I walked back into the hotel and spent a second night pacing. This

• 56:14David Senra?

  is more terror. First thing the next morning, I received a call summoning me back to Anasuka. They awarded me the exclusive distribution rights for the United States. He gave me a three-year contract. I tried to be nonchalant as I signed the papers and placed an order for 5,000 more shoes, which would cost $20,000 I didn't have. They said they'd ship them to my East Coast office, which I also didn't have. And I promised them I would wire them the exact address. I think important takeaway from the book is just how tenuous the early days of Nike was. And I would say probably the early days of any company. Five years into the company, he still has no money. The waitress brought the check and I told Woodall, so he's at a, there's another person that was a track star, winds up having a

• 56:59David Senra?

  freak accident, winds up getting paralyzed. He's in a wheelchair. He's going to be one of the first employees of Nike, one of the most important employees of Nike. So they're having like lunch or something, or maybe breakfast. And this is like their job interview. The check came and I told Woodall gladly that lunch was on me. I pulled out my wallet and found it was empty. I asked Blue Ribbons' full-time employee number four if he could float me just till payday. So around this time, Bowerman is doing all kinds of innovations in shoes, some of which are patentable. That comes later. But they wind up wanting to name a shoe, the Aztec. And because they tried to name the shoe, Adidas has something

• 57:38David Senra?

  called like the Aztec of Gold. So Adidas sues them. And this is, you know, Adidas is one of the main motivating factors in Phil Knight's drive. He hated the fact that they were bigger and better and could kick them around. But I just want to read the story because Bowerman's hilarious. I was aggravated. I drove up to the mountain to Bowerman's house to talk it over. We sat on the porch looking down at the river. He took off his ball cap, put it on again, rubbed his face. "Who was that guy that kicked the shit out of the Aztecs?" he asked. "Cortez," I said. He grunted. "Okay, let's call the shoe Cortez." I was developing an unhealthy contempt for Adidas, or maybe it was healthy, that one German company had dominated the shoe market for a couple of decades

• 58:21David Senra?

  and they possessed all the arrogance of unchallenged dominance. So I actually covered... I'm Founder's Number 109. It's a book called Sneaker Wars. It's about the enemy brothers. So the one brother founded Adidas, the other brother founded Puma, and they hated each other. I didn't really like the brother that founded Puma, but I thought the founder of Adidas, Adi Dassler, he's an obsessive, he's a genius, he is worth time studying, for sure. And part of that infighting caused, the family infighting, that distracted Adidas and actually opened the lane for Phil Knight and Nike to occupy, which was a lot less than there, too. So if you're interested, the book's interesting, but you can also listen to the podcast. Of course, it's possible that they weren't arrogant at all and that to motivate myself, I needed to see them as a monster. In any event, I despised them.

• 59:06David Senra?

  I was tired of looking up every day and seeing them far, far ahead. I couldn't bear the thought that it was my fate to do so forever. Being legally checked by them irritated me to no end. It also drove me hard. So around this time, they wound up getting their first office. He had been running things out of his parents' house, then he got an apartment and ran things out of there. And then he's like, "Okay, now we're gonna have our first office." I love reading descriptions of companies' first offices. "It wasn't much, a plain old workspace with high ceilings and high windows, several of which were broken, meaning the room was a constant brisk 50 degrees. Right next door was a tavern, the pink bucket, and every day at 4:00 PM promptly, the jukebox would kick in.

• 59:50David Senra?

  The walls were so thin, you could hear the first record drop and feel every thumping note thereafter. But the rent was cheap. We couldn't afford to fix the broken glass in the windows, so on really cold days, we just wore sweaters."

• 1:00:09David Senra?

  And then I love what he says here because he realizes he is a crazy person. As I gradually moved my inventory out of my apartment into my new office, the thought crossed my mind that it might make more sense just to give up the apartment altogether, just move into the office, since I'd basically be living there anyway. When I wasn't at Price Waterhouse, this is where he's an accountant, making the rent, I'd be at Blue Ribbon and vice versa. I could shower at the gym. But I told myself that living in your office is the act of a crazy person. And then I got a letter from Johnson, saying that he was living in his new office. Okay, so let me give you, there's a lot happening on this page. Let me give you an update to what his schedule is like. This is now five years into the company. I was putting in six days a week at Price Waterhouse,

• 1:00:53David Senra?

  spending early mornings and late nights and all weekends and vacations at Blue Ribbon. No friends, no exercise, no social life, and wholly content. My life was out of balance, sure, but I didn't care. In fact, I wanted even more imbalance. Or a different kind of imbalance. I wanted to dedicate every minute of every day to Blue Ribbon. I'd never been, okay, so, I'm gonna read the whole section. I'll finish reading it, and then I'll tell you my interpretation. I'd never, I'd never been a multitasker, and I didn't see any reason to start now. I wanted to be present, always. I wanted to focus constantly on the one task that really mattered. If my life was to be all work and no play, I wanted my work to be play.

• 1:01:36David Senra?

  I wanted to quit Price Waterhouse. Not that I hated it, it just wasn't me. I wanted what everyone wants, to be me, full-time. But it wasn't possible. Blue Ribbon simply couldn't support me. Though the company was on track to double sales for a fifth straight year, it still couldn't justify a salary for its co-founder. So I decided to compromise. Find a different day job, one that would pay my bills but require fewer hours, leaving me more time to my passion. This is when he decides to become, instead of being an accountant, to teach accounting at, I think, Portland State University. So before I move on to the next page, I'll just read my notes to you. So many lessons in just a few paragraphs. Find what you love to do, and no one can keep up.

• 1:02:21David Senra?

  And I always think of the way to find that is, this is a quote from Naval Ravikant. And he says, "What feels like play to you, but looks like work to others." Another note, no multitasking, focus on the most important task. And the end goal should be to be yourself full time, which I love that sentence. I wanted what everyone wants to be me full time. So he tells his dad this decision and we're going to see, you know, he's difference between inner scorecard and outer scorecard. He stared. I, I'm sorry, this is his boss first. His boss and his dad react the same way. So he tells him, I'm quitting. He stared. I'd gone off script, way off. Why the hell would you do something like that? I then told my father.

• 1:03:06David Senra?

  He was pretty pissed. I was still jackass-ing around with shoes, he said. Teaching at Portland State was downright disrespectful. What am I going to tell my friends? So, outer scorecard. This is, this is how Phil thought about this. I was following a path that felt like my path. And though I wasn't sure where it would lead, I was ready to find out. Inner scorecard. And he's constantly comparing and contrasting the way he felt with the way outsiders did. To outsiders, it, this, nothing he's doing is making sense. But his, this company was his soul. I confess that Blue Ribbon was tenuous. The whole thing might go bust any day, but I still couldn't see myself doing anything else.

• 1:03:51David Senra?

  My little shoe company was a living, breathing thing, which I had created from nothing. I breathed life into it, nurtured it through illness, brought it back several times from the dead, and now I wanted, needed, to see it stand on its own feet and go out into the world. I told her, he's on a date, talking about this. I told her flat out, I didn't want to work for someone else. I wanted to build something that was my own, something I could point to and say, I made that. It was the only way I saw to make life meaningful.

• 1:04:25David Senra?

  Skipping ahead, so I was wrong. I think I said it took five years before he could work on it full-time. Seven years. It was seven years. Rising sales enabled, this is 1969, and rising sales enabled me to hire more and more reps. Most were ex-runners and eccentrics, as only ex-runners can be. But when it came to selling, they were all business. This is also important, too, because all the people he's hiring, he's not paying a salary. It's all commissioned salesmen. Because they were, this is not very different. It made me think of, we did that book on Bill Gates, The Early Days of Microsoft. You know, a lot of people would be surprised. The first 30 employees of Microsoft, 28 programmers, one secretary, and Bill. And Bill spent almost all his time on sales. So it's almost like we have Phil doing everything here, and then he's got a bunch of people selling the product. Because they were inspired by what they were trying to do, and because they worked solely

• 1:05:08David Senra?

  in commission, they were burning up the roads, hitting every high school and college track meet, track meet, within a thousand mile radius. And their extraordinary efforts were boosting our numbers even more. I decided that Blue Ribbon was now doing well enough to justify a salary for its founder. Right before my 31st birthday, I made the bold move, so he quits his teaching job, and I went full-time at my company. And just pause and think about that. How many people would have given up before that? He's spending every free minute, he's working full-time, every free minute he has on his business for seven years before he can work on it full-time. That's amazing and inspiring. All right, let's go to insight into his personality. He's a loner and an introvert that's obsessed with

• 1:05:53David Senra?

  making his company survive, and he's super competitive. So he's talking about, he got married, his wife's understanding who he is. She was learning that I spent a fair portion of each day lost in my own thoughts, tumbling down mental wormholes, trying to solve some problem or construct some plan. I often didn't hear what she said, and if I did hear, I didn't remember it later, minutes later. She was learning that I was absent-minded, that I would drive to the grocery store and come home empty-handed without the one item she asked me to buy, because all the way there and all the way back, I'd been puzzling over the latest bank crisis, or the most recent shipping delay. She was learning that I didn't like to lose at anything, that losing for me was a special form of agony. I was determined to win.

• 1:06:37David Senra?

  And around this time, even though he just started working there full-time, I'm not skipping over anything. He is riddled with self-doubt. And again, oscillating back between euphoria and terror. And this is gonna work. Oh, my God, this is the stupidest thing ever. Oh, my God, this is the best idea ever. No, I'm really crazy. It's this entrepreneurial emotional roller coaster that is present in all these biographies. They all have periods of this intense, intense self-doubt. Was it even feasible to run a startup company while starting a family? Should I go back to accounting or teaching or something more stable? Leaning back every night in my recliner, I would stare at the ceiling. I tried to settle myself. I told myself, "Life is growth.

• 1:07:22David Senra?

  You grow or you die." And so why is he going crazy at this particular moment? Because the bank is about to cut him off. He has to put up his house as collateral. And also, interesting point that I think is really instructive on human nature is the things that we work hardest for, things that we desire the most, the things that we're willing to sacrifice the most for, are also the things that we get the most joy from. And this is just great writing. This is what I mentioned earlier about documenting your life, that you'll think you'll remember everything, but you won't. So he says, and fantastic, fantastic writing here. "I struggle to remember. I close my eyes and think back, but so many precious moments from those nights are gone forever.

• 1:08:03David Senra?

  Numberless conversations, breathless laughing fits, declarations, revelations, confidences, they've all fallen into the sofa cushions of time. I remember only that we always sat up half the night, cataloging the past, mapping out the future. I remember that we took turns describing what our little company was and what it might be and what it must never be. How I wish, on just one of those nights, I'd had a tape recorder or kept a journal."

• 1:08:35David Senra?

  So now we go back to another thing that just keeps repeating over and over again. Every few years, his contract's up. He's got to figure out, okay, am I going to get the contract? Am I not? Like, I've built up this entire company, but I'm still selling other people's products. And so this is euphoria at a contract renewal, followed by terror. "I was relieved to have a new contract, but I returned to Oregon feeling troubled, anxious, more so at any time in the last eight years. Sure, my briefcase had held a grantee that Anesuka would supply me with shoes for the next three years, but why were they refusing to extend beyond three? I was skeptical, but there was nothing I could do. I was at their mercy. I had no leverage."

• 1:09:16David Senra?

  And so getting fired, which is essentially what they do, what happens, they're trying to cancel his contract and sign contracts with other retailers, winds up being, and he doesn't notice this time, forces him to go all in on Nike, which is one of the best things that ever happened to him. Reminds me of the famous Steve Jobs commencement address. He says, "I didn't see it then, but it turned out getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me." Phil Knight and Steve Jobs are going to have the same experience, or a similar experience, since I guess Phil didn't get fired from the company he founded. The entire history, early history of Nike, he never has enough money.

• 1:09:56David Senra?

  His MO is, "Any money we have, buy more shoes, because the demand for shoes is always larger than the supply we have." So we're not, and the banks hated this. There's no venture capital at the time for companies like his. And so they're constantly saying, "No, leave the cash in the bank account." He's like, "I'm not leaving the cash in the bank account." And so he would lose banks and he got cut off several times. So at this point, banks are not lending him any money. Investors are not interested. And so he tries to do a small IPO, and no one buys. And so now we have more mind games. Ultimately, we withdrew the offering. It was humiliation, and in its wake, I had many heated conversations with myself. I blame the shaky economy. I blame Vietnam. But first and foremost, I blame myself. I had overvalued Blue Ribbon.

• 1:10:39David Senra?

  I'd overvalued my life's work. More than once, over my first cup of coffee in the morning, or maybe while I was trying to fall asleep at night, I'd tell myself, "This is the mind games. This is so important." Maybe I'm a fool. Maybe this whole damn shoe thing is a fool's errand. Maybe, I thought. Maybe.

• 1:11:00David Senra?

  So once I scrounged some money together, but here, more mind games. Another sigh of relief, followed by a tightening in the chest. What would I do the next time? And the next. I needed cash. I spent most of every day thinking about liquidity, talking about liquidity, looking to the heavens and pleading for liquidity. And this is where he feels is one of his lowest moments. The, one of his fourth employee, Woodall, comes in, knows his boss is just distraught, worried that he's going to go out of business. And again, this is something that happens, I know I'm repeating myself, but it's so important. If you read the book, you'll know. Dozens, hundreds of times, he's just convinced that it's all going to end.

• 1:11:44David Senra?

  And he's just rattled with nerves and sick and just, there is a lot of struggle in building the foundation of Nike. With nowhere else to turn, with no other options, I was sitting at my desk one day staring out the window. Woodall came in. He said that his parents wanted to loan me $5,000 and they wouldn't take no for an answer. He said I should drive to his house and collect the check from his folks. Days later, I did something beyond imagining, something I didn't think myself capable of doing. I drove to Woodall's house and asked for the check. I knew the Woodalls weren't well off. I knew that with their son's medical bills, they were scuffling about more than I was. This $5,000 was their life savings. I knew that, but I was wrong.

• 1:12:29David Senra?

  His parents had a little bit more and they asked if I needed that too. And I said, yes. And they gave me their last $3,000, draining their savings down to zero. How I wished I could put that check in my desk drawer and not cash it, but I couldn't. I wouldn't. On the way out the door, I stopped and I asked them, "Why are you doing this?" "Because," Woodall's mother said, "if you can't trust the company your son is working for, then who can you trust?" "Keep going," I told myself. "Don't stop."

• 1:13:07David Senra?

  So he's embarrassed, he's devastated, but he's got to do everything he can for his company to survive. There's a happy ending in that story, that $8,000 on the day of the IPO makes the Woodhills $1.6 million. So his distributor comes and meets him in Oregon, winds up lecturing about how bad his sales are, which isn't true, they're growing rapidly, but he's using it as an excuse to break the contract and to go further. Distributors, he gets up and goes to the bathroom, the distributor, and Phil Knight does something he never thought he would do, he steals documents out of his briefcase. So he says, "I had the strangest thought. I had volunteered with the Boy Scouts, and now I was stealing documents from another man's briefcase. I was headed down a dark path, no telling where it might lead."

• 1:13:50David Senra?

  So they wind up, the guy leaves, him and Woodhull conference together, and they see the evidence in black and white. So he said, "I held up the folder, I stole this from his briefcase." "You did what?" Woodhull said. "He started to act appalled, but then he was just as curious as I was about the folder's contents. Together, we opened it and laid it on the desk and found that it contained a list of 18 athletic shoe distributors across the United States, and a schedule of appointments with half of them." So there it was, in black and white. "I was outraged, of course, but mostly hurt. For seven years, we devoted ourselves to Tiger Shoes. We introduced them to America. We reinvented the line. Bowerman and Johnson had shown them how to make a better shoe, and their designs were

• 1:14:34David Senra?

  now foundational, setting sales records, changing the face of the industry, and this is how we were being repaid." And so a lot of things are happening at the same time. So his wholesaler's trying to replace him, his bank has just terminated his account, and he's now back to, "What am I going to do now?" The company, my company, born from nothing, and now finishing 1971 with sales of $1.3 million, was on life support. So at this point, there's a lot of these companies that are popping up on the west coast of the United States are called Japanese trading companies, and they're willing to extend credit. They understand the manufacturing base of Japan, they understand his sales.

• 1:15:19David Senra?

  So this is, they wind up saving his ass. And without this Japanese trading company, there would be no Nike. And he talks about that later on in the book as well. So before this falling out with his manufacturer, he decides that they're going around and trying to make their own shoe, which this is what they're eventually going to call Nike. And I just want to bring to your attention that when they picked the name, I thought it was fascinating. I told you a few weeks ago, Four Seasons was almost called Thunderbird, I think. So Nike was almost called Falcon, and then our Dimension Six, terrible names. "Waddle, waddle into my office. Time's up," he said. I rubbed my eyes. "I know. What's it going to be?" "I don't know." "There is one more suggestion." "From who?" Johnson

• 1:16:01David Senra?

  phoned first thing this morning, of course, it's Johnson, and apparently a new name came to him in a dream last night. He says he sat up right in bed in the middle of the night and saw the name before him. "What is it?" "Nike." "Huh? Nike." "I wrote it on a yellow legal pad. The Greek goddess of victory." "I like that Nike was the goddess of victory. What's more important, I thought, than victory?" "I might have heard Churchill's voice." "You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word. It is victory." So he chooses Nike, but does it reluctantly. He's like, "All right, maybe..." And his final thought is like, "Maybe it'll grow on me." Which, I don't know, I find that

• 1:16:44David Senra?

  very, very fascinating. So they need money. They're getting some money. They have a new bank. There's a little bit of credit there. They have the Japanese trading company that are sitting second on their loans, so essentially endorsing the loans for them, which is really helpful, and loading the money. And so they try to do this thing called a debenture.

• 1:17:03David Senra?

  Really, it's good that they're raising a little bit of money here because he fights wanting to he mentions it maybe a dozen times in the book that he didn't want IPO, that he had IPO. But this is really on the fact that if you can find true friendship, it's one of life's greatest joys. We announced in June 1971 that Blue Ribbon would be offering 200,000 shares of the ventures at $1 per, and this time the shares sold fast. One of the first to buy was my friend Kale, who didn't hesitate to cut a check for $10,000. Buck, he said, "I was there at the start, and I'll be there at the bitter end." And this is a little bit about where the name of the book comes from and a reminder that passion can make anything interesting. Shoe dogs were people who devoted themselves wholly to the making, selling, buying, or designing of shoes.

• 1:17:47David Senra?

  Lifers use the phrase cheerfully to describe other lifers, men and women who had toiled so long and so hard in the shoe trade that they thought and talked about nothing else. It was an all-consuming mania, a recognizable psychological disorder to care so much about insoles and outsoles, linings and welts, rivets and vamps. But I understood. The average person takes 7,500 steps a day, 274 million steps over the course of a long life, the equivalent of six times around the globe. Shoe dogs, it seemed to me, simply wanted to be part of that journey. Shoes were their way of connecting with humanity. What better way of connecting, shoe dogs thought, than by refining the hinge

• 1:18:32David Senra?

  that joins each person to the world's surface? And again, that's just fantastic writing. And in more fantastic writing describing all of the Bowerman is doing countless different experiments. He invents the waffle trainers, starts getting all these patents. And this is a description of how important he was to Nike. "I look back over the decades and see him toiling in his workshop, Mrs. Bowerman carefully helping, and I get goosebumps. He was Edison in Menlo Park, Da Vinci in Florence, Tesla in Wardencliff, divinely inspired. I wonder if he knew, if he had any clue, that he was the Daedalus of sneakers, and he was making history, remaking an industry, transforming the way athletes would run and stop and jump for generations.

• 1:19:17David Senra?

  I wonder if he could conceive in that moment all that he'd done and all that would follow." I know I couldn't. And that idea that he says the Daedalus of sneakers, I had to look that up. In Greek mythology, Daedalus was a skillful architect and craftsman, seen as a symbol of wisdom, knowledge, and power. And so they wind up getting cut off by their manufacturer. They sue their manufacturer in the United States, the manufacturer sues them in Japan. And really, this is, this might be my favorite part of the book. Might be. It's the birth of Nike. And what he does here is just, it's just perfect. So he's calling an all-hands meeting and he says, "They were all about, there were about 30 people there. I expected to be nervous.

• 1:20:01David Senra?

  They expected me to be nervous. On any different day, under any other circumstances, I would have been. For some reason, however, I felt weirdly at peace. I laid out the situation we faced. We've come, folks, to a crossroads. Yesterday, our main supplier cut us off. I let that sink in. I watched everyone's jaw drop. We're completely on our own. We're set adrift. We have this new line, Nike, and that's all we've got. I looked down at the table. Everyone was sinking, slumping. I looked at Johnson. He was staring at the papers before him. And there was something in his face, some quality I had never seen there before. Surrender.

• 1:20:46David Senra?

  Like everyone else in the room, he was giving up. The nation's economy was in the tank. Our recession was underway. Gas lines, political gridlock, rising unemployment, Nixon being Nixon, Vietnam. It seemed like the end times. Everyone in the room had already been worrying about how they were going to make rent, pay their light bill, and now this. I cleared my throat. So in other words, what I'm trying to say is we've got them right where we want them.

• 1:21:17David Senra?

  Johnson lifted his eyes. Everyone around the table lifted their eyes. They sat up straighter. This is the moment we've been waiting for. Our moment. No more selling someone else's brand. No one working for someone else. They've been holding us back for years. Their late deliveries, their mixed up orders, their refusal to hear and implement our design ideas. Who among us isn't sick of dealing with all that? It's time we faced facts. If we're gonna succeed or fail, we should do it on our own terms, with our own ideas, our own brand. We posted 2 million in sales last year, none of which had anything to do with the manufacturer. That number was a testament to our own ingenuity and hard work. Let's not look at this as a crisis.

• 1:22:01David Senra?

  Let's look at this as our liberation, our Independence Day. Yes, it's going to be tough. I won't lie to you. We're definitely going to war. But we know the terrain, and that's one reason I feel in my heart, this is a war we can win. And if we win it, when we win it, I see great things for us on the other side of victory. We're still alive, people. We are still alive. So they started Nike. One of the first athletes they actually endorsed is this guy named Pre. He was, held all the records. He winds up dying in a car accident when he's 24 years old. And at the time of his death, he held like almost every single record in his sport.

• 1:22:45David Senra?

  And he's watching him run, and he's drawing lessons from a race that he's gonna apply to his own company. So he says, "No matter the sport, no matter the human endeavor, total effort will win people's hearts." Pre reached down. He found another level. We saw him do it. He opened up a yard lead, then two, and then five. I saw the person in second grimace. He knew that he could not, would not catch Pre. I told myself, don't forget this. Do not forget. I told myself there was much to be learned from such a display of passion, whether you were running a mile or a company. I knew that race was gonna be a part of me, would forever be a part of me.

• 1:23:29David Senra?

  In our coming battles, we would be like Pre. We'd compete as if our lives depended on it. Because they did.

• 1:23:39David Senra?

  And that reminded me of this line from this random YouTube video that I heard one time that I never forgot. And I don't even know who the speaker is, but he says, "Find out what it is you want and go after it as if your life depends on it." Why? Because it does. And we're seeing that manifested in Pre and in Phil Knight here. There's this huge lawsuit. It could bankrupt the company, obviously, if they find out that he violated the contract, winds up winning the lawsuit, but we're not there yet. The lawsuit is killing him, but at the same time, it's bringing him closer to his father. So he says, "By the end of 1973, I thought it was very possible I'd have two kids and no job." Remember, I know I've said this a lot, I'm sorry, but I have to repeat that because he repeats it over and over again in the book. "It was a decade and a half of doubt.

• 1:24:23David Senra?

  The final act of every evening was my phone call to my father. In his retirement, he had loads of time to research old cases, to spend on arguments that we might be useful. His involvement, plus his sense of fair play, plus his bedrock belief in the rightness of Blue Ribbon's cause was restorative. He'd tell me what he found in the law books. I would take careful notes. Before signing off, he'd always say that he liked our chances. We're gonna win, Buck." That magical pronoun, "we," he'd always use it, and it would always make me feel better. "It is possible that we were never closer, maybe because our relationship had been reduced to its primal essence. He was my dad. I was his son. And I was in the fight of my life."

• 1:25:07David Senra?

  And so even while this lawsuit's going on, he's still gotta run a company that is always short on cash. Nike's gonna be short on cash until it IPOs. And this is something that's gonna be familiar to any entrepreneur. His mood is determined by sales. I was fixated on sales. Every day, I would get a Telex from our warehouses with a pair count, which is, the pair count is the exact number of pairs shipped that day. And for their purposes, a shipped pair was a sold pair, okay? I ran over my point here. A pair shipped was a pair sold. So the daily pair count determined my mood, my digestion, my blood pressure, because it largely determined the fate of Blue Ribbon. If we sell all the shoes in our most recent order, and we quickly convert that product into cash, excuse me, if we

• 1:25:49David Senra?

  did not sell all of the shoes in our most recent order, and quickly convert that product into cash, we'd be in big trouble. Our problems could tip us into bankruptcy. We were leveraged to the hilt. And like most people who live from paycheck to paycheck, we were walking on the edge of a precipice. When a shipment of shoes was late, our pair count plummeted. When our pair count plummeted, we weren't able to generate enough revenue to repay the bank and the trading company on time. When we couldn't repay them on time, we couldn't borrow more. When we couldn't borrow more, we were late placing our next order. Round and round and round it went. Our sales for 1973 rose to 50%, to 4.8 million, a number that staggered me the first time I saw it on a piece of paper.

• 1:26:32David Senra?

  Wasn't it only yesterday that we had done $8,000? And that makes it even worse is that his sales are growing by 50% every year for like the first seven or eight years. And he's still worried and still on the precipice of going bankrupt. He does not have enough money. Late at night, I'd sit with Penny, this is his wife, and she'd ask me, what are we going to do if Blue Ribbon went under? What was the plan? And for the umpteenth time, I'd reassure her with optimistic words that I didn't wholly believe.

• 1:27:01David Senra?

  Then he comes up with, this is actually, he comes up with an idea that winds up helping a lot. And it accounts for, I think right before the IPO, like 80% of their sales. Then that fall, I had an idea. Why not go to all of our biggest retailers and tell them that if they signed commitments, if they'd give us large and non-refundable orders six months in advance, we'd give them hefty discounts up to 7%. So they went to people like Nordstrom, Athlete's Foot, all kinds of other people. I was persuasive because I was desperate. A few retailers signed on. The program started to gain traction. And then, like I said, many years later, I think it was like something, 80% of their sales were done at this discounted rate, which gave them a lot more money upfront.

• 1:27:47David Senra?

  So they wind up winning the case. They settle out. The judge, I think it's like a $400,000. I want to say it's $400,000 judgment. His attorney gets half of that. So he's talking to his attorney. He says, I asked him what he was going to do with all that loot. I forget what he said. With ours, Blue Ribbon, and they're still called Blue Ribbon. They don't, I don't think they renamed themselves until right before the IPO. But they're only selling Nike at this time. With ours, Blue Ribbon would simply leverage the bank into greater borrowing. More shoes on the water. And that is Phil Knight in one paragraph. This entire book. Sell more shoes. That's his MO. He does not, he's constantly reinvesting every single dollar he has into getting more shoes and then selling them.

• 1:28:30David Senra?

  So he winds up recruiting one of, he liked one of the attorneys that worked on this case so much, he recruited him to be the first in-house counsel. And he's talking to them about being one of us. And really, his description, his pitch to recruit this guy is really tells us how he views himself in Nike, which is why I'm reading it to you. "You're one of us," I said. "One of us." He knew what those words meant. "We were the kind of people who simply couldn't put up with corporate nonsense. We were the kind of people who wanted our work to be play, but meaningful play. We were trying to slay Goliath. At heart, he was an utter David." So he's talking about the guy he's recruiting as a David. "So were we. We were trying to create a brand, I said, but also a culture.

• 1:29:14David Senra?

  We were fighting against conformity, against boringness, against drudgery. More than a product, we were trying to sell an idea, a spirit. I don't know if I ever fully understand who we, if I ever fully understood who we were and what we were doing until I heard myself saying it all that day." I just want to read one paragraph to you. He's going to look for his own factories. And he's with his, one of his true friends, this guy named Kale, the guy that put up the $10,000. And they're trying to rent a car. And he says, "The clerk at the rental car company declined my credit card. Talk about deadbeat. I couldn't bring myself to look Kale in the eye. Here we were, a dozen years out of Stanford, and while he was an eminently successful businessman,

• 1:29:57David Senra?

  I was still struggling to keep my head above water. He had known I was struggling, but now he knew exactly how much." So think about that. He is, he's 10 years into his business. It's still tenuous. He's still running out of money all the time. He's 36 years old. Phil Knight is 36 years old when this is happening. And that's important for two reasons. One, it's just another illustration that most people would have given up by now. And two, you still have time. You still have time. And there's two, a few pages later, there's two, there's two stories, each on the next page next to each other. And really, the summaries, we're in over our heads, so let's go faster. They're, they're trying to run their own factory. What do I know about running a factory? I'd been completely over my head. I laughed and laughed.

• 1:30:42David Senra?

  Over your head, I said. Over your head? We're all in over our heads. Way over. And so he's talking to Johnson, and Johnson agrees to run the factory. And he says he knew, he said he knew that when it came to Blue Ribbon, each of us were willing to do whatever was necessary to win. And if whatever was necessary fell out of our expertise, he was willing to try and willing to learn. And then, so that's the we're in over our heads part. This is the let's go faster part. The bank was always pressing us to slow down. We responded in 1974 by mashing the accelerator. We were on pace for $8 million in sales, and nothing, but nothing, was going to stop us from hitting that number. In defiance of the bank, we made deals with more stores and opened several more stores

• 1:31:22David Senra?

  of our own and continued to sign celebrity athlete endorsers we couldn't afford. And do you remember how he kept several examples of the book where he's like, what's my purpose? What am I doing? Constantly wondering about his life. He applies that same line of questioning and thinking and philosophizing to the company. So he's like, what is our purpose? I could go back to asking the deep question. What are we trying to build here? What kind of company do we want to be? Like most companies, we had role models. Sony, for instance. Sony was the apple of its day. Profitable, innovative, efficient, and it treated its workers well. This is interesting because Akio Morita, I read his autobiography, Made in Japan, it's Founder's Number 102. But not only did he influence Phil Knight, but he influenced Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos.

• 1:32:05David Senra?

  Both of them talk about what they learned from Akio Morita and Sony. I would search my mind and heart, but the only thing I could come up with was this word, winning. It wasn't much, but it was far, far better than the alternative. Whatever happened, I just didn't want to lose. Losing was death. Blue Ribbon was my third child. I simply couldn't bear the idea of it dying. It has to live, I told myself. It just has to. That's all I know.

• 1:32:33David Senra?

  And so we're getting closer to the IPO. But I want to go back to this idea that it was the hardest thing I ever did. And yet it was the best time of my life. So they have these conferences where like the thing is like Phil Knight and a lot of the people that he started company with, they go off and try to strategize, right? So it says, I can see myself so clearly. Remember, he's remembering this 40 years after it happened. I can see myself so clearly at the head of a conference table, shouting, being shouted at, laughing until my voice was gone. The problems confronting us were grave, complex, seemingly insurmountable, made more so by the fact that we were separated from each other by 3,000 miles at a time when communication wasn't easy or instant. And yet we were always laughing.

• 1:33:15David Senra?

  Sometimes I'd look around the table and feel overcome by emotion, camaraderie, loyalty, gratitude, even love, surely love. But I also remember feeling shocked that these were the men I had assembled. These were the founding fathers of a multi-billion dollar company that sold athletic shoes, a paralyzed guy, two morbidly obese guys, and a chain smoking guy. And yet, in the midst of these intense discussions, in the middle of one of the most trying years in the company's history, those meetings were nothing but a joy. Of all the hours spent, not one minute felt like work. It was us against the world, and we felt damn sorry for the world.

• 1:33:59David Senra?

  And a few pages later, he brings up something that I think is, we learned from Danny Meyer. I did his autobiography back in the, somewhere in the 20s. But he learned from Stanley Marcus, Neiman Marcus. And he talks about businesses as just problems. And then I brought that, I took that idea, that thought and combined it with, if you think that business is just problems, then that means companies, at least successful ones, then companies are just effective problem solving machines. And I think that's a great way to think about it. Phil says, "The problems are never going to stop, I realize. There is no finish line." So he talks about one of their first campaigns, and this is exactly what Steve was talking about, the fact that they don't mention their products in their ads. They talk about great athletics, right, or athletes.

• 1:34:42David Senra?

  They managed to dream up a tagline that perfectly captured Nike's philosophy. His ad showed a single runner on a lonely country road. The copy read, "Beating the competition is relatively easy. Beating yourself is a never ending commitment." That's fantastic. Beating the competition is relatively easy. Beating yourself is a never-ending commitment. Everyone around me thought the ad was bold and fresh. It didn't focus on the product, but on the spirit behind the product.

• 1:35:12David Senra?

  So there's one line that made me think. He says, well, let me read it to you and I'll tell you what it made me think of. Obsessives were the only ones for the job, the only ones for me. So Phil hides his intelligence, but he's definitely super smart. But I think more important than his intelligence is the fact that he is super, super determined. And I was listening to Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator, talk one time. And the video is on YouTube. I think it's called Y Combinator Podcast, A Conversation with Paul Graham, if I'm not mistaken. But he was asked the question, like, what is more important in overall success, like, of a company for the founders? More important to be determined or smart? And his answer to this was fascinating.

• 1:35:55David Senra?

  It turns out it's much more important to be determined than smart. If you imagine this hypothetical person that is 100 out of 100 for smart and 100 out of 100 for determination, and then you start taking away determination, it doesn't take very long until you have this ineffectual but brilliant person. Whereas if you take someone who is super determined and you take away smartness, eventually you get to a guy who owns a lot of tax medallions or a trash hauling business, but he's still rich. And super determined is exactly how I would describe Phil Knight. And we're edging closer to the IPO, which is the end of the book, and this is just perfect. I redefined winning, expanded it beyond my original definition of not losing, of merely staying alive.

• 1:36:40David Senra?

  That was no longer enough to sustain me or my company. We wanted, as all great businesses do, to create, to contribute, and we dared to say so aloud. When you make something, when you improve something, when you deliver something, when you add some new thing or service to the lives of strangers, making them happier or healthier or safer or better, and when you do it all crisply and efficiently, smartly, the way everything should be done but so seldom is, you're participating more fully in the whole grand human drama. More than simply alive, you're helping others to live more fully. And if that's business, all right, call me a businessman. Maybe it'll grow on me.

• 1:37:26David Senra?

  So they realize there's no more putting off the IPO, that we're always going to be a constant precarious financial position. Interesting enough, which always blows my mind, I knew this, I learned this when I read the book the first time, but being reminded of it always blows my mind, Apple and Nike IPO'd on the same week. How crazy is that? But I want to talk about what was really interesting, and this is how he felt after the IPO, and again, more and more great writing. For a long, this is the night of the IPO. It happened early in the day, now he's at night, and then we're going to go into the next morning. "For a long time, we lay in the dark. It wasn't over, far from it. The first part, I told myself, is behind us. But it's only the first part.

• 1:38:11David Senra?

  I asked myself, what are you feeling? It wasn't joy. It wasn't relief. If I felt anything, it was regret? Good God, I thought. Yes, regret. Because I honestly wished I could do it all over again. I fell asleep for a few hours. When I woke up, it was cold and rainy. I went to the window. The world was the same as it had been the day before, as it had always been. Nothing had changed, least of all me. And yet, I was worth $178 million. I showered, ate breakfast, drove to work.

• 1:38:56David Senra?

  I was at my desk before anyone else." So one of the benefits of reading biography and autobiography is the fact that, yeah, we're going to get a lot of ideas. There's no, I mean, he worked on Nike for 40 years. It's impossible not to come up with good ideas from that, right? But I would argue more important than the good ideas that we copy from these founders and these people who've lived remarkable lives, is avoiding the regrets they have. And if it's not more valuable, it's just as valuable, and some regrets, you just have to learn to deal with because there's no way to avoid them. So what I want to close on is the fact that the book ends, the last chapter is him at the age of his book, right? So the IPO ends, now let's fast forward 35 years in his life, and he's in his 70s,

• 1:39:37David Senra?

  and he's going through, taking inventory of his life, which is so, so valuable. Because there's a lot of knowledge in the regrets at the end of a life. And so what happens is he's coming up with like, what do I want, like, what's ahead of me? What's on, he would just watch this movie, The Bucket List, and he talks about it a lot, actually. And he couldn't come up with like, what he wanted to do. And the book ends with him getting the idea to write the book. And again, just fantastic writing, and here's where we'll close. I think about the few things I want to do. It's not so much things I want to do as things I'd like to say and maybe unsay. It might be nice to tell the story of Nike.

• 1:40:17David Senra?

  Everyone else has told the story, or tried to, but they always get half the facts, if that, and none of the spirit. I might start the story or end it with regrets. The hundreds, maybe thousands of bad decisions. Of course, above all, I regret not spending more time with my sons. Maybe if I had, I could have solved the encrypted code of Matthew Knight. And yet I know that this regret clashes with my secret regret, that I can't do it all over again. God, how I wish I could relive the whole thing. Short of that, I'd like to share the experience, the ups and downs, so that some young man or woman,

• 1:40:59David Senra?

  somewhere, going through the same trials and ordeals, might be inspired or comforted, or warned. Some young entrepreneur, maybe, some athlete, or painter, or novelist, might press on. It's all the same drive, the same dream. It would be nice to help them avoid the typical discouragements. I'd tell them to hit pause, think long and hard about how they want to spend their time, and with whom they want to spend it for the next 40 years. I'd tell men and women in their mid-20s not to settle for a job, or a profession, or even a career. Seek a calling. Even if you don't know what that means, seek it.

• 1:41:44David Senra?

  If you're following your calling, the fatigue will be easier to bear. The disappointments will be fuel. The highs will be like nothing you've ever felt. I'd like to warn the best of them, the iconoclasts, the innovators, the rebels, that they will always have bullseyes on their backs. The better they get, the bigger the bullseye. It's not one man's opinion. It's the law of nature. Entrepreneurs have always been outgunned, outnumbered. They've always fought uphill. And those who urge entrepreneurs to never give up? Charlatans. Sometimes you have to give up.

• 1:42:24David Senra?

  Sometimes knowing when to give up, when to try something else, is genius. Giving up doesn't mean stopping. Don't ever stop. And that is where I'll leave it. For the full story, read the book. If you want to buy the book, using the link that's in the show notes on your podcast player, you'll be supporting the podcast at the same time. That is 186 books down, 1,000 to go, and I'll talk to you again soon.