Rob Fraser: The Power of Focus

Rob Fraser unveils the untold story of OUTWAY—from hawking socks on street corners to building an eight-figure empire. Surviving near-catastrophic business crises, he leveraged lessons from his professional sports career to navigate the business world. Discover the counterintuitive mental models that transformed a world-class athlete into a business maverick, turning the humble sock into a ten-million-dollar revolution. As a special offer to listeners, the TKP community can get 30% off using the code SHANE at checkout. https://outway.com/ Newsletter The Brain Food newsletter delivers actionable insights and thoughtful ideas every Sunday. It takes 5 minutes to read, and it’s completely free. Learn more and sign up at https://fs.blog/newsletter/ Upgrade If you want to hear my thoughts and reflections at the end of the episode, join our membership: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://fs.blog/membership/⁠⁠ and get your own private feed. Follow Me: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/farnamstreet Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shane-parrish-050a2183/ Follow Rob: X: https://x.com/robbfraser LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robbfraser/ Sponsors: Somewhere.com https://www.somewhere.com/ Overlap: https://www.joinoverlap.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  For 10 years, I woke up with a very clear idea of what I wanted to do with my life and where it was going to go. And I loved that. I woke up every day with a fire in my belly, saying, this is the goal. Here's how I'm going to get it. And here's what I'm going to do. And then almost seemingly overnight, when I walk away from the sport, that's gone. Your identity is gone. You know, like, the day before I retire, it's, hi, I'm Rob Fraser, professional cyclist. It was everything. The next day, that's gone. And over the next year, that fades away because you're no longer on the scene. And the friends, they're still friends, but you don't see them. And the common interest starts to fade. And, you know, that kind of led to this dark period for me where I was like, what am I going to do with my life?

• 0:49Shane Parrish?

  Welcome to The Knowledge Project. I'm your host, Shane Parrish. In a world where knowledge is power, this podcast is your toolkit for mastering the best of what other people have already figured out. If you're listening to this, it means you're not a supporting member. Members get early access, no ads, my personal reflections at the end of the conversation, access to the highlights from the books I'm reading, hand-edited transcripts, and so much more. Check out the link in the show notes for more information. My guest today is Rob Fraser, founder and CEO of Outway, a rapidly growing, direct-to-consumer brand disrupting the premium performance stock market. Rob's entrepreneurial journey is a masterclass in overcoming obstacles and scaling a business. In just a few years,

• 1:30Shane Parrish?

  Outway has gone from startup to multimillion-dollar success story. The company has achieved impressive year-over-year growth, progressing through four, five, six, seven, and now eight-figure revenue milestones. Rob's ability to focus on what matters, build a strong brand, and execute on scaling offers valuable insights for aspiring and established entrepreneurs and managers alike. As a special offer for our listeners wanting to experience Outway's product firsthand, Rob's offering 30% off. Simply visit outway.com and use the code Shane at checkout. Get ready for an illuminating conversation on the parallels between sports and business, scaling a company, and the mindset required to push through challenges and achieve audacious goals. It's time to listen and learn.

• 2:23Shane Parrish?

  There are too many podcasts and not enough time. What if you could skip the noise and get just the insightful moments, even from shows you didn't know existed? That's what Overlap does. Overlap is an AI-driven podcast app that uses large language models to curate the best moments from episodes. Imagine having a smart assistant who reads through every transcript, finds just the best parts and serves them up based on whatever topic you're interested in. I use Overlap every day to research guests, explore and learn. Give it a try and start discovering the best moments from the best podcasts. Go to joinoverlap.com. That's joinoverlap.com.

• 3:05Shane Parrish?

  There's a new massive trend emerging in entrepreneurship. More and more business owners are hiring overseas and running their companies with half the overhead of their competitors. Sales in South Africa, operations in Latin America, finance, marketing, engineering, you name it. Our sponsor, Somewhere.com, can find these people for your business starting at $5 per hour. Visit Somewhere.com/knowledge for $1,000 off your recruiting fee. Again, visit Somewhere.com/knowledge for $1,000 off.

• 3:36Shane Parrish?

  You've been successful against the odds in both professional sports and business. Talk to me about the mindset required to do that.

• 3:45Speaker 00

  I mean, the mindset really comes down to like a personal mission. I mean, if you think about doing both of those things, whether it's sport or anything hard, having some intrinsic reason or some motivation or some personal drive to accomplish something really pushes you forward and pulls you into that goal. A lot of people talk about building a resilient mindset or building a stronger mindset. And I really think that, sure, maybe there's some benefit to trying to teach that or learn it, but I really think it's something that you can really only learn by going through it. And you go through those tough times and push through those things when it's because you care about something. So that personal mission. So when it was with sport, it was this goal to become a competitive cyclist.

• 4:30Speaker 00

  As professional cyclists and reached different goals that I had. So whether it was coming back from injury or coming back from setbacks, the goal was so much larger than the pain I was dealing with or the stress. And the idea of kind of not pushing forward wasn't even there, you know, whereas I look at other parts of my life. And sometimes you don't push as hard because there's no personal mission there. There's no reason to push. It's not necessarily something you you you take that mindset into everything you do, but it's really helpful in those larger goals and similar with business, you know, it's just, I ultimately think success in any large goal comes down to your ability to endure over the long term, perseverance, resilience. I think extending the time horizon, people always talk about, you know,

• 5:15Speaker 00

  hacks and quick wins and how can you shorten the timeline? And ultimately, I think that leads to maybe a quick win here and there, but not longevity. And in business and in sport, the careers are built on longevity. And and that really comes down to a mindset because along that path on anything worth doing, there's just so many ups and downs and sideways and with sport and business and there's just so much going on.

• 5:40Shane Parrish?

  Where does that drive come from? Are we born with drive or is it something we develop by following our passion?

• 5:46Speaker 00

  For me, my drive started kind of in childhood, going into adolescent, early teens. And it was really, you know, my personal journey was I wanted to show the world that I could do something. My childhood was kind of marked by not quite succeeding at anything that I set my mind to. I was an overweight child and I loved sport, but I never was able to find what I was good at. So I would try out for all the, all of the school sports, your basketball team, your volleyball team. And I wouldn't just not make it. I was always the first person not to make it.

• 6:26Speaker 00

  So I was always on the cusp and that almost made it a little bit worse because I could like taste what it would be like to be there. And so that started over time to build this drive of like, you know, when I find something I'm good at, I'm going to go all in and I want to win because when I looked around me. The feeling I felt at that time was, you know, I'm not succeeding in these areas and everyone that is seems to be getting some level of acceptance. And, you know, for me as kind of a child and growing up is like, maybe that's, that's love, that's, you know, what I should strive for. And I just wasn't able to do that. And, and so like that started to build and build. And so when I found early on, it was cycling. I was like, oh, I'm pretty good at this. And I was like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna go all in.

• 7:06Speaker 00

  And the drive was really, I think, when I reflect back, it was a drive to be accepted, to feel like, oh, I finally, I'm in the club. I finally am good at something. And then I didn't want to be good at it. I wanted to be great. I think that has some destructive kind of tendencies to it as well, but that's ultimately where it came from, is this feeling of acceptance and, you know, a chip on my shoulder of not being able to pull it off for so long and seeing my peers do it and assuming that's what it felt like to be part of the club or accepted.

• 7:37Shane Parrish?

  The one thing that stood out there for me, actually two things stood out was the ability to consistently fail and keep going at such a young age where you're the first person not picked over and over and over again, but you didn't give up. Whereas I think a lot of people would give up. That relates, I think, to the acceptance, like you're, you're striving for, did you have a brother who got attention or something where for a different reason and you're like striving to sort of like get noticed?

• 8:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, totally. I mean, so yeah, I had a younger brother and he was almost in our childhood, the exact opposite. He was incredibly good at sports. It came natural and, you know, so we're a big hockey family. You know, we grew up in a very traditional family, you know, very traditional around school, like go to school, go to university, very traditional around team sports, hockey. And hockey was the big one. And my, my brother was really good at it, you know, triple A and came natural and, you know, I wasn't as good, you know, I was. Barely could make like the select team. And so seeing that is like, oh, my parents really like value sport and in particular hockey and my brother's really good at it and I see him succeeding and I'm not succeeding at it. And my parents are great. And of course they love me, but I was like,

• 8:51Speaker 00

  I want to be good. I want to make them proud with something, right? Like, because I'm not particularly great at school. I didn't enjoy it, you know, I just, I never really understood, it wasn't articulated in school what the purpose was. And I was like, you're learning this because this, it wasn't made kind of real for me. So I didn't enjoy that too much. And then I did enjoy sport, like, but hockey just wasn't the thing for me. And so the ability to fail over and over again, I think, you make a choice every time you fail, whether that's going to hold you back or push you forward. And ultimately, I decided early on to let that push me forward. And I've carried that through because that's where you learn your most important lessons. You can learn from winning, but a lot of the most important lessons and the stories I tell and what I reflect on in my

• 9:32Speaker 00

  life has come from all the losses or the setbacks. And that's really, over time, built such a base of lessons and insights to just kind of propel me forward that, you know, I'm thankful for all those failures. They're incredibly difficult at the time. And when you're going through them, you wish they'd go away. And I've always found one year, three years, five years in the future, you become more and more thankful for those opportunities.

• 9:54Shane Parrish?

  Last night, you told me that competitive sports is better than business school. Talk to me about that. As a training ground for business.

• 10:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. I think for life as well, honestly. I think, you know, what does sport teach you? Ultimately, sport will teach you that you have to put in the work. If we use running as an example, you can't just show up and run a marathon, right? You can get to the start line. Anyone can go to the start line, but it's going to be pretty clear who prepared and who didn't. But beyond that, competitive sport, at least in my experience, you know, as competitive cyclist, I was five times on the national team for about 10 years, traveled around the world racing my bike. And what that taught me was a bunch of things. Most importantly, failure and resilience. Like, like, how do you ever, like, we would race. Maybe let's say 10 times a year, maybe win once or twice. So you're failing more than you succeed. It's how are you dealing with that and building forward and how are you

• 10:46Speaker 00

  dealing with injuries? But more than that, it's how are you networking yourself? So I managed myself as well. So I was negotiating my sponsorship contracts. I was booking worldwide logistics. You know, I remember when I was 16 in high school, I was named to my first national team. And I got an email. So I had just won a national race and that named me to the team that year. I didn't even know what world championships was. I was so green in the sport, so new to the sport. And I got an email from the National Federation. It's like, hey, you've been named to the world championships team. It's in Italy next month. Like, we'd love for you to come. And I remember emailing back and being like, no, I can't. I have school. And because I had no idea. I was so green. And then I showed the email to my

• 11:28Speaker 00

  parents. They're like, what did you do? Like, email them back. Like, you're gonna go. We'll talk to the school. We'll get you out and like, we'll support you to go. And so I emailed them back. I got on the team. And what that led into is like, it was going to Italy. So hop on a plane, arrive in Germany for a layover, having no idea where I am, and just being kind of thrown into the deep end like that. Like, as a young kid, just hop on a plane, you end up in Europe. I didn't even really know where Europe is at that time. Embarrassingly, if you said, point out Italy on a map, I would have had a tough time. And so that's like, how kind of I just, but now I'm there. And how do you deal with that? And how do you meet new people? And then how do you perform? All of these lessons, and we talked about earlier about building a resilient mindset, and how do you learn to kind of just push forward when things get tough? And sport will teach you that. And, you know,

• 12:13Speaker 00

  business school, I think, is important. I don't want to knock on it too bad, but they're teaching you, you know, all the things you can read about and learn about, right? So all the tactics and kind of just the common knowledge and how you would apply that. But I think ultimately in business, at least what I've learned is like, you could know everything, but it's how are you going to react when shit hits the fan, right? And how are you going to talk to people and negotiate and use your network and kind of think creatively? And those were a lot of the lessons that I learned in sport is like, how do you use some of your past experiences to your advantage? Like, having the network I did was so incredible. I just think that sport, if I boil it all down to like a succinct answer, it's really

• 12:55Speaker 00

  that it taught me that everything is earned, not owed. You had to do the work. There was no substitute for the work, that things almost never go to plan and you need to figure it out. And it just built so many skills of performing under pressure, you know, talking to people. It's just, it just, you're immersed in it and there's no getting out of it. And I just thought that was such a formative experience. You know, everything we'll talk about today and everything I've done in business has been on the, like, on the back of the sporting career. You know, I didn't go to business school. Of course, I've read all the books and I've tried to learn the common knowledge and I have, but the lessons and the, the, the actual mindset I take to business for almost the last 10 years is the same mindset I had when I was competing in sport.

• 13:37Shane Parrish?

  Talk to me a little more about the role of sort of preparation or positioning when it comes to sport and business. Seems like there's a lot of similarities between the two in that.

• 13:46Speaker 00

  Yeah. In sport, I was never the most talented rider. And honestly, sport was a manifestation of my entrepreneurial tendencies. Cause like I said, I grew up in a sport family. I think when I look back, if I had been introduced to business at that time, I would have gone into business and done something more entrepreneurial. But I didn't have an entrepreneur model growing up. I didn't really even know that was a thing. It was, like I said, traditional family, normal jobs and sport. And so I was like, okay, I have all of these kind of tendencies of, you know, wanting to go after a big goal, willing to take risk, resilient, pointed at a sport, you can be pretty successful. My superpower in, that I use with those entrepreneurial tendencies in sport was preparation and positioning. How can I be more prepared than any other

• 14:30Speaker 00

  athlete when it comes to the start line? How can I study the course? How can I take what I know that's coming up on the season before, replicate that at home and practice and study it, knowing that I had disadvantages, you know? So I raced downhill mountain bikes, but I grew up in Pickering, Ontario. There's not a mountain in Pickering, Ontario. So how do you compete with people that live around the world around mountains or the, what I called the B C kids, the people lived in B C with all the mountains in British Columbia? And you have to really figure out how to make that work. And how I made that work is I would build little 10 or 15 Second parts of the course on the hillside by my house. And what that taught me was I really learned precision and the importance of really executing at a high level and executing when it mattered.

• 15:12Speaker 00

  Positioning myself and being prepared for when the race run came to be the most ready I could be. That started way before the actual event started. That was studying the course in advance, the sort of preparation, the training, all the off season and just knowing ultimately when you get to the start line, whether it's in sport or business, that you've done everything you could do to prepare for that. And that usually worked for me because the pressure in those situations, no matter what you know or how much you've done, if you're not prepared to position properly, the pressure will overtake all the talent that you have for sure. Like the ability to execute is so important.

• 15:47Shane Parrish?

  One of the other similarities, I think, is from the outside looking in, sports looks really sexy. Business looks really sexy, but from the inside, it's a bit of a mess.

• 15:58Speaker 00

  It's a total mess in both really in sport. Being a professional athlete or competitive athlete is glamorized. It's you're seeing the very tip of the iceberg. You're seeing the 1% of the time that it goes right and you're standing on the podium and you're seeing these people succeed. But you're not seeing the early mornings, you're not seeing the injuries, you're not seeing the setbacks, the mental health that comes along with it. And similarly with business, you see the headlines, but you don't see what led into that. And the athletic careers and the business successes that we all read about, these are often these 10 year overnight successes. Right. And people glamorize that and latch on to that and be like, you know, that's what business is or that's what sport is. And I think that's somewhat destructive because it really misses the true nature of these endeavors,

• 16:42Speaker 00

  which is resilience and tough times and in a long time to get there as well. And we kind of get into this world with where people want to hack or they want to shortcut. And I just think it's, it's the wrong messaging and it's the wrong way to approach these things. It's just so important to extend the timeline on these things and, and, and really just give it your all.

• 17:00Shane Parrish?

  Is it true you taped your broken wrist to a bike to compete?

• 17:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, so the way our sport worked is you train all winter and you basically compete in the summer. And so you spend so much time preparing for a race that you have three months of racing. And you would constantly get injured and you would just have to figure out how to make that work. And yeah, leading into one of the biggest races of the year, I had a broken wrist, a broken finger. There's no long-term damage to just dealing with the pain. I can get this dealt with when the season's over. In my mind, it was like, I've worked too hard to just back away from this challenge. It's like, so I asked myself, what is it going to take to get this done? You know, I couldn't hold on to the handlebar. I didn't have the strength. And so I was like, I'm gonna have to take, because everything's led to this moment.

• 17:48Speaker 00

  I'm not gonna back down. Like, if I physically can do it, if I'm awake, I'll be there. And I think it's those lessons. And ultimately, we talked about earlier about resilience and that mindset of doing hard things. And I talked about, you just have to do them. That taught me, you can do it, you know? Like, the pain I was feeling was so crazy, but ultimately, you get up there and you're prepared. And, you know, when you're ready to execute, the pain goes away. I think it's really important to go through those tough times and realize that you can come out the other side. Because that's ultimately where you start over time to build that muscle and be able to deal with the really high-stress things as they come. And stay calm during them. I'd be very surprised someone could teach themselves to do that without going through the tough times.

• 18:29Shane Parrish?

  You went through a bit of an identity crisis post-sport. Talk to me about that.

• 18:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, for 10 years, I woke up with a very clear idea of what I wanted to do with my life and where it was gonna go. And I loved that. I woke up every day with a fire in my belly, saying, this is the goal. Here's how I'm gonna get it, and here's what I'm gonna do. And then almost seemingly overnight, when I walk away from the sport, that's gone, right? Your identity's gone. You know, like, the day before I retire, it's, hi, I'm Rob Fraser, professional cyclist. The next day, it's, hi, I'm Rob Fraser. Who is that, right? I've identified as this cyclist for so long. My, my entire identity is that. My friend network is that. You know, my friends at this point were All over the world, we would meet up during the season or the off season and be in the same

• 19:18Speaker 00

  place. It was the common language. We all spoke. It was it was everything. The next day that's gone and over the next year that fades away because you're no longer on the scene and the friends, they're still friends, but you don't see them and the common interest starts to fade. And, you know, that kind of led to this dark period for me where I was like, what am I going to do with my life? At this point, I was in my early twenties. So the rest of my life was still ahead of me. But I felt so lost, you know, because I was I just I didn't really know what to do. And the idea of not having that big goal was terrifying. And it really led to this period of trying to figure out what am I going to do with my life? It sounds a little ridiculous sometimes, but it was just kind of, yeah, it was this identity crisis of how do you reinvent yourself?

• 20:03Speaker 00

  How do you build a new network around something you don't even know? And what am I good at? You know, like, I didn't go end up going in or finishing university, you know, I hadn't worked any other career jobs. I worked the odd jobs here and there, but cycling was my life. Sure, you could go into coaching or something like that, but that wasn't really where my my passion was. It was really about that fulfilling some large goal and ultimately being in kind of control of my destiny. And yeah, so it was about a two year period of trying to navigate that and figure it out. And it really makes sense of it.

• 20:36Speaker 02

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends, like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an ultra because it's not just a superior light beer. It's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser-Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 21:05Speaker 03

  Are your ad campaigns lighting up the dashboard? But not the pipeline. That's bull spend and marketers are calling it out in. Dashboard confessions.

• 21:15Speaker 04

  My boss asked for results, so I opened my dashboard for the only positive sounding metric I had. Impressions.

• 21:22Speaker 03

  Cut the bull spend, see revenue, not just reach. LinkedIn delivers the highest return on ad spend of major ad networks. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $250 credit. Go to LinkedIn.com/campaign. Terms and conditions apply.

• 21:35Shane Parrish?

  Is that when you started the business?

• 21:37Speaker 00

  The business was the way out. So during that two years, I tried a bunch of things. I was applying for jobs. I ended up getting into the local college in Victoria, where I live in Victoria, B.C. For sport management, I thought the logical step here was a career in sport. It's like I said, coaching. It's like, here's my skill set. How do I apply that moving forward? What's the logical thing to do here? So get into sport management. I simultaneously got a job with the Canadian Sport Institute, was working with future Olympians. I was on paper doing what made sense, what you would see the typical post athlete do. And I was dead inside. I was just like, this can't be it. You know, I'm doing what is supposed to be right. This is what everyone says is right. And I was like, if this is the rest of my life, I'm not sure like I can do this, you know?

• 22:22Speaker 00

  And at the time, I was going into my second year of school and I was just kind of, you know, I was in a four year program, so three more years left, but I was starting to get that angst of like, this is going to be over soon and like, real life's going to hit. I'm going to be expected to like, go deeper into the career and just kind of go further down this path I'm on that I really don't want to be on. And I don't know how I got onto it, but I, for some reason, listened and listened or read to the Four Hour Week, Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss. And it sounds so, so trite, so, it's so common. I got into that book and what it really taught me, I can remember exactly where I was. I was walking around a local golf course, you know, I listened to books more than, than read them. This idea, listening to the book really gave me the idea that, oh, I think I have some skills here. What he's saying makes sense.

• 23:06Speaker 00

  I understand this and I think I can do it. Business sounds interesting. And the way it was framed in that way was like, oh, this is the sport of business. Like this. This is a new thing that I can go and try to like compete in and not necessarily win, but just a big goal. And that was so exciting to me. It was like a new, a new path and it had more longevity. There was more income opportunity and that was incredibly exciting. And that kind of evolved into how do I stay in sport, but on the other side of the table? You know, if I'm not going to be in coaching or an athlete or on the kind of more common path, is there a way that I can build a business or a brand in the athletic space? Like, how do I keep this party going? Was kind of the idea while also having a new big goal and trying to just chase something? Why socks?

• 23:50Speaker 00

  Socks, particularly in cycling, are a large part of the culture. So in cycling, when you're on a team, it's an individual sport. We race individually, but you're on a team and the team, whether it's national or your sponsorship team, you'll get a kit. So you'll all look the same. You look the same as your teammates. Socks were this area where you could wear whatever you wanted. And so I would always wear kind of funky colored socks. I actually had a sock sponsorship. That was a way that my parents ultimately could pick me out on the hill because you're watching a bunch of bikers come down the hill and I would wear really loud socks, like pink and blue. And you could kind of spot that and be like, okay, that there's Rob. Beyond that was a way to kind of like express your individuality, right? It's like, okay, you're in the sea of sameness. How can

• 24:35Speaker 00

  I have a little bit of me out there? And so socks were already in my blood. And so I took that same kind of mentality out of sport into the real world. So at school, I would wear those socks in the gym, at work. And so I became known as the sock guy before owning a sock business. And so when it became times like I'm gonna start a business, I started thinking of like, what do I know? And what do I like? And what do I think can be improved? And I ultimately wanted, at the time, I loved brands like Lululemon and Red Bull. Those were two like, kind of top tier brands for me around their athlete marketing, their product development. I just, I loved everything about those brands. I was like, I don't really, I'm not technical. I didn't have like a particular set of skills. I was like apparel seems like a more, an area that I could

• 25:17Speaker 00

  get into and understand. I've got some skills I could do there. And what's, you know, what's like the simplest form of apparel? At least, you know, my, my thinking back then was like, oh, I kind of know sock. Socks seemed like a good place to start because relatively low risk in terms of how much I would need to invest to get, get started. It was the culmination of all of those things. And I could probably tell a story right now of like why socks were this incredible business opportunity, which they are. But at the time, I was just like, socks are cool. You know, I think socks could be improved. And it turned out, as I went further down that path, I uncovered how much opportunity actually existed in socks. And, you know, ultimately, the insight was the entire world was moving towards athleisure. We were coming

• 25:57Speaker 00

  into a less traditional, less formal way of dressing, and much more into a more functional way of dressing. And we can see that with our clothing, the pants I'm wearing right now, for example, or the yoga pant. And when I looked at the sock category, they remained use case specific. So the recycling socks, or running socks, or dress socks. I was like, why isn't there a yoga pant for the foot? That was the idea. It's like, look at the yoga band, how versatile that is. You can wear it exercising, dress it up, down, casual. I was like, what a functional, fantastic, and fashionable piece of apparel. It's like, why are our socks not like that? And so that was the simple idea. And I got kind of obsessed with it. And I was like, this can be improved.

• 26:37Shane Parrish?

  I remember the first time I tried on a pair of your socks. I had never thought about socks before. I mean, I was the guy who sort of went to the store and like, what's the cheapest per pair of socks that I can get? Put them on your feet. They sort of cover up your feet, and that's what they do. And then I tried on a pair of yours. And I forget how I got the first pair. I think a friend gave it to me. And then I instantly went to your website and I ordered, like, I threw out every sock in my drawer. And I just ordered a brand new drawer of socks. I had never thought about the difference between a good pair of socks and a bad pair of socks. And I still have no idea. But I know your socks feel really good. What's the difference between a good pair and a bad pair?

• 27:15Speaker 00

  So what you said is not uncommon. If you think about socks in general, they're the world's worst gift as you're a kid. It's what your parents always would get you as a gift.

• 27:23Shane Parrish?

  Yeah, if you're bad for Christmas, here's some socks.

• 27:25Speaker 00

  Exactly. It was almost a punishment. And then as an adult, you've learned to almost hate this product and buy it begrudgingly at the department store. It's an afterthought. No one actually thinks about their socks. And so we're living in this world of 90% of the population is thinking a lot about everything they wear, except for one of the most important things, really, like, one of the most- Like the pair of apparel that touches the ground with you, right? And this is, it's kind of foundational to the feeling right up the standing and walking and everything you do. The idea that this was an unaware category was super interesting. But what makes a sock special? I mean, there's so many things like the common socks you'll buy. They're just low quality. The seams, uh, they're not seamless. So they're going to, you know, create hotspots and pinching.

• 28:10Speaker 00

  They're going to be typically probably low quality cotton. And so they're going to absorb sweat, which leads to blisters. There's a ton of different things. If you look at, you know, any good athletic sock and specifically ours, they're going to be seamless. They're going to be moisture wicking. They're going to have support. So there's going to be support in the arch to help with, you know, mid foot fatigue. There's going to be strategic cushioning. So like, where is the foot making contact with the ground? We could go on for days, but ultimately what I was trying to solve for was like, I want something that is going to be incredibly comfortable, useful across a bunch of different sports or activities. And it was born out of a personal need, right? Like I said, I was going to school. I was working a job and I was still training and staying active. I was doing some triathlons at the time and I wanted a pair of socks that could do all of those things.

• 28:53Speaker 00

  Cause the cycling socks I mentioned I would wear at school, they weren't great for running. They would fall down. The cuff wasn't compressive enough. And so I was like, that led to that kind of discovery of like, why isn't this better? And ultimately a good pair of socks should be supportive. They should look good. They should feel good. You should be able to do almost everything in them. I mean, that seems obvious, but it wasn't at the time.

• 29:12Shane Parrish?

  It's crazy. They're almost like compression socks too, right? Like they feel really good around your feet and your feet just feel happy.

• 29:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's the fine balance of like, it's like a hug for your feet, you know? And, and, but how do you not make that too compressive? And how do you make that work across a wide variety of foot sizes? And we're not always perfect, but that is the goal. Like it should hug the leg and not fall down, but it also should come off the leg without leaving marks, which is a tough thing to do. We are striving to always improve that, but I think we've got a good mix. And your story is not uncommon. The people will come in and they'll buy a pair typically because a lot of our socks. Have fun designs on them. What we recognized early on is socks are this, like I mentioned with cycling, socks are this way that people can express individuality. And within that, people have different ways they like to do that, whether they like to celebrate different animals they love, or you know, nature landscapes, or their favorite food.

• 30:03Speaker 00

  So we discovered that like, it's really hard digitally because we're primarily sold all online. And we're also sold in store, but primarily online, at least for the majority of the business. How through the computer screen or the phone screen can we convince you that this sock feels good without putting it on your feet? That's really tough. An easier way is to give you an emotional response being like, I love cats, for example. I want to buy that sock because it has cats on it. But what we know is that's the best pair of socks you're ever going to put on. And so that person buys the pair of socks because they like the design, they put it on, and then like you, they come back and go, oh my, like, I didn't even know socks could feel like this. And they replace their sock drawer with it. And that's, that's quite literally, you know, our mission is to like, or our vision for the business is to replace the sock drawer.

• 30:44Speaker 00

  I truly believe that we should be able to make a great all-day performance sock that someone could line their whole drawer with based on what height they like, what kind of material they like. And you shouldn't have to make a decision in the morning anymore of what you're going to wear. It's like, that sock will do it for you. Did you have a business partner when you started? I was in school when I started the business. So I was in my second year. I just had the idea. You know, when I said I'm gonna start a business, I was quite literally listened to that book, laying in bed, kind of, you know, having my nightly identity crisis, some existential crisis, like, it just snapped. I was like, I'm gonna start a business. I kind of got up right then. I started opening my Apple Notes, started thinking about different brand names and went to school and I talked to my good friend at the time. I developed a good, a great friendship

• 31:27Speaker 00

  with a classmate. We would do all our class projects together. We actually got a job together outside of work. I was doing some rep work for a brand. I got him involved. We were doing some field marketing. And so we got on well. You know, we're friends. We worked well together. And I didn't expect the business to work. I was like, it was, it's like, what are the odds? Here's this like former athlete guy that's kind of like, not particularly great at school, has no business experience, who set a goal to build a sock company. Everyone looked at me like I was crazy. Like some people still do, right? And so I was like, this would be way more fun with a friend, which by the way, is like the world's worst reason to start a business with someone. This is because it's fun to do with a friend that I've learned in hindsight. But you know, ultimately, what I didn't ask myself at the time, which I think is so important for entrepreneurs

• 32:10Speaker 00

  and just people in general to ask themselves is what happens if this goes right? The common knowledge is for people to hedge their downside. They go, what happens if this goes wrong? And that's very, that's fair. People want to protect themselves and these are ultimately risky endeavors. But I didn't ask myself at the time, like, what happens if this goes right? Because if you think about it, and I try to always tell young entrepreneurs is like, what would be more painful? Failing because it didn't work or failing because it did and you didn't capture the opportunity? That would be so much more painful. And I felt like that kind of happened in my cycling career. So, you know, I was like, I'm working really hard now to not kind of repeat that mistake. But yeah, I started it with a business partner and it was fine when it was kind of like just something we were doing. But, you know, ultimately, as it started to get a little bit of traction, like I said, I didn't expect it to work.

• 32:54Speaker 00

  But that doesn't mean that I wasn't incredibly committed. You know, I was obsessed. The second I decided to do it, I was all in. I was reading every business book I could find. I was, like I said, I had entrepreneurial tendencies. I just didn't know. They had manifested in sport for so long that I was like, oh, I've found business now and I just got obsessed with it. The same was not true of my business partner. That wasn't kind of his thing, you know? He wasn't necessarily, I don't think he would identify himself as an entrepreneur. And so as things started to grow and we were pretty lucky with some early success, the business started to work. You know, in the first year, we did, you know, multi-six-figure revenue of just selling socks kind of around town for the most part. The first socks I sold, I just took to school and Tupperware and hand-to-hand combat and sold them to students, teachers.

• 33:37Speaker 00

  Basically, like, you know, we're not friends if you don't buy these. And so that was like how it got started. And so ultimately, after a year, it started to get real, like the work required nights and weekends is like the common stories go. And, you know, it became pretty clear that this was out of line with his values, you know? We didn't have those discussions early on of like, what do we want out of this? Because we were doing it for fun. We were friends. We just wanted to have a good time and try, try something and really kill time and during school. Like, we always expected just to continue with school and kind of continue on. But that for me evolved very quickly into like, oh no, I can do this, you know? Like, I really like this. There's a big opportunity here. So. You know, ultimately, over time, that tension started to grow and the gap between our abilities to have conversations of what's going on, because I was just like consuming

• 34:22Speaker 00

  knowledge and trying to to learn at such a rate because I was obsessed with it. It became very difficult for us to be aligned on what we wanted out of the business, which ultimately led to him leaving the business and quitting. True form, we didn't have any proper resolution for that. We didn't have a shareholders agreement. We didn't like, we just did almost everything wrong when setting up the company, which is really easy to do because there's almost no great resources for helping an entrepreneur. And ultimately, to get the proper legal agreements is expensive. When you have, like, we started the business with a thousand dollars each, right? So put a thousand bucks in. That's all we had and it all went into inventory. There was no money for a legal agreement or a lawyer. And you're in the honeymoon phase of business. Of course, you're never going to fight with your partner, right? Everything's great. It's going to be successful. But when shit

• 35:07Speaker 00

  gets real, that's when those those kinds of things are super important to have at least a discussion about. And there was no discussion. And so he left the business. There was no resolution. And that kind of led into this this period of where I had to figure out how to how to resolve that. And it was super messy and ultimately ended up coming to an arrangement and buying them out about it ended up kind of closing two, two and a half years into the business and kind of March of 2019 is when he officially left the business and I got full control. And that's kind of what I peg is like the real start. That's where I was like, I'm all in because I had to go take out a personal loan to make it happen of like $150,000, which was insane, right? I remember we finally agreed on a number and I didn't have that money. I had student debt. I had the exact

• 35:52Speaker 00

  opposite of money in the bank and but I was so committed around that. We talked about earlier around just the mindset and the willingness to kind of just go all in. I went to every bank in town and would just, I was like, okay, I've got credit cards I'll draw out on. I've got a line of credit. I've got some student loans. My then girlfriend, now wife, like she was like, I'll sign on, we'll get some loans. And I was able to kind of put the money together through all these various, very high interest, high risk kind of funding sources. Because I didn't want to ask anyone. I was like, I believe in this. But I don't want to put anyone else at risk, you know, like I'm willing to take this on and put it on my shoulders and go and

• 36:31Speaker 00

  and the act of doing that, actually, my now father in law reached out after he's like, hey, look, I appreciate that you were willing to do this, but I'll loan you the money and I'm forever grateful for that because A was a vote of confidence and it was, it just, it, it allowed me to kind of, you know, push on and I was super proud to be able to pay him back in a couple of years too. We paid him out like relatively quickly and the terms are super fair anyways, but it's like, I want to get his money back and I take that responsibility incredibly seriously. Christmas dinners. Yeah, yeah, of course. And but I had such high conviction that like I would do anything to get that money back. If the business wasn't going to fail, I would, that money would go back first and

• 37:07Speaker 00

  and I take those sorts of things like when people bet on me or, you know, my employees or investors, whatever, I take that incredibly seriously. The number one thing you should be focused on is like doing right by the people that believe in you and bet on you. Who was the first person to ever bet on you? My mom. Yeah. So I went to university and dropped out. So that's like, that was a big riff in our family because going to university was the safe path. That was the known path of, you know, my dad sold insurance and, you know, my mom, when, when she had us stayed at home and it was, it was super traditional, super go to school, get, get whatever job, build a family. And so the idea of kind of going all in on this cycling career at the time was just like a pipe dream for the most part. And it wasn't really anything yet was a big riff, but I'm like,

• 37:51Speaker 00

  I could tell deep down, she was like, I know you got this. I know you'll figure it out. Cause what I would always say to my parents at the time, and I was telling you about this yesterday, is like, whenever I have these big goals, I kind of hold two beliefs at the same time. One belief is I'm absolutely sure I'll pull this off. Like I have no doubt. I will figure this out, but I have no idea how I'm going to do it. I could not articulate that, which is very difficult for a parent because they're like, I want to believe you, but I need to see some pathway for it. What's the plan, dude? Yeah. It ended up working out and it was the same thing in business too. It's like, I have no idea how I'm going to do this, but I do know I can do it and it's going to work out. My mom being like, you know, kind of just on the side, you know, being like,

• 38:32Speaker 00

  I know you'll figure it out. That was, you know, so important. She's always kind of been in my corner like that. And certainly the, the person to kind of bet on me and, and understand I was different. You know, she understood that, like, I was intensely passionate about things as a kid. And I don't think also she really had a frame for entrepreneurship, like, because it just wasn't a discussion. Like, I had all these little things going. I had my own little, my own little bike shop repair. I built an office in my bedroom closet. I was always doing these. I just didn't know what it was. I was obsessed with the idea of kind of building business. I built bike teams. I would get all the kids in there. We built teams. I was organizing people. We had like schedules. And so I was always building teams, leading teams, building little businesses. And I just didn't know what I was doing was entrepreneurship or building a business.

• 39:17Speaker 00

  That was just what came natural to me and what I loved to do. And so she knew I was different. So she knew when I was kind of going to go on a different path. And she encouraged that, which was, I'm like forever thankful for, because, you know, it's, it's hard to, to be the only one that believes in yourself sometimes.

• 39:33Shane Parrish?

  How important are the people you surround yourself with towards happiness and accomplishing your goals?

• 39:40Speaker 00

  I think it's, it's everything, really. Let's talk about like business or life in general. It's like you want people around you that are rowing in the same direction, right? Like, you want people that have goals. You want to be able to swap and share insights. You want to be able to encourage each other. The power of having like a great network or group around you is kind of a double edged sword sometimes too, though. Because although the, like, a great network of people are going to propel you forward and teach you things you wouldn't know. Sometimes you start to kind of try to keep up with the Joneses a little bit. So in particular, like, as I started to get some level of moderate success in business, my network started to grow. And I started to become friends with people that were much further ahead than me. And it almost led to this insecurity, you know, like, for the five years before I was building my business, relatively unknown.

• 40:25Speaker 00

  Didn't really know anyone else building a business. I was really operating authentically and like what I wanted to do and setting goals that I thought was achievable. And then I'm immersed in this world where people are thinking much bigger, which is on one hand, great. You know, lessons of thinking bigger and realizing like, oh, I am limiting myself. But at the same time, trying to shorten the time horizon to try and catch up to these people that I admire. There's just no way to rush that process. And every time I've tried to rush that process, particularly over the last couple of years, it's ended up backfiring. You know, like this year in particular, I made a conscious effort to be like, no more. I'm gonna go back to operating authentically, doing what I feel is right. Listening to the advice around me, but filtering it and using it to the best of my ability.

• 41:10Speaker 00

  And it's going so much better. It's really back in that that way of operating authentically. And so there is, I think you have to be careful as your network grows, that you're not trying to compare yourself to those people as much. And you're just gathering inspiration from them. When you're around a lot of smart people too, ideas are gonna start flying. And it's your, you need to have the confidence and willingness to say like, that's a great idea. That one's not for me. Or how do you synthesize those ideas? Cause in the early days, I thought, well, these people all know a lot more than I do. And sure, they know maybe it's more about business, but they don't know more about my business. They don't have all the context of what's going on. They don't understand the complexities of simply introducing a new product. Right? Like that has so many supply chain implications, marketing implications.

• 41:53Speaker 00

  Like, sure, like the most common advice I got from people is, oh, you sell socks? Have you thought about doing underwear? It's like, yeah, of course I've thought about doing underwear. But like, those are completely different supply chain psychologies. Now it's gendered where socks are unisex. Like, there's so many considerations, but on the surface, it's good advice. And so I've had to really learn that, you know, advice is welcomed and appreciated, but it's my job to synthesize it and actually use it when it makes sense. So just start accumulating all of that and making sense of it. And, you know, I've stopped applying a lot of it when it doesn't make sense anymore. And being okay with saying no, which is tough when you're surrounded by smart people, right? You've got investors, you've got mentors, you've got advisors. And of course they're smart, they know what they're doing.

• 42:35Speaker 00

  But I think it's really important as an entrepreneur to know, you know, your business best. Right? And the advice is there to help guide you, but sometimes it's not, not what you should be doing.

• 42:45Shane Parrish?

  Walk me through some of the changes you made specifically this year. Like what's different between?

• 42:51Shane Parrish?

  The mindset, approach, attitude, processes that you're doing this year that have led to incredible results versus what you were doing last year.

• 43:00Speaker 00

  I'd say the number one thing we talked about was removing ego. Let's just not do things because we think they're the thing to do. Let's just do the right things. We need to understand that we can't necessarily change the market. We can't create demand that's not there at our current size right now. We need to be okay with the ebbs and flows and we don't need to, when things are not going well or we're in a slower period, we don't need to try and artificially inflate that. We don't need a Hail Mary. You know, silver bullets and like hacks and all these things, they're so appealing to an entrepreneur. Every entrepreneur is like, you're just in it, right? It's so hard. And when someone has this new hack or new thing, it's that fallacy of like, oh, that one thing I'm

• 43:43Speaker 00

  not doing is going to unlock all of my, all of my, or solve all of my problems, unlock all of the growth and it's just not true. And the worst thing that can happen is the one time that maybe that silver bullet does work because then it teaches you that, oh, there's hacks here. So I always kind of caution, like, if you get lucky, just appreciate it. But these hacks typically don't work. What we ended up doing is just extending the time horizon. You know, like I said, I was trying to rush before to, for what reason though? To, it was literally expectations I had put on myself. No one around me was saying, you need to grow at X or do Y. It was really me just feeling like I needed, you know, to gain acceptance of people that already accepted me. It was kind of weird and it was really just the self-discovery of being like, no, these people already accept me. I'm doing what I do.

• 44:27Speaker 00

  I'm, it's kind of that kid again, right? Of like, oh, if I don't keep performing and outperforming and winning, maybe they won't like me anymore or I won't be accepted anymore. And then just being okay with like, look, you know, I have to just operate this authentically. And I asked myself, what would it look like for this business to be around in 20 years? Forget about what we grow this year. How do we build a business that endures over time? And that makes the building so much more fun. Like, how do we actually get back? I fell back in love with the product again this year, right? Like, I love socks, you know? It's such a weird thing to say, but one of my superpowers is I actually really love socks and care about the product and that comes through in the product that we we offer. People love them as well because I'm obsessed with making it better.

• 45:11Speaker 00

  And you know, like I'm obsessed with the customer feedback around it and falling in love with the product, serving the customer, extending the time horizon and not doing things because your ego is dictating it. That's a pretty good recipe for business success. The thing gives me the most joy is, you know, I sit down with our team now and we're we're talking about the future and it feels like we're on our toes and not our heels now. And they're also feeling really inspired and they're saying, you know, even when, you know, like there's still challenges. You know, business is still super hard, but we're dealing with the hard problems calmly. We're like, we can figure this out. We've learned the tough lessons and we planned for this versus throwing hail marys. You know, it's like we're operating from a position of just trying to play catch up on on hitting our arbitrary goals.

• 45:52Speaker 00

  That didn't really matter and it ultimately led to an unhappy work environment. Like it was just, it was stressful and it just wasn't fun. It's like, why are we doing this? Like, like why we do this because we we enjoy what we do. We enjoy learning and improving.

• 46:09Speaker 00

  And that was, that was the big unlock is ultimately just extending the time horizon, being like, what makes us happy running this business?

• 46:14Shane Parrish?

  It's interesting when you think about extending the time horizon, there's so many different ways to do that, right? Not going into debt, there's operating from a position where we can run a marathon instead of a sprint. It's not taking advantage of your customers and treating them as a win win, like you're going to be a customer for life. Is there anything else that comes to mind when you think of extending the time horizon?

• 46:35Speaker 00

  In order to extend the time horizon, I need to be physically and mentally as healthy as I can be. Same with our team. This doesn't work if we're not all operating to the best of our ability too. And the business has been so stressful, like any business over the last 10 years, that it really took a toll on my body, specifically over the last two years. We had a few very stressful events and I didn't deal with them. I dealt with them well in business, but the rest of my life kind of fell apart and my body. And realizing that that's not a sustainable path to go on, like being an athlete for so long and a younger, like in younger in general is like I death gripped through life, you know, I was just like, I learned very early with the injuries we I rode through is like, oh, you can just, just make it through this. You can just brute force your way through this.

• 47:18Speaker 00

  And that's not the best approach always in business, and especially if you have an extended time horizon and longevity in mind, right? It's like the same idea of are you better off consistently working out or going once a week and just like demolishing yourself? And the consistency is going to be better for sure. I had kind of like three goals this year is like, get the business back to a place where we're thriving and having fun. Get my health back to a place where I feel confident and inspired and like kind of all in on this. And the third one was a little more personal. It was just like, you know, I had a new kid. I have two, two boys and one was born this year. It was really just like, you know, like really focus on the family because I had my first kid during like the real thick of business and during COVID as well. And, and I really wanted to kind of enjoy the process of this. So it was kind of like, you know, family business

• 48:02Speaker 00

  and health were three core pillars. And those things holistically all need to be kind of going well for me to operate at my best. You know, we talk about work, life balance, which is like, I, I hate the concept of it in entrepreneurship, you know, like for, for like a salaried worker, like sure, like balance should be, you know, something that you're thinking about, but in particularly in sport or high performance careers or something that you're doing. It's like, you need to tilt the scale in your favor, right? And that's by definition, no balance. However, I think what gets missed here is that part of the work for an entrepreneur, like an athlete, is like your health and your personal relationships. If those aren't in a good spot, you're not operating at a hundred percent

• 48:44Speaker 00

  efficiency. And so that's part of the work, right? What's not part of the work is maybe partying or doing things that you shouldn't be doing that are going to set you further back. But people think about, you know, if I say work, life balance is, is a joke. People are like, oh, what about your health? Well, health is included in the work. And I think it's such an important part of it too, is like, how can you be a high performance entrepreneur? How can you tilt the scale in your favor? How can you? How changed the odds and I think your ability to be sharper, more alert, physically and mentally fit is going to do so, so much benefit for you, especially as the business grows too. The business now in its current stage is much more dependent on me thinking clearly and having good ideas

• 49:28Speaker 00

  and meeting people and being on when I do that. And that requires me feeling good.

• 49:35Speaker 02

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends. Like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an ultra because it's not just a superior light beer. It's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 50:04Speaker 03

  Blowing ad budget on metrics that look great till the CFO sees them. That's bull spend and marketers are calling it out in dashboard confessions.

• 50:14Speaker 04

  I remember telling my boss, it'll be good for the brand when leads were slow. Yeah, it, it wasn't.

• 50:21Speaker 03

  Cut the bull spend. LinkedIn lets you target by company, job title and more. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $250 credit. Go to LinkedIn.com/campaign. Terms and conditions apply.

• 50:34Shane Parrish?

  I like how you said tilt the odds in your favor. I've never really understood this concept of balance. The balance implies that you're perfectly equal in these things. And so I always think of this as like a mosaic. You have a border and you have different sized pieces and some of those pieces are family. Some are work, some are maybe your hobbies. Health is definitely one of the big pieces there and they shrink and they sort of like, but they can never go away. Sometimes work's going to be more of a priority. Sometimes it's not. Sometimes you're going to, family's going to take over. So these, the pieces expand, but they can never really go to zero. And health is like so foundational for all of these. But when we get busy, the first thing we do is like, what do we do? We skip lunch or we get a really crappy lunch. We stop working out, we stop sleeping really well.

• 51:18Shane Parrish?

  And we think, we tell ourselves that we'll just make up for it later. And we start making worse and worse decisions. We're cranky, we're irritable and it just compounds negatively.

• 51:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, it almost ensures destruction, right? So I've got a protocol now because that's what happened to me two years ago when, when things were going poorly. That's what I let go and it just, it cascaded into a two-year event, which I'm sure could have been much shorter.

• 51:40Speaker 00

  And I just treat it much more like an athlete. You know, if you're injured, you go into recovery protocol. So if you're dealing with a high-stress event in business, what's your recovery protocol? What's that look like? How do you build that? How do you build that into a system and follow it? When these things happen, you can't solve them overnight. And so like working extra three hours, I mean, sometimes you need to stay up late. You know, there were late nights because I'm literally on email change with my lawyers for dealing with stuff, but like, that's not every night and that's not super common. And you can, you know, moderate that stuff. Letting your health go is, is kind of the worst strategy I've found, honestly. Cause getting through those times is down to resilience, perseverance. And if you let your health go, and when it did, like, that's when, you know, very rarely have I ever felt like I couldn't do something.

• 52:24Speaker 00

  When my health was in a poor spot about two years ago, going through the thick of it, that was one time where I was like, I don't know if I can do this much longer. Like if I don't get better, I honestly don't know if I could do this, or I would trade this business to feel better. Cause I'm just so sick right now and I just don't want to do it anymore. That was the only period. So that's when my health left. I was like, oh.

• 52:43Shane Parrish?

  Was that the lossy?

• 52:45Speaker 00

  That was the, the cease and desist that led to our ultimate rebrand. Yeah, that was like the first.

• 52:50Shane Parrish?

  Walk me through that.

• 52:51Speaker 00

  We're five years into business, operating under a former name and it's going really well. It's 2021, our business that previous year grew 135% year over year. And we were already growing an average of 100% year over year. So it was just up and to the right. I was physically feeling good. I was fit. I like ran a half marathon PR that year. Like everything was great. I, it's the year I think we met and I was raising, we bootstrapped the business from the start. And like I said, I started to build a network and it, this opportunity rose to, to raise some money that not only, there was kind of three parts to it. You know, there was a personal security part to it. There was capitalizing the business for the first time, like actually having some, some

• 53:35Speaker 00

  firepower behind what we want to invest in. And then also inviting in some voices that I was so desperate for, of people I admired. So it was kind of this opportunity, I remember telling, you know, a bunch of friends and my wife being like, You'll never get this. Like, all my business heroes like want to give me money and invest in the company. Like, this seems almost like cheating. This is incredible. So I pounced on an opportunity. But literally, the day the money hit the account, we raised, you know, millions of dollars, it hits the account. I get an email from my lawyer that says urgent in the subject line, and that's just almost never a good thing. And it's from my IP attorney, which I barely hear from. It was our first ever cease and desist. And it basically said, you know, there's a company that believes they have rights over your name

• 54:19Speaker 00

  and is demanding that you do X, Y, and Z, and one of those to stop using the name. And so I was kind of like, immediately just shook, because we just raised all this money. We've been in business for five years. And that was the first time, you know, in sport and in business at that point, everything was something that like, I was solving problems that I created. I wasn't battling somebody. Like, I was in charge. This was something happening to us that I was completely out of control on. And I had no frame for it. I had never gone through it before. I didn't know anyone that went through it. For maybe half an hour, I was like, this is a death blow. You know, like, I was kind of like, let myself. And then, you know, I called you, actually. I called a few other people. I was like, okay, like, this is not uncommon.

• 55:04Speaker 00

  But it was incredibly stressful. It basically led us on to this six-month journey of rebranding and changing our name. And that's an incredibly complex process for a business that's been around for five years. And how do you even start that process of, you know, communicating the messaging? What is a name that's going to work? And the stress, I think ultimately, the stress came down to was not messing it up. Right? I had so many people that relied on me at that point. I had a young family. I had employees. I had investors. I had what felt like the world on my shoulders. And none of them were putting that pressure on me. I put it on myself, because I told you, I take these responsibilities incredibly seriously. If someone gives me money or bets on me, like I said, like, it's my duty to do right.

• 55:46Speaker 00

  And so I wasn't going to not put 110% effort into it. And I had to learn. So I basically, over the next six months, became quite educated on IP. Law and figuring out kind of everything and working with the best attorneys and we found the best people and working through the rebranding process and kind of going through discovery of what is a brand, you know, like when I started it, I kind of just picked a name that that I liked. And yeah, we filed trademarks, we did all the right things, but I didn't do any diligence to see if there were other brands using similar names. And so this time around, I had to be like, what's a brand name that could champion a business going forward? We've been in business for five years. People know about us. It's not a massive business, but it's growing. And what's one that's protectable? And you've got a timeline because you've got a person on the other side saying, change your name by this date, or we're going to sue you. And it's just like, so you got a

• 56:31Speaker 00

  gun to your head, and you've got this huge list of things you need to accomplish. And it was incredibly daunting. And this was, you know, the one time, like, I had no one else to lean on, like, my team couldn't do this for me, investors couldn't, I had to do all of it and kind of absorb all of the stress, work directly with the, like, I don't have a, like, I didn't have a co-founder, an operating partner at that level. So like, it's me on email chain with all the attorneys, understanding all the complexities of it, and then figuring out how are we going to go down this process. And so, yeah, it was ultimately, the stress of that. And but like I said, now, kind of a few years removed, I'm incredibly thankful for that period. I just like, learned so much, like the buyout of my co-founder, that was kind of what I coined as like 150 grand, that was my MBA.

• 57:14Speaker 00

  I learned so much during that process, just around, what is a shareholder agreement? What's the importance of it? Like, around co-founder dynamics and values and buyouts, and the way we had to do everything, I learned so much at that period. This was now another learning opportunity of like, okay, we're, we're operating in a different league now, where like, this is a thing, and people, you have to play a little bit of defense. People are going to throw, like, shoot arrows at you, you know, and, and so that was an arrow. And ultimately, I let the second arrow hit me, which was my reaction, right? You have the first arrow, which you can't control, the second arrow is like, how you deal with it. And I forget where I'm quoting that from, but someone says that I loved it, because it's like, you can choose not to get by the second arrow. And I chose to kind of like, not do the right things in terms of taking care of myself. I give myself grace now, because I didn't know any better. I didn't have protocols built, I didn't know

• 57:57Speaker 00

  I was going to get burned out, because, similar to work-life balance, I believe burnout is the result of working long time, a lot on things you, that don't fill your cup, that are out of line with your mission. Not from overworking. The common thing is like, oh, if you work 80 hours a week, you're going to burn out. It's not true. I can work 80 hours, 100 hours a week on things I love and feel very energized and excited. And you're obsessed with it, but working that 80 hours on this legal stuff and which was completely counter to what I wanted to do in our mission. It was such a distraction and a sideshow.

• 58:26Shane Parrish?

  And it's draining.

• 58:27Speaker 00

  It was incredibly draining. The stress, the anxiety around it. I smile, right? Cause it's just like, if I think back, it's, there's so many incredible stories and it was just like such a rewarding thing to go through. Knowing we've been on the other side and we've now under our new name outweigh sold more product than we did ever as our old name. But like, it just, yeah, it was incredibly difficult.

• 58:47Shane Parrish?

  It goes to show you then like, as you get more successful, you start to attract attention. And a lot of people like to compete with lawyers instead of product.

• 58:54Speaker 00

  That's the losing mindset. Those people that are doing that are like operating from a place of fear and they're playing more defense than offense. And that's not how I like to operate. I'm much more of a friends in business kind of guy. I think like business is not zero sum. I think everyone can win. The markets are massive, especially in the stock space. It's a $50 billion market. But yeah, we went from

• 59:15Speaker 00

  no, no legal issues to three in one year. So it wasn't just that one. I got like, within the next six months, got two others around completely unrelated things as well. And I was just like, it was almost comical, you know, it's just like kicked me while I was down and, but I learned how to deal with those things. We resolved all of them.

• 59:35Speaker 00

  But yeah, man, it's, it's, it's something you just kind of have to go through.

• 59:39Shane Parrish?

  What went into the decision to rebrand instead of fight?

• 59:43Speaker 00

  So every bone in my body wanted to fight, right? I came from a career of where like you're in a sport, you're competitive, like your number one goal is to fight, it's to win, right? Not physically, but like fight for that podium spot. Like that's what you're doing. But I had to this time prioritize everyone else as well and think through what, how does this affect not just me, but everyone involved, like I mentioned? And it was just a lot of discussions, you know, first it started with like, if we do decide to fight, what's that look like? And the quotes I got were, it could take you two years per country you fight this in and up to a million dollars. There's the finance. And then there's the brain drain of doing that. And so you weigh that against what are the financial and other implications of changing the name?

• 1:00:26Speaker 00

  And ultimately, you know, what I landed on was this understanding of what our brand is, which is why this whole process was incredibly rewarding is because got to really dig into like, why do people buy our product? If we were a brand, like a luxury brand where we were trading on our name as a big piece of the value, this was going to be a big problem. But we were a product driven, so people bought us because they loved the product. The name in that, in that scenario was a reference to the product. And the way I thought about it was like, I broke brand down into kind of three core components. And I like to use kind of like analogies to help visualize things. So I, I visualized a brand as a human and we'll use you as an example. Okay. So you've got three things primarily. You have your name, how you look and your essence.

• 1:01:12Speaker 00

  And so your name is how I'm going to reference, I'm going to call you or I'm going to talk to you about other people. But if you came to me and said, you know, now my name is Dave, that would be like a little weird. It takes some adjusting, but like, it doesn't change who you are, whatever, no problem. We can figure that out. How you look, if suddenly you came and had shoulder length hair somehow. And yeah, and, and changed how you look and look completely different. It would take some getting used to how to recognize you, but ultimately you'd be the same person. And I would still want to hang out with you. If you came, looked the same, had the same name, but were a completely different person and our interactions were different, I would question whether or not you were the same person. Whereas you changing your name or how you look doesn't change who you are. Brand is ultimately how you make someone feel.

• 1:01:57Speaker 00

  And it's the essence of the company. Understanding that gave me a lot of kind of like a much more kind of positive path forward of realizing, okay, we're changing the way people reference us and we can communicate this story. We're not changing how we look. We're able to maintain our logo. We're able to maintain our product and everything that made us visually look the way we do. That's not changing our mission and vision. That's not going to change. It's going to evolve with our community, with our customers, but we had to change our name. And so once we understood kind of like, what are the implications here? And how should we be thinking? Thinking about it, it became a lot less daunting, not easier, but less daunting to figure out, we're just changing how people reference us. And thankfully, we, uh, people don't buy our product because we put our name on it.

• 1:02:39Speaker 00

  You know, our name is just the way that we're referenced in the world for the most part. And there is goodwill. There's not to say that a name's not important. It is incredibly important, which is why we took so much time to figure out a new one. Once we could communicate that message and do that authentically and try to get that message to as many existing customers as possible,

• 1:02:56Speaker 00

  we can control the narrative there. And also understanding that this only really affected people who have heard of us. And when we looked forward, it's like all the majority of the growth was still in front of us. So this doesn't actually matter for people that never heard of us because they wouldn't know our current name from a hole in the wall. So it's like, okay, that also makes it a little less daunting. It's like, we have a community of customers here that know about us. We know how to reach them and we're going to be very authentic. So we actually ended up creating a little YouTube series where I walked people through and brought them along on the rebranding process. I was like, here's what we're doing. We interviewed like hundreds of people of our customers being like, what does the brand mean to you? We're going to evolve this and we're going to actually like, take it in a direction that you now help us build.

• 1:03:35Speaker 00

  When the name changed, that was almost a part of the ego I had attached to like, I made this thing. It's mine. That's where that kind of like left, which I think was really a good thing. So it's like, this is our brand now. This is the customer's brand. This is the team's brand. We're all building this. And I think that's really important for an entrepreneur is to let go of that my, mine, mine, uh, because you need to be able to delegate. You need to be able to bring in people that are better than you. You need to realize that your job as the entrepreneur, the founder is to really get the thing going. And, and if you're the person to scale it, do that as well, but you need to build the system around you. And so that was also a really unique time where I was like, it felt like what I had created, the name I created kind of died a little bit, like that phase died a little bit.

• 1:04:18Speaker 00

  And we were reborn as like, I had this kind of other analogy. It's like, up to that period, we were, you know, we were a caterpillar in the first five years. And we went into a cocoon and emerged a butterfly. It's like, I called it our butterfly moment. And, you know, although like we look different with a new name or whatever, we're still the same thing. We're just kind of now we've got wings and now we can fly. And it was like, it was kind of this like beautiful little way I I made myself feel better and explain that to the team and is like, this is our butterfly moment, you know, we can either, like I said earlier, we can choose to let this this unfortunate situation hold us back or propel us forward.

• 1:04:54Speaker 00

  And so we went through the mindset of like, how do we actually use this as a springboard? How do we bring the community along for us and actually walk them through this and make them feel involved and like their voice was heard and it ended up working out really well for us.

• 1:05:05Shane Parrish?

  I suspect you're gonna have a lot more legal challenges as you go from eight figures to nine to hopefully 10 as you get more and more attention.

• 1:05:14Speaker 00

  At dinner last night, David said this too, is like, you know, you're not a real entrepreneur, you get a legal letter, right? And I've that he's not the first person to say that to me. And it's just so hard when you get the first one, like anything in business, you know, it's like, the first time it happens to you, you feel like you're the only one in the world this is happening to. And it's very lonely, especially if you don't have a network. Like if you don't have a network in particular, that can be very scary. Thankfully, at that time, I had people to be like, oh, this happened. They're like, oh, no big deal. Like you'll, you'll do it. And now I have I dealt, I met with a young, really kind of something similar was happening. I'm like, no, you'll be okay.

• 1:05:45Speaker 00

  And it felt good to kind of be that voice. I could see them kind of like starting the wheels were starting to turn and starting to get stressed. I was like, look, just trust me. I was in your position, like you will be okay, but you need to do this. You need to like, take care of yourself and kind of walked them through what we did. Ultimately, if we can share those lessons, I think they're so important. I welcome the challenges. I'm I'm happy to be in a period of like smooth water right now. But, you know, ultimately, like the challenges, like I said, are how we grow. And you're right, these are just as part of business. It's like people are shooting arrows and you're going to get hit. It's what are you going to do about it?

• 1:06:17Speaker 00

  And learning that what seems like a death blow often is not is is how you build that resiliency and the ability to keep pushing forward. So now when we got the each subsequent legal letter, that initial shock impact and how I dealt with it was was better and improved a lot and how I managed those things. And and that's ultimately the goal is how how can you build that resiliency? And how can you build the teams? And we've gotten incredibly great, you know, attorneys now and and processes for when these things happen. You only build those over the first time it happening, right? It's like, no one's building up an IP attorney team and the whole process around IP infringement if you don't have issues there.

• 1:06:51Shane Parrish?

  I can say things you can't, but like some of the stuff that people are claiming is just like absolutely ridiculous. Like it shouldn't be granted that this has, you know, any sort of intellectual property rights whatsoever.

• 1:07:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I'm intentionally having to be quite vague and not even mentioning what our previous name is because that's that's in these agreements of like what I can and cannot say. But you're right. It's the unfortunate thing about IP law in specifically is it almost exclusively operates in the gray area, right? In trademark infringement, in particular, what they're looking for is will the non observant consumer, in other words, a person who knows nothing, who's not paying attention, would they be confused between one brand and another? That come down to logos or words, and that's a hard thing to prove. And ultimately, who's going to prove that over time is the person with a lot of money because they're going to argue different things.

• 1:07:38Shane Parrish?

  Battle of bank accounts.

• 1:07:39Speaker 00

  The battle of bank accounts, it's a battle of time, right? Like, how much time are you willing to spend? Like I said, it was like much more than a million dollars. It was the two years, the two years with no certainty. So I was like, that's too much of a looming, you know.

• 1:07:51Shane Parrish?

  Too big of a risk.

• 1:07:52Speaker 00

  Too big of a risk. And generally, these things are without, they're pretty baseless, but it they're usually bigger companies with firepower.

• 1:07:58Shane Parrish?

  Want to come back to the mosaic or balance with two young kids, rapidly growing business. What have you learned about using your time effectively?

• 1:08:08Speaker 00

  It's had to evolve, right? Because I've been in a few different, I've worn a few different hats to the different scale of our business. And like, as a founder, you start day one doing everything. And as the business evolves, you start to hire people, but you're still doing a lot of the things and you're micromanaging. You're not, you're, you know, I hadn't done this before, so I do all the mistakes and you're overriding things. And and you don't know any better, but eventually you start to learn, like I mentioned with kind of how we evolved after the rebrand, like you've got to bring in better people than you and understand how are you best applied, right? How are you the most effective in your job? And how I manage all that now is like, I kind of had to for myself relearn what work is. How do I hold myself to account? How do I judge myself? Because the other kind of.

• 1:08:54Speaker 00

  Downside of entrepreneurship is you don't have a lot of feedback as a founder. When you have a boss, you're getting feedback, you know, if you're hitting marks or not. And, you know, we have investors and stuff, but our investors are also like entrepreneurs and they're great. They're not exactly kind of keeping tabs as much as like a boss would, for example. And so you have to, one, hold yourself to account and figure out what that looks like. And for me, I had to reinvent that as like work today is not what it used to be. It's not hands on the tools as much. It's not overriding decisions. It's not getting too into the weeds. It's not losing touch. I still have a very firm kind of finger on the pulse of the business. I have a lot of consumer feedback sent directly to my inbox.

• 1:09:37Speaker 00

  I want to know what's going on at that level, but it means not getting involved in the weeds and kind of doing those jobs. And so work for me is how do I like the mosaic? How do I holistically make sure I'm in the best mindset to have a good idea? I say my, my job is to really have a good idea once a quarter, like a really good idea. And, and those ideas move the needle quite substantially and they often require a lot to go into those ideas. But I've got such incredible people working on kind of the day to day, week to week, month to month stuff. My job is to be looking six to 12 months out and then further, but typically six to 12 months. Cause I think beyond that, you're guessing in six to 12 months, we can make a pretty good idea where we need to be going.

• 1:10:21Speaker 00

  And ultimately it's to have those good ideas. So how do I put myself in a position to have those good ideas? That's a lot of reading. That's a lot of consuming just basic information out there. So reading even just like the, there's publicly traded companies in our space, reading the reports. How are the CEOs thinking, you know, how's the market looking at these businesses and what are they saying? It's networking with people, extracting those insights. I call it like almost like engineered serendipity as well. It's like, how do you put yourself in a bunch of different situations to just extract an idea? How can you go idea harvesting? I look at that as my job to basically go out there and collect the information, come back and synthesize it and apply it in which way makes the most sense for our business. And of course, like that's not all.

• 1:11:04Speaker 00

  All I do, I would love to, that's all I do, but I get pulled into, you know, the, in a business, problems flow uphill. And so there's still those things, but thankfully I've got incredible people that kind of had those off now as well. And my area of excellence and like where I'm the most effective is when I'm creative. And so I'm creative when I'm not stressed. When I'm creative, I'm thinking about those ideas and networking and kind of operating. But the lack of stress also comes from taking care of myself. And so it's been tough though, to redefine work as that because it doesn't look like sitting in front of a computer. It doesn't look like nine to five. And so I had to battle with this, like, am I working hard enough? And it was this, this realization that like, oh, I'm out of the death grip phase.

• 1:11:47Speaker 00

  That's no longer serving me. I can't just sit down and death grip a good idea. I can't just sit there with a Google Doc and be like, good idea time. That's not how it works anymore. My, my, my work is 24/7, the mosaic. It could be something my wife says, like, she's incredibly smart, like she gives me tons of ideas. She's the real co-founder in the business, right? Like those early days, who am I going over everything with? Like her level of business knowledge would be higher than, you know, people going with MBAs. Like she's seen it all, talking to her about things, walking through problems, talking to everyone. It's just like, work looks like that. And so it's spending time with family, but it's, it's, are you, can you extract something? Is there an insight that comes out of that as well? Another way to look at the mosaics is seasons, right?

• 1:12:29Speaker 00

  There's seasons where you need to be busier and I've really identified where those seasons are. And, and that's communicated with my family and, you know, my wife and partner and where that's going to be kind of all in. And like what's, and we'll just say, what season are we in, right? And, and how do we adapt to that and make sure that we're operating at the best of our ability in, in all areas that matter?

• 1:12:49Shane Parrish?

  What have you learned about simplicity and focus when it comes to operating a business that most people miss?

• 1:12:55Speaker 00

  I think the tendency. To do more is just the common, the common path people go down. They're like, okay, I've got some level of success. How do I replicate that by doing more? So like, for example, we sell socks. Should you sell underwear? What people fail to realize there is have you fully maximized the opportunity that's in front of you? I mean, really optimize it. I mean, the power of focus is so important. The way I kind of like explain this to our team is imagine you're running a race and you're in the lead pack and you're, you're doing a good job. And out of the corner of your eye, you kind of catch another race going on. You're like, oh, that looks fun. And you hop the barrier and you're in that. But now you're middle and back of the pack. You didn't prepare for that race. You don't really know the landscape.

• 1:13:37Speaker 00

  Oh, and you're, you're now falling behind in the race you're running because you haven't built the infrastructure to maybe have another teammate that could run that race who trained for, for example, that'd be like hiring or developing a different line of business. But like what a lot of entrepreneurs do is they try to run multiple races. And that's like a surefire way to burn yourself out and also just not give the attention and focus to what really matters. We're taught that like to get more, you have to do more. I just don't think that's true. I think to get more, you should be doing less typically. You should be subtracting. So going into this year, we're very clear on our goals. Almost like a bit of an insecurity. We were chatting about this too, is like, are socks enough? You know, is it a big enough goal? But outside of my own ego, it's like, why aren't socks enough? Right?

• 1:14:21Speaker 00

  It's a fit, like I said, $50 billion industry. We're a leader in it and we're doing really well. And we're of that market size. We're just scratching the surface, if you would even say that, right? It's a massive market. It's what I always go back to is like, we've barely maximized the opportunity here. We're at the start line still. Why would we do anything else? And we love doing this. And I think that level of focus empowers you to like really become an expert at it and re become a master of it and, and extend the time horizon. Not to say we won't do other things in the future, but right now, the best opportunity we have in front of us is what we're doing. So why would we take any of that focus away? And every time we've kind of faltered over the past years, it's been, like I said,

• 1:15:05Speaker 00

  chasing a silver bullet or trying to go down a path that is just out of line of our circle of excellence. You know, like, why are we doing this other than? And it wasn't really a, those paths were never something I was like, this is what we need to do. Like the conviction I have around socks, it was advice or. Or grasping for growth or trying to figure it out. And I think like in anything in life, like focus is so incredibly important and business is also just so hard like life. There's just always things coming at you, being able to simplify what you're doing your day to day to deal with those coming in. Like I said earlier, we're, we now of course still have problems, but our ability to deal with those problems is incredible, right? Because we're not so

• 1:15:47Speaker 00

  underwater with everything we're trying to do. We're just so ready to deal with whatever's coming that way. And I think the focus and just the, the mental clarity around it and being okay with socks, you know, which is, it's, it sounds kind of funny now that I say it, but just being okay with that is, is, is so important. And it's a, it's just unlocked this level of like love of what we're doing again.

• 1:16:08Shane Parrish?

  When it comes to design, how do you go about anticipating what people want?

• 1:16:12Speaker 00

  It's become more data driven. In the early days, I designed what I liked, of course. And young entrepreneurs or people starting their first business, they have solutions looking for problems. So that's what they teach you in business school, like come up with a solution and go try and find the problem. Whereas you should be solving problems, right? You should be looking for it. And particularly if it's your first business, you should be solving a problem you deal with because otherwise why are you qualified to do that? And so like I said earlier, I was solving my problem of a pair of socks that could, could do it all. Figure out where your advantages are and you know, what product path you want to go down and why that, why that matters. I'm not that unique. What I like, there's likely millions of people that are going to like these designs as well. And so that was the simple start, not trying to guess what people wanted. I

• 1:16:56Speaker 00

  was really trying to just solve my own problem. That's evolved now to having core categories of what we know people like. And like I mentioned earlier, the designs are a way that we get people into the business. So we kind of designed things around nature, animals, food, abstract, funny. And that's really a way to evoke some sort of emotional response from people. Give them that kind of like giggle or, or laugh that maybe they want to buy that pair and it makes them feel a certain way. But ultimately what's super exciting too, is we found that designs act as a certain level of inspiration for people. It's one of the first pieces of clothing you put on in the morning. And what I would do with socks is I would lay them out, like how I'm feeling that day is the kind of design I would use. And I heard that from customers and friends as well. They're like, oh,

• 1:17:39Speaker 00

  I've got this important meeting today. This is the pair of socks I wear for that. So I think that's a really cool aspect of the product too, is like, can our product be this thing you put on in the morning? That inspires you to go after your big goal. One of our internal kind of goals is to inspire personal bests. That's kind of why we do what we do at a brand level. We don't really care if you get to the finish line first. We want to make sure you get to the start line, you try. And you set a goal and you actually go for it. I think that's just so important to move forward and kind of remove the outcome, but like really focus on getting started. And yeah, so ultimately like the designs follow that kind of pathway. And, and we were trying to inspire people, but also just give them what we know they like. Our best selling stuff and what people buy the most are just really basic stuff. And I've kind of evolved into wearing more basic designs.

• 1:18:24Shane Parrish?

  We're both wearing basic versions of your socks.

• 1:18:27Speaker 00

  That's, that's the season I'm in is more basic. Well, I got like more of a retro inspired kind of design going on, which I really like right now. But yeah, the designs are just this fantastic way people express themselves. And I love seeing what our customers, how, how they kind of move through the world with them on. And I love to ask them when I see them like, hey, why'd you choose that as well? Like, why does that mean something to you? We've got incredibly talented designers now and they use a lot of kind of insights and, and data. And then sometimes we'll just throw shit at the wall too. Like I'll have an idea, you know, like of course like founder has an idea for something stupid and we'll try it. And typically they just don't do well. One thing I have had to get better at is not letting my preferences dictate what goes out. So if I dislike a design, I have to ask myself, I have to remove kind of my personal preference. Be like, do I think our customer base will like this design?

• 1:19:08Speaker 00

  Because we're now much bigger than my preference and it's no longer the million or so people that are like me. It's, it's much bigger than that. And so that was challenging because like it is your business and you ultimately kind of want it to be in line with what you like. But again, it's, it plays into that, like it needs to evolve to be much more than you. Cause I don't like, for example, one of our best line designs right now is a cat and I don't like cats. So I'm just like secretly, I'm like, I don't want to see it do so well. But at the same time, I'm like, hey, people love it, you know? And like, cool, power to them too. Like people love cats. I don't like cats, you know? I'm allergic to them. That's why I don't like them. But I think that's really cool. And that was important is getting out of my own way too. And realizing like, that comes down to just hiring good people in general. It's like you hire them because they're better than you. It's like, so guide them and have your inputs, but you know, make sure you ultimately.

• 1:19:53Speaker 00

  Let them bring forth something that is better than what you would have done as well.

• 1:19:57Shane Parrish?

  What have you learned about taking big swings?

• 1:19:59Speaker 00

  I think it comes down to like, why are you taking that swing? So I've taken big swings that were authentic and they were like the big goals. Like even just starting the business or trying to go after certain, you know, athletic goals. But then there's big swings that are trying to solve problems in a faster way. So maybe making a big hire that you're trying to rush because you think they're going to come in and be able to solve all your problems. Just choosing a co-founder because you think it'll be more fun. Like, these are just never good reasons to kind of take big swings because you're relying on hope. And the hope's just generally a bad strategy. The big swings I've taken where they weren't in line with my authenticity and kind of why we're doing them. Like, like I talked about earlier, that, that personal mission and drive of why are you doing what you're doing? Like, how, like, that's what's going to take you through the hard times. That's what's going to make you endure.

• 1:20:43Speaker 00

  And, and if you're going to take the big swing, you've got to know it's going to come with a lot of turmoil. It's going to be challenging and you've got to be ready to back that up. When I think about it now, I try to imagine I'm in a room with a hundred people and I'm explaining my rationale for taking a big swing. And I like to imagine that, like, I need to do a good enough job that the majority of the people be like, that makes sense. At least that's rational, that, that why you want to do that. So I try to take myself out, metaphorically put myself into a room and be like, would the mo- would most people agree with this? And then the second question I like to ask is like, and would, would I be happy with this decision in five years? So I like to extend the time horizon on that. It's like, is this solving a short-term problem but creating a long-term one? Is something I've had to learn the hard way, of course, but I really try to do that now.

• 1:21:27Speaker 00

  And even if it's going to be short-term, good, long-term, bad, I just, no way. It's just, it's not worth it.

• 1:21:32Shane Parrish?

  What have you learned about hiring?

• 1:21:34Speaker 00

  I learned that I got really lucky early on. And so that, like I talked earlier about the worst thing of like hacks or, or doing hard things that work out for you is that you get lucky. So I got incredibly lucky with my first few hires who are all still with us. Um, and they've scaled and grown with the company and they're leading major parts of the company, which is incredible. During the period of high growth, um, we had to build the team and build it fairly rapidly because we started growing pretty quickly and, and honestly, I just was. Not experienced enough to really do that properly. And, you know, hiring for what I would say now are probably the wrong reasons. Hiring for org chart, not really what needs to be executed. Hiring in ways because that's just how it's been done.

• 1:22:17Speaker 00

  Cause I was just trying to like, look around web and I'd never done this before. Not really questioning if we should be hiring or subtracting. Right? So a lot of hiring happens because there's just a lot of inefficiency in the organization. And I think that's a really important thing is like, do you need a person or a process? Or do you need to stop doing that entirely? And so when we were half the size we are now, we had twice as many people as we do now, which is crazy because we were just so inefficient. I really didn't understand the concept of subtraction and how we could build efficiently. The biggest hiring mistake I made was thinking like, you know, going into our second year of not hitting the growth goals, like I arbitrarily said, ego really attached to it. Like, we need to do better. We need to kind of keep the good times rolling. You know, COVID was this big inflationary period for e-commerce businesses and direct consumer businesses.

• 1:23:02Speaker 00

  Like everyone started shopping online. You had this huge boom and the market started to draw down really hard. And so you're trying to find growth and exceptional growth in a market that's going down. It's, it's very challenging, but I was kind of hard headed about it. And I was like, surely we just need an experienced person to come in and lead marketing. I ran a good process in terms of diligencing the person that I ended up hiring. But the mistake I made was not filling the top of funnel. I didn't get enough candidates of that same quality to compare and contrast them again. So I was, they were able to tell me exactly what I wanted to hear. I got good references, you know, all the typical things. Yeah. Ultimately, the lesson I learned there was like, I need to actually take what they're saying and compare it to other people as well. And so I took a big swing. That was, this is one of those big swings I took that wasn't authentic.

• 1:23:47Speaker 00

  It was like, it was trying to accomplish something that like-

• 1:23:49Shane Parrish?

  Trying to force something.

• 1:23:50Speaker 00

  Trying to force something and shorten the time horizon. And it just went incredibly wrong. You know, it turns out they were not exactly truthful about their experience. Like they weren't as good at the job as they were. They were working other jobs during ours. It was a remote, they were, you know, based in the U S. We're here in Canada. I got played. It felt like almost violating because it was just like totally like- I'd never dealt with that before. It was, it was, it was very weird. It didn't only work. It caused a lot of internal conflict as well because like it was a big org shift. The guy currently had running marketing was now replaced with this, this expert. And that's, you know, wasn't a great move on my part as well. And that was kind of the last straw, you know, like last year, mid year is where we kind of like, that didn't work out. That's where I just like wiped the table clean and said like,

• 1:24:33Speaker 00

  here's everything we're not doing anymore because we're just going to strip this down. We're going to subtract and rebuild because this just isn't working. And I don't care about these growth goals anymore. Like we need to get back to a place where we're operating authentically and doing good work and fulfilling our mission. We're just like, we're not even listening to the customer anymore, right? We're doing things, trying to chase growth and that chasing growth will, will as a consequence, force you to start doing things that, you know, aren't inherently good for your brand. Or you're going to new categories that don't make sense or change messaging that's out of line with why your customers are there in the first place. And so again, as painful as that hire was and getting that wrong, it was just kind of the last straw of like another lesson learned for sure. But last straw of like, no, I need to rethink how we're doing everything right now and the internal team and.

• 1:25:16Shane Parrish?

  That's where you went for simplicity and sort of focus.

• 1:25:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, that was July of 2023. I was like, this is where we're resetting. And that's really like, the success we're seeing now is the result of a thousand things we've done over the last year. It's not, we're not doing anything special right now. But the, the, the choices we made in July and subsequent choices after that all built this forward momentum of doing the right thing that are now all working. And so people, you could ask me right now, it's like, what are you doing that's leading to your, your growth this year? I couldn't really answer that question because it would be, well, here's how much time do we have, right? Are we going to do an eight hour podcast? Cause there's literally a thousand things we did. It started with subtraction, but it goes much deeper than that. It goes, it goes, you know, into everything that we do. And it's been so fulfilling to do that though, because like from that point on, we've just been building.

• 1:26:04Speaker 00

  And it's just been, it's, it's felt way more like it did previous to like the, the tough times.

• 1:26:08Shane Parrish?

  I remember we went for a walk July last year and we were talking about Bill Walsh's book, The Score Will Take Care Of Itself. Instead of focusing on the revenue, the score, just focus on the things you control.

• 1:26:21Speaker 00

  The revenue will be the revenue, right? I can't like go like the early days where I could force my classmates to buy a pair. I can't go force people to buy socks now. And I think like

• 1:26:30Shane Parrish?

  It's not going to move the needle if you're knocking on doors.

• 1:26:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, exactly. It may be a little bit, but yeah, not, not, not where we needed to. And I'm not shy to still get out there in hand to hand combat. I will do it. If you're focused on the work and you're focused on fulfilling the promise you have to your customers, like the results will come. If you, if you do a good product and you market it well, and the goal for us is socks on feet. The product is so damn good. I want to get more socks on feet because then people will come back. So how do we do that effectively? The same is true of sport, right? Like every time I got to the start line to race, like anything could go wrong. There's no guarantee I'm going to win. Like if I focus too much on the results, you lose sight of everything else that's important of just actually executing. Like my job was actually just to do what I trained for, and that's all you can really do, right? Like those people out there will be like, we don't have goals. I think goals are still important. I think goals are incredibly important. You need a north star.

• 1:27:15Speaker 00

  But that's how we think about goals, much more of a north star than like, we need to hit this. Like, because those are fairly arbitrary, you know, we're not a public company, you know, we're not having to like, do arrange reports that are going to move our stock prices. Like, it doesn't matter, right? If we're doing good business and we're growing and our customers are happy and we're profitable, and we can do that over 20 years, we've got a pretty damn good business.

• 1:27:36Shane Parrish?

  I have a saying with the kids, which is the lack of patience changes the outcome. There's a natural pace to a lot of things and we get into a lot of trouble when we try to speed that up.

• 1:27:46Speaker 00

  I agree with that wholeheartedly. That has been kind of the theme. Sometimes these things can work, but I think very rarely over the long term, they, they do. That's not to say don't try things as they come up too. I think like, I always try to be cautious of, of telling people like, oh, don't try the hacks. Just focus on the long term. Sometimes you need to try things and you need to like touch the stove once or twice. But generally speaking, if you prioritize the long term and do good business, it's going to work well. And in life, like even with just health, man, it takes so long. You know, it's just like if you actually want to build a resilient body and healthy body, like it's just, it takes time. Same with the business and sport and results. It's just like be kind to yourself, I've found. It's like you don't need it all right now, you know, you're just like one foot in front of the other, steady progress.

• 1:28:29Shane Parrish?

  You went through a process recently to learn not to care as much about what other people think about you or what you're doing.

• 1:28:37Speaker 00

  I kind of had this current fear, or like I got to a certain level in my cycling career. Where I peaked and but it wasn't where I wanted to peak. It wasn't kind of the ultimate goal of well, the ultimate goal would have been winning, being the best in the world, right? I never got there. One year I was number one in Canada, but like I didn't, I don't feel like I kind of had unfinished business there before I just didn't reach the top. And you know, looking back, there were a lot of things I wish I did differently. When I was looking here, like I don't want that to happen again. So I was trying to search for like, what am I not doing? What have I never done before that I should be doing to try and challenge myself and grow? So I actually texted a mutual friend of ours, Andrew Wilkinson, and I was like, here's kind of what I'm going through. I didn't know if it was therapy I needed to do. I didn't know if it was a business coach.

• 1:29:21Speaker 00

  Like I just knew I needed to work through this and understand myself better and just learn more about like, what is my superpower ultimately? Like, where should I be focused? And I just want to make sure I'm doing everything I can. And he mentioned this guy, Jack Skeen, who does this roadmap process where Andrew had done it and a few other people in the business community had done it. And it's this kind of extensive process where you work with Jack and you do some clinical kind of like psychology tests, understand kind of your tendencies. And he does interviews of your close friends and family, people that have opted in to being around you. For the most part, they see something in you and then interview calls and coaching calls with him.

• 1:30:04Speaker 00

  And the goal of that is to kind of understand yourself better and understand, you know, what your superpower is. And I didn't go into it with the goal of trying to care less about what people think. That was an outcome of the process. I actually didn't know what to expect. I just knew that I wanted to be taken apart and put back together. I wanted to like actually piece by piece, really understand myself. Like I wanted to dig into the childhood and be like, what does drive me? Why do I do the things I do? Why am I so intense? Why do I have these goals and need to achieve them? Why are my expectations so high? A lot of why I was moving through the world was acceptance and caring about what people

• 1:30:48Speaker 00

  thought, like, like attaching my worth to how other people thought about me. And that was a really unique insight of just like, I wasn't living authentically, you know, and I was kind of.

• 1:31:02Speaker 00

  Limited by the belief of others. I never really struggled with caring what people think unless I admired them or cared about their opinion. And I think it's important to prioritize what people you care about think, but that can't limit you and it can't change, you know, what you feel is right and what you need to do as well. And so going through that process and building the the systems and kind of building the understanding of how do you deal with that? Like one thing I did daily is I all kind of like do some journaling and I just started asking myself every day, when did I not say or do what I was really thinking or feeling? Cause I didn't want to moderate myself anymore. That's not to say be rude, but it's not to like, if we're having a

• 1:31:47Speaker 00

  conversation and I disagree, like I want to be more willing to say that because I don't want to have a fear of thinking that the other person across the table is going to not like me anymore because I disagree. It's like, is that a good friendship anyways? It sounds obvious, but a lot of people operate that way, right? It's very natural to like want to fit in and want to kind of be accepted. And so it can be a bit scary to kind of like be really authentic.

• 1:32:10Shane Parrish?

  And it causes resentment if you're holding that in.

• 1:32:12Speaker 00

  Well, totally. Yeah. It's exhausting, right? Because you're actually not living your true self. You're like a chameleon. And that's where a lot of people who think they may be introverted, I think are just actually limiting a lot. They're just kind of molding to their environment. And that's why they're so exhausted after is they're just around the wrong people or they're not being authentic. So learning like strategies on how not to care, that's a lot easier said than done, but asking myself that question and kind of like knowing I have to be accountable to that allows me to be more authentic. Cause like, I don't want to answer that question. But like, here's where I moderated myself and I'm happy to say like, I've only like once in a couple of months had to like answer that question and, and not be like, yeah, I moderated myself here. It was just out of fear. It was like a public speaking. I didn't want to get up and talk. It's like, it's like, I don't know. I cared what people thought for some reason. It kind of.

• 1:32:57Speaker 00

  Affected me outside of not caring what people think, the, the real kind of unlock there was, I said, superpower and like it came down that, you know, like my love and appreciation for socks and the, like the utility and how they can improve what I see there and learning how that, that can be enough, you know, like learning that, um, I would, like I just mentioned earlier, is insecure about socks being enough. I, I do now feel I'm in a spot where I know a lot about business, I've got a lot of experience. I kind of had this, this angst of like, are socks the best utilization of these skills that I've built? And I kind of mentioned that to Jack. He's like, well, that's kind of silly. Like if you're doing shoes, would that be enough? What about tennis

• 1:33:37Speaker 00

  rackets? And I was like, oh, I've never thought about it that way. I was like, you know, Nike's a great business, right? It was shoes for such a long time. I was like, no one ever was like, that's a lame business, right? I was like, socks. I was like, I've mentioned a couple of times, it's a big market. I was like, why isn't this enough? Why in my head are socks, you know, not as good as shoes or rackets or some tech thing? It's like, it was just this kind of like self-imposed sort of limiter of like, I don't know, of like, I guess caring what people think, because I don't have a better idea right now and I really love what I do. And so it was really helpful to understand that because it, like I said, it helped me, I was already falling back in love with kind of the process, but it was like, it almost allowed me to kind of like fully

• 1:34:19Speaker 00

  commit to it again and be like, oh no, socks, you know, are enough until the next idea comes. I kind of challenged him because I was like, oh, I did all this work and like socks are my superpower? And he's like, no, they are right now. Your ability to like, take a product and see how it can be improved is your superpower, but you don't have another product in mind right now. He's like, that will come and you'll know when it comes. He's like, be okay with where you are. And that's been a kind of theme for me is, you know, I got to see the feedback and read the report and, you know, one of the things that like Rob tries to rush through life and I do, like I'm always like on to the next thing. I don't celebrate the wins and it's just like, I'm trying to rush to the next thing. And it's like, as I get older too, and I'm trying to

• 1:35:01Speaker 00

  appreciate the moments and smell the roses. And a good example of this is when I was cycling, I got to travel the world. See all these incredible places. I was so intense and so focused that I would not enjoy anywhere. I'd be in Spain or Italy and I would be so tunnel visioned that I didn't even give my time, myself time to like appreciate where I was. And I always told myself, I'll be back. I'll appreciate it later. I haven't been back, right? Like it just ended. And I look back, I'm like, I think I would be a lot more fulfilled if like, I actually just smelt the roses, right? Cause like, the results are one thing, but like, the experiences and the opportunities to like be there. And like, we always look back and like, we don't talk about the results. We talk about the experiences and the

• 1:35:42Speaker 00

  journey. And unfortunately, I just like, didn't take time to appreciate the journey. And so I'm really trying to do that now. And you know, it's just way more fulfilling to be like, we're in it. One of my favorite quotes is one of my favorite shows, The Office. And it's like in the final episode and Andy says, uh, he's kind of reminiscing. He's like, um, I wish someone told us we were in the good times, like in the good old days, right? He's like, they're looking back and they're like, I wish they would tell you before it ended. And I'm kind of getting goosebumps talking about it. It's like, I'm in the good old days right now, right? Like, I know when this business is over as tough as it is, or whatever we're going through, even like raising young children. I try to remind myself, like, these are the good old days. Like, another thing I read, it was like, you know, like,

• 1:36:24Speaker 00

  it can be hard to take your dog. I have a dog, hard to take them out in the rain. But when they're gone, how much would you pay to take that dog for a walk right now?

• 1:36:32Shane Parrish?

  It's almost like rewinding a little and just being like, remember when you wanted what you have now?

• 1:36:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:36:37Shane Parrish?

  And just being happy and content with that, but also still, you know, striving for more. And maybe there's a title of a book by David Sokol, which I like, which is pleased but not satisfied. And, and it's sort of like, you can be happy where you're at and you can still drive for more.

• 1:36:53Speaker 00

  That's something I've struggled with is like, I'm incredibly happy this year and like, and I've been, you know, struggling with like, people ask like, what's your biggest challenge right now? And I'm like, or what's your biggest problem? I'm like, I feel like I've spent two years fighting problems that like, I'm in kind of like a solution phase right now. On one hand, hyper ambitious, but on the other hand, content, because content is almost like counter to ambitious, right? And it's how do you balance those two things? Not to use balances. It's like, but how do those two things live simultaneously? And maybe it comes down to seasons. But that's the thing I've ultimately been like, when I'm in a creative space, It's not tied to the result as much. You know, it's not, it's not like, yeah, I'm in a place now that's incredibly hard to even imagine 10

• 1:37:36Speaker 00

  years ago, but there's still so much more I want to go and but I'm not driven and I never was driven. I think that's why I go back to sport is like the ultimate motivator where I said, everything's earned, not owed. The goal of starting my business was never financially driven. It was this deep desire to accomplish something and that hasn't gone away, you know, and that that won't go away. And so there's no level of income where that's going to kind of leave me. And so it comes down to like, how are you resilient or why are you doing it? It's that personal mission of like, why are you doing it and being authentic?

• 1:38:07Shane Parrish?

  I think that's a great segue to the question we always end with, which is what is success for you?

• 1:38:11Speaker 00

  This changes over time because my life's changed so much over the last few years. I feel like I'm learning a lot of hard lessons and a lot of great lessons. And I look at my young children, I'm like, I want to do the best job I can to share these with you and give you kind of a bit of a head start. You're going to go through pain, you're going to go through tough times, but I want to do as good of a job as possible to prepare them with these lessons that I've learned. And I try to do that through young entrepreneurs too. Like I do a lot of work with the local schools and I try to share these lessons on different platforms too, just because like I didn't have anyone to go to, you know, like I didn't have that or my whole network was, was athletes and all that. So like when I was going through all the early challenges, it was kind of me and just internalizing it on like, I want to be that voice that says, you'll be okay.

• 1:38:57Speaker 00

  Right? And I think success looks like being able to show my kids what hard work looks like, show them what doing that while having like a great family life as well and, you know, honoring my partner and that, just sharing the lessons, you know, that would be, that would be success. If the kids grow up and they're in a good spot, you know, like what's, what's more important than that? And I think ultimately having fun while doing all that, operating in this zone of being healthy and being happy and that would be success, man. That would be winning.

• 1:39:32Shane Parrish?

  Thanks for listening and learning with us. For a complete list of episodes, show notes, transcripts, and more, go to fs.blog/podcast or just Google The Knowledge Project. Recently, I've started to record my reflections and thoughts about the interview after the interview. I sit down, highlight the key moments that stood out for me, and I also talk about other connections to episodes and sort of what's got me pondering that I maybe haven't quite figured out. This is available to supporting members of The Knowledge Project. You can go to fs.blog/membership, check out the show notes for a link, and you can sign up today. And my reflections will just be available

• 1:40:13Shane Parrish?

  in your private podcast feed. You'll also skip all the ads at the front of the episode. The Farnham Street Blog is also where you can learn more about my new book, Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments Into Extraordinary Results. It's a transformative guide that hands you the tools to master your fate, sharpen your decision-making, and set yourself up for unparalleled success. Learn more at fs.blog/clear. Until next time.