A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:04:59 · Pablo Srugo, Rob Woodbridge
[00:04:59] S0: What was that story? I don't think I touched on that. [00:05:02] S1: Yeah. So Prefontaine was this up-and-coming runner that was the – he was their ambassador. It’s who they could afford, and I remember Pre. I remember this guy dominating. He was a world-class runner, and then he, in his prime at 24, rolls his car and dies, like dead, right? And so you have these moments where you're like what is the universe telling me? And they get this point where – so I think we – let's pick a demarcation point because that's an interesting story. At some point, the universe is telling you something <laugh>, and you're either receptive to it or you ignore it, like most stubborn entrepreneurs do. And when your spokesperson dies, that's a pretty big statement to <laugh> – that's something where you're like, oh, how can you get past that? [00:05:57] S0: I think it's true. If you just go through and you just count punches to the face, Nike is probably top of the list. Today you look. It's $150 billion company, number one in the shoe market, just crushing it, right? But it was such – I remember that when I listened to Shoe Dog for the first time, just how long it took. He gave half his company away to – it was effectively like an advisor, his coach. I was watching the – I don’t know if you saw that BECKHAM documentary came out? [00:06:30] S1: No. [00:06:30] S0: Anyways, it's on Netflix. [00:06:32] S1: More of a Spice Girls, like a Posh Spice guy, anyways.
00:06:32 · Rob Woodbridge, Pablo Srugo
[00:06:32] S1: More of a Spice Girls, like a Posh Spice guy, anyways. [00:06:36] S0: Right. You watch the Spice Girls documentary. I'm watching the second one. One of the pieces was like it just – this resonated with me because it reminded me of Phil Knight a bit where he's like – I mean, he's a superstar, right? But then, whatever, something happens with his coach. I think it was at Man U or Real Madrid. I don't remember which club. They don't just bench him. He's the best. He’s literally one of the best players. They don't just bench him. They’re like you're no longer training with this team, and he had to finish off the season. And this guy keeps showing up every single day to practice, and he trains on his own on the side. And the coach was like – I don't even know what to make of that. I don't know how long it took. A few weeks in, the rest of the squad was like, “Dude, like, bring this guy back in.” This is crazy, right? But that reminded me of Phil because it’s like, if you just look at it, he goes and he starts doing part-time – he's a professor part-time just to pay the bills. He’s going to track meet after track meet. You know what? There was just enough there, I think, every year that kept him going.
00:07:34 · Rob Woodbridge, Pablo Srugo
[00:07:34] S1: But I think that that's the little taste, right? There was always just enough. In those early years, there was always just enough and then there – something happened that made it not just enough. It's so weird that they – it was just enough always, and then they would grow a little bit. And then something would land on their lap that set them back. So distributors would say, “No, we're out,” or the tire distributor would say, “No, we're going with somebody new.” And it was always something that just when you think that you're about to climb that hill it's the false summit. You get up there and you're pulling yourself up and you look over. You're like, oh, my God. I'm a third of the way up. I still got all this to climb, and I'm exhausted. That was Phil Knight. [00:08:22] S0: I mean, that's what I admire most because I haven't been on the other side, on both sides of the fences. It’s like I'm telling you, I'm too probabilities driven. You almost can't calculate the odds of success when you're in it. Yeah, after every one of those punches would've been a pretty – perfectly suitable time to be like, okay, this – realistically not going to work. [00:08:46] S1: Somebody’s telling me no. [00:08:47] S0: Call it quits. But yeah, no, I mean, I think that's almost the defining kind of feature of Nike is just him just continuing and continuing and continuing through it all.
00:09:00 · Rob Woodbridge
[00:09:00] S1: Maybe there's a little piece of necessity there, and I echoed with Phil Knight. I can't compare myself to Phil Knight. I just want to be really clear that there's no comparison between Phil and I when I say this whatsoever, except for this one thing. He probably had no other option. Maybe he did, but he didn't know what he wanted to do or be in his life. So this was a natural thing. He was young enough. He was unencumbered. He had gone to school. He had a job, but the key for him was that this is the time. So you hear that a lot about young founders, but the one thing that really resonated is that he had no idea what he wanted to do with his life. And it's kind of like that was – to me, when I was reading that about him was that it was just a clear indication that he was born to create something. Now, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, but that was just because out of pure necessity that I started my first company because there was nothing else out there. But I think a lot of entrepreneurs have that feeling is that you want to create something. But you don't fit in anywhere, and so you have this world. You don't fit. I'm not going to be a lawyer. I'm not going to be an accountant. I'm not going to be here. So where do I fit in this world? There's no vocation. So it's entrepreneurship, and then you find out if you have it or not. But Phil had it, man, and it is in his blood. And I think that he absolutely – maybe not absolute but I feel that he had nothing to fall back on if this failed.
00:10:35 · Pablo Srugo
[00:10:35] S0: I think a hundred percent. There's kind of a burned all boats, and the other thing on that note I think that was – and especially important today because today it's so hard to fundraise, right? Two years ago, everybody was raising $5 million pre-seed grants. Now it's tough, and there's power to constraints, which is part what you're saying. He’s constrained on one hand because he is like what else am I going to do if I don't do this? So I might as well keep doing it. He's also constrained on the other hand because he doesn't have VCs that have backed him for 5, $10 million where he can just start trying this out, trying that out. He's just got to grow with the rate that he can grow, and he actually talked so much about how he couldn't get enough funding. And so the fastest he could grow is effectively like a 2X, and that was what he did. And I thought to myself – because this whole WeWork thing came out. They’re filing for bankruptcy, which is a whole other tangent I want to touch on in a minute. I think to myself what if Vision Fund existed in the ‘60s, and what if this guy went and somehow secured $10 million way too early? What would that have done? Part of me believes – because I've seen so many founders I've spoken with who told me – these are billion-dollar founders who were like I bootstrapped early on where I raised like 200K, really, really small, and it was such a blessing at the end of the day. Most of them, by the way, try to fundraise. They just couldn't. They were like, ultimately, it’s not like they wanted to, like they were thinking, oh, I really should bootstrap. It was like I'm trying to fundraise and I can't.
00:11:54 · Rob Woodbridge, Pablo Srugo
[00:11:54] S1: No, no, no, keep your money. [00:11:54] S0: But then they look back – exactly. Don't let me pay myself so I can eat. But when they look back, they're like the fact that we were bootstrapped helped because, again, there's power in these constraints. And so I think about the Phil Knight story, and I go back to this kind of analogy. What if there was Vision Fund? What if there were VCs back then? What if he would've raised 5, $10 million because he had this big idea about how he's going to disrupt Adidas and Puma or whatever with this strategy of whatever? What would've happened? There’s an argument to be made that the market was tiny back then. It was only going to grow at a third rate. He only could have pushed so much harder, and there's a huge argument that Nike might not exist today because he could have over hire, try to push on things that don't really exist, try to have this idea of the market's going to move at the rate it's going to move. Of course, you can pull on it a bit, but only so much. And if you think I've raised five million, now I'm going grow 5X instead of 2X and you don't, things get complicated, right? And that could have been a reason for him to give up.