Nike Founder Quotes

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” George Bernard Shaw On a cool fall evening in 2008, four students set out to revolutionize an industry. Buried in loans, they had lost and broken eyeglasses and were outraged at how much it cost to replace them. One of them had been wearing the same damaged pair for five years: He was using a paper clip to bind the frames together. Even after his prescription changed twice, he refused to pay for pricey new lenses. Luxottica, the 800-pound gorilla of the industry, controlled more than 80 percent of the eyewear market. To make glasses more affordable, the students would need to topple a giant. Having recently watched Zappos transform footwear by selling shoes online, they wondered if they could do the same with eyewear. When they casually mentioned their idea to friends, time and again they were blasted with scorching criticism. No one would ever buy glasses over the internet, their friends insisted. People had to try them on first. Sure, Zappos had pulled the concept off with shoes, but there was a reason it hadn’t happened with eyewear. “If this were a good idea,” they heard repeatedly, “someone would have done it already.” None of the students had a background in e-commerce and technology, let alone in retail, fashion, or apparel. Despite being told their idea was crazy, they walked away from lucrative job offers to start a company. They would sell eyeglasses that normally cost $500 in a store for $95 online, donating a pair to someone in the developing world with every purchase. The business depended on a functioning website. Without one, it would be impossible for customers to view or buy their products. After scrambling to pull a website together, they finally managed to get it online at 4 A.M. on the day before the launch in February 2010. They called the company Warby Parker, combining the names of two characters created by the novelist Jack Kerouac, who inspired them to break free from the shackles of social pressure and embark on their adventure. They admired his rebellious spirit, infusing it into their culture. And it paid off. The students expected to sell a pair or two of glasses per day. But when GQ called them “the Netflix of eyewear,” they hit their target for the entire first year in less than a month, selling out so fast that they had to put twenty thousand customers on a waiting list. It took them nine months to stock enough inventory to meet the demand. Fast forward to 2015, when Fast Company released a list of the world’s most innovative companies. Warby Parker didn’t just make the list—they came in first. The three previous winners were creative giants Google, Nike, and Apple, all with over fifty thousand employees. Warby Parker’s scrappy startup, a new kid on the block, had a staff of just five hundred. In the span of five years, the four friends built one of the most fashionable brands on the planet and donated over a million pairs of glasses to people in need. The company cleared $100 million in annual revenues and was valued at over $1 billion. Back in 2009, one of the founders pitched the company to me, offering me the chance to invest in Warby Parker. I declined. It was the worst financial decision I’ve ever made, and I needed to understand where I went wrong.

Nike founder and CEO Phil Knight quickly recognized that Riswold

Nike, Microsoft Amazon and similar companies went public relatively early in their growth cycles. As a result, public investors had the opportunity to participate in 95 to 99% of their overall price appreciation. Founders, early employees and VCs took all the risk. Most of the reward was left for grabbing – anyone could’ve bought those stocks on the secondary markets.   As the Federal Reserve prints more money and interest rates remain low, an increasing percentage of capital is flowing into risky asset classes like venture capital and “angel investing.” This capital has chased up valuations in the pipeline preceding IPOs, making the IPOs feel more like the end of the journey, not the beginning. Thus,

When he talked with us about goals and hopes, he asked us, though never in so many words, to balance the hunger that is in all runners with some grasp of what our predecessors had achieved. The thing was not to blindly disregard limits but to understand the odds, even as one refused to accept them. He asked us, then, to leave open a tiny window of possibility. "If you go out to race," he said, "and know you'll lose, there's no probability involved. You'll lose. But if you go out knowing you will never give up, you'll still lose most of the time, but you'll be in the best position to kick from on that rare day when everything breaks right.

All of a sudden people were asking, "Where were these guy coming from?" As the world would soon learn, Bowman hasn't developed a solitary prodigy. He was shaping a succession of them.

The ancient Greeks," Bowman said, echoing his response to the Munich terror, "believed the Olympic arena so sacred they stopped their wars for them. Now we believe our wars are so sacred we sacrifice Olympics for them.

Keeping vivid both the story of Pre and the truths Bowman held to be vital-namely, that we are all physical entities, that we all have the ability to get better, but to do that we have to accept our limits at any given moment and work within them. Great coaches are great because they see and help transcend those limits. If that is not an immortal message, it should be.

You could issue two classes of stock—class A and class B. The public would get class Bs, which would carry one vote per share. The founders and inner circle, and your convertible debenture holders, would get class As, which would entitle them to name three-quarters of the board of directors. In other words, you raise enormous sums of money, turbocharge your growth, but ensure that you keep control.

Consider the $400 million donation that Nike founder Phil Knight made to Stanford University in early 2016. The money will be used to cover tuition and living expenses for just one hundred grad students a year at Stanford, which has one of the largest endowments in the United States, over $20 billion. The idea is to train the next generation of leaders who will go on to “address society’s most intractable problems, including poverty and climate change.” Of course, though, there are plenty of talented leaders who are already in the trenches working on these problems—and could sure use some help from the likes of Phil Knight. It’s hard to think of Stanford grad students, many of whom already get a tuition-free ride, as a needy bunch.