YouSaid · the spoken record

Andy Dunn

lines on the record: 100
first: 2019-01-21
most recent: 2019-01-21
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I am I am, I think that the two things that the two really big things that influence your life, the family that you're born into, and I don't know what I call it, your DNA, the genetic stock, how you show up as a creature, as a human being, you have no control over those two things. And so I feel like in life, I was dealt, if we call it luck, I don't want to say pocket aces because I don't know how to think about my genetic makeup, but I was born into the most incredible family ever, and I was given the best of all opportunities, wanting for nothing, educationally or experientially. The best mom, the best dad, the best sister. Now I've got the best wife. So with all that and all the amazing groups of people I've been around, I owe it to everyone to do something akin to this. And at the end of the day, the credit goes to them.”
2019-01-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bonobos: Andy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People who love you, who, if you just listen to them and cultivate relationships with the people who are direct, will tell you what you need to hear if it's not what you want to hear. The same thing at a company, the people along the way, your board, your investors, your employees, who know as a collective what to do, more so than you, but in combination, you can unlock that. So I think if you bring self-awareness and you bring empathy and you bring positivity and you bring intellectual honesty and courage, and you ultimately try to make good decisions, I think you can influence a lot. I would attribute Would attribute this outcome in this company at the end of the day to three things to the quality of the people around me on all fronts, to the hard work of those people who really believed in this and made this happen, the team.”
2019-01-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bonobos: Andy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Luck is a concept that I thought of in a straightforward way for a while, and then when I converted to Judaism last February, I became acquainted with this concept of kismet, which is not even pronouncing it right probably, but it's kind of the intersection of luck and serendipity. And maybe even some measure of destiny. I don't want to go that far, because I still don't know why really bad things happen to good people. I think you've got to be open in life to the way that the universe is trying to help you.”
2019-01-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bonobos: Andy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, I'm so proud, it's so hard to do that. So hard to build a company that ends up being worth something really meaningful. Was just a staggering number. And I was so grateful that we got that done and got a chance to, you know, there are very few things in this life that you can look at and say we did that. And selling a company is one of those moments. And so I'm so proud that we got to chalk that win up and that we get to keep going in a really safe home. You know, people ask, why are we doing this? And part of it is, hey, I'm excited about the strategy, but part of it is we get to exist now. If we do our jobs well for a long time, maybe fifty years or more. Maybe 100 years Bonobos will be around. And that's rare.”
2019-01-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bonobos: Andy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Walmart reportedly paid $310 million for bonobos, which is impressive. I mean, it's a lot of money. How did you respond to that number? Did it mean anything to you? Were you proud that you got it to that point? Or was it just a signature at the bottom of a sheet?”
2019-01-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bonobos: Andy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, not at all. So we anticipated. Meaningful blowback, and if you go back and look at what I wrote at the time, I was pretty direct the day of the announcement around the future of bonobos. And I said, look, I think a lot of people are going to be confused by this. It was fascinating. For 72 hours, there's a really big reaction and an availability bias of the most vocal people. And then business returns to normal. The vast majority of people don't think about this stuff that much every day. And for me, what I couldn't say to them is, hey, bonovos gets to continue to exist. We get a home. You know how hard that is to actually secure the outcome?”
2019-01-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bonobos: Andy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But it just energy changed by directly addressing it. It felt like, wow, that turns out that just telling people like it is the truth. And the truth was we hadn't decided at that moment Minute, I think it was another couple months before we actually could announce.”
2019-01-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bonobos: Andy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It leaked, I was out of the office, I was actually working on the deal elsewhere, and I rushed back to the office and I got everyone together. And I said, we're going to have a very unusual meeting. Here's what I can tell you I love this company at least as much as you do. You know me I would never guide us to doing anything that wasn't in our self interest as a Brandon as a company and as shareholders and employees of the brand. What has been published is not A fact, it's not. An announcement It's speculation We have not decided on our path. And when we have news versus rumors, of course you'll be the first to know when we have news, and in the meanwhile, please get back to work. Was the weirdest meme I've ever had. Everyone just got up and went back to work. And I'm sure the conversations continued.”
2019-01-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bonobos: Andy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, that's not, that wasn't the approach, ultimately, because people, you know, the quote unquote water cooler talk was jamming and then there were messages on Slack saying this is a catastrophe for the brand with no context. Walmart acquiring bonobos, I get it. If you didn't have the understanding of the strategy and the way that Walmart and Jet.com are transforming e-commerce for the company, it wouldn't make sense. And so I had to call a very strange meeting.”
2019-01-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bonobos: Andy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yet, it took months, and it was made tricky by the fact that the deal leaked in the middle of the process, and because Walmart's a public company, the world's largest revenues, I think. I couldn't say anything”
2019-01-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bonobos: Andy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mark and I mind melded that was going to happen in commerce and that Bonobos was going to be the brand that would lead that and that we would go and lo and behold that long dreamed of multi-brand vision was going to come to fruition in the least expected way I could have ever imagined which is with the power of Walmart and Walmart's balance sheet behind it.”
2019-01-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bonobos: Andy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Founder of Jet. So probably the best third party e commerce entrepreneur. On the east coast. And I said, You know what? I know, Mark. I can't understand how would Walmart and Bonobos be a fit? That just doesn't make sense. And he's like, just talk to him. And I thought, you know what? Every time I've talked to Mark, I've found him to be a bit of a Jedi. We sat down and it was amazing. I didn't think Mark cared about brands, and then we had this incredible mind meld that the future of e-commerce was going to look a little bit like the history of Netflix, that a platform that was streaming other people's content and distributing other people's content would vertically integrate and start to develop their own proprietary content.”
2019-01-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bonobos: Andy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I felt like we were at that stage where the company needed to get ready for the next stage. We had discovered our soul as a consumer retail company. And we needed to learn from people that were good at taking consumer retail companies public. So that's the point we're at. And then at the 11th hour, I got a phone call to do a reference. And I did the reference. And then the individual who was calling me said, how are things going? This is someone that I, a colleague from way back. And I said, look, we're in the middle of this process. And the colleague says, hey, why don't you come talk to us? And he worked at Jet.com. And I was like, I knew Jet had been acquired by Walmart. I've known Mark Lori for years. And every time I saw him, we had a game-changing, for me, a game-changing conversation.”
2019-01-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bonobos: Andy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was at a wedding and I was talking to a friend and he knew one of our angel investors and that angel investor said you know bonobos is great but I wonder if I'll ever get paid I think at that point he'd invested eight or nine years ago in the very first round. And that wasn't the only reason, but once you've got venture investors who've been in for seven years and angel investors who've been in for 10, it just would be wrong. To not make other people money”
2019-01-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bonobos: Andy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So you guys, you know, you finally turn a corner and you're growing and this brand is out in the world. And then what it seemed to hit the rest of the rest of us following this lightning was in twenty seventeen you sold to Walmart. How did that happen? Did they approach you guys? Did they say, hey, we want to buy you? Did you go to them? Did you get to a point where you thought, okay, we've got to find a buyer because I've got to pay these investors back.”
2019-01-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bonobos: Andy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Wow, did we get to have fun learning everything we did? And wow, is it gratifying to be the pioneer in the category? And if raising a lot of capital was the price of that, then that's what the price of it was.”
2019-01-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bonobos: Andy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I'm speaking out of two sides of my mouth because on the one hand, that's what my philosophy is. On the other hand, I did say, look, look, I want to be incentivized. I do feel like at the end of the day, you know, owning two or three percent of the company is probably not commensurate with the work put in. And while it sort of is my fault that we had to raise so much capital, it also is the price of innovation. If you're the first mover in the digital native brand space and you're going to invent that model, I can't go back in time and do this company on 20 to 30 million, which is what I think it would take knowing what I now know.”
2019-01-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bonobos: Andy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That I would just cut back to hey, when I graduated business school, I had $3,000 in the bank and $160,000 of debt. And I started a company with that balance sheet. That was scary. And so I tried to stay true to that and think instead about how do I make sure everyone else makes money? How do I make sure that our shareholders from every round, you know, that we're up into the right on the post-money valuation and ultimately going to make people money? How do I make sure the management team has enough stock and employees have stock? And I'm going to be fine.”
2019-01-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bonobos: Andy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“More than, yeah. Yeah, it's just, I don't get it. I think you get warped because you start to heal about what other founders are making and you hear about it's the human problem, right? You start to circle with people where you start to live in these bubbles, where people have so much money.”
2019-01-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bonobos: Andy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh my god, I thought I'll be so lucky to have any of this. And I think it's warped to live in a world where, let's say you're going to make $20 million, the difference between $20 million and $100 million, it's not clear. For me, the only things that excess capital are good for is giving money to family and loved ones who were a part of getting you to where you were My case, you know, an immigrant mom and a high school history teacher dad That's number one. Number two is investing in other entrepreneurs and companies. Number three is making political contributions if you want to influence the future. And number four is being philanthropic. Now I'd love to throw in some nice seats to the Cubs game too. But the idea that you're trying to optimize for making.”
2019-01-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bonobos: Andy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was there, I mean, you know, we've interviewed lots of entrepreneurs, some who take on capital, some who don't, who bootstrap and then sell it for hundreds of millions of dollars. As you saw the value of the company go up, but your cut of it going down, did you care or did you say, you know, at a certain point, a certain number is just a number, and that's great. If this works, I'll have a little bit of money.”
2019-01-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bonobos: Andy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Said no at first, and you know said, hey, like, you need to work. You need to work for the shares that you've got. And then, you know, ultimately, uh, Just warm down and I got some alternative perspectives from people in the venture capital back. Company space and said, Hey, this feels right to me”
2019-01-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bonobos: Andy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh wow, this is a fun question. What it leads to, you know, I think a lot of times as a founder, you're thinking, I'm going to go do this for two years and see if it works. And then I'm going to do it for five, which you don't realize is it takes a decade to build a real business. And so what happens is... After four years, you're fully vested. And then you've got a debate, which is stay where you are, take on more capital, get diluted, which is what's happening to all the other shareholders, or ask for more equity. One day I woke up and said, you know what? I'm going to ask for more. I want to get my steak back to a more meaningful level. And then I had this really unusual kind of zero-sum game standoff.”
2019-01-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bonobos: Andy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As you started to turn a corner, I guess you also started to attract more and more investors and more and more capital to fuel the growth. What did that mean for your own stake? Were you just getting more and more diluted? And did you care? Was that important to you?”
2019-01-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bonobos: Andy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that was the insight, which is the customer doesn't need it right away. And that flew in the face of everything everyone in retail told me from the traditional industry. Instant gratification. And it turns out for a busy customer, that's just not true. If they get great service, which is what you can put out if you ripped the inventory out, you put the service in and Actually, it is a much more magical combination in terms of dollars per square foot productivity and customer delight as measured by net promoter score”
2019-01-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bonobos: Andy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That would actually be consistent in a deepening of who we are, getting us closer to who we are, to our soul as a business, versus getting away from it. And so the question was, well, how do you do that with physical inventory? If the whole model of bonobos is offering a lot more sizing and a lot more fits and a lot more colors, if you look at our Chinos business, we've got 36 waste and inseam combinations, four different fit silhouettes, and we might be running 15 to 20 colors. So if you do the math, that's four to five thousand variants. How do you possibly stock that? And so the incredible insight was, you don't. You don't stock it. You create a clothing store that has no clothing.”
2019-01-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bonobos: Andy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. It's a fit to ship concept. And so when you think about our, and this was another really fun board meeting, was this debate around is this an e-commerce company or is this a menswear experience company? And I made the case, and this is to people that funded the company with a view of e-commerce being at the core, that our company was actually not an e-commerce company. It was about serving this customer. And if we could invent a way to deliver the same level of fit and service in person.”
2019-01-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bonobos: Andy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it was actually more focus. So what really changed the company was the move from single channel to multi channel. Meaning the build out of the relationship with Nordstrom and the reinvention of the retail store with the guide shop model. And this was an incredible paradox because everyone was betting on e-commerce. Venture capital was flowing into e-commerce. Countless companies were rising and falling. And the irony of our business was after years of being told that wholesale was going away and that department stores were dying, our most profitable business became Nordstrom. Our second most profitable were our retail stores, and those two businesses' profits were funding losses from the e-commerce business, which is a wonderful paradox to the way that we conceived of the company.”
2019-01-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bonobos: Andy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Fine. Stay optimistic. What makes you think that I was optimistic? I was. I was defiant in the face of a terrifying reality. And ultimately you just got to believe it's almost religious. It is religious. It's faith. And there's a really good saying, I don't want to say this is true because I've been lucky, but that companies don't die because the companies fail. They die because the entrepreneur gives up. That was the approach. Just keep the lights on, keep growing, keep learning, and that's what we did.”
2019-01-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bonobos: Andy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So once you kind of recovered from the kind of the tech mini disaster, or more than mini disaster, and things started to stabilize, first of all, was the company profitable? Was it making money in 2013, 2014?”
2019-01-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bonobos: Andy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We got two engineers in this data scientist to relocate. Literally, I remember sitting at a coffee shop in Palo Alto just begging. I mean, literally begging, being like, will you please come to New York at least for one to two years? And so it really did work out. I don't even want to think about running that play in retrospect without those two who came.”
2019-01-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bonobos: Andy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was really scared, but what I've learned in 11 years of doing this is Sometimes when you're the most afraid is when you're making one of the most important decisions, right? Like if it's not scary, it's not hard. And I think ultimately what we need to value more in this life for everyone, not just entrepreneurs, is courage. The courage to look at yourself honestly, look at the decisions you're making honestly, and say to yourself, you know what? That was my fault. I got that wrong. I'm not going to blame anyone else. I'm going to take responsibility for it, and I'm going to fix it.”
2019-01-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bonobos: Andy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Don't we give it two or three? And I said, Look, this is becoming more costly. This is becoming harder by the day. The culture is deteriorating. This is just wrong, and spending more time is going to only make it. More expensive, more doubling down on a sunk cost. Let's adjust, let's be intellectually honest here and let's adjust course.”
2019-01-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bonobos: Andy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't think you can tell anyone in this life what to do. I mean, I think you can try, but human beings are a gallant species we don't like. Love authority. And so, what you want to do is inspire people. You want to set a common vision and context and shared values. And then there are times where you have to step in and intervene and make important and difficult calls. But what it was, was it was clear to me in my gut that the organizational harmony at the company was being destroyed by this cross coastal. Conflict. And so, in some regard, it became pretty straightforward, and I brought it to the board and they couldn't believe that we were going to pull the plug a year in”
2019-01-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bonobos: Andy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And and so I'm trying to imagine you as the CEO going back and forth and trying to kind of, I guess, keep everybody happy. But the tech folks, the engineers, they have knowledge that you just didn't have. You're not a tech guy. That's not your skill set. Did you feel like you couldn't just tell them what to do?”
2019-01-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bonobos: Andy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. And if you think tribalism and human nature are still alive within one office, When you have people in different places with different ideas about what the soul of the company is, and you increase the expense, and by the way, you're now competing to hire software engineers with Facebook and Netflix, and the pay is higher. All those ingredients came together, and it was clear after about a year that we had hired the people, but it wasn't working. It deepened the divide between, let's just call it tech and retail. And it's hard enough to be a good CEO when you've got five days a week in the same office. All of a sudden you're two days a week in each office.”
2019-01-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bonobos: Andy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was both, which is the challenge. I mean, if I had been a better leader, maybe I could have figured out how to do that. Know we opened an office in Palo Alto, and it turned out to be a catastrophic error.”
2019-01-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bonobos: Andy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They were in the Bay Area, or they wanted to work at a company where the core enterprise is technology versus a PANS company. It was really a rift between the folks who worked on technology and the folks who worked on the rest of the business. It wasn't.”
2019-01-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bonobos: Andy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was a huge challenge because at the time the New York tech ecosystem was pretty small, or at least it felt small to me. At the same time, it was really hard to attract talented software engineers. Because they were all in.”
2019-01-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bonobos: Andy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Aside from raising money, we were still running a company. It was both a men's fashion company and a technology company, right? Because this is e-commerce. This is not brick and mortar stuff. So how was the technology side of bonobos? How is that working?”
2019-01-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bonobos: Andy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was terrible. It was really, really bad. And so I flew out to apologize to him and I said, I really screwed this up. And I said, would you consider now that we have this discussion, would you consider ever investing again? And he said, look, not right now, but maybe let's talk later. And for the next round that I raised, I went out and saw him and I said, look, I've learned so much from you. I learned a ton from you in terms of how badly I handled that situation. You actually tell me the truth and hold me to account. Would you consider coming onto our board? Not only investing but coming under the board. And he said yes.”
2019-01-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bonobos: Andy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we did two million in that first year of kind of full operations in 08 and then four in 09. And then we were heading towards seven or so. And I think we made one of the cardinal errors that an entrepreneur makes, which is the second angel round that we raised. We raised too high of a price. And actually, Joel was pretty upset about this. Actually, I think I wrote the email to Joel that was a condescending email in some regard around supporting the company. It was the dumbest email I've ever written, and Joel then said he wanted to sell his shares and created a whole issue for ourselves.”
2019-01-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bonobos: Andy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He offered to invest $300,000 in the business. And then I had another 90 conversations like that over the course of next. Couple months and piece together another round, and we ended up raising our first eight million from over 120 investors. So we just pieced it together.”
2019-01-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bonobos: Andy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I flew to Silicon Valley one day from New York because our then head of finance told me that we weren't going to make payroll. We had enough cash in the bank, I thought, to make payroll, but then we had, I guess, promise a supplier through a letter of credit. And we were about... Eight days away from not making payroll, which is not an inspiring moment for your employees. And I went to Hertz Renticar in San Francisco to rent a car and I swiped the card and it was declined. So, you know, I swipe my personal credit card, which was somehow still solvent in spite of all the debt that I had. And I drove to a Starbucks and sat down with someone who knew about the company and explained to him our growth and said, we definitely need some more money. I didn't say we're going to need it in the next week.”
2019-01-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bonobos: Andy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was a scary year, I thought I was good at hiring and a bunch of people I had hired didn't work out. I thought that I was good at fundraising and we were running out of money.”
2019-01-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bonobos: Andy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“2008 was the co-founder separation. I thought that would end all this depression. I thought that would be the worst year of my life. 2009 was far worse because I couldn't no longer blame anything on Brian. I had to blame it on myself.”
2019-01-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bonobos: Andy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't think Unless I could have been more enlightened at the time about how to do it. I think we were both so young and in some ways insecure and trying to prove ourselves and in some regards I think arrogant. I think that it was going to be hard at that stage of both of our lives to figure it out. But I wouldn't do it any other way. You know, the way that we did it was how it had to be done. And Brian went out and built another company called Chunk Club and did an amazing job with that. And he's got two amazing stories. And so I'm so grateful to him that he enabled Bonobos to thrive and gave me the opportunity to continue to build it.”
2019-01-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bonobos: Andy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was an unbelievable gift. I mean, he gifted the company that he had originally conceived of. Me and This day, the loyalty that I feel to him for having done that. And then the fact that afterwards it's difficult, right? That friendship has been eviscerated by that business issues. It took kind of years before we could sit down and have dinner and go to Cubs games together and”
2019-01-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bonobos: Andy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which was so weird because I had envisioned that conversation so many times and was so terrified to have it. And he was just unbelievably dignified about the whole thing. And that was when I learned you learn a lot about a person by the way they leave something that they love.”
2019-01-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bonobos: Andy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it was a very Bad way to do it, probably speaking to the challenges I had with difficult conversations and candor in person, but I wrote Brian a long email where I basically said, look, I think one of us should become the chairman and the other be the CEO. I'll take either side of the trade. And the CEO can run the day-to-day and run the company and the chairman can focus on external work. That was how the conversation started was through that kind of open it up. And then one day we were in the office. We used to work on Saturdays and just get stuff done at the office. And one day I just asked him, I said, hey, would you be willing to step aside, you know, given everything that's going on? He got a little teary and he looked at me and he said, yeah.”
2019-01-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bonobos: Andy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT