YouSaid · the spoken record

Bayard Winthrop

lines on the record: 123
first: 2024-07-01
most recent: 2024-07-01
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

“And he told me about the business he was trying to launch, and little by little kind of began to suggest to me that maybe I could join him. And so that's what I did.”
2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, in fact, so we got acquired. And I was so ready to get back to a tangible thing. Webchat had seemed like those was a good financial moment for me. It was a return to banking and that I was dealing with a product that didn't truly understand, wasn't passionate about. And so. I didn't even consider tech. I had met another guy that had gone through the Stanford product design program. His name was Steen Strand. And I had met him when I was at Atlas. And Steen and I became close. And fast forward a few years later, I had sold WebChat. I was sitting out on Clement Street in San Francisco and had just come out of a bar with some friends. And I saw a guy go flying by on a skateboard. And then he turned around. He said, Bayard, it's Steen. And we reconnected.”
2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so I eventually ended up overseeing quite a bit of the business just because I was someone there that was willing to work really, really hard and I loved it and I'd never left the office. And so anyway, it was a period of rapid learning and also just real joy and passion for me. It was a really important chapter.”
2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so I came in and said, listen, I'll do whatever. And you basically have to pay me nothing. I think I offered to work for $15,000 a year or something like that. And they finally agreed, but very quickly, as the business started to grow, as you point out, they needed everything. They needed help in building the sales force, help in running the production floor. And so just by being in the right place, I got to take on a lot of those functions. And maybe most importantly for me, all these theoretical things I'd been learning at the bank, I was now applying and finally understanding how they impacted business, so understanding why a cash flow statement mattered and what margin meant and how it impacted the financial performance of a business and all those things.”
2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, in the beginning, it was literally that it was moving desks, sweeping floors, cleaning toilets, just doing anything I could, the business that they had done something funny. They'd been interviewed by a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, and nobody at that point were just getting started. And the reporter said, where can I get this thing? And one of the guys said, oh, they sell it at Marmot Mountain Works in Berkeley, which was not true. The snowshoes were not there. And suddenly a bunch of people started calling. And the owner of Marmot called up these guys and said, I keep getting all these customers. I should get some pears in. So they were beginning to see some growth. And it was just the two of them. And one guy helping to build Snowshoes, Mario.”
2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And what do they have you do? I mean, you came from a job on Wall Street. Did you do sales, marketing? I mean, I'm assuming it was a small company, so you had to be like a Swiss army knife. What did they have you do at the company?”
2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's really from the ethos that those two instilled in that business. And I had a front row seat to that, really seeing those guys be sticklers for design and manufacturing, that was something that never left me”
2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Neither a skier nor a snowshoe. I don't think I'd been on a pair of skis more than once or twice when I moved to California and had never been on a pair of snowshoes. But that company, Atlas Snowshoe, was a remarkable little company. When I found out about it, it was a couple of guys, one guy out of Stanford's product design program and another guy who had actually conceived of the idea of building a modern snowshoe. There had been no innovation really at all in 30 or 40 years. And they had designed an interesting harness for your foot that gave you a mechanical advantage when you used the snowshoe itself. And they launched a company around that. And I was their, I think their first or their second employee. But it was all I could have dreamed of. A couple of really smart guys making a product, trying to get a company stood up in a warehouse in a bad part of town in San Francisco. And it was just, I felt like I'd fallen into a tub of butter. I mean, it was just the absolute realization of what I'd hoped for.”
2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I guess through a series of friends of a friend, you ended up meeting this guy who was one of the owners of a company called Atlas Snowshoe, which I looked up. They are literally snowshoes. Were you like, I don't know, is it like a skier or a snowshoe? What was your interest in that”
2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Part of it was in the two years at DLJ and the summers that led up to that, that work was almost theoretical. It was analytical in nature. It was looking at spreadsheets. It was not at all tangible. And so I had no interest in technology or the advent of the Internet or none of that. I wanted to go in the opposite direction. I really wanted to find a company, a brand that made a physical product. And that's really what I focused my energy on.”
2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, you get to San Francisco, and this is like 1993. So, this is the dawn of the internet era, and you would just come off a job on Wall Street, but I guess you were really looking to get into products, like working for a company that made something. What do you think that interest came from?”
2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I had a fair amount of cushion financially from two years of DLJ, and that made it easier And I began to form a philosophy then having kind of gone through that experience at DLJ where I really wanted to crank down on everything in my life to give me freedom in my professional sector. So I got into a posture that said, I'm going to do whatever I can to give me maximum flexibility on work, which included taking a lower salary, which I ultimately ended up doing at the first job I got. Drive an old car and not buy in stuff, including clothes and other things like that, really trying to live as modestly as I could to give myself as much opportunity professionally as I could.”
2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I think it was purely the desire to start new and be free and ended up in terms of going total happenstance, a really good friend of mine. I said, That's funny. I'm leaving. And he said, Would you ever move to San Francisco? I need a roommate. And I had no plans. And so I said, sure. And we got an apartment together. But I think the real motivation guy was just wanting to let go of all of these things that I had sort of built as part of my narrative and say, it's wrong and I'm going to try something new. It was kind of that intensely liberating, but that poorly thought out also.”
2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You stay there for about two years and you decide you're going to leave New York and not just leave New York, but go to the West Coast, go to the opposite side of the country. First of all, what do you remember about that time? I mean, you're probably 25. What was it about the West Coast that seemed interesting to you”
2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a real gift, and that certainly was that after my tenure in that program, I decided to get out of banking, which was a big decision for me because I'd worked so hard to get the job, but it became clear to me that it was the wrong fit.”
2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we did make a lot of money, and it was a grind. DLJ became kind of legendary. There was a book written about how difficult the life was as an analyst. He basically didn't get days off. And that took its toll. But I have to say that experience was phenomenal. I have tremendous amount of appreciation for that job because it taught me how to work hard. It taught me how to be accurate. It taught me how to get things done over the line. But at the same time, I was surrounded by a bunch of folks who had gone to Harvard and Wharton and Michigan and Stanford who were econ majors and were way smarter than me were outperforming me. And I think that began to kind of creep its way into my head that I just was not in the right place. And I think about it a lot in that that's a gift. If you can early on figure out, even if it's what I don't want to do or what I shouldn't do.”
2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To get into finance and banking. Which is a grind. I mean, especially when you're starting out. It's like 60, 70 hour hours a week, right? Just a grind. But if you can stick it out, you can make a lot of money.”
2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In New York City, and fairly doing fairly menial work that first summer. The bank was called Donaldson Luffkin and Jen Ratt. And I was working in essentially the mailroom, the sort of private wealth kind of back office part of that bank. And that kicked off, I think, three summers of internships that eventually landed me a job in their investment banking program, which was a pretty prestigious program at a pretty prestigious bank. It was one of a couple of professional moments that was a real kind of aha, because when I finally got that job, it became clear to me that I was ill-suited for that as a career.”
2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Did at a pretty young age get pretty fixated on this idea of being stable financially. In that town, Wall Street was kind of the thing. And starting, I think in my sophomore year in college, I got a summer intern job at a bank.”
2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In America. So he decided to make them himself. And he also decided to see if he could create textile jobs in some of the very same places that lost them in the eighties and 90s. Today, barely 3% of all clothing sold in America is made in the US. An American giant has managed to become one of the very few U.S.-made activewear brands. And Bayard has proved with a lot of difficulty that you can build a sustainable and profitable clothing business without outsourcing. You might make a bit less money, but he'd argue the long-term benefits massively outweigh the money. Byard grew up just outside of New York in Greenwich, Connecticut. His parents split up when he was young and Byard went to live with his mom, who was a real estate agent. Growing up, they moved around every couple of years, and Byard remembered not having A lot of stability.”
2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“American, the cotton for the flannel shirts and denim jeans, the dyes they use, the rivets, the buttons all produced in places like Los Angeles, Chicago, and North Carolina. This is an expensive proposition. The company could make a lot more money by simply outsourcing to China or Vietnam. But that would defeat the purpose of the business. The whole point of American giant was to build a brand that was entirely American made. And why? Why would someone be obsessed with this idea? Well, for starters, because it is really, really hard. But more specifically, Bayard Winthrop, the founder of American giant, couldn't find the thick and soft cotton sweatshirts that he used to wear as a kid in the seventies and eighties when, believe it or not, 70% of clothing sold in America was made.”
2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You've likely heard many businesses talk about purpose, and purpose could mean a bunch of things commitment to quality or healthy living or bringing people together, right? But at the end of the day, and I say this with the utmost respect, a business is about being sustainable, or to put it a bit more bluntly, it's about making money. It's about scaling, and it's about finding the most efficient way to do these things, which is what makes today's story so unusual, so remarkable, because almost everything American giant does flies in the face of convention, starting with where and how they manufacture their products. American giant is an apparel brand, they're best known for zip up hoodies, t shirts, and jeans, and everything they make and virtually everything they source is a”
2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I got a handful of brands in my life that I like giving them my money because I admire what they're doing and it aligns with my own values. And I think that is probably behind it is there's this intuitive sense that the Amazonification of our lives is not great and that we're getting this disconnected reality from the people and the places that make the things that we need and love. And we got to turn back on that a little bit.”
2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT