YouSaid · the spoken record

Bobby Trussell

lines on the record: 81
first: 2018-10-22
most recent: 2018-10-22
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

“Ever written We said we're going to Because it's only three inches thick. We thought it would fit great into the back of the cabs of the semis.”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, given my position in life, I was more forceful than that. I said, I'm interested, I want to get involved if it's any possible way. And he said, well, we want to go worldwide with it. We have nobody in the States. So why don't you go back and write me a marketing plan? And we'll see. And I said, okay. So I did so. I went home and wrote a marketing plan. Had some help with some old high school friends who eventually came on to work for us. And we wrote, which is perhaps the worst marketing plan”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I stayed at his house and slept on the mattress, and I woke up, and he said, Well, you think? I said, this is the most amazing product I've ever encountered. I'm interested. And when I came home after my first Swedish trip, I told Martha, I said, sweetie, we're in the mattress business.”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, that was the weird thing is they really didn't know what they had. They had this squishy, squishy foam with slow comeback. And they had originally been interested in it for football helmets. But they made some three inch overlays and they put them in a nursing home in Copenhagen. And they were thinking maybe it would be good for bed sores. And the reports they got back is that it, yes, indeed, it helped people who had bed sores. And the other thing they heard, though, anecdotally, was, hey, the people who had back pain said it helped their back And so that's when they said, hey, looks like we got something here.”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“U.S. government, there wasn't a patent on it. It was freely alienable. And my Swedish friends bought a company in Denmark called Danfoam. They made it better and reproducible and more durable.”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yah, it was originally invented by NASA for the space program to cushion the astronauts from G forces. And since it was a public thing, U.S. government.”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, exactly. It's temperature sensitive, so it distributes the pressure over wider area. So it was breakaway. You could put your hand on it. It would make a handprint. You take your hand off and it would slowly come back to where it was.”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Michael Magnuson is the guy he and his stepbrother Douglanvick own the manufacturing company which developed the first tempered products. And he told me that they had just launched it in Sweden the previous month and that they wanted to go worldwide with it.”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so this was going nowhere fast, but I had to go to Paris in October of 91 because I had horses over there, you know, still kind of in the business. And the Swedish horse chiropractor said call me. He says, Bobe, you have to come to Sweden while you're in Europe. I said, why? He said, there's another company. It's a mattress, Bobby. You have to come see this mattress. And his name was CG. And I said, CG, I don't want to hear about any more of your Swedish, crazy Swedish. Connections, but I still said, okay, I'm in yes mode. I went to Paris and I got on a plane, I went to Stockholm. And I met him, and he introduced me to a guy by the name of Michael Magnuson. And that changed my life.”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No. So he would send me faxes in Swedish. And I would have to take them to University of Kentucky and get them translated. And when I talk to him on the phone, I had to use an AT&T language line operator. And each call cost me $300. Wow. So this was like the worst company with the worst product over 10 times the price that it should be.”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, plus the company was owned by a guy in Sweden who's probably the only guy in Sweden who doesn't speak one word of English. Wow.”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“$500 for these, and there were products on the market that were similar that were $49.95 who could make the exact same claims.”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, it was actually a negative ionizer with kind of the air. And so my friend Alan said this Swedish horse chiropractor wants me to sell it in France. And he said, I'll go you one better. I know someone will sell it for you in the States. So I started a company called Nion. And it turned out to be the worst company because the product over there it's 220 volts. Right. Over here it's 110. So the product worked half as good here. Wait, you can figure it out.”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I just decided, okay, if people come to me with ideas, I'm just going to say yes. And my French horse trainer, Alain Foulord, he called me and he said one day I know a Swedish horse chiropractor who knew company in Sweden that makes an air cleaner that can clean the horse's stalls.”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really didn't know what to do. I would get in the mail, I would get pre-approved credit cards going, you're pre-approved for a $25,000 line of credit. And I would say you're really stupid, but I would take them up on it and we would charge groceries onto the credit card. Always figuring that things were going to turn around. But this was the period of my life where I fell back onto my roots, my Catholic education. I had started going to Sunday Mass with my wife when we got married. She really moved me up quite a bit. But I would still kind of going through the motions. So I kind of rolled up my sleeves and went to church and started going to weekday masses and literally just prayed that God would show me what to do. And I said, it doesn't have to be. In the horse business.”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it wasn't easy because I would go to my office and my secretary would say, Bobby, we haven't paid the rent in a couple months and the landlord was just down here and they're going to turn off the electricity and then I would go home and my wife would tell me the same thing. gas company called and so”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I never did. I owed everybody in town, but everybody else owed everybody too, so everybody knew that suing isn't going to really help. And the big joke was if one guy could come up with $10,000, he could pay a million dollars in debt because person A would pay B and B would pay C and it would come all the way back around to person A”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I felt like I was the brokest man in America because, you know, I did get married when I was 34 in 1986. And so by this time, fast forwarding to 1991, I had two little kids, and we moved to a better location for kids than my downtown townhouse. But I couldn't sell the first house. And so I had two houses, two kids, two mortgages, and no job.”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. So we started stallion management services to do the same thing we did at Gaugeway, but do it remotely for farms that couldn't afford to have that infrastructure. And then we also had a company called Thurbred Advisory Group, which advised people on other horse-related transactions.”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, that was in, so I always had Gangeway from 79 through 86. And then I decided to go out on my own with Jim Philpot. He was the general counsel, the in-house counsel for Gainesway.”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yeah. And yeah, that horse, his name is Proud Appeal, and he eventually ran last in the derby. But it was quite an experience. And we also had significant interest in European racing. We were just as interested in who was going to win the English Derby or the French Derby or the Irish Derby as we wore the Kentucky Derby because we were looking for stallion prospects. And so I spent a lot of time. I went over following horses that we had made major investments in.”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, yeah. I got a job at Gainesway Farm, and I had studied pedigrees while I was on my racetrack adventure and became something of an expert, and they needed that. And that was the best move I ever made in my young life because I was soon involved in racing at a very high level instead of with a horse that my dad bought me for $1,500. We were buying Kentucky Derby favors for $10 million a month before the race.”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Trainer Trainer is what I wanted to do But I did leave New York after two years and went to Chicago, and my dad bought me a really, really, really slow racehorse for like $1,500. And so it got me my trainer's license, and I got in the game and ended up training my first winner was at Keenand.”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A hot walker is a guy who walks hots and hots are horses that come from their morning workout and they're they're sweaty and hot and you need to walk them in a circle for about 30 minutes and make sure and the water them off slowly so you make sure that they don't drink too much water because that can make them sick and then because what I wanted to do was be a groom”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I said, I want to work on the racetrack. And he said, you can stay over the barn. Only one problem is we have the mattress frames came up from Florida division, but we don't have the actual mattresses yet. So I said, okay, that's fine. So anyway, I slept on the springs for two weeks since the other horses and the mattresses came up from Florida.”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In New York, and I had never been on a plane before. So I went there with my bag, showed up at the front gate, and told them I had a job with John Nehru, showed him the letter, and they said, well, Mr. Nayru's still in Florida. And I said, Oh no. And then he said, Well, but his assistant is here and he's got ten horses here. You can go see him. So they put me in inside the track on the backstretch, they call it, or the barns are. And I went to meet the assistant trainer who was a Yugoslavian guy who spoke very broken English. And I told him the story and he said, you have a college degree, boy? And I said, yeah. He said, what you doing here, boy?”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, the thoroughbreds who actually raced at the racetracks, and that's where my interest was. So I wrote letters to the top 10 horse trainers in the country. And nine of them didn't answer. And one of them was John Nehru, N-E-R-U-D, who offered me two jobs. One at his farm in Ocala and the other one at the racetrack of Belmont Park.”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Much, yeah. I majored in finance, but I would often be sitting in the back row of a lecture reading the racing form. And I would get my marquette buddies and we would get in the car and we would drive and 90 minutes south to Chicago and go to the races at Arlington or Hawthorne racetrack. We would have a ball, but I know several times we were so broke on the way back we had to run the tolls they didn't have the gates. You could breeze right through them and hope they didn't catch you.”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My dad was, I think, early 40s, he went on a vacation with my uncle, and they rode some horses. And he came back and he said, I'm thinking I'm going to buy a riding horse. I was 11. And any kid who hears that is totally music to his ears. And so I rode with my dad between the ages of 11 and 11. Until I went to college when I was 18. Pretty much every week. And horse racing became my favorite sport. We would get issues of the Chicago Tribune and I would cut out the race results and keep them in a scrapbook and try and follow when the same horse ran back. So that was, I was totally enthralled in that.”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that had failed and gone broke. So I had to convince them that even though we lost money in something that I knew a lot about, that we were going to make money in something that I knew nothing about.”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, that's a really good question because I had to go back to all my basic same people who had invested with me in my other horse ventures.”
2018-10-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tempur-Pedic: Bobby Trussell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT