YouSaid · the spoken record

Davis Smith

lines on the record: 95
first: 2020-05-04
most recent: 2020-05-04
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

“It's certainly a little bit of both. I mean, I can't say that hard work and skill don't matter. Of course they do. But the reality is that I think most of the success that I've had has been because of luck. I was lucky enough to be born where I was born at a time that I was born in. I happened to have certain skills that those skill sets may not have been worth much a thousand years ago. I don't know if I would have been a great hunter or a great farmer. So it's really luck that has allowed me to be in the position that I'm in. I feel lucky every single day to live the life that I have. And with that comes a deep sense of responsibility and a duty to find ways to help others that maybe weren't as fortunate.”
2020-05-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cotopaxi: Davis Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One Utah and the entire would donate 100% of the proceeds of the shirt to support the COVID-19 response here in Utah over the last 48 hours since we launched that we've sold thousands and thousands of these shirts. These are really hard times to prepare for. And as a leader, what's important is to stay optimistic. It's to unite your team around your mission. Around each other, and that's what we found has been really interesting. And I feel like I feel more connected to my team now than I did before this crisis.”
2020-05-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cotopaxi: Davis Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I read this great article about a week ago that talked about different CEOs and how they're managing this crisis. And the author interviewed 29 CEOs. The three categories that he grouped these CEOs in was the first was like this fear-based CEO. And they were using a lot of words like government and Trump and coronavirus and COVID-19. And really using words that they have no control over. Then there was this unfocused CEO, which was basically kind of head in the sand, hadn't made any decisions yet, was just kind of waiting to see what happened. And then there was the strategy focused CEO. These were CEOs that were making changes. They were four times more likely to have already made changes in their team. They were using words like innovate and opportunity. They were using these forward-looking positive words. And so our team has rallied around this idea of innovating. We've come up with some really fun ideas. We've created a shirt that we're calling.”
2020-05-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cotopaxi: Davis Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, these are definitely challenging times. You know, for us, we fortunately have some pieces of business that are still working, like the e-commerce, while our retail stores have shut down and other things have shut down. We still have some revenue coming in. But yeah, it's impossible to plan for something like this because in a normal recessionary period, you'd think, okay, we'll see a slowdown. We'll start having an impact. You know, maybe sales will be impacted by 10%. In a worst case, maybe 20%, but you'd never expect revenue to just be completely shut down.”
2020-05-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cotopaxi: Davis Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Flying from Ecuador, where people have so many people there have so little. Like the fact that we can sit in comfortable homes, we have food to eat, we have hopefully toilet paper. You know, we have all these things that we really need. And at the same time, it is incredibly stressful. I went to bed with tears in my eyes multiple times that week just worried about my team and thinking about how this is going to impact these people that I care about. And, you know, we had to close our retail stores, our retail partners like REI and 500 other retailers all had to shut their doors. We've been deeply impacted. At the same time, it's been beautiful because I've never seen my team rally together like it has the last couple weeks. And that's been a really special thing to watch.”
2020-05-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cotopaxi: Davis Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was actually in Ecuador two or three weeks ago when this all started unraveling. And I was visiting some of our impact partners there that were supporting. And I cut the trip short to fly back to the US because I saw kind of what this was headed. And my first thought is how lucky we are.”
2020-05-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cotopaxi: Davis Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so our investors will have an opportunity definitely when we raised money, we understood that we had to create a return on investment. And we built a brand that is a respected brand in the outdoor industry. It's a brand that people are talking about. And there's certainly opportunities for, and we've had interest in larger companies that have come in and said, hey, we'd love to help be a steward of your brand as you try to grow to the next level. And I believe we can go build a billion dollar business. And that's motivating to me, not because of the money, but because if we could build a billion dollar business every single year, the amount of impact that we could have on the world would be tremendous.”
2020-05-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cotopaxi: Davis Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we've made some amazing progress. And we're finally to the point where we don't have to raise more venture capital moving forward. We also knew that there was a potential downturn coming at some point. And so the last two years, we've been really working towards being in a place where we could weather that storm if it came.”
2020-05-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cotopaxi: Davis Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Economies and they change, they evolve their giving strategy and we watch very closely what others are doing so that we can learn from them. And my hope is that young entrepreneurs that might be listening to this are learning from us and that one day they can look at us and say, wow, they did a really good job, but they could have done this better. And I'm going to do that better when I build my business.”
2020-05-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cotopaxi: Davis Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a really, really important question. You know, I'd say in the early days of our business, we relied on our product team. You know, they were on the ground at factories for weeks at a time. We oftentimes were using the same factories as other great brands that also had similar values. And so we relied on the vetting that they did as part of that. But as we've grown, we've been able to invest in our own resources. We hired someone to head up our impact work in the first year of our business before we even hired someone in marketing. We hired someone in impact. And so we really started dedicating resources to making sure we were giving in the very best way. And we know that we're making mistakes. You're going to make mistakes along the way. And I think we can't let that get in the way of us finding ways to do good. You know, we look at Tom Shoes, for example, and I think they learned some really valuable lessons about impact and about there were some unattended consequences as they were distributing their shoes around the world, disrupting local, you know.”
2020-05-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cotopaxi: Davis Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, definitely the whole idea behind a benefit corporation is that as we scale our impact is able to scale with us. And so of course in the early days, you don't make much money or you don't make money at all. And so eventually as the business scales and grows and becomes more profitable, like hopefully there'll be some profit left over to continue to invest in our growth where you don't have to continue raising venture capital.”
2020-05-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cotopaxi: Davis Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it ends up being somewhere around four to as much as five percent of our total sales end up getting dedicated towards impact in one way or another.”
2020-05-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cotopaxi: Davis Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Our model's a little complicated. It's not as simple as buy one, give one model. I just felt there was something that we could do that would be much more impactful. And so we identified healthcare, education, and livelihood training as the three things that we believed were inextricably linked to poverty alleviation. And we started focusing our efforts on identifying nonprofits that were world-class and how they operated. And we started partnering with them. And so we have that part of the business, which is the giving. And that's what we do through the Cotopaxi Foundation. So we dedicate 1% of all of our sales to that foundation. But we also dedicate money to our local community. We have a number of refugee programs here in Salt Lake that we support. We also invest a lot in our supply chain, in fair trade manufacturing, and in other activities. For example, one of our factories, we built a community garden.”
2020-05-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cotopaxi: Davis Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it was a combination of things. There's not one silver bullet that allows you to do this. You just have to do a lot of things really well. And so we started doing questivals all around the country. We did them in San Francisco and Las Vegas, in Denver, in Boise, in New York, in Boston. So we were doing these all over the country. We had over 100,000 people participate in one of our questable events. At the same time, we were using traditional digital marketing. And then a lot of word of mouth. And eventually, we started getting the product into other retailers like REI. And so people were discovering the brand through their regular retailer.”
2020-05-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cotopaxi: Davis Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, we had an intern that was tasked with the challenge of finding a place for these llamas. At first, they were in my backyard for a couple days, and then Stefan, my co-founder, had him in his backyard. And he was renting, and he almost got his landlord came and said, we're going to evict you if you have llamas in the backyard. But this intern went around and knocked doors. He looked on Google Maps and started looking for places that had horse properties. And when it started knocking doors, I think the second door he knocked on, they said, yeah, we take care of your llamas. And they had a little 11-year-old boy that we pay a dollar a day per llama to take care of them. And yeah.”
2020-05-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cotopaxi: Davis Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so we gave challenges like, you know, go do this hike or catch a fish and cook it on a campfire or go do service in the local community. Go work at a soup kitchen for an hour. There were all these quirky challenges that we gave them as well. So people were documenting this all on social media. We had 30,000 social media posts the day of our launch of people using our bags, outliving our brand values. And it was a really special way for us to go build the brand.”
2020-05-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cotopaxi: Davis Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Within minutes, we had hundreds of students gathered around us taking selfies with llamas saying, What are the llamas for? Why are they on campus? And we'd say, because we're this new brand, we're going to be launching in two weeks, and we've got this event, this 24-hour adventure race, this scavenger hunt that we're calling the questival. And you can win gear, you can win trips with your friends, you form a team, and we'll have hundreds of challenges that you can choose from. It was a huge hit. We ended up with thousands of people that showed up at this first questival and every one of them was wearing one of our backpacks. You got a backpack for participating for registering for the race.”
2020-05-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cotopaxi: Davis Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so for example, we went on to BYU's campus where I'd gone to school. We showed up in the middle at the heart of campus. Of course, we didn't ask for permission because no one's going to give us permission to bring llamas on campus. But we thought, better to ask for forgiveness later. Sure.”
2020-05-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cotopaxi: Davis Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so we bought two llamas Kodo and Poxi, and they became our buddies, and we went around college campuses with them. And the idea was if we went to a college campus and started handing out flyers, people would just ignore us or throw the flyer in the trash.”
2020-05-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cotopaxi: Davis Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. Yeah. I think we might have paid a little less than that. Bay Area is a more expensive. Prices are higher. Okay, I gotcha.”
2020-05-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cotopaxi: Davis Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Believe it or not, I bet pretty much anywhere in the country you could find some llamas on Craigslist. Oh my God, really?”
2020-05-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cotopaxi: Davis Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All online. And the one thing that was a little bit different, though, about our approach was that we wanted to find a way, we knew that this young consumer really valued experiences more than things. And so just trying to sell them a new backpack was going to be challenging. But we wanted to create an experience that allowed them to connect with our brand. And so before we launched, we started coming up with this idea of creating an experience, an event that allowed people to go live the Codopaxi values. So we called it the questival. We bought two llamas on Craigslist.”
2020-05-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cotopaxi: Davis Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so we suspected that it would last us about 18 months executing on the plan that we had, which was let's keep it simple. Why don't we just start with five backpacks? And so that's what we started with. We started with five backpacks.”
2020-05-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cotopaxi: Davis Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, you get these factories going, and you've got $3 million, which isn't, I mean, again, this is a capital-intensive business because you've got to buy product and you've got to get designs. And so how long was $3 million going to last?”
2020-05-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cotopaxi: Davis Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you know, we've worked together for six and a half years now, and we've never had an argument. I mean, it's just been an amazing experience.”
2020-05-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cotopaxi: Davis Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, exactly. I knew that I had certain things that would serve me well in building a business, and I knew there were things that I didn't have a lot of experience with. And so one of the most important pieces of our success has been finding a great co-founder. Right when I was moving back to the US, but before we'd started anything, I was at a school reunion for Lauder, the Lauder Institute with Wharton. And I was connecting with one of my closest friends, Stefan Jacob, who is from Germany, from Munich, and had stayed in the US to build a business himself as a CEO after business school. And I was catching up with him and telling him how I was moving back. I was going to build this new brand. And he was just selling his business. And within 24 hours of that conversation, he had committed to moving to Utah and joining me. And it was crazy. And Stefan has just been one of the greatest gifts I could have received as a founder, especially in that time where I was feeling so insecure about my”
2020-05-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cotopaxi: Davis Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What did you know about making jackets and outdoor gear? I mean, you didn't, right? It's like you didn't know anything about pool tables or baby products. You just figured you would learn about it, figure it out.”
2020-05-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cotopaxi: Davis Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, like people is one of our core values as a brand, and that included our supply chain. And so we thought deeply about how we could impact those lives. And so, for example, the llama wool products, we went to these little communities in Bolivia where I had been a missionary and that I fell in love with. And it always wanted to go back and find a way to help. And we built a supply chain buying llama wool from these communities. We went to our backpack factory. This is a factory that manufactures for many of the outdoor brands that you've mentioned already, as well. And we just saw a massive amount of waste from the cutting and sewing process. And we also saw that the sowers, they've been there on average 11 and a half years. It was a great place to work. They're paid fairly and treated fairly. But they never got to innovate. They just sewed what people like us told them to sew. And we wanted to change that. And so we went to them and said, hey, all this remnant material that we see, all this leftover, we want to use it. And we want you guys to design the bags. The only rule is to make no bag alike.”
2020-05-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cotopaxi: Davis Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so the name Kotopaxi comes from a volcano in Ecuador where I grew up as a kid. And we chose a llama as our logo, kind of our mascot. And that was actually the first place I saw llamas in the wild was in Ecuador at the base of Mount Cotopaxi. I just felt it connected back to my roots. It was connected to this place that really mattered to me, that was important to me, the school I went to in Ecuador was called Academia Cotopaxi, named after this volcano. So that's where the name came from.”
2020-05-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cotopaxi: Davis Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really good advice, actually, but I didn't want to take it. I didn't take it. I just felt like this is so core to who I am and why I want to build this business that it has to be part of us from inception. And there were certainly investors that didn't invest in us because of that mission, of us giving away money. It is hard enough to build a business, a normal business, but to have a business that you're building while you're also giving away money before you've made money is a challenge. And so, but eventually we found investors that believed in us. We had Kirsten Green led our first round. This is an investor that she's backed, Warby Parker and away and birchbox and Dollar Shave Club. And she believed in us and she believed in our mission. And so she wrote the first check. And that was the beginning of the brand.”
2020-05-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cotopaxi: Davis Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, uh-huh. And the difference is that all of these companies to date had converted to benefit corporations after they had been a real business. And this attorney told me, Davis, don't incorporate as a benefit corporation from inception. No investor is going to want to invest money in a business that's giving away money before you've even figured out who you are and what you're doing.”
2020-05-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cotopaxi: Davis Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, one of the first pieces of advice I got was from my attorney, and this is an attorney I'd used in the past. I told him when I was in Brazil, I told him, hey, I'm going to be coming back. I want to build a benefit corporation, a business that's giving back.”
2020-05-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cotopaxi: Davis Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We weren't used to investing in a business they hadn't done anything yet. You know, they were shocked that I was coming to them and we hadn't sold a single product. So then the other option was to go to traditional investors. And I'd always lead with our mission and why the brand needed to exist. And then I talk about the opportunity in this outdoor industry to go build the first digitally native brand. And I got rejected a lot too. It reminded me a lot of being a missionary where you get the door slammed in your face. Yeah”
2020-05-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cotopaxi: Davis Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So originally I thought that impact investors would be really interested in this. I didn't know much about impact investors, but I'd read about them and I knew that they had big hearts and they cared a lot about finding ways to innovate and help people living in poverty. I started meeting with some of them and I was rejected instantly by all of them.”
2020-05-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cotopaxi: Davis Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Alright, you decide. All right, we're going to do this. We're going to launch this company. First of all, I mean, you left Brazil. I can't imagine you had a whole lot of cash to use. Is that, okay? And so you have to, you decide that you're going to raise money for this. Company”
2020-05-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cotopaxi: Davis Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The brand innovation was really around people. All these other brands in the outdoor industry focus on the environment, which I think is wonderful. I love the environment. We need to protect it. I'm so glad that so many care about it. But what I felt needed to happen moving forward was like, we need to take it a step further. We need to care about people. Like, what about people that live in extreme poverty? We have an opportunity to eradicate extreme poverty in our lifetimes. And I want to be part of that. And so that was really the focus of what our brand was going to represent and stand for.”
2020-05-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cotopaxi: Davis Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. What really set us apart was, number one, that we were digitally native. We weren't reliant on these legacy channels that everyone else was reliant on. We would sell online. So that was more of a business model innovation.”
2020-05-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cotopaxi: Davis Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so the first thing I did is I decided I need a team. I may not have everything that I need to go build this, but I can build it. I do know that I have the ability to go build a team of people that do. And so I immediately went on LinkedIn and I started looking for award-winning designers, product designers, a pack designer, apparel designer. And I started reaching out to some people on Skype and just started doing phone calls and interviews with them. And I reached out to a friend who Sam Ricks, who was an amazing graphic designer. And he started helping me think through the brand itself and what it would look like. And so yeah, I just started building this great team of people around me. And they had relationships with factories. They started designing product and we started developing what the brand would look like and feel like and what it stood for.”
2020-05-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cotopaxi: Davis Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I mean, the idea, the concept for me was I wanted to find something that could inspire people to go out and do good with us, but I needed a brand. I needed a product. And I'd always loved the outdoors. I'd spent a lot of time in the outdoors as a kid with my dad. I'd still go backpacking every summer with my dad and brothers. And I just thought, you know, there's no digitally native brand in the outdoor industry. I felt that there was an opportunity to go build a brand that really connected with this young consumer, this millennial or Gen Z consumer that was very passionate about the world. And so The idea was to build an outdoor brand like Patagonia, like the North Face, like Columbia, like all these brands that have been around for 50 to 70 years, but to build one that was really built around this young generation.”
2020-05-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cotopaxi: Davis Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was terrified. I was so scared I wasn't sure I could actually manage. I was so stressed out. I was terrified that if I went into something on my own, that I would fail and that everyone would look at me and say, you know what? It turns out Davis wasn't a great entrepreneur. It was actually his cousin Kimball that was a great entrepreneur and he just wrote his coattails. Kimball was just a great leader. And so there was a lot that I looked at him and thought, I just don't have everything that he has. And so those were the fears in my head. And I had a lot of self-doubt about whether I could do this on my own.”
2020-05-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cotopaxi: Davis Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To figure out a way to do something that would, like Tom is obviously one for one and Warby Parker provide a pair of glasses to somebody in need around the world for every pair sold. So this was your idea. I'm going to come up with something that will enable me to do something like that.”
2020-05-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cotopaxi: Davis Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One, I've thought of Edgar. And pretty quickly I landed on this idea of building a business that could help others. I was inspired by Warby Parker, my classmates in school. I was inspired by Tom Shoes. And I thought, you know, this is a way I could make a meaningful impact on the world.”
2020-05-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cotopaxi: Davis Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As we were walking back to our place, it was close to midnight. We saw two little boys cuddled against each other on the sidewalk trying to stay warm. They had their sweaters pulled over their knees. We could see our breath in the air. And as we got closer, we recognized that one of them was Edgar. And I woke him up and I asked him why he was sleeping on the street. And he told me that someone had stolen his shoe shiny kit and he was too afraid to go home. His mom relied on him to help feed his family. We gave him a little bit of cash we had. We didn't have much. The next morning we got on a bus to leave Cusco. We went around the main plaza with this bus. And as it stopped to let some people on and off, we looked out the window and we saw Edgar and he saw us and we had just enough time where we slid open the window of this bus and he like rant next to it waving goodbye to us and he had a big bag of candy in one arm that he'd bought with the money we gave him. He was now selling that candy in the streets. And an entrepreneur, which I just love now. So every day since 2001.”
2020-05-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cotopaxi: Davis Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I did not have a plan initially, but that changed quickly. I made the decision I was going to leave, and I knew I wanted to do something that was about helping. The story that I kept in my mind for my entire adulthood. My wife Aisaline and I, when we were in college, we did an internship in Peru. We went to a little city called Cusco, which is near Machu Picchu. And our first hour there, we sat on this park bench. We were eating this food, and all these little kids ran up to us to sell us things, finger puppets and postcards. But there was one little boy that sat next to me on his shoe shiny kit. And his name was Edgar. He was nine years old. He kept sitting there and it was watching us see. And then I realized maybe he's watching us eat because he's hungry. So I offered him the rest of my food and I'd never seen somebody eat like that. He absolutely devoured it. And that night, Asian and I decided, let's save some of this food for dinner and let's go see if we can find this little boy, find Edgar. And this became a daily ritual for us every day. The highlight of our day was finding Edgar. Our last night in Cusco.”
2020-05-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cotopaxi: Davis Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. You know, this is interesting, actually, Guy. I think this is a great lesson that I've learned, which is I think there's two different ways to think about the early days of starting a business. You can either find some of the think you want to work with a close friend or family member, someone that you trust immensely. And together you can go find a business opportunity together and go pursue it. And that's a lot of fun in a lot of ways. The other way to do it is to identify an opportunity on your own and to go build a team around that. and then to go bring in experts that can help you go solve problems that you need to solve for that specific business. And those are likely not going to be your best friend. It's not likely not going to be your cousin or your sibling or your spouse. And not to say that doesn't work. It does work. There are plenty of stories. And Guy, you've interviewed so many that it has. But I think that's, for me, a better approach.”
2020-05-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cotopaxi: Davis Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. It was a very painful experience, I think, for both of us. And I think even more so for Kimball than for me because Kimball stayed in Brazil running that business until the summer of 2019. He spent so many more years down there trying to make this business work. And when he left, he sold the business to another company. But it was not a great... Transaction that I don't think that's ended up working out. And I can only imagine how hard it was for him and for him to be there alone without a partner to kind of navigate the whole thing. And so it was very damaging to our relationship.”
2020-05-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cotopaxi: Davis Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so in 2014, Brazil basically hit a wall. And there was a massive recession in Brazil, inflation, the currency went from when we moved to Brazil, it was 1.5, 1.6 reals to the dollar. And it went up to about four. So everything became more expensive to buy. People were out of work. You know, it became an incredibly challenging time and a time that the business was not really prepared to weather. And so Kimball did a phenomenal job continuing to run that business as best he could, but it was an uphill battle in a country that's very complicated. The tax system, the taxes are astronomical, and a lot of businesses cheat. They don't pay their taxes. They don't report things correctly. And we weren't willing to do that. And so it put us at a major disadvantage.”
2020-05-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cotopaxi: Davis Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was a very painful time. I can't really speak to exactly how he felt, but probably a lot of feelings of, wow, like I'm on my own now. And we've worked together for so long. And then as Brazil imploded after we left, I mean, that was a very difficult time to be a leader of a company in Brazil.”
2020-05-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cotopaxi: Davis Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Definitely. When I left at the end of 2013, there was still a lot of optimism, but there were some tensions there around, you know, who's the leader of the business? We were co-CEOs, and we had very different management styles. My team had a very different culture than his. You know, he gave me some feedback that, you know, I wasn't great at leading people because I wasn't great at following up and holding people accountable. And it actually is true. That's something that I've had to work on a lot as a leader. And that experience helped me learn that. But eventually I just decided that the business didn't need both of us. And it was a very, very difficult decision. I was walking away from something that I loved. I was in Latin America with my two daughters and my wife, my girls were speaking Portuguese and going to an international school like I had as a kid. It was a dream come true for me.”
2020-05-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cotopaxi: Davis Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so this is a lot of the pain that is associated with some of those memories there. And, you know, my cousin Kimball, I mentioned that, you know, we grew up together. We were best friends. We were like brothers. We built our first business together. We went to business school at the same time. We built homes on the same street as each other before we'd gone to business school. We were inseparable. And when we were in Brazil, we started just kind of. Separating, it made it not fun to be working together. And I know this is not a unique story for co-founders. This is maybe a very common story. But for us, it was very painful because we were so close and because we were family.”
2020-05-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cotopaxi: Davis Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT