YouSaid · the spoken record

Dick and Peter Dreissigacker

lines on the record: 67
first: 2024-05-27
most recent: 2024-05-27
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 we'd always go on the perfect mornings. And I mean, just be able to water be calm and just black. And you could see the bubbles from your last round still sitting on top of the water. That's pretty nice.”
2024-05-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Concept2 Rowing Machines: Dick and Peter Dreissigacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you know, it kind of, you wouldn't know about rowing a pair unless you wrote a pair that it's a boat that has no stability whatsoever. And all of the stability is based on how you're holding the oars. And each person only has one oar. So you have to sort of have this mental connection and physical intuitive connection as to what is the other person going to do with his ore and when's he going to do it? Because if it doesn't happen simultaneously in a total flow, it just messes up entirely.”
2024-05-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Concept2 Rowing Machines: Dick and Peter Dreissigacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm sure we have, but in general, I think this stems back to our kind of the concept two thing, you know, where the problem solving or decision-making process is more of a More of a mechanical decision making process of trying to figure out what the best option is, what's going to give us the best outcome.”
2024-05-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Concept2 Rowing Machines: Dick and Peter Dreissigacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're studying that right now, actually. And, you know, we've looked at things like what Patagoni has done and, you know, they become kind of this poster child a little bit for. Idea of the purpose trust”
2024-05-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Concept2 Rowing Machines: Dick and Peter Dreissigacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we're working on how we can. Sure that the company continues on more or less in the way it is now. And it just hasn't seemed like From experience that the sort of buyout thing is not necessarily the way to do that”
2024-05-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Concept2 Rowing Machines: Dick and Peter Dreissigacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Haven't had to. I mean, we haven't ever well to go back to the very beginning, an interesting story, you know, our father was kind of worried at some point when we were making and selling the product, but when you start making product, you have to buy materials and you have to pay bills. So in general, the cash flow goes down in the beginning. He was worried. So he said, here's a check for $5,000 because I think you're going to need it before you start going up. So we kept that check and didn't cash it. We watched the bank account go down. And just as it was getting close to being ready to cash, we got some more payments coming in or more sales. And from then on, it's gone up. So we tore up the check.”
2024-05-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Concept2 Rowing Machines: Dick and Peter Dreissigacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's the ranking system People look and see where they are and who's ahead and behind them in the ranking system. I had a UPS driver come by, drop off a package, and you looked at it and said, oh, I'm right behind you in the ranking.”
2024-05-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Concept2 Rowing Machines: Dick and Peter Dreissigacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the things that comes to mind are all the little events and challenges we would have, like the holiday challenge. How many meters can you row between Thanksgiving and Christmas? It all gets posted online. You get this big list of people and you see where you stand in that.”
2024-05-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Concept2 Rowing Machines: Dick and Peter Dreissigacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's interesting because I think that there is a lot of membership fatigue going on. We pay Constantly are paying subscription fees for these things. So you buy a concept too, and it's a lot cheaper, but that's it. You buy it and you don't have to pay anything anymore”
2024-05-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Concept2 Rowing Machines: Dick and Peter Dreissigacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, right, right. I think one of the things is we have such a diverse customer base. Some people like to throw the machine in the back of their car and take it with them everywhere. Right. And you can do that.”
2024-05-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Concept2 Rowing Machines: Dick and Peter Dreissigacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The customer service folks we have here have a lot of pride. I think they consider themselves part of the product. We sometimes try to embarrass them when we get these glowing letters from people and we read them at staff meetings.”
2024-05-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Concept2 Rowing Machines: Dick and Peter Dreissigacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we tried, but I also think our best marketing was really taking Care of customers, making sure that people have access to the parts they need to maintain their machine and make sure that the parts aren't obsolete. And then the word of mouth tends to follow.”
2024-05-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Concept2 Rowing Machines: Dick and Peter Dreissigacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, our first step was moving from the farm production shop, but also we happened to find a good one in Vermont that was very progressive in terms of efficient metalwork. But we do make components. I mean, now it's a world product. We get components from everywhere.”
2024-05-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Concept2 Rowing Machines: Dick and Peter Dreissigacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, absolutely. We saw our planned 5 or 10% growth year over year increase to more. I don't know exactly, but it was like higher growth than we expected. We called it, that's the CrossFit bubble. It'll pop soon. But it lasted a number of years. I mean, I think there's something like 13,000 CrossFit gyms out there now.”
2024-05-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Concept2 Rowing Machines: Dick and Peter Dreissigacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But in the 90s, we were making some attempts to make it mainstream in clubs. And we said, we have got this great idea similar to what the boat houses have now, where the boathous will have 20 machines for their team and they'll work out together. So we've created this package and we said, okay, this is how much space you need. You need at least 10 machines. We'll train your staff to instruct and coach how to row in a team kind of workout. We had the whole thing sort of packaged and we had a couple of pilot health clubs that we inserted these into. And that was the same year that spinning started.”
2024-05-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Concept2 Rowing Machines: Dick and Peter Dreissigacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I think when we first started out, you know, stores or retailers were demanding very large margins. They had to have 40% margin or whatnot. And we didn't want to raise our price so that we could give them a 40% margin.”
2024-05-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Concept2 Rowing Machines: Dick and Peter Dreissigacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I wonder by the late 90s when there actually were stores selling fitness equipment. Were you still resistant to the idea of doing it that way? Did you still want to focus on? No, you got to buy it from us.”
2024-05-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Concept2 Rowing Machines: Dick and Peter Dreissigacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think that was an effort to make it more suitable for more general public. I think the health club market for us with the original Model A, as we call it, was very limited because you had this open flywheel spinning around that people could walk up to and stick the fingers in. Although nobody ever did that that I know of, it seems, you know, you see this spinning thing and you know you shouldn't touch it. Having it in a cage was big, broke that barrier for us, really.”
2024-05-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Concept2 Rowing Machines: Dick and Peter Dreissigacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was somewhat of a take on machines that were meant to do all these exercises on and thinking that rowing does all these things for you. That is definitely what we're trying to convey there. I think we were one of the few voices trying to say that for quite a while in those days.”
2024-05-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Concept2 Rowing Machines: Dick and Peter Dreissigacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the difference between yours and the earlier versions was this air resistance that basically you could ratchet up, make it harder, easier using air resistance, and it would adjust how easier hard it was to use the rower.”
2024-05-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Concept2 Rowing Machines: Dick and Peter Dreissigacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“These rowing machines at the colleges would use that they couldn't really afford to have a whole bunch of them in their gym, but they maybe have one or two, they were over 3,000 at that point, maybe 3,500, and they were big, clunky kind of machines. They took a lot of space. Whereas for that same amount, they could get eight of our machines and have the whole team of eight rowing at the same time and training at the same time”
2024-05-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Concept2 Rowing Machines: Dick and Peter Dreissigacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, alright, so I'm thinking these initial, from today's perspective, these first models looked kind of janky. They probably had uneven welding, not uneven, but sort of they weren't machine-tooled, right? It was like the hand welded. So each one was probably a little different.”
2024-05-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Concept2 Rowing Machines: Dick and Peter Dreissigacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the metal framework. There was a machine shop in town that probably most of the work was fixing tractors and farm implements, but they were able to cut and weld and drill and poke. And so they took our pencil drawings and created the framework.”
2024-05-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Concept2 Rowing Machines: Dick and Peter Dreissigacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The Charles River, yeah, and we took probably the one machine we had down there and set it up in front of the boat house that was where the registration was. I mean, it was a pretty rickety thing. You have to laugh at it at this point. And I would say almost every one of these people who registered for their race came out the door, looked at it, tried it, said, oh man, I'm going to get one of these. It was just an instant. Yeah.”
2024-05-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Concept2 Rowing Machines: Dick and Peter Dreissigacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm interested by Guy's question. One issue is we don't really have a good answer to your question about market research and that kind of stuff. I mean, we didn't go into this from the idea of a business major might go into it in a different way and say, well, let's look at the market size, what percentage of market can we get and this kind of thing. We didn't do that.”
2024-05-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Concept2 Rowing Machines: Dick and Peter Dreissigacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, at one point when we were first selling these, thinking that a lot of them were to individuals, we were visited by a benefactor of one of the schools. And he saw them and he said, you know, I think I'm going to get 10 for my school. And that was the first kind of mass school training sale that we had.”
2024-05-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Concept2 Rowing Machines: Dick and Peter Dreissigacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, as you started to kind of refine this concept, because it wouldn't take you very long. I think it took you about a year before you actually had a product, in your mind was the market still rowers, like students and professional rowers who wanted to train the offseason?”
2024-05-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Concept2 Rowing Machines: Dick and Peter Dreissigacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, and it felt quite good, actually, surprisingly, just in that crude form, we could see the potential. We had these little fan blades paddles. It's almost like putting baseball cards on your bike, you know. On your bike spokes and putting the right amount of weight on the wheel, on the bike wheel.”
2024-05-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Concept2 Rowing Machines: Dick and Peter Dreissigacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm looking at a photograph of the first prototype that you guys built, which essentially it looks like you took a bicycle, turned it upside down. I guess you nailed it to the ground and then attached some kind of chain to the rear wheel and then some kind of seat and that's what you basically would just pull and pull and pull and that would feel like you were rowing.”
2024-05-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Concept2 Rowing Machines: Dick and Peter Dreissigacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, there was fitness studios, gyms would use. And there was a pretty good market for those at one point, but I don't think people really like to use them that much. It wasn't that exciting to use them. It was more of a... Drudgery. But the whole idea of indoor rowing was kind of nobody was out there beating the indoor rowing drum when we Made our early rowing machines.”
2024-05-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Concept2 Rowing Machines: Dick and Peter Dreissigacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, most of the products that we've worked on and been successful with are products that we want to use ourselves. And the theory is that if we like the idea of having some way to train specifically for rowing without having to get to the water or have water available, then there's going to be other people like us that are out there.”
2024-05-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Concept2 Rowing Machines: Dick and Peter Dreissigacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I guess the idea that came up was all right, if we're going to have a business that we can sell a product year-round, let's sell an indoor rowing machine. Let's make an indoor rowing machine. That was the thinking?”
2024-05-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Concept2 Rowing Machines: Dick and Peter Dreissigacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, the teams that buy the oars, the college teams, they're on sort of a budget schedule that they have money to spend during certain times of year. So they would typically, I mean, it would be kind of winter, really, because they're buying them for the spring.”
2024-05-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Concept2 Rowing Machines: Dick and Peter Dreissigacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We tried to price it at what we thought we could eventually make it for. So we were projecting ahead that we could eventually get to the point where it was more profitable. And we used that philosophy all the time with other products now”
2024-05-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Concept2 Rowing Machines: Dick and Peter Dreissigacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, I think right in the beginning, it wasn't as big a factor because it took Title IX a few years to really. Gear up Very shortly after we started making the oars, it really was noticeable that there was more women's crews. At a much bigger pool of universities across the whole country”
2024-05-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Concept2 Rowing Machines: Dick and Peter Dreissigacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think our breakthrough came probably when Yale bought some ores because we knew the coach really well. And they end up beating Harvard for their big Harvard Yale race. And a lot of people took notice on that.”
2024-05-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Concept2 Rowing Machines: Dick and Peter Dreissigacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The other thing at that time, and this is a product of taking the master's courses and the product design at Stanford, we did a lot of Studying or learning about the design process, the whole idea of concept two came out of the idea that you don't just consider one idea. You look at at least more than one idea. Preferably many ideas.”
2024-05-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Concept2 Rowing Machines: Dick and Peter Dreissigacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let's talk for a moment about the name Concept 2 because it's an unusual name. You called your firm. It wasn't that you were calling the product concept two. Your firm was called Concept 2, right? Your design firm.”
2024-05-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Concept2 Rowing Machines: Dick and Peter Dreissigacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Remember, the Oars were kind of an interim thing, though. They were to get us going. And we were hoping that we didn't have to make too many, so we'd have time to do other stuff. I think the reason we picked OR is because we knew a lot of the coaches that were at the colleges, you know, so we could take oars to them and say, here are these oars we're making, try them. And, you know, I mean, people liked them, and they started buying them.”
2024-05-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Concept2 Rowing Machines: Dick and Peter Dreissigacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But Guy, I'd like to come back to one thing that you had asked a question about. Did our family hide emotions or express emotions? I think this was one case where we've benefited by the fact that they probably hid their actual feelings about what they.”
2024-05-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Concept2 Rowing Machines: Dick and Peter Dreissigacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, that's correct. Yeah, they were wondering what we were doing, but I think there was a gradually they came around when things started to happen. But in the beginning, I mean, I think they were probably worried of what we were doing.”
2024-05-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Concept2 Rowing Machines: Dick and Peter Dreissigacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm curious for a moment because you would end up in Vermont, in northern Vermont, in a rural part of Vermont, and I want to ask you about that in a moment. But did your parents think that was a little weird given that? Both of you had these Stanford master's degrees in engineering, and that your dad had been an engineer's whole career, and that this is still a time where people were doing these traditional kind of career paths. Did your dad or mom or anybody say, wait, what are you doing?”
2024-05-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Concept2 Rowing Machines: Dick and Peter Dreissigacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Way around. People come to California for lifestyle. Well, but we'd already tried that. Think we had a very clear vision of the place. We had a clearer vision of the place that we wanted to move to, to live, to do this business than we had of what the business was going to be. The vision was to be more rural than we could find in California, to have a place where we would live, get up in the morning, have a shop right there, walk over to the shop, do our thing. And if it was a beautiful day, we could stop early and go for a ski or work in our garden. It was definitely a mid-70s kind of vision.”
2024-05-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Concept2 Rowing Machines: Dick and Peter Dreissigacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All right, so you, I guess both of you were still kind of in California, but you decided that you needed to find a place to build your business. Tell me about the decision. Why didn't you just stay in California and keep making ores there?”
2024-05-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Concept2 Rowing Machines: Dick and Peter Dreissigacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We'd make prototypes like we did the backpack with Northface that gave us some confidence that we could operate in that mode. I guess the problem was when we started making oars, the oars kind of took off and it kept us busy full time.”
2024-05-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Concept2 Rowing Machines: Dick and Peter Dreissigacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's two advantages. First, when you're rowing at a high stroke rate, you're having to swing this, rotate this oar back and forth through this wide arc. And because there's weight, particularly the weight out at the end where the blade is. It takes effort to accelerate that back to get to the next stroke. So that takes a little bit of effort. And races are won and lost on little bits of effort. Now, the other element is when we started manufacturing the ores, there were round shafts, smaller diameter than the wooden ones. So there was a lot of wind resistance. And again, that may not seem like much, but every little increment gives you”
2024-05-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Concept2 Rowing Machines: Dick and Peter Dreissigacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Boat builders were using carbon and synthetics for boats. And typically a boat builder would have some guy in the corner making wooden oars because they needed them for the boats. But it was really a boat oriented industry. So we came along and said, well, you know, the oars are important too. And by utilizing the synthetics, we could make them lighter, more durable, easier to maintain.”
2024-05-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Concept2 Rowing Machines: Dick and Peter Dreissigacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I would add here at this point in time, the plan, we had a plan to try to start a business together. And these new ORs that we had was going to be our first product. And it was changing from wood to where the whole ore would be composite material, fiberglass, carbon fiber, et cetera. So that was our real plan first making these prototypes, which were real Frankenstein ores. going to trials and then going on and starting a company where we would do kind of product design not necessarily a manufacturing company but we were saying well you know the ore market's not that big we could make a few ores just to make ends meet and in the meantime come up with other product designs that like the backpack or something that other companies might want to manufacture”
2024-05-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Concept2 Rowing Machines: Dick and Peter Dreissigacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What was the modification? Well, we cut off the last four feet of the oar, blade and shaft, and then created an apartment a lightweight blade. So we had these sort of hybrid, I guess you'd call it nowadays, but they were pretty ugly kind of contraptions that were half wood, half carbon. And that's where we came to the trials with.”
2024-05-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Concept2 Rowing Machines: Dick and Peter Dreissigacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Got it during that training period when you were training for the Olympic trials, which would be for the 76th. Montreal games. You started to experiment by kind of modifying your rowing oars a little bit and kind of playing around with them. What were you doing? Because the oars, I'm assuming, were just big wooden oars, right? At the time?”
2024-05-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Concept2 Rowing Machines: Dick and Peter Dreissigacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT