YouSaid · the spoken record

Tim Brown

lines on the record: 99
first: 2019-06-10
most recent: 2019-06-10
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 think they're inextricably linked. I've always thought of luck as. Some random event happening to you. But that happens and then what are you going to do with it? And I think we've had the good fortune together to have great timing across a whole host of things. Like we could start a business and put up a website in seven months and reach 10,000 people in a week. But we also, you know, we seized and capitalized on that opportunity and we worked super hard and made some good decisions along the way to turn that luck into something that was really positive. So I just think you can't really separate those ideas or that construct. And fortunately, we've done a good bit of both.”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know The way, whether it be meeting Joey or all the different characters along the way that popped up seemingly at the right time, you can't call that anything other than luck. But there was a lot of different offer amps along this journey where if you were logical and rational, you would have stopped. And for whatever reason, we've kept going. It just seemed like it was impossible. We've managed to find a different solution and keep on going a little bit and you need that. But if we've had any luck, if I've had any luck personally, I think we've been given an enormous leg up with our families and with our mum and dad and now with our wives. And that was a loving household that valued education, that encouraged us to go and take risks and do what we wanted to do. And not everyone has that. And it's been enormously important part of it.”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're always sitting there thinking of the ten things that you could be doing better, and anyone who started a business will know that feeling. Oftentimes people are asking, oh gosh, it must be work long hours. And you're like, well, that's the wrong question. It's like when you start something, this thing embeds six inches in your brain and you don't shut it off and it's a voice that's there 24-7 all the time and you're constantly thinking about it and I retired from sport and I that had its pressurized moments and getting out in front of lots of people at times and playing sport but this is in some ways greater, more sustained pressure and it's a very very difficult thing to do and you know we're certainly we've had some good progress but we've got a long long way to go to achieve what we want to.”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's never been about. Neither of us really need much money to be happy and live. So it's never really been about the big valuation of the company or anything. I think we have enough anxiety between us just to push forward that regardless of it while we're still in there. We're still cranking and pushing. We pay ourselves more now than we used to pay ourselves when we started the company. So we're certainly in a better situation financially and a little less financial stress. But yeah, the anxiety still is palpable.”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I want to shift. You mentioned, Tim, that there was a time where you were dipping into your savings, it was stressing you out back in 2014. Do both of you feel like you can breathe a sigh of relief now that you're financially you're on stable ground because your company's valued at a billion point six, or do you still have stress about financial matters?”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Take that choice, but on the margin, you can absolutely do it when it's a little more expensive, it's much better, and it follows our North Star of making a lower carbon footprint shoe or product, we'll do it. And so we just don't see that tension. I think the other aspect is we built this into the charter of the company. So our charter says we have a fiduciary responsibility to our shareholders, and we have an equal responsibility to the environment. And so if Tim or I are no longer in the business and some other person takes over, they still have a responsibility to do what our charter says unless they get two-thirds of our shareholders to vote and say that they don't care about the environment. And so we've kind of embedded this in the fabric of the company. And so people have to know when they sign on for a financing. This is part of the deal.”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, Don't believe that there needs to be the tension between financial success and success for other purpose driven aspects of our business, and namely the environment for us. And I think that's true for a lot of businesses. We have a lot of debates inside the company because there's always a balance. Like if something costs 20 times as much, yet it's way more sustainable, maybe you can't do that.”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it is. We're not there yet. And I think when we started this business, we had a really clear idea. We wanted to be, we wanted to be like a tree. We wanted to suck carbon out and spit out oxygen. We want to be that good. And we knew we were quite a ways from that ambition. But in the problem of climate change is that businesses pollute and And society pays for that The companies don't pay for it, and that's the problem. And so we've believed that we should pay for it. And so we have committed to be carbon neutral. How do you do that? So we try to minimize the carbon impact across all those dimensions that you said from transportation to the electric grid that the factory is. And we're in Korea because it's a much cleaner grid than other places in the world. Sure. But we still...”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Big picture with someone wearing a pair of shoes. That catalyzes a bunch of attention. And then you get a moment, like you mentioned, Gail King. A lot in the media. And I think we just gave it time too. You know, we didn't sell, we sold one style, the Wool Runner, for 14 months. We didn't do anything else except sell the Woolrunner. And I think that. It's hard to create any doubt about what you stand for when you have just one product. I think that helped too. And just being methodical and intentional about that and not taking advice from people who said, turn it out faster or drop more colors, drop more styles, you know.”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's also, I mean, there's a directness in our relationship that. If we didn't have that, like you can't just Can't just talk about superficial business tasks that are going wrong or right. Like, you know, we're like, Dude, this is not good. I like this guy to be a different direction for us to work this out with, and just getting to the heart of issue, not letting it calcify. It's, you know, give it no time, nip it in the bud, and move on and have super low ego about it. And I think our personalities and our respect for one another is what kind of lends itself to allowing that strategy to work and might not be for everyone”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's the joke about the idea that this is a marriage, there's an intimacy to it that is pretty deep. And I don't think we'd acknowledge that. And we hadn't found ways to sort of purge the system and reset the machine. There was a bunch of stuff that had been building up over time that kind of came out in a little bit of an avalanche of kind of emotion and tiredness. And I think it was, we realized that we needed to manage this more effectively, that our relationship would be as important as the strategy. As important as many of the things we were doing, and that needed to be worked on like any healthy one.”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it was a dark moment. And it's funny, we've had a couple of them through the journey, and they've usually linked up from the outside when we've had no success. When everyone would sort of be high fiving and popping, we had a moment and it was, I don't think we'd yet found a kind of a A mechanism to kind of get stuff out. I think we've just been working side by side, heads down.”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it was one of those moments where we then kind of fell back on the promise we'd made probably to our wives about not ruining their relationship and the fact that if we were going to make something successful, it was going to take two of us and we got to work on this. And this is more important than whether we sell out the next color or whatever.”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I remember we had a beer. It must have been like at the end of March, so our first 30, 31 days of sales. We did a million dollars in sales in the first month. I mean, it was crazy. And no way, I think we. We blew through our first year business plan projection and like weeks after that, like a really short amount of time. So we were beyond any. Doubt that it was working We're having this beer, and we're like both eyes watering up and being like, why are you, you know, I don't like how this is going?”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Singular creative This product, and then you put it out there and just see what happens. And it worked ostensibly, you know, people, 15,000 or close to that bought it. And then we're sitting there like, okay, the stress is gone. Now it was like, I don't know, maybe we had too much of a swagger. And I think it was funny. The most successful times on the outside, maybe you look on the inside and it's actually where we were probably maybe at one of our worst moments as a partnership. I think we just started, you know, we started maybe I was probably getting over my skis and talking about things in design. And maybe Tim was doing some things in the area of the business that I was stronger at that maybe he shouldn't have. And we were like, hey, this worked. Like, step off.”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was weird Hell, it was like neither of us would have said that we were like really successful at that point. And I think in some ways it was great. Like, obviously, it's certainly better than not selling any shoes. So don't get me wrong. I mean, and we had ordered like 15,000 pairs. So it was a lot. And we started selling through really fast. And then I think we both found ourselves acting strange. It was like letting the air out of a balloon. It was like you'd have this unbelievably stressful seven, eight months of working for”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In some ways, the barriers for entry to launching a new business have never been lower, and in others it's never been more competitive. But certainly we were able to do that reasonably easily.”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We are Yeah, I mean, this is the thing. We started direct to consumer as a concept has been around for a while. But the technology has developed. And so it allowed us to take advantage of things quite inexpensively from that infrastructure, that stuff.”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We'd been brainstorming a lot of different names, and ultimately landed on the name All Birds as a sort of this whimsical encapsulation of the type of business that we wanted to build. And when people first came to New Zealand, there was nothing there but birds, it was all birds. So it was a little nod to the provenance of the story. And the idea that we should tread more lightly in the way that we make products.”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And comfort often is equated with ugliness. So if your dad tells you he's got a comfortable pair of shoes, you assume they don't look very good. So the idea of bringing great design and pairing it with that. And achieving the comfort through materials that were also better for the environment is really kind of the North Star for the business.”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Comfort was the way the problem to be solved, and we were going to solve comfort through sustainable materials that enabled that comfort experience, but were also better for the environment.”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We'd sat down with them and we said, Hey, we want to build a different type of footwear brand, and we believe there's a problem to be solved and we can make shoes that are more comfortable, that are bitter for the environment. And that's our plan. What do you think? And he said to us, Fantastic. Don't pet yourself on the back. Just get on with doing it. People don't buy sustainable products. They buy great products. And the only reason there's an opportunity for you to do this is because the rest of the world is far behind where they need to. But get on with doing it and don't make sustainability a part of your brand. Make the attributes of the sustainable materials the story.”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we had to build the brand. We'd had quite an instrumental conversation with a guy who's previously been on the show called Eric Ryan from Method.”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All that stuff. Okay so you spend basically a full year raising the money from investors and perfecting the design and doing everything you need to create this comfortable and sustainable wool shoe, what was your game plan at that point? What do you do at this point”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so the idea from the beginning was direct to consumer you were going to have a big marketing campaign to attract people to the website and you were going to have the shoes in a warehouse and then you could just ship them”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We did our little business plan, which was remarkably inaccurate. But we had decided that we needed a million and a half dollars And we felt like that could get us through a huge amount of marketing, branding work in the beginning, and then buy a whole bunch of inventory. And we wanted to buy a lot of inventory because we had this mentality of if we were going to do this, we were going to fail super fast or succeed really big.”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think the important part that we both understood was that. Doing this alone, I mean, Tim had experienced it for a while that doing it alone is really lonely. And I'd always been of the opinion that Substantial. And then I would much rather have a piece of something big than a lot of something small. Yeah. And so, you know, and I think he respected what I was going to bring to the table, particularly in the future of the business. So it wasn't, it ended up being a reasonably quick conversation. And I think neither of us have really looked back, at least I certainly haven't looked back and ever regretted that.”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think I found a guy that on the surface was very, very different from me, but maybe underneath shared a lot of similarities in terms of attitude and approach. I'd found maybe a kindred spirit in terms of... Competitiveness, which we both shared that was attractive. And I think I found someone that could do all the parts of the business that I shouldn't be doing and that we potentially could be a great partnership.”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is in early 2015 and we spent the weekend together getting But drunk and talking about our families and getting to know each other and walking in the hills of Marin, and really just sort of imagining what it might be like to work together and trying to understand if that would be a good idea or not.”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I jumped on the plane and I flew out to San Francisco and Joey and I spent the weekend together and he picked me up at the airport and it was”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and I'd read this book Cradle the Cradle. I remember the intro chapter talked about one of the scourges of the earth on pollution and the environment being the shoe industry. Wow. The number of shoes, and I mean, there's 20 billion pairs of shoes that are made every year. And in the U.S. alone, the average American, kid, woman, man, they buy eight pairs per year per person. So it's two and a half billion just the US. And all these things are sitting in landfills. And so what you put into the chemicals and the materials that used to produce it, they're incredibly important and no one's thinking about it. And so, yeah, the gear started turning a little bit. And I started thinking more. And, you know, look, timing is everything. And I asked him, my family, I had two really young kids at the time.”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, so you see this term sheet Gears start turning in your head, Joey, where you're thinking wait a minute, this actually there's some legs to this thing, and actually maybe I can talk to Tim about sort of using this shoe idea as a vehicle for a sustainability business.”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then it turns to this really inane sourcing conversation where they're like, just do what we do now and do it cheaper. We don't really care about the sustainability part is not the words they use, but that's the sentiment that's conveyed. And so I just realized through this super frustrating experience that the brands, big brands, they said they cared about sustainability, but in reality they were just paying lip service to the idea. So I'm sitting here and Tim comes with this. Not just a concept, but like a pretty fleshed out idea with a Kickstarter success. And it really resonated with me from a sustainability perspective, but it was also about an opportunity to sell shoes in a totally different way than the industry had ever done before.”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I said at that time, and look, this is a moment in my life, too, that I'd been at Solazine for six years. Yeah. I had a very consistent experience. And I mean, I kind of look back and laugh a little bit now, like algae oil kind of sounds like the 2000s version of snake oil salesman. But I was going to big multinationals and chemical companies, big brands. And there was like a couple of these just seminal moments where I would have an idea. I would go talk to the right people you'd want to talk to if you had an amazing new material that happened to be really sustainable for the planet. I pitched it in, had multiple meetings, and everyone at first is like, this is amazing. It's an exciting idea. We love the sustainability mission. And then you'd be like, okay, well, let's do this. Yeah.”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I thought, you know, I didn't think that there was any ill intent from the guys who sent the deal, but it was. It was vulturous in the way I read it. And I thought that it was taking advantage of a great idea and trying to sink their talents into this business. And what Tim would have been left with was not great. So I think I told him at that time, I was like, look, I wouldn't take the deal and I wouldn't run the business this way.”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Something like that. And so Joey took a look at this thing for me and he jumps on the phone and he hasn't just looked at this thing. I'd really, really good friends, close friends that had looked at it, that kind of looked at it. He'd gone through he'd rid it.”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was some upfront capital that would convert to equity depending on how the business performed and involve kind of moving to New York and they were going to take a big chunk of it, a large, large chunk of it.”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everyone was like, oh, it's good and it's bad, and you don't really have anything else. So do you want to shop this round or what do you really”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, this thing's on the table. And Lynn's, she goes, you need to speak with Joey about this. He comes from this world. He's a customer of the project and he'd be an interesting person to sort of put this in front of. And so I did. And everyone had given me their kind of 10 minutes on this.”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was starting to think, what do I do next? I've been through this really difficult year and I was like, what am I doing? We're making wool shoes. What does this even, why am I doing this? And so there was a lot of those questions kind of going through my mind. But we get this investment offer. I knew enough to understand the deal.”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Liked it, and I went to New York and spent a lot of time with them, and we went through every aspect of it, and they put a deal in front of me.”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I found myself on a plane to New York speaking with someone from within the footwear world who had seen the traction and the product.”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, if you'd ask me at the time, I would have laughed at you. You just thought, I'm just going to support this guy's shoe. No chance. I mean, yeah, not just supporting. I mean, I did think it was really cool. Looking back at that video as I once in a while do when we're showing.”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I just kind of somewhere in between. And that year was awful. And I would find myself at dinners with Lynn's and her friends who were kind of early 30s now at the stage of their career where things are starting to take off and we go out for dinner and we go around the table and I just would dread when it would come to me and people would ask what I was doing. And Lynn's would make fun because my body would curl up into a little ball and I would sort of say wool shoes. And when we'd leave the dinner, people would pat me on the head and say, that's... It's lovely that you're pursuing this little thing, and good luck with that little fella, and it was just awful. And it became clear too that doing this by yourself was really hard. And that I was good at some aspects of it, and there was a bunch of things that I was not good at.”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not even close. And so I was tapping into my savings that were rapidly dwindling at the time and living in London. And then right at the end of that, the factory in Portugal decided to go bankrupt right at the end of this, shortly after we just delivered it. So the idea that we were going to kind of try and make more and build this business and go forward to the next phase of things. I had to do a mercy dash to Portugal to go rescue the 10 metres of wool from the factory.”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, I mean, every mistake you can imagine. And I remember the factory, the young guy had gone over to the factory and he called me out one day and he goes, we've got a problem. The factories made the men's and women's shoes exactly the same size. I go, that's bad. There's like a one and a half, there's quite a big difference. Sure. What are we going to do? We've got no choice. We're going to have to just send these out.”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A couple of young guys kind of working for me, and we'd found a little office space in London, and I spent probably the worst year trying to make this thing happen.”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was one of those moments sometimes from the outside when you've had the moment of greater success, that's the moment where you're most unsure or you're most scared. And I remember being scared. I have to go deliver on this now and execute it. And this is going to be really, really hard.”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And Len's had sent this out to all her friends and, hey, my boyfriend's doing this project and maybe you could support him. And Joe was one of the earliest customers.”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it went on the Kickstarters homepage and on their mailing list where they send out sort of interesting projects. Went to $120,000 in four days, and I had to stop it because I didn't have enough. And I had to stop this thing, and I was like, oh my gosh, I can't believe this. Because you”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT