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

“And I chased some sheep around, and it's a little It's kind of a little flood of the Concords esque, maybe. I don't know, a little weird and funny, but tried to really hone in on sort of why this is different and why it matters and click live on it. And I was back in London, and I remember. My phone just started going”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I went home to New Zealand for Christmas and I needed to shoot a video. And I'd organise with my dad's friend who owned a sheep farm not just outside of Wellington. Yeah. We have one day to do this And my dad's friend, I remember showing up on the morning of, he went and got a bunch of sheep so they could be in the backdrop of this video. And I very nearly pulled out. I was writing this script and I just, it was one of those moments where you think this is dumb. This is not going to work. And my brother literally dragged me along to the farm and said, just do it. What's the worst that can happen? And so we went ahead with it and shot a video and ultimately launched the Kickstarter. It went live on March of 2014.”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I found another factory on Google. Where was it? In Portugal this time. And I'd flown over and it was a tiny factory. And I'd made, I think, eight pairs of samples.”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Called Allbirds? No, at this stage, I'd renamed it again. It took another crack at naming and it was called 3 over 7, and it was going to be very, very simple design, original, and it was going to be made out of wool with this new material.”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay but so to do something on Kickstarter, which you did in 2014, but to do something on Kickstarter, you need to have the prototype, you need to have a lot of things. What was it called? Was it called Albirds?”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then people go, okay, that's interesting. And then as much as people kind of laughed at the idea, and this has been a consistent thread, I think on some level they sort of said that's interesting. But I got the end of that course. And I flew back to London after my time at Kellogg and decided I was going to launch Wool Shoes on Kickstar”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a different, and it's a finer material, and it's softer, and then you also had to talk about not just the material, you actually had to talk about the benefits of the material. So why? If you're going to do this, there must be a reason. And the reason is because wool has these miraculous properties.”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, first of all, I realised that wool to Americans meant hot and scratchy. Yeah. So, all of a sudden, you actually had to talk about Merino.”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everyone said that, but there was something about the idea that people sort of said, oh yeah, why has that not been done?”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So this idea of wool shoes, which you'd really been toying with since 2009 now around 2012, 2013, it's starting to get some traction. But I wonder, I mean, was anyone saying, like, how do you turn scratchy wool into shoes?”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you were able to take the pick of classes that you wanted through the quarter that you were there, the period that you were there. So I show up at Evanston and I walk into an entrepreneurship class. With a professor called Cartercast, who is a former CEO of Walmart.com and this pretty special professor there. And he'd sent an email out and he said, everyone has to come in and that you've got three minutes to pitch an idea to the class. And we will form teams around the best 10 ideas. And for the whole quarter, you will go after this business idea. And I came in and I pitched the idea of wool shoes. And I think people thought it was a little bit of a joke. But for whatever reason it got selected. And I found myself immersed for three months. On this idea and truly actually building this into a business”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and I had a little bit of shoemaking knowledge, so I'd made a couple of shoes. And I showed up and did the first couple of semesters at LSE and then went off to Kellogg at Northwestern”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“From soccer in 2012. I go to the World Cup and I have this great experience, and I realise that's the end of this moment where I depart. I tore up a two-year contract, and at this time, the idea of going back to school and studying all the subjects that I'd avoided was interesting. And I'd always wanted to go back to London where I was born and where my father was from. So the idea of being able to go back there. Study was both a way out of sport in some ways, and the best of ways, and that the opportunity to kind of step back and start this next chapter.”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We'd meet each other at a wedding. I'd come back to visit one of my old teammates from Cincinnati and gone to their wedding and stopped by to see some friends in New York and sat next to Lynn's at a dinner.”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were undefeated. We're the only undefeated team at the World Cup. We drew three games and didn't get out of our pool. And Spain won the World Cup. But that was an enormous achievement. And this was a New Zealand team that was ranked, I think we were the smallest nation at the World Cup. We were the lowest ranked. And we went in there, and I mean, even to qualify was enormous.”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, so it was the second time New Zealand had ever qualified for the World Cup, so the first time in 1982 and the second time in 2010. So that was a big deal.”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To actually make that textile because it didn't exist. And, you know, I think the backdrop and the context around this was that New Zealand's probably famous for having lots of sheep And it's a hugely important legacy industry in New Zealand that has gone through a really, really tough time. And, you know, I think they were searching for new ideas and new categories. And it was kind of right time, right place A random, maybe obvious idea that hadn't been done before, and we got lucky. And so probably around the world, a couple of bit before, this grant, this research lab in Christchurch, set about trying to make a fabric for us.”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But it needed something more both for me and for the product. The product was okay, but it wasn't differentiated. And And I think I remember reading a magazine one day about the wool industry in New Zealand and we'd actually put some wool felt, experimented on some wool felt on the outside of some of the sneakers. And I was like, gosh, wouldn't it, why is wool not used in shoes? And what if we could do that? That would be hugely interesting. And so I, you know, with the help of some friends at the time, put together a grant on a whim to develop a woolen textile for making the upper of a shoe out of it.”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We did a pop up shop in Wellington, and I think it was the beginning of an interest in this category. Because I realized too in the process of selling the shoes, the design story was one part of it. I think it resonated with people.”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Leather, right? And just to understand just generally just where these materials were coming from. And I remember the samples would come and you'd open the box and it would smell like just. And I think that opened up the idea of exploring different materials”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Canvas and some leather, some New Zealand leather that I was shipping over, which was. Another eye-opening experience where I walked into a tannery for the first time and started to understand how bad that material is. Right.”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Still a soccer player, and I'm kind of 80% folks, I mean, on the World Cup. That was everything. It was training, it was diet, there was not room for much else, but this was my mental escape”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Had like 2D drawings that we'd made of just this form, and I had photos of. Other examples of shoes that I thought were kind of close. But that was it. And I thought, you know, you could go make this. And I think if you could make it, you could sell it. And there's potentially a business here. And I had started to get really, really interested in this idea of entrepreneurialism and building a business and of making things.”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so I said, okay, well, let's go see if we can do this. And I had greatly underestimated, as I'm sure Joe would attest, how complicated it is actually to make a shoe”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I'm gonna go do it. It was that simple. And I tried to do it in New Zealand and realized that that industry had long since disappeared from nobody was manufacturing.”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It wasn't about comfort at that time, it was a design observation about a category that I thought was super complicated and overcrowded over logo.”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it was. It was one of those ones. I just saw a problem that was my own. I didn't write a business plan. And so in the offseason of one of my soccer seasons, I want to say it was the 2008, 2009. You get a month off at the end of the year where you kind of go off and you rest. And I found a footwear factory online and I went and visited one.”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I remember still my dad probably got this from my dad, but like picking logos off clothes. And so the idea that there was logos over everything that I was wearing was just like this weird thing. Completely the antithesis of everything I stood for from a design point of view that had been ingrained to me at the University of Cincinnati. And I guess the other thing that was happening is I just had it, I had my afternoons free. I was training in the morning and I was incredibly focused on sport, but I had a lot of free time. And so I started to get curious about this particular problem, particularly in footwear.”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the other cool things that happened is I got a sponsorship deal from one of the big sportswear companies that shall not be named. And that felt like a moment. And I could go into the shop and get what I wanted.”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I hadn't thought about that. I was probably singularly focused on this sporting career. And I was being paid a good living better than my friends that had gone to university and were getting consulting jobs. And it became a job for the first time. Wow. And I got a taste of playing for my country and what that meant. We had a small group of players that realised that we had a potential shot at a World Cup. And that was the special source that drove me to kind of get through the humdrum routine and professional sport and keep driving and keep improving and keep working because there was this larger prize there and this larger sense of purpose.”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The competitiveness was something that burned in me. Whatever it took to win. That was within me, and it took a little while to realize that, but it was there and I just was competitive.”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was a midfielder, but I had a kind of a defensive responsibility that was about tackling and about aggression and about running around and getting the ball. And then it was about scoring goals.”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Being fit and running around a lot, kicking people and tackling people and getting the ball off the opponents and giving it to the good players on our team.”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and I found myself signed on a multi-year deal to play professional sport in my hometown and I was now a part of a New Zealand team that had set its target of qualifying for the World Cup in 2010 and I was kind of on my way. I wasn't the quickest and I wasn't the most technical, but I'd found a way where I could carve out a career that involved me doing a couple things really, really well.”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure. Yeah. I mean, we had dreams of fortunes, I suppose. But yeah, what I took away from that experience was incredibly rich. And towards the end of that, I started looking around at a ton of different opportunities because I had refined what I wanted to do. And I saw what I thought was a path to make a different kind of a company. Where the output of that business was really high impact.”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Response for the company was incredible. I mean, we were, I joined in 2009 and we ended up going public in 2011. We raised over a billion dollars of money for the business. And it had a legitimate shot of doing something special. And, you know, towards the end of my time there, I think I. I learned a huge amount about what not to do. And it ended up, I think, unequivocally being a pretty big failure.”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The company was called Solazyme, and Solazyme was doing something really unique in the biofuel space. They were using microalgae and doing it in a totally different way. They were growing this microalgae in huge fermentation vessels. And I was completely captivated by the technology. Vision was to basically be the next source of liquid fuel and chemicals for the entire world.”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, actually. I was searching with all the engineering schools at Penn to find a clean tech-oriented company that I could help take the technology out of the university and start the business. And then I also got to just come out to the West Coast where most of the clean tech style of business was happening right now right then. It was solar, wind, biofuels, biochemicals And that was big shaping experience too.”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Guess 2005, and I latched onto this concept of environmentalism through business and using business. For good and doing it for the environment. And so I decided that business school would be a good opportunity to kind of refine my interest and help really focus on getting into that sector.”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Probably my most transformative one was I worked for a client, was a garbage company. It was the second largest garbage company in the country. And I was, I looked at something esoteric like fuel surcharges. And I was negotiating all these trucking fleet contracts. I was literally doing deals in landfills. I would go to a landfill and you'd walk in and the guy who was running a landfill would be like, yep, smells like money because it would smell really bad, but that was what was business success. And it was really eye-opening. It was very scrappy. And it was something I actually really loved it. And I ended up leaving consulting because that really early taste of entrepreneurial business just got me and being in the Bay Area, you almost can't help it. Sure. You kind of like, and this was in,”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I really didn't. And then at some point, I just latched onto this concept of business consulting, which I think was marketed to me as if you don't know what you're doing, this is a great way to get a taste for a lot of things. So I was like, okay, cool. That sounds good because I definitely don't know what I'm doing. And so I just went to a couple of those little info sessions that they have on campus and thought this company Deloitte sounded amazing. I ended up jumping into there and did their consulting group.”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I wanted to go to a great place that challenged me. I wanted to do engineering. And I also wanted to try and play soccer. And so those are the two guiding factors that ended up leading me by deduction to get to Berkeley.”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was the solving of problems. I'd found a place that was like a catch-all for my curiosity and was a process that it took me a little while, but with the help of a couple of these professors, I realized this was, the design was actually not about the output. It was a process of problem solving. And if you applied it, you could apply it to all sorts of different things.”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The design program was difficult. It was a five-year program. They wanted to break you down and build you up over five years literally in the first foundation year, cutting paper and not using a computer, and literally going through a very, very traditional sort of design education. And it was difficult because the whole athletic department kind of had their trainings in the afternoon. And I had a studio every just about every day from 9 to 12 and then from two to five. And I can still remember sprinting across campus, changing, and I structured some agreement with a coach that I could kind of be a little bit, I could miss the warm-up or something, and then I could do the studio and I somehow made it work. It was intense from the beginning. When I look back on it, there was a fair amount of pressure, but I'd found something.”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I ended up getting about six scholarship offers, and then I found in Cincinnati a design school, which was the subject that it was starting to really connect with me. And so Cincinnati was where I hit it. And I hadn't visited. And it was probably, I feel like the first adult decision, big decision I'd made where mum and dad were like, We'll make it work. I remember as part of the application, they put their mortgage as part of the credit that sort of said he's good for this. You want to do it? Go, we'll back you 100%. And so off I was on a plane to Cincinnati as an 18-year-old.”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a really popular sport in a nation that loves its rugby. So the joke always was this went on to become more a part of my life that certainly some of my mum's family were disappointed that it was soccer and not rugby. But it was something that I love to do and kept doing it. And even when I look back, by the time I was 16 or 17, that was my identity. And that was what my friends were doing. And I was starting to get a sniff, you know, of something that I could do well and something where I could carve out, if not a career, certainly a pathway. It was, gosh, if I could make the New Zealand under 20 team, you know, I could die happy.”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In twenty fifteen, Tim partnered up with Joey's Willinger to figure out if they could actually find a market for these shoes. They raised about a million dollars from investors to launch all birds in March of twenty sixteen, and almost instantly all birds were dubbed the world's most comfortable shoe by Time magazine. Today, just three years on, their shoe company is valued at $1.4 billion. But what's also incredible is how unlikely it is that they even met in the first place. Joey grew up in Marin County in California. Tim, of course, grew up on the other side of the world, and even before he seriously got into shoes, he was playing soccer professionally. He even competed at the World Cup. Tim was raised in Wellington, New Zealand in the nineteen eighties and nineties. His mom was a nurse, his dad worked in nonprofits. And from a pretty early age, he found himself being drawn into”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would find myself at dinners with friends who are 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 would dread when it would come to me and people would ask what I was doing. My body would curl up into a little ball and I would sort of say wool shoes. When we'd leave the dinner, people would pat me on the head and say, that's lovely that you're pursuing this little thing, and good luck with that little fella. And it was just, it was awful.”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, one of my favorite parts of traveling is getting a feel for a neighborhood, the way locals do. A few summers ago, I was in Rome and stayed in an apartment I booked on Airbnb. It was tucked in a quiet neighborhood just outside the Roman forum. Every morning I'd walk to the corner cafe, grab an espresso, and just watch the world go by outside. I even managed to chat with the owner about the neighborhood he lived in for nearly forty years. And he got me thinking about my own neighborhood. There are incredible hiking trails and great restaurants and, of course, the beach. And when I'm traveling this summer, listing my own place on Airbnb could be a really smart way to let someone else experience the area the way I do, like a local. Listing your home on Airbnb while you're traveling is a great way to make some extra money. You could put the money toward your next trip. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much”
2019-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT