Phil Knight

“Phil Knight basically never took on any equity investors, and so he took no dilution. He and his management team and Bill Bowerman owned 56% at IPO, him owning 46% because he just kept betting the farm all on debt and basically had no buffer at all.”

“Phil signs a deal, finally, with Nisho EY, and the core part of the deal is Nisho will, A, finance all of Blue Ribbon's financing needs, henceforth, pretty much at a scale that goes all the way up to the moon. I mean, they're a hundred billion dollar revenue c…”

“And in the course for Knight's final paper, He writes the business plan for Blue Ribbon Sports, pretty much word for word.”

“So when they went public, after the IPO, Phil owned 46% of the company and was overnight one of the richest people in America.”

“Like, he got kicked out of multiple banks. The FBI got involved. They were playing it a little bit too fast and loose, where they were using every available penny to, you Buy inventory, and so there would be checks that bounced for payroll and things like that…”

“And the way I'm gonna do it is I'm gonna hire a part-time student from Portland State to do my advertising collateral for two dollars an hour.”

“An item among many that is not discussed in the movie is that Rob, shortly after signing Jordan, had an enormous fight with Phil Knight, left the company with Peter Moore, who was the designer behind Jordan's, and ended up joining Adidas as CEO of Adidas Ameri…”

“Nike has a dual class voting structure. Phil Knight controls all the high vote shares, and he controls the board.”

“If you commit and pay for your orders six months in advance, Blue Ribbon will give you a seven percent discount, and we're gonna call this the Nike Futures Program. So he's essentially moving his financing from banks and niche UI over to his retail partners, t…”

“Phil Knight to this point, which is hilarious given Nike today, doesn't believe in advertising, and so he's like, Fine, I'll give in to some other people who are advising me that I should make some brochures or something.”

“It's Phil, like, basically inventing sports marketing. I mean, there was a sort of nascent idea of athlete sponsorship at the time, but it really, this is the invention of it as we know it today. And all athletic brands are defined by athletes, and this is rea…”

“So, Strasser, we'll get into his contributions, but he is probably second only to Phil Knight in willing Nike into existence.”

“The guy runs a four minute, 13 second mile and is convinced he's okay.”

“So what Phil does is he decides to employ Pri as a corporate employee of Nike as the National Director of Public Affairs for 5000 dollars a year.”

“I mean, literally, Phil Knight's Stanford paper is about arbitraging cheap labor from imported goods and selling into markets willing to pay higher prices.”

“Here are the things that are wrong with that statement. One, Phil Knight did not write it. Rob Strasser did. Two, Nike's principles. Also incorrect. When this was written, it was actually still Blue Ribbon Sports, so that it was not yet the Nike corporation. T…”