Phil Knight, every mention
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Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Phil Knight comes up
Trader Joe’s: Hawaiian shirts and counter positioning (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 6:26 Ben Gilbert Like, he's not the, you know, the Phil Knights come to mind.
Holiday Special 2023 (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 23:27 David Rosenthal Part of that was, I went to Stanford Business School, which is the Knight Management Center, and this is Phil Knight, and you know, I've never met Phil Knight, but I felt an extra debt of gratitude to him and obligation to do it right.
- ▶ 45:40 Ben Gilbert It's Phil Knight.
Costco (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 2:54:46 David Rosenthal You are becoming Phil Knight during his Oakley phase.
Nike (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 4:43 David Rosenthal 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…
- ▶ 5:22 Ben Gilbert So, Strasser, we'll get into his contributions, but he is probably second only to Phil Knight in willing Nike into existence.
- ▶ 5:47 David Rosenthal Now, Bill was a legendary figure, in addition to being Nike's co-founder, along with Phil Knight.
- ▶ 7:29 David Rosenthal So, a few years into Bowerman's tenure as head coach, he recruits a pretty talented middle distance runner, freshman from Portland nearby, one Phil Knight.
- ▶ 7:41 David Rosenthal Now, Phil also has some interesting Oregon roots.
- ▶ 7:57 David Rosenthal Phil follows in his dad's footsteps.
- ▶ 8:02 David Rosenthal And I would say Phil is okay as a runner.
- ▶ 8:07 Ben Gilbert Phil Knight would describe himself in his prime as an okay runner because he was running with the best collegiate runners in the world, coached by Bill Bowerman, who barely gave Phil Knight the time of day.
- ▶ 8:26 Ben Gilbert And so, you've got Phil Knight.
- ▶ 8:36 David Rosenthal I think at any other school, Phil would have been a star.
- ▶ 8:39 David Rosenthal This isn't really in Shoe Dog, but I know Phil's personality from reading so much about him over the past couple weeks.
- ▶ 8:57 David Rosenthal I mean, Rockefeller was pretty introverted, but he looks like Elon Musk compared to Phil Knight.
- ▶ 9:18 Ben Gilbert That's not Phil Knight at all.
- ▶ 9:22 David Rosenthal I owe a huge thank you in my life to Phil Knight.
- ▶ 9:56 David Rosenthal So, Knight runs at Oregon, and it's important to say, we should note about Bowerman.
- ▶ 11:00 Ben Gilbert And his guinea pig was Phil Knight, because Phil wasn't at the front of the pack, so he could sort of afford to experiment on him.
- ▶ 11:06 Ben Gilbert So, very fortunate for Phil Knight and his future that he was not the fastest runner on the Oregon team.
- ▶ 11:15 David Rosenthal So, after Phil graduates, he goes to business school right after undergrad to Stanford, to Stanford GSB, hence the connection.
- ▶ 11:35 David Rosenthal So in Phil's final term there at Stanford, he takes what is then the only quote unquote entrepreneurship course at GSB.
- ▶ 11:45 David Rosenthal I mean, today there's like a hundred different entrepreneurship courses taught by the famous professor Frank Schallenberger, who Knight gives tons of credit to for Blue Ribbon Sports and ultimately Nike.
- ▶ 11:57 David Rosenthal And in the course for Knight's final paper,
- ▶ 12:07 David Rosenthal His thesis is that he knows from growing up with his dad, and I think he actually maybe spent some summers at college and then at GSB working in the newsroom at the Oregon Journal, and he knows from the photography department that high-end…
- ▶ 12:47 David Rosenthal And he also knows about the sporting goods market from his time at Oregon, and particularly
- ▶ 14:36 David Rosenthal So, Phil Knight's thesis here, it actually didn't get any sort of notice or praise famously from his classmates, or even really from the faculty, because they're like, okay, this is a good idea to apply Japanese low ed disruption to the…
- ▶ 15:07 David Rosenthal And it's worth maybe saying one word on the Adidas or Adidas story before we move back to Phil Knight and Shoe Dog here, because it's pretty crazy.
- ▶ 17:06 Ben Gilbert Ok, so take us back to Phil Knight.
- ▶ 17:09 David Rosenthal Phil has this idea in this class in business school, this good idea but small idea to sell Japanese track shoes in the U.S. and undercut Adidas.
- ▶ 17:19 David Rosenthal In 1963, after he graduates, Phil decides that he's going to go off before he really starts life.
- ▶ 17:41 David Rosenthal Phil, though, goes on to Japan, and he's still thinking about this idea.
- ▶ 18:09 David Rosenthal And Phil, for a desperate introvert, kind of crazily, this is how passionate he is about this idea, he gets it in his head that he's gonna hop on a train from Tokyo and just go knock on their door and say hi to the Onitsuka Corporation…
- ▶ 18:30 David Rosenthal So the story goes that he shows up on the door, and I can only imagine what twenty-three-year-old Phil Knight is feeling as he's,
- ▶ 18:39 Ben Gilbert Well, this is the other side of Phil's personality, where he's sort of a tortured soul.
- ▶ 18:54 Ben Gilbert Phil's like, but I'm longing for something.
- ▶ 19:26 David Rosenthal And Phil doesn't present as a Genghis Khan.
- ▶ 20:28 David Rosenthal While Phil is making this train trip down to Kobe, he suddenly has a realization.
- ▶ 20:56 David Rosenthal The one that Phil tells is that the name Blue Ribbon Sports comes from him thinking back to his childhood days, becoming a track athlete in middle school and high school.
- ▶ 21:21 David Rosenthal The other story that appears in the other books is that Phil was out drinking the night before, either drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon PBR beers, or I think more likely the other one that I read is Suntory Blue Ribbon Whiskey, which is a…
- ▶ 21:49 David Rosenthal Either way, perhaps driven by this drive to succeed, Phil puts on the performance of a lifetime in this meeting.
- ▶ 23:57 David Rosenthal So, Knight leaves this meeting, this performance of a lifetime.
- ▶ 24:17 David Rosenthal So, first thing Knight does, he gets in touch with his dad, I don't know, he sends him like a telegram or something,
- ▶ 25:06 David Rosenthal So Phil gets home.
- ▶ 25:18 David Rosenthal At the end of 1963, I think right around Christmas, Phil writes in Shoe Dog, the samples show up, and Phil gets them, you know, they're great, they're what he remembers.
- ▶ 25:40 David Rosenthal So, Phil gets back and writes on Itsuka, says, great, I would like to be
- ▶ 25:58 David Rosenthal Phil's like, great.
- ▶ 26:13 Ben Gilbert The naivete is just dripping off of Phil at this point.
- ▶ 28:50 David Rosenthal And it turned out, actually, that Onitsuka had already studied the U.S. market, whether they agreed with Phil's plucked out of thin air market size or not.
- ▶ 29:03 David Rosenthal So they actually were looking for somebody like Phil.
- ▶ 29:07 David Rosenthal So Phil goes down to see Bowerman, and to Phil's surprise, I mean, Bowerman is not a warm and fuzzy guy, he's never really shown Phil much encouragement when he ran for him, or since.
- ▶ 29:32 David Rosenthal And Phil is like, floored.
- ▶ 29:43 David Rosenthal So, Phil's like, what's the deal you have in mind?
- ▶ 30:17 David Rosenthal On the other hand, this is a no-brainer yes for Phil.
- ▶ 30:24 David Rosenthal Well, and if Phil doesn't do this deal, he would have a hundred percent of Phil Knight's Blue Ribbon Sports.
- ▶ 32:10 David Rosenthal Just like Onitsuko was primed to receive young Phil Knight, so was Bowerman.
- ▶ 32:26 David Rosenthal He worked super closely with Phil on writing Shoe Dog.
- ▶ 33:20 David Rosenthal So, okay, we've got 51 night 49 Bowerman in Blue Ribbon Sports.
- ▶ 33:32 David Rosenthal And they do, they, meaning Phil, does what he intended to do.
- ▶ 33:45 David Rosenthal Even with that funny sales strategy, and in Shoe Dog, Phil talks about this.
- ▶ 33:50 David Rosenthal While he was in Hawaii with his buddy, the way they made money was they sold encyclopedias door-to-door, and then Phil gets a job as a, um, stockbroker trying to sell stocks.
- ▶ 35:16 David Rosenthal So Phil is selling the Tigers for six dollars and 95 cents a pair.
- ▶ 35:32 David Rosenthal Pretty soon Phil hires his first full-time employee,
- ▶ 36:20 David Rosenthal He met Knight at Stanford.
- ▶ 36:22 David Rosenthal Jeff was a Stanford undergrad who ran track and met Knight while he was at GSB.
- ▶ 36:58 Ben Gilbert This is a quote from Shoe Dog, so it's in Phil Knight's voice.
- ▶ 38:31 David Rosenthal So there are only like two or three banks that Knight even has the option of going to.
- ▶ 39:11 Ben Gilbert Phil Knight.
- ▶ 39:29 Ben Gilbert And this is where Phil Knight's complete opposite approach comes in.
- ▶ 40:09 Ben Gilbert So what this banker is basically saying to Phil Knight is, I will only loan you up to the amount of money that I already know you have.
- ▶ 40:57 David Rosenthal So, since growth is literally rate-limited by the banks, Knight decides that he can't justify taking a salary.
- ▶ 42:08 David Rosenthal And Phil overhears her talking with some friends in the hallway one day talking about art classes, and he stops her and he says, hey, I've got a company.
- ▶ 42:25 Ben Gilbert Phil Knight to this point, which is hilarious given Nike today, doesn't believe in advertising, and so he's like,
- ▶ 43:03 Ben Gilbert What else could anyone possibly design for Nike that would change Phil Knight's life?
- ▶ 47:50 David Rosenthal So Bowerman and Phil get together.
- ▶ 48:25 David Rosenthal So, Bowerman and Phil want to call the shoe, they actually want to borrow from the Adidas playbook,
- ▶ 49:04 David Rosenthal Bowerman is casting about for other ideas for names of the shoe, and he says to Knight, what was the name of that Spanish guy that kicked the you-know-what out of the Aztecs?
- ▶ 49:14 David Rosenthal And Knight is like, oh, that's Cortez.
- ▶ 50:53 Ben Gilbert This is Phil Knight.
- ▶ 51:25 Ben Gilbert This is Phil Knight, the founder of Nike.
- ▶ 51:28 David Rosenthal I mean, even Phil Knight is, like, jogging?
- ▶ 52:23 David Rosenthal So, Knight has this great quote about this later in life.
- ▶ 52:26 David Rosenthal He's asked literally this question, if Nike started the fitness revolution, and his answer is so typically Phil Knight.
- ▶ 54:09 David Rosenthal When this happens, Phil then goes to the bankers in Oregon and asks for, hey, you know, great.
- ▶ 54:42 David Rosenthal So he asks for a line of credit of 1.2 million dollars to finance inventory.
- ▶ 54:49 David Rosenthal He never asked for a over a million dollar line of credit before.
- ▶ 54:53 Ben Gilbert He trips the alarms.
- ▶ 54:54 David Rosenthal He trips the alarm system.
- ▶ 55:12 David Rosenthal So, the bankers, not literally, although literally they would do this very shortly thereafter, they throw him out.
- ▶ 55:57 Ben Gilbert And what Phil Knight did was all of the time kept it at a 100% ratio or close to it, like a 90% ratio.
- ▶ 56:03 Ben Gilbert He'd look and see how many assets they had and say, great, we should have exactly that much debt, too, so I can grow as fast as possible.
- ▶ 58:19 David Rosenthal So, when this happens, when he gets thrown out of the banks, Phil needs to do something to raise money, so he decides the only thing he can think of is to do a small public offering, like a local IPO.
- ▶ 58:41 David Rosenthal This is what Phil wants to do.
- ▶ 58:45 David Rosenthal So, A, he changes the name of the company.
- ▶ 58:51 David Rosenthal He changes the name of the company to Sports-Tech, T-E-K, Inc., with the idea that, oh, this will make us sound like a technology company, and then people will be interested in investing.
- ▶ 59:01 Ben Gilbert Because he hears that people are getting financing for their business in the form of equity capital, where they're willing to assign a valuation to the company, and regardless of what your current sales and assets look like, that sort of
- ▶ 59:38 David Rosenthal Of course, Phil up in Oregon is hearing about this.
- ▶ 59:49 Ben Gilbert So what I've never been able to figure out is, did he change it to Sports Tech Inc. and then change it back to Blue Ribbon Sports, or did they sort of like, I'm trying to figure out if they ever literally changed the name on documents.
- ▶ 1:00:14 Ben Gilbert Well, and Phil Knight undersells it, too.
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