Tim Brown
person on 3 shows · 15 statements across 3 episodes · said 19 times in 7 episodes since 2019
20VC 10 
Founder's Journal 5 
How I Built This 4
On the record as a speaker too: Tim Brown across every show, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
Mentions by year, every show
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 10Founder's Journal 5How I Built This 4
2023 9 mentions in 1 episode
2022 1 mention in 1 episode
2021 5 mentions in 1 episode
2020 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
2019 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
every mention on every show, scene by scene, with the transcript →
15 statements about Tim Brown, every show
Allbirds co-founder Tim Brown captained the New Zealand World Cup team
“Tim Brown's my co-founder. He was a professional athlete, but he happened to have a design background. He's from New Zealand. He became the captain of the New Zealand national soccer team all the way through the 2010 world cup.”
Tim Brown raised $119,000 in five days on Kickstarter for Allbirds
“He used that grant to launch the idea of Allbirds on Kickstarter, where he raised 119,000 dollars in five days.”
Brown: Design is a problem-solving process, not just an output
“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.”
Brown earned more playing pro soccer than his peers did in consulting
“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.”
Brown: Late 2000s footwear was overly complicated and dominated by excessive logos
“It was a design observation about a category that I thought was super
Complicated and overcrowded and over-logoed.”
Brown: Founders greatly underestimate the complexity of manufacturing shoes
“And I had greatly
Underestimated, as I'm sure Joey would attest, how complicated it is, actually, to make a shoe.”
Brown: A minimalist design alone cannot sufficiently differentiate a physical product
“I realized too, in the process of selling the shoes, the design story was one part of it.
I think it resonated with people, but it needed something more, both for me and for the product.
The product was okay, but it wasn't differentiated.”
Brown secured a New Zealand government grant to engineer woolen shoe textiles
“With the help of you know, 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.”
Allbirds co-founders met because their wives were Dartmouth college roommates
“Back in maybe, 2000, early, early part of that decade Lindsey and Liz, my wife, were roommates and doormates in college at Dartmouth.”
Brown: Americans view wool as scratchy, so marketing must emphasize merino
“Well, first of all, I realized that wool to Americans meant hot and scratchy. So all of a sudden you actually had to talk about merino. It's a different shape. And it's a finer material and it's softer and then you also had to talk about not just the material,…”
Brown: Allbirds precursor Kickstarter raised $120,000 in four days before being halted
“Ah, and then it went on the Kickstarter's homepage, and on their mailing list, where they send out sort of interesting projects, and, ah, it went to a hundred and, you know, 20,000 dollars in four days, and I had to stop it.”
Factory erroneously produced early Kickstarter shoes in identical men's and women's sizes
“The factory's made the men's and women's shoes exactly the same size.”
Portuguese supplier went bankrupt shortly after delivering the initial Kickstarter order
“The factory in Portugal decided to go bankrupt right at the end of this shortly after we just delivered it.”
Zwillinger: Better to co-own a big business than solo-own a small one
“Doing it alone is really lonely, and I'd always been of the opinion that if I was gonna do a business, I wanted to do it with someone, cause I knew my shortcomings were substantial, and that I would much rather have a piece of something big than a lot of somet…”
Brown: Founding a business brings more sustained pressure than professional sports
“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 seven all the time, and you're constantly thinking about it, and I, you know, I retired from sport, and I, That, that h…”