The Ledger, every show

“And I actually think it's a win for Cotabaxi to, like, I don't want to give the company away to a foundation. I actually want to create something that can create wealth for many people within our organization, and that can allow them to go pass on this to thei…”

“The first thing that they did was they tied our bonuses, our compensation as leaders in the company to our impact work.”

“We had a chief impact officer before we had a chief marketing officer. We didn't have a marketer.”

“We've more than tripled our revenue, you know, since they've invested two and a half years ago.”

“Are we a multi-billion dollar business? Not yet, but we will be.”

“If you look at, you know, the percentage of businesses that have started in the last 10 years, we are in the top one percent.”

“We ended up having our first profitable year in 2020, and it was significantly profitable. And it allowed us to pay those bonuses to our team. And then in 20, 21, we grew a little over 60%. And then in 20, 22, we grew over 90, about 90%.”

“I believe we can go build a billion dollar business.”

“And the return rate was like zero, like whatever they got, no matter how funky it was, they were, they loved it.”

“We had 30,000 social media posts in that first 24 hours of our launch.”

“We've made, we sold five million backpacks made of remnant leftover repurposed material from other outdoor brands. It's the leftover scraps.”

“I think I did a good job taking a business from zero to around a hundred and fifty million in revenue, and there's probably better leaders that can take it To the next level.”

“At that point, we'd raised around forty million dollars in venture capital.”

“We'd grown a hundred percent almost the year before.”

“I pitched a hundred investors to get our first investor, you know, Kirsten green at forerunner. She backed us. I pitched a hundred investors in our first to raise that seed round.”

“Our first major investor, Kirsten Green, Our second major investor, Ellie Wheeler from Great Craft. Our third major investor, Brooke Harley. Our last investor with Bain Capital, Cecilia Chao. There's a trend. Women are leading rounds in our business.”

“And even in the last 12 months since I started that fundraising process, we've think businesses increased 50%.”

“Our slowest growth year in the last 10 years was actually 20 20. We grew 40% that year, but we were profitable, significantly profitable, and it was because we tightened our belt in such a big way.”

“I'm not the CEO anymore, and I have a CEO that's, we got a major upgrade. When I left. And so I'm not going to be the CEO”

“Instead of doing layoffs, we decided to cut our executive salaries in a pretty significant way, and we cut everyone's pay by 10% for three months, and then we cut it down to five percent for the rest of the year, and then by the end of the year, we ended up gi…”

“We just hired the CEO of Eddie Bauer, joined our team last year as the president, Damien Wong.”

“Over the history of our business, the last almost nine years, we've helped and aided 3.8 million people living in poverty through our efforts.”

“Last year, 97% of all of our products that we sold were made of the three, one of the three R's.”

“4.3 million.”

“It took us six months to get a business license and entity set up.”

“I mean, we went to like 400 employees within 18 months of our launch.”

“We had Kirsten Green led our first round. This is an investor that she's backed Warby Parker and Away and Birchbox and Dollar Shave Club, and she believed in us, and she believed in our mission, and so she wrote the first check, and that was the beginning of t…”

“We went to them and said, hey, all this remnant material that we see, all this leftover, we want to use it, and we want you guys to design the bags. The only rule is to make no bag alike, and so that's been really fun.”

“We had 30,000 social media posts the day of our launch, of people using our bags, outliving our brand values, and it was a really special way for us to go build the brand.”

“We had over a 100,000 people participate in one of our Questable events.”

“We hired a, someone to head up our impact work In the first year of our business, before we even hired someone in marketing, we hired someone in impact.”

“The first first year we did over a couple million in revenue, two or three million in revenue. And over the next few years, two, three years grew to maybe twenty million in revenue.”

“I have a list of every investor I've ever met with. And at this point I have around a thousand people”

“We grow to like 300 employees in like 18 months.”

“I sat on the couch all night the next day and the entire following night. So, 36 hours on this couch. And during that period, and I took detailed notes, I still have the journal entries on my computer, and I basically had the entire idea for Cotopaxi.”

“Every year I do a survival trip or two where I go survive on an island, bring no food, spearfish, eat coconuts, build a shelter.”

“We did, yeah, we did a million in sales our first year in business.”

“We were doing like six million in revenue maybe a million dollars in EBITDA.”

“You know, we've worked together for six and a half years now, and we've never had an argument.”