Jun 10, 2019 · 1h 9m · how-i-built-this
Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
Host Guy Raz explores how former professional soccer player Tim Brown and clean-tech executive Joey Zwillinger partnered to create Allbirds, disrupting the footwear industry with sustainable merino wool shoes and scaling the startup into a global brand.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Guy holds 30.7% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Guy as informed peer 2.2 Guest teaching 1.9 Guest disagreement 0.3 Guy pushing back 0.7
speaking balance: gold is Guy, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 38:20 Joey calls out multinational greenwashing
Joey rejects the conventional corporate sustainability narrative, expressing disgust with major brands that pay lip service to green practices while solely prioritizing cheap sourcing.
Hardest push from Guy ▶ 58:03 Guy presses on environmental idealism versus investor returnsGuy firmly challenges Joey on the tension between carbon neutrality commitments and traditional investors demanding maximum financial returns.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 26:35 Tim educates on merino wool propertiesTim reframes the host's assumption about scratchy wool by explaining the distinct technical and softness properties of superfine merino fibers.
Guy holds their own ▶ 56:30 Guy lays out full footwear supply chain emissionsGuy demonstrates deep subject knowledge by mapping out the comprehensive carbon impact across wool processing, global shipping, and factory electrical grids.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Guy as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Guy pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Live Event Announcements and How I Built This Summit Promotion | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Host opens with promotional announcements and delivers an introductory monologue establishing New Zealand wool industry statistics. | |
| Tim Brown's Collegiate Soccer Career and Industrial Design Training | 2 | 1 | 0 | 0 | Tim recounts his collegiate scholarship at Cincinnati and how industrial design taught him structured problem solving. | |
| Joey Zwillinger's Early Life, Engineering Studies, and Management Consulting | 2 | 1 | 0 | 0 | Joey details his engineering background at Berkeley, early consulting experiences negotiating landfill contracts, and his pivot to Wharton. | |
| Joey Zwillinger's Clean-Tech Experience at Solazime and Its Collapse | 2 | 2 | 0 | 1 | Joey reflects on the rise and bankruptcy of clean-tech company Solazime, explaining the tough business lessons learned. | |
| Tim Brown's Professional Soccer Career and World Cup Ambitions | 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 | Tim discusses his aggressive playing style in professional soccer and the singular focus required to qualify for the 2010 World Cup. | |
| Tim Brown's First Minimalist Sneaker Experiment in Indonesia | 2 | 3 | 1 | 1 | Tim corrects Guy's timeline assumption regarding shoe manufacturing, explaining his initial logo-free prototype run in Indonesia. | |
| Exploring Wool Footwear and Securing the New Zealand Research Grant | 2 | 2 | 0 | 0 | Tim discusses securing a New Zealand research grant to develop wool footwear fabric alongside his World Cup appearance. | |
| Retiring from Soccer, Business Studies, and the Kellogg Pitch | 2 | 3 | 1 | 1 | Tim explains educating skeptical Americans on the unique properties of superfine merino wool versus scratchy traditional wool. | |
| The Three Over Seven Kickstarter Campaign and Viral Demand | 2 | 1 | 0 | 0 | Tim details the viral launch of the Three Over Seven Kickstarter campaign and having to cut it off early after raising 120,000 dollars. | |
| Mid-Episode Break and Narrative Transition | 2 | 2 | 0 | 1 | Tim and Joey candidly recount early factory fulfillment blunders, including mixed-up sizing and the Portugal factory bankruptcy. | |
| Analyzing a Predatory Investment Deal and Reconnecting with Joey | 2 | 3 | 1 | 1 | Joey reviews a predatory term sheet offered to Tim and explains how footwear industry pollution prompted his desire to build a sustainable brand. | |
| The Marin County Weekend and Formalizing the Co-CEO Partnership | 3 | 2 | 0 | 1 | Guy probes how the two co-founders agreed to split equity and formalize the co-CEO operating structure. | |
| Securing Seed Funding, Naming Allbirds, and Product Brand Strategy | 3 | 3 | 0 | 0 | Tim recounts critical advice from Eric Ryan to market product comfort first rather than leading exclusively with sustainability. | |
| Allbirds Commercial Launch and Navigating Initial Co-Founder Friction | 2 | 2 | 0 | 0 | Joey and Tim reflect on the intense friction and emotional exhaustion that emerged right after hitting 1 million dollars in first-month sales. | |
| Maintaining Product Focus, B-Corp Certification, and Carbon Neutrality Commitments | 4 | 4 | 2 | 4 | Guy presses Joey on whether investors will compromise sustainability for profits, and Joey defends their legally binding B-Corp charter. | |
| Reflections on Entrepreneurial Anxiety, Family Support, and Luck | 2 | 2 | 0 | 0 | The co-founders reflect on the persistent psychological anxiety of entrepreneurship and weigh the balance of luck versus hard work. | |
| Innovation Wrap-Up: Allbirds Sweet Foam Open-Source Technology | 2 | 1 | 0 | 0 | Guy highlights Allbirds Sweet Foam open-source sole material before transitioning into the How You Built That segment featuring Orange Screw inventor Kirby Erdely. |
Statements from this episode (25)
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.”
Zwillinger scouted Penn engineering departments to spin out a clean tech startup
“I was searching with the, 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.”
Zwillinger: Prior biofuel startup Solazime raised over $1B and IPO'd in 2011
“I joined in 2009 and we ended up going public in 2011. We raised over a billion dollars of money for the business.”
Zwillinger: $1B biofuel startup Solazime went bankrupt and sold for parts
“The entire business. It got, it went bankrupt, and then has been acquired since for some of the remnants of the technology.”
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: Major footwear brands only pay lip service to sustainability
“I just realized through this super frustrating experience that the brands, big brands, they said they cared about sustainability, but in reality they were just paying lip service to the idea.”
Zwillinger: 20 billion shoes made annually; Americans buy eight pairs yearly
“There's twenty billion pairs of shoes that are made every year. And in the U.S. Alone, the average American, kid, woman, man, they buy eight pairs per year.”
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: Consumers do not buy sustainable products; they buy great products
“People don't buy sustainable products. They buy great products.”
Brown: Consumers buy shoes for comfort, but equate comfort with ugly design
“Comfort is the number one reason why people buy shoes, and comfort often is equated with ugliness, so if your dad tells you he's got a comfortable pair of shoes, you assume they don't look very good”
Zwillinger: Allbirds generated $1 million in sales in its first month
“We done a million dollars in sales in the first month.”
Zwillinger: Allbirds sold exclusively the Wool Runner for its first 14 months
“We sold one style, the Wool Runner, for 14 months. We didn't do anything else except sell the Wool Runner.”
Zwillinger: No inherent tension exists between financial returns and sustainability
“We don't believe that there needs to be the tension between financial success and success for other purpose-driven aspects of our business, and namely the environment for us. And I think that's true for a lot of businesses.”
Zwillinger: Corporate charter legally binds Allbirds management to environmental responsibility
“Our charter says we have a fiduciary responsibility to our shareholders, and we have a equal responsibility to the environment. And so if Tim or I are no longer in the business, and some other person takes over, ah, they still have a responsibility to do what …”
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…”