The Exchanges

Q Where does that drive come from? Are we born with drive or is it something we develop by following our passion?

A For me, my drive started kind of in Childhood, going into adolescent, early teens, and it was really, you know, my personal journey was I wanted to show the world that I could do something. My childhood was kind of marked by not quite succeeding at anything, um, that I set my mind to. I was an overweight child, and I loved sport, but I never was able to find what I was good at, so I would try out for all the All of the school sports, your basketball team, your volleyball team, and I wouldn't just not make it. I was always the first person not to make it. So I was always on the cusp and that almost made it a little bit worse because I could like taste what it would be like to be there. And so that started over time to build this drive of like, you know, when I find something I'm good at, I'm going to go all in and I want to win because when I looked around me, the feeling I felt at that time was, you know, I'm not succeeding in these areas and everyone that is seems to be getting some level of acceptance. And, you know, for me as kind of a child and growing up as like, maybe that's, that's love. That's, you know, what I should strive for. Um, and I just wasn't able to do that. And, and so like that started to build and build. And so when I found early on, it was cycling, I was like, oh, I'm pretty good at this. And I was like, I'm going to, I'm going to go all in. And the drive …

AI assessment note: “For me, my drive started kind of in Childhood, going into adolescent”

Q extending the time horizon, there's so many different ways to do that, right? Not going into debt. There's operating from a position where we can run a marathon instead of a sprint. It's not taking advantage of your customers and treating them as a win-win. Like you're going to be a customer for life. Is there anything else that comes to mind when you think of extending the time horizon?

A In order to extend the time horizon, I need to be physically and mentally as healthy as I can be. Same with our team. This doesn't work if we're not all operating to the best of our ability to. And the business has been so stressful, like any business over the last 10 years, that it really took a toll on my body. Specifically over the last two years, we had a few very stressful events and I didn't deal with them I dealt with them well in business, but the rest of my life kind of fell apart in my body and realizing that that's not a sustainable path to go on. Like being an athlete for so long and a younger, like in younger in general, it was like I death gripped through life. You know, I was just like, I learned very early with the injuries I rode through is like, oh, you can just, just make it through this. You can just brute force your way through this. And that's not the best approach Always in business. And especially if you have an extended time horizon and longevity in mind, right? It's like the same idea of, are you better off consistently working out or going once a week and just like demolishing yourself and the consistency is going to be better for sure. I had kind of like three goals this year is like, get the business back to a place where we're thriving and having fun. Get my health back to a place where I feel confident and inspired and like kind of all in on this.…

AI assessment note: “In order to extend the time horizon, I need to be physically and mentally as healthy”

Q What have you learned about taking big swings?

A I think it comes down to like, why are you taking that swing? So I've taken big swings that were authentic and they were like the big goals, like even just starting the business or trying to go after certain, you know, athletic goals. But then there's big swings that are trying to solve problems in a faster way. So maybe making a big hire that you're trying to rush because you think they're going to come in and be able to solve all your problems. Just choosing a co-founder because you think it'll be more fun. Like these are just never good reasons to kind of take big swings because you're relying on hope and the hopes just Generally a bad strategy. The big swings I've taken where they weren't in line with my authenticity and kind of why we're doing them. Like, like I talked about earlier, that, that personal mission and drive of why are you doing what you're doing? Like how, like that's, what's going to take you through the hard times. That's going to make you endure. And, and if you're going to take the big swing, you've got to know it's going to come with a lot of turmoil. It's going to be challenging and you've got to be ready to back that up. When I think about it now, I try to imagine I'm in a room with a A hundred people. And I'm explaining my rationale for taking a big swing. And I like to imagine that, like, I need to do a good enough job that the majority of the people…

AI assessment note: “I think it comes down to like, why are you taking that swing?”

Q How important are the people you surround yourself with towards happiness and accomplishing your goals?

A I think it's, it's everything really. Let's talk about like business or just life in general. It's like, you want people around you that are Rowing in the same direction, right? Like you want people that have goals. You want to be able to swap and share insights. You want to be able to encourage each other. The power of having like a great network or group around you is kind of a double-edged sword sometimes too, though, because although the, like a great network of people are going to propel you forward and teach you things you wouldn't know, sometimes you start to kind of try to keep up with the Joneses a little bit. So in particular, like as I started to Get some level of moderate success in business. My network started to grow and I started to become friends with people that were much further ahead than me. And it almost led to this insecurity, you know, like for the five years before I was building my business, relatively unknown, didn't really know anyone else building a business. I was really operating authentically and like what I wanted to do and setting goals that I thought was achievable. And then I'm immersed in this world where people are thinking much bigger, which is on one hand, great, you know, lessons of thinking bigger and realizing like, oh, I am limiting myself. But at the same time, trying to shorten the time horizon to try and catch up to these people tha…

AI assessment note: “I think it's, it's everything really. Let's talk about like business or just life”

Q What went into the decision to rebrand instead of fight?

A So every bone in my body wanted to fight, right? I came from a career of where, like, you're in a sport, you're competitive. Like, Your number one goal is to fight. It's to win, right? Not physically, but like fight for that podium spot. Like that's what you're doing. But I had to this time prioritize everyone else as well and think through what, how does this affect not just me, but everyone involved, like I mentioned. And it was just a lot of discussions, you know, first it started with like, if we do decide to fight, what's that look like? And the quotes I got were, it could take you two years per country. You fight this in and up to a million dollars. There's the financial and then there's the brain drain. Of doing that. And so you weigh that against what are the financial and other implications of changing the name. And ultimately, you know, what I landed on was this understanding of what our brand is, which is why this whole process was incredibly rewarding is because I got to really dig into like, why do people buy our product? If we were a brand, like a luxury brand where we were trading on our name as a big piece of the value, this was going to be a big problem, but we were a product driven. So people bought us because they loved the product. The name in that, in that scenario was a reference to the product. And the way I thought about it was like, I broke brand down i…

AI assessment note: “it could take you two years per country. You fight this in and up to a million dollars.”

Q What have you learned about simplicity and focus when it comes to operating a business that most people miss?

A I think the tendency is, To do more is just the common, the common path people go down. They're like, okay, I've got some level of success. How do I replicate that by doing more? So like, for example, we sell socks. Should you sell underwear? What people fail to realize there is have you fully maximized the opportunity that's in front of you? I mean, really optimize it. I mean, the power of focus is so important. The way I kind of like explain this to our team is imagine you're running a race and you're in the lead pack and you're, you're doing a good job. And out of the corner of your eye, you kind of catch another race going on. You're like, oh, that looks fun. And you hop the barrier and you're in that, but now you're middle and back of the pack. You didn't prepare for that race. You don't really know the landscape. Oh, and you're, you're now falling behind in the race you're running because you haven't built the infrastructure to maybe have another teammate that could run that race who trained for it. For example, that'd be like hiring or developing a different line of business. But like what a lot of entrepreneurs do is they try to run multiple races. And that's like a surefire way to burn yourself out and also just not give the attention and focus to what really matters. We're taught that like to get more, you have to do more. And I just don't think that's true. I think t…

AI assessment note: “to get more, you should be doing less. Typically you should be subtracting.”

Q It's crazy. They're almost like compression socks too, right? Like they feel really good around your feet and your feet just feel happy.

A Yeah. That's the fine balance of like, it's like a hug for your feet, you know? And, and, but how do you not make that too compressive and how do you make that work across a wide variety of foot sizes? And we're not always perfect, but that is the goal. Like it should hug the leg and not fall down, but it all should, Should come off the leg without leaving marks, which is a tough thing to do. We are striving to always improve that, but I think we've got a good mix, and your story is not uncommon. The people will come in and they'll buy a pair, typically because a lot of our socks have fun designs on them. What we recognize early on is socks are this, like I mentioned with cycling, socks are this way that people can express individuality. And within that, people have different ways they like to do that, whether or not they like to celebrate different animals they love, or, you know, nature landscapes, or Their favorite food. So we discovered that like, it's really hard digitally cause we're primarily sold all online. Um, we're also sold in store, but primarily online, at least for the majority of the business, how through the computer screen or the phone screen, can we convince you that this sock feels good without putting it on your feet? That's really tough. An easier way is to give you an emotional response being like, I love cats. For example, I want to buy that sock cause i…

AI assessment note: “Yeah. That's the fine balance of like, it's like a hug for your feet”

Q Who was the first person to ever bet on you?

A My mom. Yeah. So I went to university and dropped out. So that's like, that was a big riff in our family because going to university was the safe path. That was the known path of, you know, my dad sold insurance and, you know, My mom, when, when she had us stayed at home and it was, it was super traditional, super go to school, get, get whatever job, build a family. And so the idea of kind of going all in on this cycling career at the time was just like a pipe dream for the most part. And it wasn't really anything yet was a big riff. But my mom, like I could tell deep down, she was like, I know you got this. I know you'll figure it out. Cause what I would always say to my parents at the time, and I was telling you about this yesterday is like, Whenever I have these big goals, I kind of hold two beliefs at the same time. One belief is, I'm absolutely sure I'll pull this off. Like, I have no doubt I will figure this out, but I have no idea how I'm going to do it. I could not articulate that, which is very difficult for a parent, because they're like, I want to believe you, but I need to see some pathway forward. What's the plan, dude? Yeah, it ended up working out, and it was the same thing in business, too. It's like, I have no idea how I'm going to do this, but I do know I can do it and it's going to work out. My mom being like, you know, kind of just on the side, you know, bei…

AI assessment note: “My mom. Yeah. So I went to university and dropped out.”

Q Is it true you taped your broken wrist to a bike to compete?

A Yeah. I mean, so the way our sport worked is you train all winter and you basically compete in the summer. And so you spend so much time preparing for a race that you have three months of racing. And You would constantly get injured, and you would just have to figure out how to make that work. And yeah, leading into one of the biggest races of the year, I had a broken wrist, a broken finger. There's no long-term damage to just dealing with the pain. I can get this dealt with when the season's over. In my mind, it was like, I've worked too hard to just back away from this challenge. It's like, so I asked myself, what is it going to take to get this done? You know, I couldn't hold on to the handlebar. I didn't have the strength, and so I was like, I'm going to have to take, because Everything's led to this moment. I'm not going to back down. Like if I physically can do it, if I'm awake, I'll, I'll be there. And I think it's those lessons. And ultimately we talked about earlier about resilience and that mindset of doing hard things. And I talked about, you just have to do them. That taught me you can do it. You know, like the pain I was feeling was so crazy, but ultimately you get up there and you're prepared. And you know, when you're ready to execute, the pain goes away. I think it's really important to go through those tough times and realize that you can come out the other sid…

AI assessment note: “Yeah. I mean, so the way our sport worked is you train all winter”

Q Walk me through some of the changes you made specifically this year. Like, what's different between the mindset approach, attitude, processes that you're doing this year that have led to incredible results versus what you were doing last year?

A I'd say the number one thing we talked about was removing ego. Let's just not do things because we think they're the thing to do. Let's just do the right things. We need to understand that we can't We can't necessarily change the market. We can't create demand that's not there at our current size right now. We need to be okay with the ebbs and flows, and we don't need to, when things are not going well or we're in a slower period, we don't need to try and artificially inflate that. We don't need a Hail Mary. You know, silver bullets and, like, hacks and all these things, they're so appealing to an entrepreneur. Every entrepreneur is like, you're just in it, right? It's so hard, and when someone has this New hack or new thing. It's, it's that, that fallacy of like, oh, that one thing I'm not doing is going to unlock all of my, all of my, or solve all of my problems, unlock all of the growth. And it's just not true. And the worst thing that can happen is the one time that maybe that silver bullet does work. Cause then it teaches you that, oh, there's hacks here. So I always kind of caution, like if you get lucky, just appreciate it. But these hacks typically don't work. What we ended up doing is just extending the time horizon. You know, like I said, I was trying to rush before to, to, for, for what reason though, to To, it was literally expectations I had put on myself. No one a…

AI assessment note: “I'd say the number one thing we talked about was removing ego.”

Q I want to come back to the mosaic or balance, uh, with two young kids, uh, rapidly growing business. What have you learned about using your time effectively?

A It's had to evolve, right? Cause I've been in a few different, I've worn a few different hats to the different scale of our business. And like, as a founder, you start day one doing everything. And as the business evolves, you start to hire people, but you're still doing a lot of the things and you're micromanaging. You're not, you're You know, I hadn't done this before, so I'd do all the mistakes, and you're, you're overriding things, and, and you don't know any better, but eventually you start to learn, like I mentioned, with kind of how we evolved after the rebrand, like you've got to bring in better people than you and understand how are you best applied, right? How are you the most effective in your job? And how I manage all that now is like, I kind of had to, for myself, relearn what work is. How do I hold myself to account? How do I judge myself? Because the other kind of Downside of entrepreneurship is you don't have a lot of feedback as a founder. So when you have a boss, you're getting feedback, you know, if you're hitting marks or not. And you know, we have investors and stuff, but our investors are also like entrepreneurs and they're great. So they're not exactly kind of, uh, keeping tabs, uh, as much as like a boss would, for example. And so you have to one, hold yourself to account and figure out what that looks like. Uh, and for me, I had to reinvent that as like…

AI assessment note: “you've got to bring in better people than you and understand how are you best applied”

Q Did you have a business partner when you started?

A I was in school when I started the business. I was in my second year. I just had the idea, you know, when I said I'm going to start a business, I was quite literally listening to that book, laying in bed, kind of, you know, having my nightly identity crisis, some existential crisis, like it just snapped. I was like, I'm going to start a business. I kind of got up right there. I started to open my Apple notes, started thinking about different brand names and went to school. And I talked to my good friend at the time. I developed a good, a great friendship with a classmate. We would do all our class projects together. We actually got a job together outside of work. I was doing some rep work for a brand, and I got him involved. We were doing some field marketing, and so we got on well. You know, we're friends. We worked well together, and I didn't expect the business to work. I was like, it was, it's like, what are the odds? Here's this, like, former athlete guy that's kind of, like, not particularly great at school, has no business experience, who set a goal to build a sock company. Everyone looked at me like I was crazy. Like, some people still do, right? And so I was like, This would be way more fun with a friend, which by the way is like the world's worst reason to start a business with someone. This is because it's fun to do with a friend that I've learned in hindsight. But y…

AI assessment note: “This would be way more fun with a friend... start a business with someone”