Shoe dog is a great book. It was really interesting to read him talk about his issues with liquidity and him lamenting the lack of VC funding at the time. Of course he doesn't really address the downsides of VC funding but the local bank he works with is a quaint reminder of how far things have come. A good story and a great reminder that choice of founder partner is crucial to your success.
It contributes to my belief that there are way too many technical founders working on absolutely horrible ideas that would be able to the foundation for a great company but don't have the skill set to determine what that is. I think after the impending recession when VC money dries up this skill will be in high demand.
Dude is a legend. One of my favorite parts in Wild Wild Country is when they're interviewing "local rancher" Jon Bowerman. Paraphrasing, but there's a part where he's talking about his father and it goes something like: "He fought in the war...went behind enemy lines in Italy and convinced the German 8th Army to surrender. Then he led the Ducks to 4 national championships and became US Olympic coach, but retired heartbroken after Munich. Then one day he was in the garage and melted some old retreat rubber with a waffle iron and glued it to an old worn out shoe. The result became...uh...Nike""
That legend has always bugged me. If one used a waffle iron to make running shoe soles, the result would not look like a Nike Waffle Trainer. It would look like, well, a waffle. The soles of Nike Waffle Trainers looked like one took a waffle iron and made it out of rubber. IOW, the legendary mold and result would have to be reversed from reality.
I mean, have I been thinking about this wrong for forty years? You can't make a Nike Waffle Trainer from a waffle iron, right?
It was exactly like him to pour a bunch of latex rubber into a waffle iron to see if his idea was feasible. It is how his mind worked.
My understanding is he ruined three waffle irons before he had a workable piece, including the first one which never opened. I'm not sure if that's accurate but it would definitely be consistent with how he "bird-dogged" a problem.
He had been experimenting with rubberized materials before the waffle iron, using it at first to resurface the track at Marist High School in Eugene after making numerous test pads and coated them with different formulations to see which ones worked best over concrete. At the time, running tracks were usually packed clay, cinders, or other "fines". Great for training by the way (fewer impact injuries) but terrible for breaking 4 minute miles or going under 10.00s in the 100m.
He shifted his attention to shoes after spending time in New Zealand with Lydiard. Lydiard was a cobbler of women's shoes and showed Bill how they were made. Bill's philosophy of making shoes lighter and lighter was no joke. He was "Bill Bowerman serious" and firmly believed athletes needed every form of optimization in order to perform their best, including going so far as to measure the weight difference between wet and dry socks over the distance of a marathon, multiplied by the number of times the leg had to lift the foot, in an attempt to understand how athlete energy is allocated during a race.
Many years had passed since the Bowermans moved out of the house where the waffle story happened. Located in the western Oregon town of Coburg (population: 1,000), the house was remote, up on a hill and only accessible by a thin one-lane road. There was no way a garbage truck could reach the property, so they often just buried trash in a pit out back. The long-married couple eventually moved away to Fossil, where Bill died in 1999 and Barbara in 2010. But their son, Tom, lived on the family property in Coburg and decided to expand the carport. Digging alongside the house, he came across a treasure trove of Nike history buried alongside the house. There were crudely cobbled-together shoes, old prototype metal plates, cracking rubber soles, peeling molds, and a rusty old waffle iron. Thanks to the distinctive 1930s design, Reames knew this was the appliance that created the Nike we know today.
> I think after the impending recession when VC money dries up this skill will be in high demand.
The next dry-up will be modest, it might last 12-18 months. The last one lasted a mere 2 to 2 1/2 years and required a rather extreme global recession. The US and globe broadly are drowning in truly enormous amounts of capital yielding nothing or close to nothing. Ten trillion dollars in wealth held in government debt yielding nothing. Tens of trillions more held in other low yielding bonds. There is a lot more real wealth (inflation adjusted) in investor hands today than there was just 20 years ago (at the dotcom bust). That capital is desperate for returns and will remain so. A 1/3 correction in the US stock market would merely set it back to April 2016.
The Fed is now permanently in liquidity mode, primed to rapidly flood the system as needed. They're on twitch notice for the next QE round. This won't change for decades at least, as the Fed must endlessly run debt monetization programs, and always keep rates artificially low, to keep the US Government solvent (5% * $30 trillion = bankrupt US Government).
Pretty much every central bank of consequence is in liquidity flood mode. They're mostly all behaving similarly.
Venture capital will remain ample in such an environment of perma low rates and relatively low inflation.
Ability, skill, will become drastically more valuable over the next ~20 years. Capital will become even easier to access and even more plentiful, if you are competent and or more generally have something to sell. The rich will get richer over the next 20 years and they will always be looking for somewhere to park it. The processes occuring now, including population stagnation in wealthy nations and aggressively advancing automation (robotics, AI, et al.) will push even more wealth to the top (taxes on the rich will rise in some cases to attempt to resolve that, certainly in the US). The returns that a capable individual can generate for capital, will soar in the coming decades. It's going to be an era of rather extreme value-capture amplification for people that have consequential skills; ever greater returns going to ever small groups of people.
With population stagnation and or contraction in much of the developed world (which is only going to get worse), finding enough skilled / talented people will remain the problem, not capital. Simply put, the capital to skilled person ratio in affluent nations will continue to rapidly climb in favor of the skilled persons.
Sounds a bit "free lunchy" to me. So nothing can stop the tidal wave of more government freshly printed money? What about the fact the money is really debt and that needs to be kept serviced? What about another credit crunch?
Hyperinflation? What if people run from holding USD. Not likely, but who knows what will happen in 20 years time?
> Sounds a bit "free lunchy" to me. So nothing can stop the tidal wave of more government freshly printed money?
Of course it's not a free lunch long-term. The cost will come due in the form of eventual sharper currency debasement, after the earlier stage process of traditional debt monetization by QE or similar (I'd expect some Fed experiments on that front). You could try to run higher inflation on an annual basis to chip away at the debt, or do larger sharper events more rarely. I think the Fed will strongly prefer sharper one-off events of big QEs (for a year or such in a recession context). In recessions, often people pile into such perceived safe investments, which is an opportunity for the Fed to take advantage of.
The US still has plenty of room to play with more traditional QE yet, before it gets to the later stages of the Japan scenario. As do the Eurozone and China. The US can likely hold at least 1.5x its GDP in national debt, probably more like 2x to 2.5x, before it starts to see more serious problems. Japan doesn't have the global reserve currency, and we've seen what they've been able to handle.
Eventually the debt - if it continues to pile up - gets so extreme there is no other option than to do sharper debasement. The recent QE (in both the US and Eurozone in their respective forms) was kicking the can down the road. China is similarly doing a lot of can kicking right now. Eventually no matter what the central banks do the debt problems and interest payments get too large, they suck up too much of a nation's free capital, and they're forced into a more serious currency event.
The Fed has to keep pushing the interest cost per dollar of debt down. That has gradually diminishing potential though, as realistically you can only go so far down. Japan, for the most prominent recent example, found the lower limits of what's possible there. They're a forecast for what the US, Eurozone and China may face.
The Fed is an enabler of bad behavior and I expect they'll continue doing it (some of it is intentional as a prop, some of it is a side effect). They enable the US Govt to borrow money at artificially cheap rates, which increases over-spending by Congress. They enable the military industrial complex and its spending levels (they temporarily keep the US from having to make a choice between social welfare and present high military spending levels). They enable Congress to kick the can down the road on spending, avoiding political-career decision risks. They enable artificially low tax rates (eventually you have to pay for the budget deficits & debt, one way or another), for pretty much everyone. They enable artificially low mortgage rates and other borrowing rates, which pumps up consumer behavior and inflates housing prices.
For posterity's sake, please consider posting this excellent reply as a comment here, broken into pieces (replies to yourself). People do do that for this reason, and this is an appropriate comment for it.
I just finished reading the book yesterday. It's amazing what Nike had gone through to become the company today. I learned to have great respect for Phil Knight, but I don't understand why he mistreated Jeff Johnson. In the book, Jeff Johnson clearly believes in the company and Phil Knight. He goes out of his way several times, sacrificing himself to make the company afloat. And yet, Phil Knight doesn't treat Johnson with the respect he deserves. He flat out ignores him for an extended period while Jeff Johnson reaches out for input from his boss. That's rude even for a boss. Why would Phil Knight do this? He doesn't explain in the book and it's really annoying.
> . And yet, Phil Knight doesn't treat Johnson with the respect he deserves...
One of the things that surprises me whenever I read other people's reviews of Shoe Dog is how most don't seem to get the point, revealed by a careful reading between the lines, that Phil Knight is as ruthless, cold blooded, and cunning as any other billionaire entrepreneur out there. Not that I hold this against him; but time and time again in the recounting of how he grew the business, he would reveal these traits. He was however smart enough to conceal this under layers of PR fluff.
It contributes to my belief that there are way too many technical founders working on absolutely horrible ideas that would be able to the foundation for a great company but don't have the skill set to determine what that is. I think after the impending recession when VC money dries up this skill will be in high demand.