Transcript
Introduction
"My entire life, I've never had one big idea. I'd like to think I woke up one day, figured out how to make the world's best canvas and rubber waffle-soled deck shoes, how to distribute said shoes and thus create the first vertically integrated tennis shoe company in the world. But the fact of it is, I could have been growing potatoes. Actually, shoes has nothing to do with my success. What I've accomplished comes down to one thing: my knack for identifying and then solving problems.
What I do better than anyone else is cut out distractions. If a system isn't working efficiently, I can see where it's jammed, eliminate the problem and find a way to keep everything moving forward. Everyone has something that they naturally do better than anyone else. This just happens to be mine, and I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to leverage it.
Then there's everything I learned by doing. Much of Vans' early success was the happy result of hard work and creative troubleshooting. It helps that at Vans, we used vulcanized rubber on the soles of our shoes. It helps that we identified retail spaces. It helps that we dialed in production like Lee Iacocca on his best day at Ford or Chrysler. It helps that we knew our customers, especially the skaters and the surfers and the moms. It helps that I handed over the reins in 1980 when I got burned out and was able to return in 1984 per an order from a judge in bankruptcy court. It also helps that we were tenacious.
I learned that what makes a successful entrepreneur is the same thing that makes a good skateboarder or a good surfer. You need grit and determination to get back up every time you're knocked off the board. In the world of successful entrepreneurs, I'm not Phil Knight. I'm not Yvon Chouinard. I'm not Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk. My guess is I'm unlike any other founding CEO. I'm just a small business owner who did well and found the right partners.
When I was approached to write a business memoir, I wondered how I could explain my life as a series of tidy lessons learned. Eventually, I realized that what I could offer to other businessmen and women is less formula and more whatever the opposite of formula is, let's call it, fluidity. I don't know where to draw the line between the business me and the personal me. It's something that I failed to teach my children. The lines have always been so d*** blurred. The way I've run my business is the way I live my life. The one thing that has always been sacred to me, and this goes for life as much as business is just this, always try to do what's right.
I learned early on what's right is right and what's wrong is wrong. If you put thought into something and do what's right every single time, you won't be far off from doing the best you can, the best any of us can. Many of my guiding principles are equally simple, and they've served me equally well. Don't rest on your laurels. Do the work. Don't just look to others to do it. Get your hands dirty. If a young entrepreneur came to me today and asked how to start a company, I would say right off the bat, know what goes into making what you're selling.
If you sell from a place of total confidence in the quality down to the details, you will succeed. I also say, find honorable people to be your partners, work with creative people and be fair. Be kind, give a s*** about how you treat people and be aware of how your actions might disturb or distress them. In other words, don't be a jerk. Until our last breath, we can do something good for someone else. I've had one hell of a ride. And in telling my story, I tell Vans, but that isn't the whole of it. Without my kids, Vans wouldn't exist.
They, alongside their mother Dolly and me, got their hands dirty and worked for tacos. My in-laws dropped everything to help us launch. Bob Cohen listened to me when I was a 16-year-old supply boy at the Randolph Rubber Company. Serge Delia handed me a parachute when Bob left me no options but to jump. Gordon Lee and my brother Jimmy took the flying leap alongside me. My debt to each is as obvious as the words on this page. I've experienced a lot of joy. I am also all of what I've lost.
While my kids, their kids and their kids' kids are healthy, I outlived my wife Drena, and a number of my peers. I've lost brothers, business partners, colleagues and friends, everyone, I knew from my shoemaking days is gone. Suffice to say, no one is around to fact check most of what I offer herein. You'll have to take my word for it. And as you read, keep in mind, I work from memory, recreating situations from the near and far past as best I could. Five decades after I started The Van Doren Rubber Company, our brand is associated with expressive creators. The artists, musicians, skaters and surfers, the trendsetters, the ones who go their own way. I cannot be prouder because that's how I always did things, too."
That is an excerpt from the book that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is, Authentic: A Memoir by the Founder of Vans written by the founder of Vans, Paul Van Doren. This is an absolutely fantastic autobiography. I don't think I ever would have found it if it wasn't for the fantastic book recommendations. This book recommendation actually came from a subscriber. As soon as I got the recommendation, I downloaded a sample on the Kindle app, started reading it. The introduction is fantastic, so I bought the book right away. It's taken me a few months to circle back around and actually do a podcast on it. And one of the most remarkable things about this book is the fact that he's writing it when he is 90 years old.