Transcript
Introduction
"When I die and go to hell, the devil is going to make me the Marketing Director for a cola company. I'll be in charge of trying to sell a product that no one needs, is identical to its competition and can't be sold on its merits. I'd be competing head on in the cola wars on price, distribution, advertising and promotion, which would indeed be hell for me."
So that is a quote from the founder that we're going to talk about today and that’s Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia and his book, The Responsible Company: What We've Learned from Patagonia's First 40 Years. So before I get into that, if this is your first time listening to Founders, welcome. The concept of this podcast is fairly straightforward. Every week, I read a biography or an autobiography or a book about a founder and then just pull out ideas that are useful for our lives. So after last week, when we studied Howard Hughes, I pushed -- so I've had The Responsible Company on my bookshelf for a few weeks now, and I knew I was eventually going to read it. And I decided after finishing that Howard Hughes podcast to push this one up to the top of the queue.