NPR’s How I Built This is a fantastic podcast that brings the stories behind some of the world’s best-known companies. How I Built This interviews innovators, entrepreneurs and idealists about the movements they built.
Peloton co-founder: John Foley
In this episode, they interview John Foley, one of the co-founders of Peloton; the fitness and media company that you’ve probably seen commercials for.
In the interview, they greatly undervalued John Foley’s network and experience but nonetheless, this episode touched on several relevant topics my clients often face. I picked this episode because it was a little more in-depth and enlightening than other episodes in that Foley he talks about:
- having the discussion with this wife about moving in with her parents if the company fails,
- how everyone is similarly able including Harvard MBAs,
- the CEO being the janitor when starting out; something I discussed in a previous post about bootstrapping
- how VCs are not very adventurous,
- how Peloton is only recently profitable after 7 years
There are also great questions asked by interviewer that touches on market trends such as arcades no longer thriving due to user experience-to-price dynamics (i.e. video game consoles vs arcades due to quality of experience), penetration/awareness strategy which led to their distribution model given that malls are making an industry correction, and lastly the trademark question: “How much of this was because of your intelligence and hard work, and how much of this was just luck?”
FYI, I always discuss market and industry trends, launch and penetration strategy, as well as bootstrapping in all my business plans.
The entire podcast can be heard here
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