The co-founder effect, w/Rothy's Stephen Hawthornthwaite and Roth Martin

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On a lifted table. Three dancers perform on top of this table. They're really intimate with each other, physically intimate, being really close to each other. But they're also telling a story.

That's Matt Kent. Artistic director of the dance company Palabolus. And the dance he's describing. Like most of the work Polobolus is known for, features bodies assembling like Voltron. And to elegant.

Complex shapes. From a moving VW bus. to an elephant wiggling its ears in time with its swishing tail. These physical collaborations do more than create pretty pictures.

They give the dancers leverage that almost works like a superpower. When you are lifting someone, when you're partnering, your center of gravity has changed, which means that you can jump a little bit further, you can lean a little bit further, you can reach out a little bit further because you're working with another person. Speaking. Of working with others. Matt doesn't leave the company alone. He shares that job.

with his co artistic director, Renee Jorsky. our physical partnering is really just the physical representation of the collaboration of the minds as well. Polobolus. Has been making work for over fifty years, performing everywhere from the Olympic Games to the Academy Awards.

And they've done it with an approach so collaborative that it actually makes some people uncomfortable. We've been in situations where people have literally come behind the stage and said, Who's in charge? Please tell me who's in charge here. They don't understand. And it's stressful for some people. But for Renee and Matt. The collective input of the group. is the essential ingredient that drives your company to keep inventing.

Our ability to fail together is our insurance against mediocrity. It feels like a Ouija board. You wanna go this way, but sometimes you feel a little pull in a different direction. If you just relate Come on, we're going this direction and yank it over, you're gonna lose the groupness. And that groupness is what we protect.

In business, leaders are constantly trying to channel this kind of collective spirit into a company that can innovate. Move fast and beat its competitors to scale. But It's incredibly hard to harness a collective. By yourself.

That's why I believe that two co-founders are better than one. And a few voices are better than fewer voices at any stage of business. You gotta have incredible talent at every position. Huge push. There are fires burning when you're going out. Can you believe that? Such an idiot. And then you go back to this is truly gonna be amazing. There are so many easy ways. So I have no idea what to do. Sorry, we made a mistake. But you have to time it right. Oops. It just seems absolutely not all. But well that's just how you do it. We haven't made just how you do it.

This is masters of scale. I'm Reed Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn. Partner Greylock. And your host.

And I believe that two co-founders are better than one. And a few voices are better than fewer voices. At any stage of business. There's a famous song you might know. That starts with this iconic line.

That was recorded in the year I was born, nineteen sixty seven. by a musician named Harry Nielsen. though you might be more familiar with the versions by Three Dog Night. Ramey Mann. It was inspired by a time Harry called an acquaintance.

And got a busy signal. And you can hear the echo of that Peep peep peep. In those first opening notes. This song has special resonance for founders and business leaders because running a business often feels like a lonely job.

You have multiple fires burning every day, posing existential threats to your business. You're working sixty or eighty or hundred hour weeks. Just to get a foothold. Even with a terrific team, it can feel like you have the weight of the entire company on your back. That's

Where the transformative power of co founders comes in. Co founders don't exactly Lessen the workload. There's more than enough to go around. But they can distribute the work.

Bring in complimentary perspectives and skill sets that help you conquer problems with conviction and creativity. I wanted to talk to Steven Hawthorne Thwaite and Roth Martin about this because as co-founders of the sustainable shoe and handbag company Rothys, they've leveraged each other's strengths to build Rothie's into an e-commerce Cinderella story. Celebrities from Kristen Bell to Megan Markle have been photographed in their eco-friendly shoes knitted with yarn made from recycled water bottles. As of twenty twenty two, the company has deroted nearly a hundred and fifty million single use plastic water bottles from landfills or the ocean. And we'll get it.

to how they did it. In just a moment. But first, a short disclaimer. There's one word you're going to be hearing a lot of. In the next thirty minutes.

And that word is Yeah. Because the relationship between you and your co founder Whether it's one or many is personal. And conditional.

When I say that two co founders are better than one That's only true. If you work well together. If You are equally committed.

And if Together you build a plan. to empower future employees. Pay attention. To that word if.

In Roth's founding journey. Because her story is so full of Uphill battles and tough breaks. It would be a minor miracle for Rothis to succeed at all. Yeah.

It weren't for Roth and Stevens incredible. Co-founder relationship It was October of twenty eleven. And we were at a friend's Fourtieth birthday party.

That's Steven. We had met each other through our wives and had been friends for about six years at the time. That's Roth. And they're about to tell us about the night these friends decided to become business partners. We were in

the back room of a restaurant in San Francisco. I think there were probably forty or fifty people there. And Roth and I were seated together. Professionally. They couldn't have been more different.

Steven had spent years in investment banking. Advising on mergers and acquisitions at Barclays and other firms. Roth, meanwhile. was in art and antiques. running the hedge gallery in San Francisco's financial district.

But there was one thing they realized they had in common. They were both looking for a change. I was forty one at that point, Roth was thirty seven. That was

I had made the decision at that point. Two Leave the deal business. In the hopes of starting my own business. Now I was just becoming increasingly disenchanted with what I was doing at work.

We just realized that professionally we were in the same place at the same time. As they talked. Roth and Steven each saw something valuable in the other. individually, each had been feeling the need for a career shift. But together.

Party talk started morphing into something more serious. The two decided to go into business together. What that business would entail? That. Would come second.

And here's where we'll want to deploy the magic word. If Because this is not a template that works for everyone. Many co-founder relationships start with a product idea first. A better mouse trap.

Or the next killer app. Others, like Roth and Steven. Form the relationship first. And then start talking product. Both are valid.

But only one might be right for you. One of the first decisions Roth and Steven had to make was whether to go into software or physical goods. Or As I often describe it.

The world of bits? Or atoms. If you said, Hey, there's these two guys who are founders, one has in depth technology MA experience, the other one has been running a amazing gallery. What product do you think you create? Women's shoes.

Wouldn't be top of mind. Right. Really? Reed. You'd be surprised how many times we heard that. We weren't thinking about service businesses or technology businesses. We had a shared passion around creating a physical product that was innovative, right? Something that didn't exist. Both of us were adamant about not creating a copy and paste product that you just add marketing to. And maybe it was naive, but really believed in like if we built the product right, it would sell itself.

Steven and Roth started to think about the patterns they'd been observing in their daily lives. Was there a product? not yet invented, that might actually sell itself. That's when their attention drifted to something they both saw. Their spouses.

If you wind the clock back and you think about twenty eleven Women were in Lululemon Tights. All the time. All of a sudden, every woman we knew was wearing Lululemon leggings.

And they had no idea what shoes to wear them with. They were wearing them with running shoes when they weren't going running. They were wearing them with flip flops sometimes, with dressy flats. Both of our wives would go to Soul Cycle or Yoga, drop the kids off at school, maybe go to the office, out to dinner. And there just wasn't a clear

footwear compliment to that outfit. There's all these frustrations around it. God, these kill my feet. I love these, but I don't want to ruin them today. Just

It was like a light bulb moment. Notice that this light bulb moment might not have occurred to either Roth or Steven on their own. But together. They were able to recognize a pattern.

This wasn't just something their own wives were struggling with. It was a common problem. With a large. Total addressable market. This

Most powerful functions. Making it easier to spot major trends. Each person added to the team. acts as a prism.

To reflect back and clarify. The observations of the others. I think really the white space is well kept drawing us back to this, that there was a true need for it. Witnessing our wives and women we knew not knowing that this product didn't exist and how much that they really would value it. For Roth and Steven.

The appeal of this white space was electrifying. A well designed shoe that behaved like a sneaker and tapped in the lululamification of women's wardrobes. This was a product that might Sell itself. Once it met the market.

Now Roth and Steven just had to figure out How to make it. We had no idea how hard Footwear is. We had a vision.

Yeah. We could crack the code. on creating the perfect shoe. It really sits at the front of the closet. It's equal parts.

Style. Comfort. And sustainability. that we'd have a shot at building a global brand. What we didn't know.

What is that? You know, it was gonna take four years to create the product. Keep that four-year timeline in mind. That will become relevant a little later. It's worth noting that Stephen and Roth were entering an industry in which they had zero experience.

This isn't a small challenge. If you're building a software product, having a technical co founder is almost always a stronger position than if you have to hire out all the coding. And in fact. Some VCs will insist that you add a technical co founder. Before they invest.

But again. Let's deploy the word. Yeah. The entrepreneurship journey. Is one of constant learning.

And presumably. Something you're doing. Has never been done before. Or else there's no room for upside in your business. This is the

Is where newcomers can bring a unique Outsider perspective that can disrupt old calcified ways of doing things. Entering an unfamiliar sector. Doesn't have to be fatal to a startup. or an established business.

If You and your co founders and teammates can learn the rules quickly. This is how Steven and Roth found themselves in southern China. Criss crossing the landscape.

to learn about their newly adopted industry. Shoe manufacturing. Driving four hours this way in a minivan and four hours that way across Guangzhou. And toured footwear factories left and right. Steven and Roth were in China to learn the new business.

One dismal discovery? Shoemaking. is wasteful. All the die cutting. And all the off cut waste.

Look at leather or fabric. If you need a circle. You start with A square piece of fabric and you die-cut out a circle. Cutting a circle out of a square.

means you're shedding all those corners and throwing them. on the scrap heap. It's simple geometry with profound consequences for the planet. But that wasn't the only wasteful process Roth and Stephen noticed.

Uh Behind each subsequent door. Why does it require so many materials to make a shoe? Why is the supply chain so disparate? Or when we went to look at the merchandising processes.

Why are lead time so long? Why make a product if you may not even sell it. To produce the materials, to commit the labor to it. to make a box for it, to put it in an ocean container and ship it across the world. And maybe in the worst case of all it's

Incinerated. That's what ultimately led to knitting. Why can't we just Knit the circle. From the beginning. Can only use the material we need.

That's right. Roth and Steven's answer to a more sustainable manufacturing process was to deploy the same process that makes sweaters and mittens. For making shoes. Knitting The uppers to their shoes would make them much more sustainable in two ways.

First. As Steven just told us, it meant that they could produce just the material they needed at the moment they needed it. And second It would allow them to make their own yarn. from reclaimed ocean plastic.

Using computer aided design software in a process called Additive manufacturing. It's sort of like three D printing. In fact. It is.

Three Ditting. Note. Their vision came up. Long before they'd worked out the details. But

If they could pull it off. the environmental implications would be huge. Really the innovation with which we were trying to create shoes had never been done before, which is A massive reduction in the amount of parts, materials, suppliers, all these kinds of things. Figuring out low waist manufacturing.

was one kind of disruption they wanted to take on. The other What to make? But where?

Out of the gate, we wanted to do this in the US. We had networked through LinkedIn to number of footwear professionals in the US. And we told'em, you know, we're gonna try to do this in the US. And they said, You are certifiably crazy.

Like it cannot be done. The entire footwear supply chain in the US went off shore in the eighties and the nineties. Everyone knows this has to be done in China. Roth and Steven had wanted to onshore jobs to the United States. They were also skeptical.

that they'd be able to convince factories in China. To change everything. And do things their way. So they started testing and probing the problem. This is a powerful advantage of the co-founder effect.

When you conceive of a radically new approach to an old way of doing things, it could mean you're delusional. Or It could mean You're about to become a major disruptor. And often what separates one from the other is the ability to problem solve.

And the conviction. To keep going. It's hard enough to tell an entire industry. Hey. You're doing things wrong.

But it's much harder. When you're the only one saying it. And that's true. Whether you're found in something new. Or

Or in an established business. Trying to make a change. Having even one other co conspirator to poke holes in the status quo gives you the resilience and confidence to say This can work. Steven and Roth.

badly wanted manufacturing their shoes in the US to work. So they scouted for anyone. who might be able to help them. And As it turns out.

They did have one surprising predecessor in this space. The military they're required to make Their boots. In the US. with US materials.

So we went to Military boot manufacturing complexes, one in Tennessee. We went to Puerto Rico. We thought if we can find the machinery, we may also find some of the materials. We ultimately ended up in a town called Lewis to Maine.

Nineteen thirty eight. They made more shoes in Lewis and Maine than anywhere else in the world. We decide that we need to set up a workshop. Or a small factory. We're convinced that there are enough, you know, engineers and suppliers in the area and

We start to work. We set up shop above a used footwear machine salesman. He was fixing up these old nineteen fifties Goodyear welting machines and we got a little bit of no how from him. Everyone was trying to contribute and say, Well you might try this, all these different things

It really came down to almost reverse engineering the supply chain. We ended up developing the shoe we practically make today, the flat. Here in the US. This development process itself.

was a feat of engineering. and co founding. Because some of your most important co-founders aren't limited to the people you form the company with. It could be the machine repairer downstairs from you. Or the early employee.

who invents a great cultural practice. Or the supplier. Who fixes a supply chain challenge. In the case of Rothys. That supply chain piece was one of the most critical puzzles to solve.

Earlier. We talked about the additive manufacturing process that enabled Rothys to knit the uppers of their shoes with yarn made of recycled plastic, such as the kind you get from single use water bottles. Spinning empty bottles into yarn. Like an eco-friendly rumple still skin wasn't. A broadly available process at the time.

So they had to create their own. Our yarn we had developed with a US supplier to transform single use plastic water bottles into a yarn. We had developed the machinery and the computer programs to knit our parts and assemble the shoes in the US. Creating their own process for sourcing materials was a major triumph.

Maybe. They could revitalize an American industry. Single handedly. But then. One year of research and development.

Turned into two. And two. Turned into three. This just ended up to be a very lengthy development process. People really looking at us and like, okay guys, you've been working on this for three years.

We have yet to see a shoe. What is taking so long? We think it's a great idea, but somebody's gonna Come out with something else. As often happens in the world of Adams, developing a prototype was one hurdle. Getting a mass production.

Was a taller one. After considerable time and a lot of challenges with getting the product consistent Really f you know, we're at the dead end and looked at each other one day and I said to Stephen, I said, Look, I think I better go to China. Mm. So I left Steven in Maine and I flew with our yarn.

And the machinery and the computer programs to knit our parts. I took all that in a pelican storm case and flew over to a sweater factory in Fujin, China. One benefit of co-founders is the ability to actually be in two places at once. But which place would hold the future of their company? remain to be seen.

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Creative planning where wealth works together. Learn more at creative planning dot com slash masters of scale The Wired Newsroom is known for award-winning reporting on how technology shapes our world. On Wire's Uncanny Valley, we take that curiosity even further. Each week, journalists from Wired break down the biggest stories in tech while speaking directly with the people building, challenging, and reshaping the future.

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Hey listeners, Bob here. If you listen to Rapid Response on Masters of Scale, you may be missing half the show because every Friday we release a second Rapid Response exclusively in the Rapid Response feed. The guests and topics are just as compelling and timely from Ford CEO to NASA's administrator to the lessons from The Devil Wears Prada. It takes about 10 seconds to find, just search rapid response wherever you listen to podcasts and hit follow to make sure you never miss an episode. I hope to see you there. We're back. With Stephen Hawthorne Thwaite.

And Roth Martin. of Rothys. If you're enjoying this episode, share it with your co-founders by clicking the share button in your podcast app. And to hear our complete conversation with Roth and Steven, become a masters scale member. at masterscale dot com slash membership.

There, you'll find stories we didn't have time to cover in this episode. Like Roth's early adventures in biotech. And the time Stephen spent learning how to make men's suits. And you'll hear. How Rothys took their e commerce business.

IRL At the farmers market in San Francisco's Ferry Building. You won't want to miss it. When we left off. Roth and Steven had just made a dramatic decision in the life of Rothys.

For over three years they had worked to develop a washable Versatile women's flat. Knitted. From plastic water bottles. And made in America.

They had ticked the first two boxes on that list. But the third had proven an unvanquished foe. After all that time. They still didn't have a product release date.

or a timetable. For when that date. Might be. We were able to make, you know, thirty or forty pairs of shoes. That were

Okay. But they were not beautiful. And the writing was on the wall. So they had sent Roth to China to save a factory there. might be more viable.

And a bear saying. This moment of reckoning. Can be a bitter one. You've been hammering away and executing on something that's critical to the mission. But the obstacles and market realities

have been hammering back. And at some point it begins to dawn on you. that the obstacles might win. And you start to wonder. If it happened because you and your colleagues

Had the same blind spots. Sometimes We refer to this as groupthink. Which we are generally told to avoid. But allow me.

to offer a slight reinterpretation of that word. Which I shared recently with my producers. Blind spots are just the flip side of strengths and weaknesses. We go Well, our blind spot is a predisposition to speed, and sometimes we don't realize it, sometimes it needs to be done long. Yep.

Right. So it's kind of just a question of of shaping the right ones. Where these are our collective hypotheses, our collective theory of the world, and What you're really saying, groupthink is the ones that are bad that might kill you that you're not seeing because of your point of view. And that means you have to be able to.

Ask each other learning like, oh, I talked to this really smart person. Maybe we should take this seriously. I see this happening with our competitor. I see this happening in the market. Maybe we should reevaluate this. We have a a group learning that us learning and being right is more important than That our collective Theory of the case. Roth. may have been the first to see that their factor in Maine wasn't going to get them to scale.

But the learning was a collective one with both of the co founders. So instead of doubling down on an old mistake, they move forward. Decision. That had its own challenges.

I flew over to a sweater factory in Fujin, China, and set up with them. And keep in mind that Roth does not speak Mandarin. And he's using WeChat. to communicate. China all of a sudden was like oh my God, I can access materials, you know, in a nanosecond, I can access the know how, the engineering, all these things. Through grit determination.

And we chat. Roth worked with fabricators in that sweater factory. To see how quickly they could produce a Rothy shoe. We had no formal agreement, nothing. I gave'em our programs. We started to work immediately and made progress.

About a week later, I think, and was like, You know what? This is just never gonna happen in the US. When you're wrong. And realize you've been wrong.

The right partner gives you double the resilience. To keep going. and double the manpower to put things back on track. as Roth scaled operations in China. It felt as Stephen.

To shutter the factory in Maine. So After I shut down the factory. I'm in the background working in the US trying to set up an e commerce business. Setting up Shopify, doing photo shoot. And so it's really going in parallel.

As both co founders followed these parallel tracks. One fact was becoming clear. The US factory may have failed. but the product they'd innovated at that factory. Really held up.

The additive. Three Ditting Process. Using reclaimed plastic yarn went shockingly fast in the hands of Chinese manufacturers. Every day. Production was gaining speed.

However There was one thing they'd had at their US factory that was proving harder. Using contractors. And that was

Team cohesion. So along the journey had OEMs defraud us. Oh yeah. Original equipment manufacturer had workers treated incredibly poorly, where they weren't paid, had machinery stolen. And so navigating that

Really? started to create the desire to build our own factory and to do things in a way that would ideally influence the state of manufacturing in China. These painful experiences working with a piecemeal workforce taught Roth and Steven a critical lesson. The wrong partners are as detrimental to your growth as

As the right partners. or additive. Building their wholly owned factory in China wasn't feasible. Yet. But little by little.

They did their best to build a team they could rely on. I would say by October Or November. The shoes were far enough along. That we

Confirmed. A final order. I think Roth and I bought eight thousand Pairs of shoes.

Our website was ready. We combined our Rolexes. Which was For me, bankers, attorneys. Friends from schools.

Roth had Galaris and Artists. Maybe we had five thousand names. Steven mentions this in passing, but their ability to combine two vastly different sets of contacts is no small thing. It's one reason that diversity of experience

Is a great thing for co founders to have. Because when you combine networks It's more than additive. It's a force multiplier. Nearly five years.

After the fateful birthday party. That brought Steven and Roth together. They got their five thousand name mailing list already. and launch their first campaign. It was a very quiet launch. We didn't make a lot of noise. We just hit sin.

On a few emails. The launch may have started quietly. But it soon took on a distinctive sound. We were on Shopify, right? And Shopify has this amazing sound, but it's a Cha ching, right?

And this thing is just cha chinging, cha chinging, cha chinging. Holy sht is it ever gonna stop? You look in, you start to look at the orders, you're like, Oh, I know that person. Oh God, they're just being nice. And I know that person, they're being nice. Then, you know, a couple of days later, it's like, Oh, I don't know this person. I don't know this person. Oh my God. I Think they might like this, right?

The analogy I use. Sometimes. We decided we were going to bake cake. We had no idea what a cake was. We didn't have a recipe.

We spent four years figuring out what that recipe was. No one really tried the cake. And then we put it up for sale and people said it was the best cake they've ever had. This instant kind of product market fit. Is not the norm.

Rather. It's a combination of luck. Timing And design. The integrity

Roth and Stephen both brought to building their product was reflected in the responses from customers. Which is not to say that the existential fires stop burning. The day they launched. We sold a couple of hundred thousand dollars worth of product and we thought, Wow, it's been Almost five years.

Now we're gonna go on vacation. And we woke up on December. To an inbox that was just overflowing with emails about, hey, this is a great product. I want to exchange.

How do I do that? I got a gift card. How do I use it? And I think that's when we quickly realized like this is real. There's no holiday vacation. For nearly five years Roth and Steven had been operating.

More or less. On their own clock. dictated only by their resources and personal capital. That's Actually rare.

More often. New business ventures find themselves racing multiple competitors to scale. As much as Stephen and Roth had been frustrated by the lack of imagination and footwear. It was this very lack that gave them time to innovate and build their product. But the launch

Drastically accelerated their time frame. If Rothys couldn't deliver an e commerce experience as beautiful as their shoes, their customers would evaporate. Or Drift to a competitor. who by now would be on their trail.

They had to move fast. So once again, the co founders divided. And conquered. Stephen went about fixing. A lot of

or e commerce problems and And answering thousands of emails one by one. He did. He would he was the sole customer service representative. And I went back to China. Notice how Roth and Steven each claim their own area of expertise.

Even If it didn't start out as something they were expert in. Nothing about Steven's previous experience said he would be a fit to handle thousands of customer service emails. And as we've discussed. Roth's experience with the manufacturers in China was learned entirely on the fly.

Each co founder. had to trust that the other would learn to master their new skill set. That trust. Is what growing teams learn to rely on. I think that's one of the dynamics you're always trying not to let each other down. And I think that pushes you to actually ideally outperform.

As Stephen dug into every customer question, Roth. Work to fulfill the dream of opening Roth's own Vertically integrated factory. factory is rich. It was a tiny Office with two knitting machines and

I started to hire a few good people and a few good people led to a few more good people and That's how it started. A few good people. Leading to a few more good people. Sounds like a simple formula.

But in fact, this is the way team building works. The co-founder effect. provides a model all teams can use as they scale. Where each new member has room to add their voice to the mix. And

If Everyone's playing well together. More voices are better than fewer. January. first two thousand seventeen, we code over to our own factory and we were nine people making shoes.

And we like to say, if you were a dog on the street that knew how to make shoes, we would have hired you. Our fact checker. Asked us to mention that dogs lack the opposable thumbs. and find motor skills. For machine work.

But You get his point. Opening their own factory. Let Rothys close a loop that had been stubbornly open for five years. There are very, very few footwear manufacturers that own their own supply chain or that are vertically integrated.

And we think it's the future. It is what has allowed us to innovate. The designers at Rothys get to put their hands on the products as they're on the manufacturing lines and and optimize for like, oh God, that extra step there, I didn't realize the unintended consequences of me designing something a certain way results in a whole lot of extra work for someone else. And so that connectivity to the design process and the ability to put that back into iterating your designs and make them better. is one of the true benefits of being vertically integrated. Remember. Co-founders are more than just the person you started the company with.

That goes for anyone. creating and owning the processes that become more integral to the business. Consider it another kind of additive manufacturing. Or instead of adding plastic yarn geometric shapes, you're adding people. And their ideas.

As Rothy scaled, Their manufacturing got more and more reliable. And they're airtight. Product Market Fit has led them to steady growth ever since.

Rothys is, you know, beneficiary of a lot of repeat business. Our customers, once they try the product, they love it, they want to come back and buy again. We have Customers that own Seven pairs twenty pairs, forty pairs.

Forty pairs? I mean, we have customers who send us pictures of their closets that they have had custom built. to accommodate their Rothes collection. And and for some people It's also a considered purchase and They might own one parent.

Roth and Steven. Take these messages from customers seriously. Because in a way. Your customers have a co founding role as well. They can be your ambassadors, your quality control.

And Your source for new ideas. was really struck by the power of the consumer And when you have a product or a service that really resonates with the customer, they're Desire.

To tell their friends. It's hard to create. But if you tap into that lightning in a bottle, how powerful it can be. In recent years, because of feedback from customers, Rothys has been able to launch new product lines Like handbags, wallets.

And men choose. And because of the customer love they've received over their commitment to sustainability. They can keep driving in that direction. In fact They have very specific plans to make their company

Even more sustainable. Which is one of the goals that Roth and Stephen bonded over. When they first started. Rafi's is incredibly proud to have pledged to be fully circular by next year. We've run a

pretty tremendous recycling program this year and using a lot of Emerging technologies in that space, such as chemical recycling. On the sustainability front, there's so much happening on the fiber side. the shapes that you're able to impart onto those fibers, how they're spun. It's a space that there's a lot of innovation happening in.

All that goes back into creating, you know Geez, those aha moments in the factory are like Why are you doing it that way? We could actually engineer this better. I think it's akin to cooking, right? You buy all these ingredients and you figure out how to put it together. Roth's reference to cooking.

Makes perfect sense. And it leads us to the unspoken question. beneath the subject of co founding. And adding more voices as you scale. Everyone is familiar with the saying.

Too many cooks in the kitchen. How do you ensure Do you have the right number of cooks for your business? It comes back to our magic word. Yeah.

If Your cooks aren't well coordinated. Or if you're not going to be able to They're confused on who's making the final call. Then even

Two cooks. Is it Too many. And You have to fix your processes before adding more.

But If Your chefs do play well together. Trust each other. And value each other's expertise.

Then Your number of co-founders and refounders. Can and should Increase with time. We took this question of cooks, Terene Jororski, and Matt Kent, the artistic directors of Palabolus, from earlier in the show.

I would say it is a real thing to have too many cooks in the kitchen, but it changes by the moment. I think it's all about the casting. In my opinion. Yeah, right. The hangout. It's all about the hangout. So yes, you can have Twenty five people, twenty five cooks in the room. And if they're all talkers, or they're all trying to take the spotlight.

Then that's too many cooks. But If you've got half listeners half talkers

If you find this happy medium where You're not all vying for the spotlight at the same time, you find a flow. I think it depends on who's in the room. Exactly. As I reflect on it, you know, I think the starting point is trust.

I think someone asks you to be a co founder, you should just say yes. To the first person who asks you no. No, it's so it's such a hard thing to get right. is immensely powerful and I think helpful and God, doing it by yourself as if it is not hard enough.

Finding your perfect co-founder Is rare. But your co-founder. And your next team members. Can come from anywhere.

If You share values, trust each other. and bring equal commitment to the mission. Accomplish that. and the co-founder effect.

Is that one plus one? is significantly greater than two. the end of the day, I can't imagine starting a company by myself. I really can't.

I'm Reed Hoffman. Thanks for listening. Humans will never be more intelligent than AI. There's gonna be two types of companies. Those were great at AI and those that went out of business because they weren't. How do we build a future?

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