A 2-part founder study by Surabhi Shenoy
In 1962, Phil Knight was twenty-four years old, fresh out of Stanford Business School, and convinced of an idea most people thought was naive, that Japanese running shoes, made well, could outcompete the German brands like Adidas and Puma that dominated American athletics.
He flew to Japan with no contracts, no capital, and no real plan.
He walked into a meeting with Onitsuka and came up with a company name on the spot: Blue Ribbon Sports. Onitsuka agreed to ship him 12 pairs of shoes as samples.
He started selling them from the trunk of his car at track meets in Oregon.
Nine years later, in 1971, Blue Ribbon Sports renamed itself Nike.
By 1980, the company was public.
Today, Nike generates over $46 billion in annual revenue, employs roughly 77,800 people across more than 40 countries, and remains one of the most studied brands in business history.
But the part of Phil Knight’s story that matters most to founders is not Nike’s scale. It’s how close the company came to dying — repeatedly — in its first decade. Cash crises. Supplier threats. Bank rejections.
The famous trunk-of-the-car story is true, but it’s also incomplete. The real story is what Phil Knight chose to do — and not do — while standing inside that fragility.
This 2-part series studies those choices. Not to admire Phil Knight, but to extract the patterns: how early dependencies form, why founders tolerate exposure longer than they should, and what early-stage growth actually looks like when you strip away the legend.
The success of a business is shaped by the decisions its founder makes. Phil Knight’s early decisions were unusually scrappy, unusually exposed, and unusually instructive. That’s what makes him worth studying and learning from.
The Series
Part 1: What Shoe Dog Reveals About Growth and Risk
In 1971, Nike’s bank cut off its credit line. At the same time, its only Japanese supplier threatened to stop shipments. Demand was strong. The product worked. And yet the company was one step away from collapse.
This edition uses that moment to examine something most founders learn the hard way: growth does not create safety. It changes the shape of risk.
As a business grows, narrow dependencies like one supplier, one lender, one major customer, one rockstar employee — become the most dangerous part of the company.
What you’ll learn:
- Why founders recognize exposure early but live with it far longer than they should.
- How growth increases fragility instead of reducing it.
- The difference between anxiety and urgency — and why most founders only act when survival is challenged.
- A direct parallel from my own company, where two customers once represented 70% of revenue, and what happened when both disappeared in the same quarter.
Key themes: Growth and risk, narrow dependencies, founder endurance, key person risk, customer concentration, early-stage survival
Part 2: Five Early-Stage Growth Moves I’d Make If I Built My Tech Company Again
After my second exit, now working with founders as Coach, I keep returning to one question: if I were building my tech company today, what would I do differently?
This edition is the answer — read through the lens of Phil Knight’s early years at Blue Ribbon Sports.
It’s not a hindsight reel. It’s a study of the early-stage moves that determine whether a company compounds or stalls — the work most founders only see clearly after the fact.
What you’ll learn:
- Why staying close to the highest-intent customer matters more than reaching the broadest one.
- How market education — not market entry — often unlocks demand in B2B and consulting businesses.
- Why early employees need belief, not just skill, because in a startup, people are the system.
- How community and trust are built before scale, not after.
- And why designing for cashflow, not just revenue, is what separates fast growth from no growth.
Key themes: Customer development, market education, hiring for belief, community before scale, cashflow design, early-stage growth strategy
Why I Study Founders
The success of a business is shaped by the decisions its founder makes. I study consequential builders — not to admire them, but to extract the thinking patterns that transfer.
Phil Knight is the second founder in an ongoing series of founder studies in CEO Mastery, my weekly newsletter for scaling founder-CEOs. Each study examines how a specific builder thought, what patterns drove their decisions, and what modern founders should take — and leave behind.
If you found this study valuable, subscribe to CEO Mastery to receive future founder studies as they publish.
The first study in this series — Sam Walton: A 4-Part Study — examines how the Walmart founder thought about cost, learning, scale, and competition.