The Pomp Podcast - #532: Zach Goldstein on Building The Best Pants

Episode Date: April 12, 2021

Zach Goldstein is the founder and CEO of Public Rec, which makes the most comfortable leisure apparel. He has an unique solo founder story and has now grown Public Rec into 8 figures in revenue annually. In this conversation, we discuss leaving investment banking, original idea for Public Rec, the initial kickstarter campaign, being a solo founder, self-funding the business, achieving profitability, and being a product-first founder. ======================= Remote makes it easy for companies of all sizes to employ global full-time employees and contractors. We take care of international payroll, benefits, taxes and local compliance, so you can focus on growing your business. Learn more about Remote and their new Remote for Startups program at http://www.remote.com. ======================= Choice is a new self-directed IRA product that I'm really excited about. If you are listening to this, you are likely part of the 7.1 million bitcoin owners who have retirement accounts with dollars in them, but not bitcoin. I was in that situation too. Now you can actually buy real Bitcoin in your retirement account. I'm talking about owning your private keys and using tax-advantaged dollars to do it too. Absolute game changer. https://www.retirewithchoice.com/pomp =======================

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to The Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off. Zach Goldstein is the founder and CEO of Public Rec, which makes the most comfortable leisure apparel. He has a unique solo founder story and has now grown Public Rec into eight figures in revenue annually. In this conversation, we discuss leaving investment banking, The original idea for Public Rec, the initial Kickstarter campaign, being a solo founder, self-funding the business, achieving profitability, and being a product-first founder. I really enjoyed this conversation with Zach, and I hope you do as well.

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as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Zach here with me. Thanks so much for doing this, sir. Yeah, no problem. Happy to be here. For sure. So you are the only person I know in the world that was a solo founder and also solo employee of a business that you ran for multiple years. You eventually grew it to $7 million in revenue by yourself. What happened and how the hell did you do that? um well you know i was the only internal employee but i had a lot of external help um working with you know a lot of third-party agencies that you know a production partner who

was overseeing our manufacturing and so you know was fortunate i i met a lot of helpful people along the way um and i i was super sensitive to you know hiring too quickly and i wanted to stay away from raising funding. And so that just kind of forced me to be as lean as possible. And so I wasn't ready to really bring on talent until I knew I could sustain them and the business could sustain them. And so, yeah. And then we were fortunate. We launched a product that kind of resonated right out the gate. And so during that three and a half years, if you're the only internal employee, you basically are doing everything. What did your day look like? Were you just awake for like 20 hours a day or kind of what were you doing uh yeah it's pretty intense

um i mean yeah i mean there's a lot you know a lot of customer support stuff that ended up being getting customer support got to a place where it's like okay i can't obviously we need help there um product development you know marketing um yeah touching a lot of different areas and And, you know, it was kind of like doing part time of what, you know, we have our employees do full time now and just probably not being at a size where it required someone to be full time. But, yeah, kind of all day thinking about the business and trying to advance it however best. Yeah. And so what was your background before you started Public Rec? I was working in finance beforehand. I previously directly worked for a private equity firm. And before that, I worked in investment banking for a few years out of school.

And so was it just you had uncomfortable pants and you wanted more comfortable pants? Like, what was the impetus for the idea? Actually, I mean, a little bit. So, you know, sweatpants never fit in me well, me being shorter. And so like sweat, like in college, I gravitated towards one pair of sweatpants that actually ended up fitting. They happened to be my mom's. And I was like, oh, why do these fit?

Why do I like these more? Because they fit better. They're shorter in length. So I was like, why aren't, you know, leisure pants, sweatpants offered in a waist and inseam sizing? If they were, they could fit better. It felt like a problem that other brands were ignoring because of the inventory risk and the investment and like trying to do it differently.

And so it felt like a way to differentiate the product was offer waist and length sizing for leisure pants. For sure. And so when you go to launch this thing, you have a Kickstarter campaign from my understanding and you do six figures in revenue through that Kickstarter campaign. why kickstarter and kind of what did you do to increase the odds of it being successful yeah at the time kickstarter felt like uh a good place to really test the market immediately uh and you know get feedback understand if the message was resonating if people were interested

in the product at all um and then like also garner some pr um you know at the time when you were having success on kickstarter and it still is but like it's a very public um display of your business and everyone can see the number that you've raised and it's like oh this company you know they have credibility because they've done this much on kickstarter or it's you know it's resonating with other customers maybe i should check them out and so yeah uh i spent six months in advance of really dialing in the campaign making the video um having a final prototype and feeling good about where I was with the manufacturer and the content and the story. And then also, you know, reaching out to writers in advance to kind of tell them this was coming

and hope that maybe they may be interested enough to write about us. For sure. And so when you think through kind of where you've evolved to today, how do you describe Public Rec and what you guys are doing? We're a leisure apparel brand, mainly direct-to-consumer online, uh making super comfortable clothes you can still feel good about wearing outside of the house um yeah we you know i can go into it more throughout but yeah we spend a ton of time making product and sourcing fabrics and making sure that whatever you know we're coming out

with is different and better than than what's out there today and when you think through the business uh being d2c obviously i think has uh kind of swept through a bunch of these different industries, but it seems like every DTC company eventually tries to get into, uh, physical retail, uh, retail locations. Why stay DTC for the most part? Yeah. Um, I think it was kind of just out of what was working and like where we felt the scale, like, you know, we were, we were fortunate that the message was resonating kind of as we scaled our marketing budget digitally. Um, and And so I was like, you know, let's just keep doing this. You know, we see we spend a dollar, we get, you know, two and a half dollars, three dollars back in revenue.

This is great. This makes sense for the business. It's profitable. You know, how much more can we push this? OK, we need to get more inventory to support how much more we can push it. And so it was kind of just like just keep doing kind of what's working for the time being. We launched one store in New York. It was open for about six months. Unfortunately, we closed it due to covid and we kind of walked away from it. It's a, you know, a strategy we're reassessing and probably will pursue at some point. But, you know, the capital required to do it and the amount of revenue it can drive

versus just kind of building the brand online, it just felt like it made sense to stay focused on the web business. Yeah. And what I think stands out about the product that you've built is you are product first, right? This idea of comfort, it's all over the marketing materials. It's literally when you describe the company, when you wear the clothes, they just feel better.

Where does that kind of product obsession come from? And then kind of, do you do anything inside of the company to continue to just hammer that home to employees, partners, vendors, et cetera, about that kind of focus on quality of product? Yeah. To me, it was like, you know, I only want to do this. I only want to start a company if, you know, I feel like we can make something that's better than what's out there today.

Because like, you know, we're starting with a no-name brand. we're only going to win and we're only going to attract customers if our product is great and then like you know everything else has to make sense and work and and but to me it's like start with trying to make a product that we think is better than what's out there currently and that customers are going to enjoy um and so you know the first product took a couple years to make uh sourcing different fabrics finding different factories finally got to a place where I felt good about the fabric, the fit. And it's kind of been that way since we've launched products.

We try to think of things as core. We don't think of them as seasonal or discount them. And we try to, I mean, we'll spend anywhere from 18 to 36 months from idea to the products in our fulfillment center and ready to sell to our customers because I just feel like we don't have the opportunity to get it wrong.

Customers are trusting us. It's a leap of faith to try a new brand. If the product isn't excellent, they're not coming back. They're not talking about us to friends and family and nothing else works. If, uh, people don't love the product. Yeah. And so how do you measure whether people actually love it, right? Obviously there's sales.

Is there anything else that you guys look at, uh, to really measure how much people love the product? Uh, we look at repeat rate. Um, we look at, you know, customer feedback, we're getting reviews from customers, um, we're looking at you know how people talk about the brand on you know different places um you know whether it be ads or responding to emails the type of inbound we get um and then it's like you know friends family all that's like anyone who's experienced the brand it's always interesting to get the perspective usually it's you know you got to understand that a lot of it

can be biased because you know if they're friends or family sometimes they don't want to be critical Then there's like the friends or family who are like, want to be super critical, which is, which is helpful. Um, yeah, yeah. Uh, but you know, trying to listen to the customer as much as possible. So when we talk today, uh, you've got, you know, uh, double digit employees, uh, you're profitable, you've raised, uh, no kind of venture capital, uh, and, uh, you've really built a great business. Uh, we started this conversation off with the idea that, uh, you were a solo employee up to $7 million in revenue. When did you know it was time to bring on other people? Like, was there a moment where you were like, oh man, I am overwhelmed. Uh, I need really,

really need help. Like what drove you to finally get another employee? Um, it was, yeah, it was something I, well, I remember like up until that time, it was like a big internal debate of like, should we hire? No, I can keep going. I can keep doing this. But then it was like, at some point I was like, you know, this isn't sustainable. You know, the goal is to build a big brand. Um, I can, we can afford to hire someone and support that salary. Um, so it was just, I think everything just kind of tipped to like, okay, if we're going to,

if I'm going to keep doing this for a long time and build a big brand, you know, I need to start hiring people, especially if the business can support it. Um, so yeah, a few, a few different variables kind of, we're all telling me, you know, now is the time to hire. I absolutely love the fact that you did that. Talk to me a little bit about the idea of not raising any venture capital, right? You did Kickstarter, so there's kind of some initial funding, but it really was kind of this pre-order model. Was it intentional not to raise venture capital or did it just kind of happen? What was that story? I think in the

beginning um i had saved a little bit from my previous jobs and we i had done the kickstarter so you know i felt like i had a little runway to test out the idea uh and see you know what could become of it um at some point i raised a small round from friends and family a couple years in to support you know moving manufacturing overseas with higher minimums and to make more products than just the pants um but i i you know we were fortunate we had pretty quick growth over the first few years and it was everything was moving so quickly that it was like i didn't think that raising equity would really change the path we were on and so it's like you know if we're growing quickly i already feel like it's as risky as you know i'm comfortable with it as it is given the

pace we're moving at so it's like i don't want to put more fuel on the fire and you know accelerate the risk and maybe make some decisions that I'm not as comfortable with. And I'm happy with the growth we're seeing. So in the beginning, it was just being OK with the growth rate at which we were on and not feeling like equity would really change that path. Yeah. Got it. And so when you think about kind of that path, would you go back and do it differently? Would you have raised capital? Do you think that was the right way to do it? Would you be in a different position if you had raised capital um i don't think i would do it differently i i you know sometimes i think about what where we would be if if we had raised capital and you know would we be three to five

years ahead of where we are today um but no i mean i i i chose the path and i you know i have no regrets about the path and um i think it's been right for us as a company the one thing is like you know there are some brands that end up raising a ton of capital and they maybe find out that you know sometimes the the financials don't make sense and they're scaling on financials or metrics kpis that don't make sense um i do think that we kind of have you know we're fortunate we have this product and we have kpis that kind of make sense now to scale and um you know financing might kind change where we are today, but yeah, no, I mean, it was a good path for us and I would, I would pursue it again the same way. Yeah. Talk to me about your supply chain,

obviously with COVID and kind of everything that's happened over the last year, I'm assuming that there was a ton of issues there and that you had to navigate, but just maybe explain a little bit about how the supply chain set up and then what you've had to navigate over the last year. yeah we so we make everything uh most of our stuff is made in thailand indonesia and peru um when when covid hit we we had a decent amount of inventory of kind of all of our products so we didn't have a lot of pos that were coming so it wasn't like we needed to shift you know and slow down pos we also you know we found out kind of later throughout covid we didn't really we hadn't really tested what the capacity levels were at our factories because we weren't really placing

a bunch of orders and so um something that we experienced was after the holidays we had we had a good q4 we had an encouraging holiday um and you know we wanted to order more we found out kind of november that stuff that was supposed to hit end of december wasn't going to hit and it was going to be six to eight weeks delayed and so uh q1 this year january and february we were out of product uh and a lot of our core skews because of factory delays i think something that we experienced was a lot of our factories slowed down last summer they laid people off unfortunately and they didn't have the same capacities that they used to have and then a lot of brands i think started seeing success q4 last year we're starting to ramp up the factories no longer had

the same capacity so they couldn't keep up and so um yeah it's it's been difficult for us uh the last four or five months, having product on hand, feeling good about continuing to keep product on hand. I think we're now at a point that will be hopefully good through the rest of the year. But yeah, it's been a challenge for sure. And part of having a really strong supply chain, not having raised capital, really kind of working your ass off in terms of those first couple of years, one of the benefits of all that is you're profitable. You've been profitable for quite a while, uh, talk through maybe the pros and cons of, uh, being profitable early. Did that change some of the decision-making that you may have made otherwise? Uh, and then how have you seen

that as an advantage as you've built the business over the last few years? I think, I think so the advantage is like, you know, we get to make our own decisions on where we want to go and what we want to do for the most part. We're not beholden to an investor. We're not beholden to trying to get more money from an outside person, institution, whatever it may be, which has been super helpful in terms of we're operating the business on a daily basis. And so everyone internally, the team now today, we're making decisions on what we think makes sense for the business and we're able to execute it without feeling like we need to check with someone or we need to do something differently. um i think it's also it's given us a little more room you know i i think it's kept us disciplined in like how we think about marketing and where we want to go and um you know the the con or the drawback is maybe that like you know we've been uh less aggressive

in our marketing uh and so you know maybe we haven't grown as quickly as we otherwise would have if we had you know a bunch more capital to try to test things um but you know obviously with the testing you find out what works you find out what it doesn't we've been able to test a good amount um but yeah maybe maybe you know the outside capital help makes us accelerate our testing a bit more and um you know allows us to do things that we would find out that do work for us that we've been maybe hesitant to do um yeah talk to me about the changes in consumer behavior that you've seen through the last 12 months, COVID, the economic crisis, et cetera?

Are there specific things that stick out in your mind that maybe other people aren't aware of? Yeah. Although people may already be aware of it or have heard it from others, mid-March, those mid-March up until really May, it was very slow for us. And the website fell off in a way

that it was like you know when you're experiencing it we don't know what's going on with covid we don't know how long it's going to last and it's at a point where it's like if we keep seeing revenue like this on a daily basis i don't know how long we can survive like is this a six month a 12 month thing where just you know people aren't spending or buying our clothes and um so that was super scary we started to see an uptick throughout the summer we saw people buying a lot of shorts um um and then you know the fall was pretty good we again we saw slow down for the election but i think that's you know outside of covid we probably would have seen that and then we had we had a good holiday season which i remember even going into black friday and cyber monday not really knowing

how it was going to go um and then you know seeing what the performance was like and seeing what the you know consumer um what the consumer was buying and that you know so that was exciting and then And then, of course, we find out shortly thereafter that, you know, the product's not going to hit that we thought for the restocks and now we're going to be out of stock. And so, yeah, I mean, I think it's probably similar to what other businesses have experienced in terms of like, you know, a dramatic drop off in demand and then a slow rebound. And, you know, it's feeling good now again. Yeah, it's incredible to kind of go through those peaks and valleys all in a short, compressed period of time, right? takes the whole idea of being an entrepreneur and puts it on steroids when you've got the macro environment going so crazy. One of the things that I find fascinating about your business

is this focus on comfort. But I got to ask, how do you measure comfort? Is it just you put the clothes on and you're like, yep, this is comfortable. Nope, this is not. Do you have a panel? Is it friends and family? Who is the determination factor around what is actually comfortable what's not it's a good question uh i mean it's friends and family you know i started a clothing company because i had a strong opinion in clothing and felt like i had a good barometer for that stuff um but of course like i'm only one person i you know i don't have a background in clothing so uh yeah as prototypes come in it's you know putting them on different people seeing what their reaction is you know if it's friends or family and they're trying it like

forcing them as much as possible to be critical and like you know not hold back um and then like you know as we've come out with products and we get feedback on what people are liking and not liking then we can refine and dial it in and do more of or do less of if you could go back uh and unpack kind of that first three and a half years when you're working by yourself uh what are the things that kept you going was it something that you were telling yourself was it uh the fear of failure was it just every day you looked for one positive sign to kind of keep you moving forward like what was the thing that kept you going for three and a half years by yourself um and really from a perspective of there's a lot of people listening to this who uh they're early right

whether they're actually by themselves or it feels like they're by themselves uh they're very very early in that journey and they're constantly looking for uh the right signs that they're on the right path and they can keep kind of uh pushing forward what was it for you that kept you there I think I mean every day was exciting to me every day was something new um I still I remember feeling like you know getting to the weekends and still like doing stuff that I could do myself over the weekends but being so eager to for it to be Monday because like then I know people were online and they'd be responding to emails or be able to take phone calls and so that I mean like it was I mean, it still is so exciting, but that was, you know, something that it was just like, it just didn't feel like a job at the time.

It was like, you know, I am so dedicated to this. I'm loving it. And it's like, you know, still super stressful and, you know, making mistakes and not doing everything well. But, you know, the excitement and then it's like, you know, if I'm not doing anything, nothing's getting done. So it's like the only way that I can keep doing this and sustain the excitement and, you know, enjoy this is like, okay, we need to progress the business so we can, you know, get to a place where it's financially sustainable. Yeah. And was there a moment when you said to yourself, it's working? Like, was it the Kickstarter and you're like, oh, you know, people want this?

Was there like a dollar figure in the bank or revenue or like, what was that moment when you were like, damn, like I actually make it like make this work? Yeah. so i think probably when i made the first tire when then it's like when i was like okay this is working um it's still like even today it's like you know i'm checking the numbers constantly and if something doesn't look good for the last hour it's like what happened is the site down you know the lights could turn off at any minute and i still fear that fear um yeah yeah it's still i mean like the goal is hopefully you know something bigger and you know hopefully just getting started but yeah do you watch the numbers on like an hour by hour basis

yeah i do it's not healthy no i actually think it's one of the best signs of you really understand the business right like i could probably ask you you know what are the uh most popular hours of shopping versus not and you intuitively just know because if you watch the numbers all day long right yeah yeah um that's when i started that so we're on shopify uh and initially there's a shopify app so you you could get a notification every time a purchase came through to your phone and it was like a dopamine hit like every because i would know what the vibrator the sound was and now i mean i've turned that off the the notification at least um but yeah i still check uh you know very often and part of it part of it's like now we're at a point where we have a

team and like if something's going wrong you know someone will someone will catch it our customer support team will catch it or you know the person who oversees our site will catch it uh but in the beginning was like i may be the only one who catches it if it's like you know the last hour we haven't had any traffic on the site something maybe the site's down or something so that was part of it i think yeah it's so funny the uh that shopify notification with the uh cash register noise. I've got two friends who are the founders of Adams, the shoe company. And I was over at their house six months ago, or maybe even a year ago at this point. And it kept going off. And I just looked at it at one point, they're like, yeah, we're not shutting that off. It was just

this thing of like, it was annoying, but it was like, hey man, we just know that like, you know, things are working. And it's pretty cool to kind of see Shopify specifically, like their whole mentality of like arming the rebels, right? I've had Harley, the president of Shopify on the podcast before. And I think that just hearing kind of their focus on celebrating entrepreneurship and really empowering entrepreneurs, it seems like you're like the quintessential story for a platform like Shopify, right? Where basically you didn't need a big team. You simply needed the platform. And once you had the tools, then you kind of get to work and can build a business and turn into something pretty special, create jobs for people and really kind of embrace all

that entrepreneurship uh that everyone always talks about yeah yeah shopify has been a great platform for us i remember uh in the beginning it was like you know shopify or squarespace and at the time it was like there wasn't it was hard for me to tell the difference between them some people are on squarespace and i'm yeah i feel fortunate that we went with shopify it's been a great platform for us awesome uh what's the most popular product that anyone buys most our best seller is the all the everyday pant um which was our first product we started with and when you decide to launch new products uh what do you have to see or like how do you get the confidence to launch something new knowing that that very first product is still the most

popular one yeah um i think a lot about like what compliments what do we already have um today and like you know if we've got a certain product do we have a top that you can wear with it or a bottom that you can wear with it um then like on a higher level i think about you know where are we as a brand today and when we launched the brand it was you know really focused on the leisure space kind of trying to stay away from the active athletic space thinking that space is more saturated and then like on the other end of like you know business casual work um and so we've kind of gravitated more towards business casual and work um and so you know it's in buckets of you know where does it fit within our product offering and then you know also what are we hearing from

customers and what do we think makes sense to complement what we already have out there yeah what's your biggest regret over the last couple of years if you go back and change one thing is there anything that sticks out i think i mean i know we've talked about you know the hiring a good amount and you know me being the only employee i do wish that i had hired a bit sooner both for customer support and then um you know our head of operations who was our first hire um it just became apparent that like you know getting good people on board and you know helping the business scale in that way uh really opens up a lot uh in terms of you know what i can focus on what more we can be doing as a company. Um, and so, yeah, I think that that's maybe

my biggest regret is kind of wishing I'd hired sooner. Yeah. And when you think about, uh, that regret that it makes me ask the opposite question, which is what is your favorite memory from the last couple of years? Uh, the, the memory that sticks out the most that is kind of funny now is we moved fulfillment centers um this was a few years ago i'm still the only employee uh and at the time like i was i had a good relationship with the existing fulfillment center i was nervous to tell them that i wanted to leave ended up telling them and at the i didn't even consider it but i i'd show up with a u-haul truck and i you know load the truck they kind of helped me load it and then i drive it from new york to chicago with my brother

um, to a new fulfillment center. And it was like, I didn't consider that I could have hired someone to, you know, help me load it to drive. I had never, I hadn't driven a truck like that before and show up to the new fulfillment center, get them. And it was like all over the weekend so that we wouldn't have that much missed time to fulfill orders. Um, yeah, it's just, it's, it's funny to think about, but those to me, like that story specifically is almost like the fun of it, right? Like if you just hired people to do all that other stuff, like it's almost like you wouldn't have that story or that memory and so uh sure you'd have a successful business but to some degree like that seems to be the uh the fun part of actually building the company definitely

definitely what did your brother what did your brother think when you were like hey man you're gonna come come with me we're gonna go on this drive luckily he's an entrepreneur himself and he was you know happy to do it and yeah i mean it was it was fun once we had like the stuff loaded we were on the road it was it was fun driving together yeah i uh one of my brothers is uh is thinking about moving and we were just talking about this this idea of like hey we'll just put it all in a u-haul and then we'll drive and it'd be you know pretty long 18 hour drive and he literally told his girlfriend he said oh we'll just like play music and like hang out and have a blast and so i don't think that she thought it was nearly going to be as fun as we thought it was

that's funny absolutely before uh before i let you go i asked everyone the same three questions you'll get to ask me uh one to finish up what uh what's the most important book you've ever read I don't know if it's the most important, but the one I've enjoyed a lot recently is shoe dog. Um, you know, it's relevant, but, um, it's, it's a book that like, I've read multiple times and then I'll read, you know, parts of it just to like, enjoy, like reread some of the stuff that I love the most. Um, yeah, it's just for me. Yeah. I really enjoy reading it.

How much of it is, uh, that story resonates with you because it is, uh, you know, kind of an apparel like story or company, um, and some of the aspects of like the supply chain and the difficulties and complexities you resonate with, with compared to just like the entrepreneurship story in general. Uh, a lot, there's a lot of similarity and it's like, you know, we're not Nike, like the dream is one day, 20 years, whatever, like 40 years. Um, but yeah, there, there's a lot, that's maybe one of the reasons why I like it so much. It just feels like there's a lot of similarities between some of the problems you went through and what it feels like I'm going through.

Wasn't even called Nike at the time, right? Right. That's right. Second question is about your sleep schedule. I'm going to break this up. I want, what was your sleep schedule? And this comes from our friends over at Eight Sleep. So they've got this thermoregulation bed. I turn it super cold. My wife turns it really hot and I still make a baby now, but I used to only sleep, you know, five, six hours. Uh, what was your sleep schedule when you didn't have any employees? And then what has it transitioned into today? Uh, it's pretty similar. I I've kind of always tried to get seven to eight hours of sleep. It's been something that like, has just been important to me. Uh, I know that like, you know,

if I go too many days without getting that, I won't be able to function. And so, um, yeah i'm usually yeah trying to get seven or eight hours all right you you uh you were way ahead of the curve on that one uh last question you get to ask me one is uh aliens believer or non-believer i'm a believer why just like you know seeing some of the seeing some of the the data out there the research it just feels like and and you know thinking about how big everything is um it feels more likely than not that there are another species out there yeah it feels like uh probabilistically yes right uh what shape they are in right are they intelligent or not uh is a whole different ball game but uh it just feels like i even go as far

say like i bet you mars has some sort of life it just may not be what we're all thinking about you know the little green man walking around right right uh could could be uh you know literally cells or something so who knows i'm not a scientist but uh but i agree with you i think that it's got to be life somewhere else yeah yeah what uh what one question you have for me to uh wrap us up i've got so uh my question is what keeps you up at night what do you think about or yeah curious what you know yeah this is gonna sound insane but this is like a new worry uh i try to balance uh happiness with ambition and uh my nature is to go 110 hard charging uh i wouldn't sleep if i thought that that was a smart thing to do anymore right like just like just go for it all

the time bigger faster better um but what i've noticed is like there's a direct trade-off between like that type of mentality and, and, um, kind of pursuit with just peace of mind and like happiness. And so like where the balance is, uh, I'm not sure because if you just optimize completely for happiness in some way, you almost feel lazy. Like you feel like you're like not doing anything, uh, which is almost a test of happiness. Like, can you do nothing and be happy? Right. Um, but, but I think that, uh, that balance is, uh, almost one of these things where like, you'll never actually get the right answer. Uh, but the constant pursuit of the balance between ambition and happiness seems to be, at least right now, you know, kind of top of

mind. And it's funny to kind of hear you thinking through and talking about, you know, when you started to hire people versus not hire people, whatever, some of it is, can you, you know, be ambitious? And also, maybe you don't have to do 100% of the work, right? Like, is does that kind of bring more happiness? Or if you got to manage people, maybe that actually makes you unhappy right uh kind of depends on on the situation uh the individuals and kind of what you're trying to accomplish but i think that that balance is probably the thing that uh that i spend the most time thinking about right now super interesting yeah that resonates with me for sure why i i think you know similarly it's like can i be happy in the moment like you know

i feel like the brand is is doing well and we've accomplished a lot and you know it's gotten to a place where you know a year two or three years ago it would have been a dream to get to this place and you know see the numbers and have the employees and and it's hard to appreciate it and not want more of like okay we got to here let's get to the next stage let's get to the next stage and it's like i don't know i think a lot about like you know how you know when do i feel like i've made it or you know we're a success or and what does that feel like and yeah absolutely Absolutely. Where can we send people to pick up some clothes? Well, hold on. First of all, before you tell us, I have to say, I've got a bunch of the pants, shirt, jacket. I said,

the shit is actually really comfortable. I know you're saying it and you literally are the founder of the company, so you're supposed to say it regardless. But as somebody who, I don't buy designer clothes. Like I'm like a $5 jeans from Walmart type guy, uh, literally just wear, you know, black t-shirts, et cetera. Uh, it's super comfortable. And so anyone who's listening to this, who's like, I don't know, like completely unfiltered advice, uh, or feedback, like it's really, really comfortable. So where can people go, uh, purchase anything, uh, especially the pants if that's what they want. Nice. That's awesome to hear. Um, very cool. Uh, our website is uh publicrec.com uh rec is r-e-c like recreation so yeah publicrec.com all right

before i let you go you got to tell me where'd the name come from uh wearing clothes in public during recreation which was like the thought of it and it was just like at the time it was a lot of back and forth with one of my friends who was like i was like you like this and he would throw And so I like the word public. And I think initially I tried to get public service and I couldn't get that clear through IP. And so I landed on public rec. I love it, man. You're building an absolute beast of a company. So keep going. I'm a big fan.

I wear the clothes and anyone who wants good to a public rec.com and we'll have to do to get in the future. Awesome. Awesome. It's good talking to you.