The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway - First Time Founders with Ed Elson – This Founder Hit $100M in Revenue Without Raising a Dollar

Episode Date: June 2, 2024

Ed speaks with Missy Park, Founder and CEO of Title Nine, a women’s athleisure brand. They discuss how her experience as a collegiate athlete led her to start her company, the benefits and drawbacks of bootstrapping, and why achieving a work life/balance is not all it’s cracked up to be. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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can learn from each other. Listen in and subscribe to The Current at thecurrent.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Support for PropG comes from NerdWallet. Starting your credit card search with NerdWallet? Smart. Using their tools to finally find the card that works for you? Even smarter. You can filter for the features you care about, access the latest deals, and add your top cards to a comparison table to make smarter decisions.

And it's all powered by the Nerd's expert reviews of over 400 credit cards. Head over to nerdwallet.com forward slash learn more to find smarter credit cards, savings accounts, mortgage rates, and more. NerdWallet, finance smarter. NerdWallet Compare Incorporated, NMLS 1617539. Scott, you often talk about how you never want to raise venture capital again. And you've talked about that with this company. You don't want to raise a penny of outside funding. Why is that? Being a fiduciary means that I'm going to think about your money as much or more than mine. Two nights ago, I decided that you're all going to Ibiza on

me. And when I say all of you, I mean everyone at Prof G. If I take an outside capital, I'd have to think, well, is really that the best use of capital? So it gives you a level of freedom. If Prof G works or doesn't work, it's not going to have a big impact on my life. But when you take other people's money, you have a responsibility to have sleepless nights thinking about, you know, is their investment going up or down? The biggest sources of stress in my life, and granted, I've led a charm life so far, have usually been, at least professionally, concerns around losing other people's money. And so control is an addictive substance. It's really nice to have total control when you don't have any outside investors. And B, I just don't want to be responsible for other people's capital anymore. Welcome to First Time Founders. In 1972, Congress passed a piece of legislation that banned schools from discriminating on the basis of sex. That bill, known as Title IX, had many impacts. Before Title IX, only 1 in 27 girls played sports. Today, that number is 2 in 5. As a college athlete in the 80s, my next guest was one of the first to benefit from Title IX.

But she also benefited as an entrepreneur. Female athletes represented a new market, she recognized that early. And in 1989, she sent out 13,000 mail order catalogs for a new clothing category known as women's activewear. Since then, the category which she defined has exploded with thousands of new entrants from Lululemon to Aloe to Athleta. But despite all that competition, she's protected her company and grown it into a $100 million per year business with over 300 employees. Plus, she did it all without ever raising a penny of outside funding. Yes, you heard that right. This founder owns 100% of her company. She bootstrapped it the whole way.

This is my conversation with Missy Park, founder and CEO of Title IX. How are you doing? No complaints. What about yourself? I'm doing very well. It's nice and sunny here in New York. You're in Berkeley? Yep. When did you move to Berkeley, by the way? I was just thinking about that. Let's see. I think I moved here in 1987. So that was before you started the company then?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I worked for a couple of years on the East Coast after college and then it was too cold. But you went to college on the East Coast, right? You went to Yale, I think coming from a small town in Greenville, South Carolina, to a really, quite frankly, ugly city, New Haven, Connecticut, and really but the people, everything. It was a big culture shock, but I wouldn't have had it any other way. And you were an athlete in college, right? Yeah, I was. You know, I came up all the way, I was a first, actually in the first class of women who came up all the way through high school and college with Title IX being in effect. Give us a little explanation of what Title IX is. I think most people probably know now, but some might not. Most people do not know. Is that right? And actually, that's awesome. They feel entitled. They think it's been this way all along, you know. So I'm good that most people don't know. It meant a lot to me and my generation, probably women on probably 15 years on either side. Basically, it was a piece of

legislation that was passed in 1972. It said that girls and women must have an equal opportunity to compete in all interscholastic activities, athletic activities. And people thought it was about the sports, but that's kind of where they were mistaken because we were talking about the whole shooting match. So yes, it was about girls getting equal opportunity to compete, similar practice times, similar practice facilities. That was a long time in the making. But what it was really about was equal opportunity to an education. And so that means, you know, in the 1970s, probably one in every 50 professional school attendees was a female. Now it's 50%. So it wasn't just about athletics. It was about law school, med school, business school, all of the advanced degrees.

And that's where Title IX really made the difference. Let's dive into the company a little bit. I mean, you started the company in 1989. It was one of the very first American sportswear brands that was made exclusively for women. I think today that sounds pretty normal to us. I mean, there are a lot of female-focused brands in all sorts of consumer products. But at that time, 30 years ago, I assume it wasn't. So why did you decide to start this company? I graduated from college and really could not find it. You know, when you're

in college, you basically get all your gear given to you for free. I mean, it's bad gear. It's men's gear, but at least we had stuff. And then when I graduated from college, I realized like, wow, there is no one out here, literally no one. We were before Nike or Nike Woman or Dix or Dix for her, certainly before Athleta, Lululemon. I mean, we were really the only one doing it. And when I told my dad my idea, I said, you know, the great thing is, Dad, we're going to be the only ones doing this. My dad was like, well, there might be a good reason for that. Ever the encouraging one. So yeah, it was a very different time. And really, as I said before, I was in that first cohort of women that could have gone all the way through high school and all the way through

college playing sports. And then in that first cohort of women who wanted to make the thing they love part of their vocation and not just have it be an avocation. And was the idea that you wanted to sell clothes to female athletes in college or just? Oh, what it was for was for 27-year-old former collegiate basketball players. For you. You got it. Exactly. You know, I mean, obviously for good and ill ill i didn't have a business plan i basically bootstrap the whole way they're good and bad things about that one of the bad things and maybe the good thing too is my ideas did not go through the rock tumbler of betting that happens when you raise money and build a business plan.

So no one pointed out some of the very obvious problems with targeting a company to a very, very small subset of women. But the good news is, we didn't spend much money. When I say we, that would be the royal we, that would be just me. You know, I had, I don't know, 25,000 bucks. I talked our suppliers into shipping us stuff and invoicing us after we sold it, which turned out to be optimistic. Even that was optimistic. But the good news was I could get the stuff out there and start to learn very, very quickly. So I had a little catalog, and at the very last minute, I put in a black and white section sports bras. And I mean, I don't know, I can't even remember, like maybe 20,000 catalogs.

We probably got like 13 orders, and of the 13 orders, I think 11 of them had a sports bra on it. So I don't know that pitching what was typically the investment community at that point would have helped me figure out that sports bras were the thing because it'd be a lot of people that don't look like me. So in the end, it would have been nice to have the rock tumbler of the vetting that goes on with a capital raise. But on the other hand, you're only as good as the people you're sitting in front of. And I'm not sure anybody really knows.

So to be able to do it relatively cheaply, realize like, wow, sports bras, running shoes, running shorts. Those were the things that came across. Yeah, that's what I was going to ask. I mean, a third of sales include a sports bra on the order. My next question was going to be, could you just not get a sports bra anywhere else? Itckstraps, which you don't even know what a jockstrap is, but you could probably imagine. But, you know, it's like, oh, well, men need support and women need support. So why don't we just take the thing that men need support for and apply it to women? It didn't really work that way, but that was the initial, I mean, women got pretty inventive about how we solve

those problems. But now, I mean, that is old news. Had you had any professional experience in retail or in apparel or sportswear? What was your background before deciding to do this? Well, you know, I probably worked a little bit of retail. You know, I played tennis in high school, a little bit in college. I worked at the local tennis shop. But no, no. I mean, probably the most relevant experience I had is obviously the experience of a participant and the passion of a participant. And you can say that cuts both ways.

And then after that was really, I had two jobs when I moved out to California. I worked for Fisher Mountain Bikes, worked for them for a year. So I got sort of a firsthand look at what a small company, how it runs. And this was a small family-run business and getting to see what that looks like. And then the other great experience I had was working at the North Face when they are much smaller than Title IX is now. I did their first ever point-of-sale print catalog. And by doing it, it meant that I just ran around and worked with all the people who knew what they were doing and was responsible for hiring photographers and models, writing the copy, being at the photo shoots.

And that's probably was the main marketing channel at the time, right? Exactly. That was the marketing channel. And then the other piece that I had of the North Face is I ran their, what they call the warranty department, which was the department that was responsible for making good on their lifetime guarantee. So it was really a customer service department. Well, it sounds like you always kind of knew

you wanted to be involved in some way in athletics, but did you always know you wanted to be an entrepreneur? You know, I always knew. I don't know that I always, like hindsight, you know, you start to mix up hindsight and memory a little bit, I think, you know, my father was an entrepreneur, although they didn't call it that at the time. He was just, he was just a bootstrapper. He's just a scrappy guy, you know, a guy with a business. Yeah. Yes.

Yes. He was just a scrappy guy. Um, my sister's in business for herself. Both my brothers are in business for themselves. I think a lot, like, um, I don't think it's a requirement, but certainly like if your parents are lawyers or doctors, you're more likely perhaps to be a lawyer or a doctor. I think just living in a household where business and running a business and the problems of small business is conversation around the dinner table. So I don't know if I always knew Ed, but I think what I would say is there was a lot in the water and in the jeans. So you're working at the North Face and then you decide enough of this, you want to start your own company, but you didn't raise any money, which I feel like most of the people I've had on this

podcast and most of my friends who are entrepreneurs, that's the first thing they do. Like, okay, pitch deck. Now I'm going to go out and raise money. You didn't do that. What was the first thing that you did to start building this company? The first piece of action you took? Well, and I think this may be relevant to people who want to bootstrap. The thing about bootstrapping, I mean, the most important thing is to take the first step and make a commitment. Sostrapping, I mean, the most important thing is to take the first step and make a commitment. So for me, there was a psychological hurdle I had to cross over. Okay, am I really doing this? And for me, it was, you know, printing up business cards, you know, asking a buddy of mine, I paid her 50 bucks and she designed a logo and put together

a corporate package with things that we don't use anymore, but letterhead and, you know, shipping labels and all these things and a t-shirt and I paid her 50 bucks. That felt like a little bit of crossing the Rubicon, I suppose. You know, it's like, okay, I'm committed. I've paid money. And that was really the first step. And then it was just a matter of scrapping. You know, I had some, I was playing on a bunch of different sports teams. I met some people who were involved in the publishing industry. They agreed to help me out on the side with design and copy editing. My teammates were models, so they were free. I mean, everything just had to be cheap, you know?

I mean, because like there was no cash flow, really. I mean, it wasn't like I had a pot of money in the bank that I could just work my way through. I mean, everything, you know, I had $30,000 I needed for that to last until I got my first sale. So that is one of the things I think that I don't like about the investment. You take so long to get to the first good information you really need. And that is, what does the customer think about this idea? I mean, and people are so good with those pitches, man. I'm just like, okay, you got your elevator speech, but I don't know if you can sell a damn thing. I mean, it's just two different

things. Like a bunch of guys usually who all look alike, think alike, bank at the same damn bank are deciding what customers want. You know, I guess there is something to the fact that they have money and that is legitimizing. But the most important thing is, what does the customer want? And for me, that is the thing you have to get to the most quickly, is to figure out if the customer wants what you're selling. And if they don't, then how are you going to change? And how long did 1989, and we had our first sale in October of 1989. So pretty quickly. What did that mean to you psychologically?

Was that like, yep, this is going to work? It meant I was really ready to quit. Because, of course, you know, I mean, because, again, i didn't go through the rock tumbler of vetting that would normally happen so i didn't have all of the hard knocks right um and when you get 13 orders that's i mean that you know everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face um and i didn't even have a plan i just got punched in the face. So for me, really, that first one, I was like, wow, I have no idea what I'm doing. It almost sounds like a better vetting process to me. It's like, that's probably the best vetting process you could have is you went through the struggle

and you had to go find out if there was demand, which you just did as quickly as possible, it sounds like. Now, from my understanding, the first four years for you were a struggle, just some of those struggles that I know about. You were $200,000 in debt. There was a flood that basically destroyed your entire inventory. What were those first few years like? And was there ever a point where you truly thought, yeah, I actually do want to quit? And still, Ed. And still. And was there ever a point where you truly thought, yeah, I actually do want to quit? Yes.

And still, Ed. And still. I mean, and anybody that tells you differently, it's just, you know, I sit on these calls. We have this pitch fest that we do that has young women who are building outdoor brands come and pitch us. And I sit on a Zoom call every so often with them talking about sort of whatever challenges they're facing. And one of them, we were talking about money and they're like, when do you stop stressing about money? And I was like, never, literally never. I know specifically back in those early days, there would be times when it was a question of, could I hold off paying the

printer and all the other marketing things that we were doing before I got my first sales? Not someone I said I got my first sales. Could I hold off the people that actually owned the inventory until I got enough sales to be able to pay them? And there was a specific time really twice a year, and that still happens about twice a year. Cash gets really, really tight. And so I would say, you know, anybody that is constantly paranoid about, is this the misstep that's going to do me in, is not being vigilant enough. Or they have too much money. I don't know which. And then in 1993, you became profitable for the first time. Would you say that was sort of the turning point for Title IX from a financial perspective?

And you're nodding yes. If so, what started going right? What did you start doing that allows you to reach that point? You know, I always say just like fail faster to succeed sooner. I mean, we didn't have enough failure. It took us four years of screwing things up to find the things that worked. You know, we found the right customers. It wasn't all the people, but we narrowed in on some places where we could advertise

and market that really worked with us. I figured out how to manage inventory, managing cash flow, marketing, and those tricks, you know, you learn those, but you have to keep relearning them, right? I mean, like at the beginning, you have to learn all the things all at once. Once you get started, it's more like conducting a symphony, I think. It's like you get the woodwinds right, and then you got to go over and work with the strings, and then by the time you get back around, the woodwinds are screwing up again i mean i think once you get it going usually not everything screws up at once so that that's helpful we'll be right back Thank you. finances, marketing is the last thing on your mind. But if customers don't know about you, the rest of it doesn't really matter. Luckily, there's Constant Contact. Constant Contact's

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Go to ConstantContact.ca and start your free trial today. Go to ConstantContact.ca for your free trial. ConstantContact.ca for your free trial. Constant Contact.ca. Support for Prop G comes from NerdWallet. If you're a listener of the show, you know business, and if you're looking for a resource to find financial products that can help you make smart financial decisions, turn to the nerds at NerdWallet. Not only have they spent thousands of hours researching and reviewing over 1,300 financial products, but they have the tools you need to make smarter decisions. Looking for a credit card? At NerdWallet, you can go beyond the basic comparisons, filter for the features that

matter to you, and read in-depth reviews. Ready to choose a high-yield savings account? Get access to exclusive deals and compare rates, bonuses, and more. House hunting? View today's top mortgage rates for your home sweet home. Make the Nerds your go-to resource for smart financial decisions. Head to nerdwallet.com slash learn more. NerdWallet, finance smarter. NerdWallet Compare Incorporated NMLS 1617539. We're back with First Time Founders. When we last spoke, one of the things you were talking about in terms of your business strategy was this idea of base hits versus home runs. And you basically said to me and elsewhere

that Title IX actually doesn't go for home runs. You try to optimize for base hits. Could you take us through your thinking there and what that means to you? Well, it's really hard, right? Because everybody wants the unicorn. Everybody wants the home run, right? Those are the people that are most highly compensated as the home run hitters. We just want to stay in the game.

You know, you show me anybody that's hitting a lot of home runs, I'm going to show you somebody that struck out an awful lot. And when you strike out, you're sitting in the dugout. You're not playing. You're not learning. You're not learning how to run the bases. You're not, you're learning nothing. I don't want huge failures. I want people's failures to scale with their expertise. I should be making bigger mistakes today than I did 25 years ago, but I don't want to make any game on for mistakes. So that's what I would say. I mean, those guys like, we're just going to make one heap of all our winnings

and risk it on one turn of pitch and toss. That is just not what we're doing. We're going to stay in the game, get lots of learnings, experiment a lot, fail quickly, give more resources to the things that work, and let the other stuff die on the fan. Yeah, which is exactly what you've done. I mean, in business for 30 years, $100 million in sales per year, 300 employees. It's incredible. Was that the game plan from the very beginning? Because it's just a very mature approach and you were, you know, young founder at the time and the most young founders I know are just obsessed with the

home run. Is that something that you knew from the get-go or did you kind of slowly learn that over time? Well, you know, it's funny. I mean, I remember, I can remember even conversations I had like, you know, I went down to the office depot and bought like a landline two-line phone. And a buddy of mine who was starting a business at the same time, also an apparel business, he put in a whole phone system. You know, I mean, we were doing basically the same thing, but he was just so much more confident. He's like, you know, hiring people and his, his first foray into it was no more successful than mine, but he was done, you know, cause he'd spent all this money. And so, so I'd say for me, I've always been fairly pragmatic, very optimistic. I always think it's going to work.

But I think there's part of me that also knows, and if it doesn't work, here's my plan B, plan C, plan D. A buddy of mine, the founder of Cliff Bar, we talk every once in a while, Gary Erickson. You know, everybody's always trying to tell you the three sort of characteristics of a successful entrepreneur. Everybody's got their opinions about that. So we do every week on this podcast. Well, and you know. This is what you have to be. And you know what?

Gary's is actually, he's the only one who I think got it right. His thing is there are three characteristics. Never give up. Never give up. Never give up. And I think that's just it and so you have to put yourself in a position that someone doesn't give up for you successful entrepreneurs they can be extroverts they can be introverts um they can be highly quantitative they can be great

sales people they can be terrible sales people but boy they have got to be able to stick through it even when they feel like quitting. Just going back to base hits versus home runs, one of the things you've also said is that by taking that strategy, you're recognizing that you're never going to win a grand slam. In other words, you recognize you're not going to be the next Nike or the next Adidas, and you're okay with that. Which, you know, I love. It sort of takes the stakes down a little bit in a way. But describe why you think that is a good strategy for you.

Why does that make sense for you to say, okay, we're not going to be the Nike? And why do you think that would make sense for other entrepreneurs who are starting their own businesses? The first thing is I think we're fairly limited when we think about the financial statements, a P&L, a cash flow, a balance sheet. Not all things that count can be counted. So I am very ambitious. But it's not counted the way venture capitalists might count that. I am very ambitious about the change I want to see in the world, the way business is done, the way women interact with business. I mean, you talk to anybody in our business, it's like if we're doing something and we've achieved it,

then I'm like, here's the next thing, here's the next thing. But they're not things that you're going to write about in the Wall Street Journal. They're like, are we doing a good job of developing the next generation of women executives, the next generation of women entrepreneurs? How are we helping other women get access to capital? You know, I'm not going to get rich in money by that, but I would say I'll take the richness of fulfillment. And I think just people are motivated by different things. My thing has always been about the team. You know, I play team sports. I want to play on a team where everybody has a sort of unanimity of purpose and that we are all made better by each other's presence and that we'll make our communities better

and we're going to make money. But damn, I mean, how much money do you need, right? I mean, and I guess for me, that's what I would ask is these measuring sticks that we use to decide whether we're successful if we've hit a grand slam home run. I feel like I have hit a grand slam home run, and I think that grand slam home run is not for other people to judge,

but for me to judge. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think another way of putting this is that your mission isn't just to maximize shareholder value, basically. It sounds like you have more missions to this company. What's interesting, though, is if you have shareholders, you must maximize shareholder value. But this is kind of the big thing,

and which is why I think I'm so glad to have you on. I think you're the first bootstrap company that we've had on this podcast. You own 100% of the company. You've never raised any venture funding. This is your company and yours alone. Therefore, you get to choose what to do with it. And that includes the missions that you want to pursue. Or running it into the ground. I mean, it could be both. Or quit. Exactly. It's yours. Take us through your decision process there. Why have you never gone out and raised money? I would say there are two reasons.

Money is kind of easy to find, honestly. You got to bring more than money to the table. If you want a share in this business, and this is sort of how we look when we make small investments in other women-led companies. I'm like, can I help them with more than just a check? Can we help them with more than just a check? So money by itself is just kind of dumb. And so I never really have found someone who I felt like brought money and was equally invested in sort of the business. And then the second reason is, you know, that a woman can be rich or she can be queen, you know, and for me, I think I choose queen. And that is having control because the fact is,

if you want something done, if you want a decision on something, the people who are making that decision are in the building and they're working shoulder to shoulder with you. The other thing that I like about it, I have sat on some boards and I see how it goes awry, is clarity of vision. You know, it never gets watered down. Now, it could be a good thing, could be a bad thing. You know, in those first four years, I am sure if I'd had investors and they had watched our performance, they would have been like, oh my gosh, what a disaster. This is never going to work. And that would have, as even a 27-year-old, that would have shaken me. You know, people can get you off track pretty easily because you're young and you don't have that confidence. So I guess for me,

the thing about bootstrapping is the business will grow as you grow. I mean, and that's probably the third thing, that the business will grow as you grow. There are things that I am doing now with the business that there's just no way I could have figured out when I was 27 or even 37, you know? So I think it's sort of like intelligent scaling would be that third thing. You know, you can't scale faster than your ability to grow it. Now, those, all three of those things, there are downsides to them. Anybody on the venture side of things

would be able to blow those arguments out of the way about like how bad those things are too. But for me, I just don't know why people do it a different way, but clearly, clearly I'm in the minority. Well, I don't know if you are in the minority. I think, I just think that we don't, those companies get less attention because Well, I don't know if you are in the minority. I just think that we don't, those companies get less attention because, probably because they don't have millions of

dollars funding their marketing campaigns. The marketing. Like, I know these guys' numbers, right? I know how much they're spending per click. I know they can't make that math work. It's just, can they raise money fast enough? And so I think there is like, yes, you want to have your head up, but on the other hand, you want to have your head down because there are a lot of people doing stupid things with money. We'll be right back after the break. We're back with First Time Founders. You have children. You had your children in the middle of running this company. How did you deal with raising a family and at the same time building a successful business?

Well, it's not without compromise. I mean, you can't have it all. Men in my generation came as close to having it all as anybody, but not your generation. And I think that's what you have to start with is that you can't have it all. You know, people talk about work-life balance. I mean, that's just kind of BS. I don't believe it. If you want to do something really great, you are inherently imbalanced. You just have to dig in. But what I would say about that is that that imbalance may be, wow, I really need to dig in on my family right now. There are some things going on here

where work is going to kind of drop off a little bit. And family, I want to do a really great job of caring for my parents in their last years. I just want to be really good at that. That takes time. You know, one of the choices I made is when we were growing to a certain point, we decided we wanted to open retail stores. And all of our customers, the vast majority of our customers are on the East Coast. And I just said, you know, we're not going to open a store past the Rockies. You know, because I want to be able to fly there. If something blows up, I want to be able to get there and get back in time for dinner. Now, I gave up something. You gave up world domination, but I also got something.

And there have been other times where I'm just like, wow, work is hell right now. And I'm sorry, but I'm not going to be the best mom ever. And I'm going to try not to feel bad about that any more than I feel bad when I'm not giving everything I need to give to work because that's just the way life is. So it's not, there's just different chapters. And I think that's the most important thing that both men and women coming up can learn.

It's like how you are now is how you are right now. And as long as you continue to sort of ride that seesaw of balance and that, you know, it's never sitting here, but it's also never sitting here or you're just kind of constantly going back and forth. And I think that's what will allow us to clear up some of this pay gap is when both men and women recognize that that doesn't work, that kind of unrelenting drive to one thing, I think it's great. But then in the end, I think that one thing is going to disappoint. I think it's going to disappoint because you gave everything for that one thing.

And nothing is worth that. There are obviously all these societal issues which make life harder for working women, but I'd love to get your take on what women can do for themselves today, right now, in spite of all of those issues that can better their careers and maybe improve their overall work trajectories. One of the biggest ones that I encourage everybody to do is getting comfortable acting without all the information. You know, I see it over and over again. By acting, I mean as simple as, okay, I haven't got the thought entirely thought through, but I'm still going to lean in here and weigh in on whatever topic

is being talked about. Like dudes, man, they are super comfortable talking about all the things they don't know a damn thing about. I mean, they're words for me. I'm just like, oh really? You're going to teach me how to hit a forehand. I've been playing tennis for 40 years and you've got some tips for me. Great. I don't know what you're talking about. The flip side is also bad. And that is waiting until you have all the data in order to act or to speak. And I would say for women, that is something we can control. I work with my daughter on it. It's so interesting talking to her.

She's like, yeah, I'll have all my arguments marshaled. And then the subject will have changed. I'm like, well, just bring it back. You can just say like, oh, that thing that we were talking about, I have one more point I wanted to add. And it's okay. People do it all the time. But again, we compare our insides with other people's outsides. They're like, oh, that thing has already moved on. Well, maybe it has, or maybe it hasn't. So for me, this is the number one thing with women. It's not lean in. It's sort of solving that problem of why am I not leaning in? I'm not leaning in because I don't have every bit of information I think I need in order to act. And sort of the corollary to that is to take small risks all the time. And then you will get better at taking the big risks.

Because with risk comes reward. That's where the compounding comes in. I can tell you almost without exception, if I'm offering a promotion to a dude, I guess about damn time, you know, whereas women are like, ah, I don't know. Do you think I can do it? Because they've already thought of all the things about the job that they don't know how to do, but they don't realize, again, that's their insides. It's also everybody else's insights. I mean, for someone who's lived through probably 40 years of the greatest change in women's station in life, there's still a long way to go. There's great opportunity out there, but there is no opportunity if you are not willing to act without all the information, take some risk, and stop conflating your insides with other people's outsides. Those three things are killers. Yeah, I think the reason I'm sitting in this chair on this podcast is because I was, for whatever reason, willing to say and do things without all the information and probably when I wasn't supposed to. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. Yeah. Raise your hand. Like if somebody wants

something, raise your hand, raise your hand. What piece of advice would you have given to your former self when you started the company back in 1989? I think I'd probably say it's a marathon, not a sprint. You know, I think that's probably it. It's a marathon, not a sprint. And pace yourself accordingly. And I also know that if someone had told me that, I would have told them they were crazy. It is a damn sprint, and I got to get going right now. Well, that's great.

I really appreciate your time, Missy. Missy is the founder and CEO of Title IX, a women's sportswear company. Thank you so much for joining us. I really appreciate what you're doing. Thank you. And I'm looking forward to hearing more women on your podcast. That needs to be in there. We're working on it. I can help you anytime. Please do. Our producer is Claire Miller. Our associate producer is Alison Weiss.

And our engineer is Benjamin Spencer. Jason Stavis and Catherine Dillon are our executive producers. Thank you for listening to First Time Founders from the Vox Media Podcast Network. Tune in tomorrow for Prof G Markets. Thank you.