Nike ($NKE) podcast mentions
They hold companies accountable because they have the highest expectation for the companies that they are fans of, whether it's Apple, Nike, Honda, it doesn't really matter the market. Fans are passionate, and passion means you care. And so then you hold people accountable to hold the standards upon which you are accustomed. And that rolls right into today's topic. We're going to just really, before we even get to the Honda thing, we need to like kind of backtrack a second on how we got here. So I want to go through and we'll just talk for just a brief moment about something we've already talked about before, but, but that's kind of how we got here is Toyota and its situation, right? We did a whole DriveCast episode about this in June.
Joel Feder · The Drivecast · Honda doesn't want to be the next Toyota · 2026-09-16So they diversify away from human capital risk constantly by having co-heads of their departments. Networks, you know, Fox has demonstrated they don't have key— Tucker Carlson was the biggest person in media, and when he got too big for his britches, they said, fuck you, it's the platform, not you. We've diversified away from key man risk. So I'm constantly thinking about, one, how you diversify your revenue stream. We have 50 advertisers, not one. That was the biggest problem at L2 is at one point in the early years, I think P&G, Nike, and LVMH were 40% of our revenues. That's— acquirers don't like to see that. They want to see diversity of revenue streams and a diversity of geography and also a diversity away from human capital risk. Have we managed to do that at PropG? Probably not. But you can still create enterprise value with employment agreements and showing that you have a platform to diversify away. I have been trying to do this for 2 or 3 years now. I recognize that 2 or 3 years ago, there was real enterprise value here that we could grow.
Scott Galloway · The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway · The $40 Trillion National Debt, and the Trade-Offs of Living With Your Parents · 2026-09-16Companies in search of new sources of profit jump into promising emerging businesses. If you're in AI, pivot to blueberries. That's what happened. Using inexpensive state-backed financing to scale up and sometimes play fast and loose with intellectual property regulations. This quickly causes gluts crashing prices. Such cycles of competition are known in China as involution, and they have transformed the country from a golden goose into a major headache for companies, including Nike and Starbucks. Driscoll's has filed more than 20 lawsuits against companies in China, some of which it has said took its proprietary blueberry plants, propagated them, and sold them to rival growers. Some Western fruit companies worked with private investigators who went undercover at plant nurseries posing as traders or farmers. Dream job.
John Coogan · TBPN · High Interest Rate Phenomenon, Driscoll's China Bet Backfires, Who Votes on AI Safety? | Stephen Colbert & Josh Kline, Jim VandeHei, Steve Menneto, Matthew Wilson, Rune Kvist, Tyler Bahl, James Cadwallader · 2026-09-15On consumer, we got downgrades of Dick's, Nike, VF Corp., Evercore cuts numbers, Kraft Campbell's, Conagra.
Carl Quintanilla · Squawk on the Street · 9AM HOUR: AI Leaders Call For Slowdown, Chips Slide, OpenAI's Altman Rules Out 2026 IPO 9/14/26 · 2026-09-14I mean, this is just marking opinion to market. I would be more inclined to see it as part of a capitulation process by the sell side than it is new information that the stocks did not recognize before. We've already got the dividend cuts. We've already gotten the, you know, the sense that, you know, Nike back to where it was 12, 13 years ago. So I don't know. It's certainly not the case that the consumer is about to pick up a lot of momentum and sort of rescue the market or anything like that. But when it comes to the stocks, they've already been just such persistent underperformers that I feel like it's a little more sort of telling the market what it was already doing.
Mike Santoli · Squawk on the Street · 9AM HOUR: AI Leaders Call For Slowdown, Chips Slide, OpenAI's Altman Rules Out 2026 IPO 9/14/26 · 2026-09-14Uh, yeah, nothing's— I did— yeah, nothing. They look at data, they look at data more from a signals base. It's not addressable, so they can't ask us to target specific users and send messages on their behalf. They can't address those users. We kind of keep it at the IP range. So what we do know for their buyer intent data is that people at Nike, for example, are researching your product right now, which you would see, wow, that's in pipeline for us. We're literally at the finish line. That becomes strategic. Or a lot of people from Nike are researching your competitor right now, but we can't tell you who it is at Nike, not at a department, not at an individual level, because that's where you would kind of cross over.
Tim Sanders · Eye On A.I. · The Hidden Algorithm That Decides Which Software AI Will Recommend | Tim Sanders, G2 · 2026-09-14Yep. That year is a big year for the company because the Olympics come to Atlanta, to their hometown, and they see it as the perfect moment to really put their foot on the gas on national advertising, becoming a big brand. So they become a major Olympic sponsor, like right up there with Visa and Coca-Cola and Nike.
David Rosenthal · Acquired · Home Depot · 2026-09-14All right, Nike. The 60-year-old iconic American brand, Just Do It, just got booted out of the S&P 100. They had been in the stock index, Saks, for 18 straight years, being replaced by— hey, shout out to our friend Nikesh, Palo Alto Networks. Congratulations to, uh, Falham Yuth and Nikesh. A little history here, they went public in 1980 with 50% share of U.S. athletic shoe market. Dominant player. The Coca-Cola of sneakers. Uh, and they changed things obviously forever with Air Jordans in '85. They did the iconic Just Do It campaign in 1988. Peak market cap in 2021 was $264 billion. Peak revenue, uh, $51 billion in 2024. Since then, revenues dropped a bit, 10%. In 2020, John Donahoe became CEO, pushed an aggressive direct-to-consumer strategy. Basically alienating all the retail partners who had helped build Nike and willingly remove those sneakers from the stores. That made brands like Hoka and On Running, that every VC is obligated to wear the white ones to any speaking gigs they have, China sales down 30%, 8 straight quarters of decline, losing share specifically to Chinese brands, Anta and Li-Ning, Uh, if you're Chinese, you probably know those. Nike's marketing also went— and this might feed some people's narratives— super woke, and they started backing political movements and putting robust people, Sachs, on billboards. I didn't get asked, but, uh, this kind of killed the entire brand. Stock down 80% from its peak. Sachs, $200 billion. Eviscerated. What's your take here? I don't know if the audience can guess.
Jason Calacanis · All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg · AI Kills Everybody or Doomer Psyop? OpenAI's Math Breakthrough, Nike's $200B Collapse · 2026-09-11I mean, this is the millionth example of go woke, go broke. Nike was a brand that stood for great athletes, for amazing performance, for victory. I mean, isn't Nike the goddess of victory? Yeah. And they built their brand on GOATs like Michael Jordan and great athletes like that. Many different sectors, men and women of, you know, all different races. There wasn't a need to like do all this woke stuff where now all of a sudden they're showing people you don't know.
David Sacks · All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg · AI Kills Everybody or Doomer Psyop? OpenAI's Math Breakthrough, Nike's $200B Collapse · 2026-09-11well, but it's not, it's not even about that. It's just like, this person isn't even an athlete. Like, who is this person? And what is the message? Like, own the floor? It used to be just do it, you know? And then they got Dylan Mulvaney in an ad. You know, like the whole transit. Yeah, this is like the Bud Light case. So you had the woke stuff, then you have the other piece of it, which is this like consulting approach where new CEO comes in and we know John Donahoe, nice guy, you know, central casting, he looks like a CEO, but it's like a lot of change for change's sake, it seems like, where he comes in and direct-to-consumer is the new hotness. So they blow up all their retail operations, all their retail relationships. They had all these stores that had shelf space for Nike, and now that goes to competitors who then took a huge amount of market share. And then the other thing I think they did is they did a reorg where they used to have departments in the company that were based on sports. So there's like a basketball division and football and tennis, swimming, so on, swimming. And they like reorg that to be, I think, men, women's, and kids. So like, why would you do that? I just— I don't get it.
David Sacks · All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg · AI Kills Everybody or Doomer Psyop? OpenAI's Math Breakthrough, Nike's $200B Collapse · 2026-09-11It's working. You're searching. Yeah, going direct— they had a very clear model here, Chamath. Clicks and bricks, right? Like, you could go to a brick-and-mortar store, have a great experience trying these shoes on, running around the store, working with people who help runners pick the right shoes. And it's nice to be able to buy direct. I have to say, the Nike app's a delightful app. But why would they kill the retail channel? Of all things and piss off those folks who were their big advocates?
Jason Calacanis · All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg · AI Kills Everybody or Doomer Psyop? OpenAI's Math Breakthrough, Nike's $200B Collapse · 2026-09-11If I've learned anything in almost 30 years of business, you have to have a very clear north star and stick to it. Mm-hmm. And at least when I was growing up, Nike's north star was very clear to me, which was mastery and excellence embodied through athletics. That was it. I would see Michael Jordan and I saw mastery and excellence. I would see Tiger Woods, mastery and excellence. I would see Serena Vina Williams, mastery and excellence. Pete Sampras, you name it, and it was mastery and excellence. And somewhere along the way, mastery and excellence became, um, too traditional looking. And so they, they went away from things that were just nothing to be associated with mastery or excellence. I don't aspire to be a fat person. Never have, never will. I aspire to be Michael Jordan, always have, always will. I just think it's as basic as that. You're not going to buy the clothes of a brand that you don't aspire to be like by wearing those clothes or wearing those shoes. I think as long as you can recenter around this idea that we're not here to make people feel better about themselves, our success was when people imbued their desires of getting better through the lenses of these people that were incredible. That's aspirational. Being, being inspired by somebody and wanting to be somebody better than yourself is a good thing. We should not shame that. It is good. It's how we all get better. And there are incredible athletes who give up their entire lives to master something. And I think that Nike should own that and they should be proud of that. And so if they do that, all the other details will make sense. How do you sell? Sell it everywhere because everybody will want it. What do you sell? To everybody because everybody will want it. But if you don't get the North Star right, you're going to miss out. And I think the North Star was clear: excellence and mastery.
Chamath Palihapitiya · All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg · AI Kills Everybody or Doomer Psyop? OpenAI's Math Breakthrough, Nike's $200B Collapse · 2026-09-11Well, I mean, those— like, entrepreneurship's a meritocracy, so you either do it or you don't. But in the case of this business, I think what they also lost was, and it, and it didn't just come through in the brand. I used to buy Nike. Mm-hmm. All the shoes I owned were Nike. It's all I bought. Me too. I like my brands. I like to go to 'em. You know what happened over time? 100%. It wasn't, it wasn't that the ads went bad. It wasn't that the ordering was bad. The product started to suck. The shoes literally fell apart in like 6 weeks. They were flimsy. They didn't have the same quality that they used to have. I could tell. That the product started to suck. So one day I went down to my REI store next to the place where I get salads. I stopped in, I tried on a pair of Brooks, I bought the Brooks, and I started wearing the Brooks. This is the Speedwalking 900s you got? The Speedwalking 900s are these Brooks shoes. That's unacceptable. Great product. They, they last forever. I know they're durable.
David Friedberg · All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg · AI Kills Everybody or Doomer Psyop? OpenAI's Math Breakthrough, Nike's $200B Collapse · 2026-09-11I actually got them for running because When I started running on the Nikes, I got these knee problems because I'm getting old. The Brooks are awesome. You just feel great.
David Friedberg · All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg · AI Kills Everybody or Doomer Psyop? OpenAI's Math Breakthrough, Nike's $200B Collapse · 2026-09-11I moved to Ons for one reason because I held on to Nike forever. Right. I was like a Nike diehard.
Chamath Palihapitiya · All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg · AI Kills Everybody or Doomer Psyop? OpenAI's Math Breakthrough, Nike's $200B Collapse · 2026-09-11