Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike
“Shoe Dog, another great inspirational one.”
Why it is worth your time
Shoe Dog is Phil Knight's 2016 memoir of building Nike. It starts in 1962, when Knight, a Stanford MBA and former Oregon runner, borrowed $50 from his father to import Japanese running shoes, and ends with the company's 1980 public offering. Most of it covers the years of bank trouble, cash shortages and the fight with the Japanese supplier. Jason put it on his January 2019 list of 10 biographies, where he argued that outsiders should read how insiders got there, and brought it up again on TWiST in May 2020 as an inspirational one. He was a Brooklyn kid who became an angel investor, so founder stories of this kind are his main genre. It suits founders who want a record of how long a company can stay close to failure. The caveat is that it is Knight's own memoir and stops at the 1980 IPO, so the modern Nike is absent.
