The cowards never started and the weak died along the way—that leaves us.
At 24, Phil Knight had a crazy idea based on a paper he wrote while enrolled as a student at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. In the paper, he asked the following question: “Can Japanese Sports Shoes Do to German Sports Shoes What Japanese Cameras Did to German Cameras?”. After a trip around the world, he decided to setup Blue Ribbon Sports (later Nike) with the goal of importing high-quality, low-cost running shoes from Japan. With that humble beginning, Nike is today the world’s largest supplier of athletic shoes and apparel and with revenue of $44.5 billion in its fiscal year 2021 (ending May 31, 2021). 1
“Can Japanese Sports Shoes Do to German Sports Shoes What Japanese Cameras Did to German Cameras?”