Hi everyone, I'm Katie Currett and welcome to next question.

Today we get a look inside one of the most comfortable, sustainable, and surprising

innovations in shoes. The wool sneaker from All Birds, with the Kiwi who invented them.

The idea was weird and it was weird and weird in a positive way.

Tim Brown, along with his co-founder and co-CEO Joey Zwollinger,

launched All Birds in 2016 as a little direct to consumer shoe company. Tim was the creative

designer for New Zealand, Joey, the analytical engineer from San Francisco. Both happened to be

soccer players and neither had any experience in footwear. Largely this was going to succeed or

fail, at least in the first instance by how strong that partnership was and entrepreneurial

thing is like another marriage, enormous pressure, not to mention the financial risk there is also

the public risk of something just being bad. And yet less than four years later, All Birds is a

$1.4 billion company with retail stores around the world and big plans to expand into other fashion

realms. So my next question, how did All Birds become the little shoe company that could?

I recently had the chance to interview Tim Brown for our very first next question live,

an intimate innovation focus series in front of a live audience in New York City.

The last time I saw you interviewed Cheryl Sandberg on stage and it was pretty intense.

Interviews I was a little nervous so let's do a friendly. Don't worry, no, I think you're not in

the hot seat like Facebook was. I went pretty easy on Tim. We started with his background.

He grew up in Wellington, New Zealand but came to the States for college, attending the University

of Cincinnati for design. Eventually he went to the London School of Economics. But what's

unique about Tim's background is that he spent the better part of his 20s as a professional athlete.

When the rest of his friends were grinding away in offices, Tim was on the field playing soccer

...