He borrowed $50 from his father.

Sold shoes out of the trunk of his car.

Got dropped by two banks.

Got sued by his own supplier.

Got hit with a $25 million government bill he couldn't pay.

Today his company is worth $100 billion.

And you've definitely got a pair of his shoes in your closet.

Philip Knight was born in 1938 in Portland, Oregon.

His father ran a newspaper.

When Phil asked him for a summer job his father said no.

Go find your own work.

So Phil ran seven miles every morning to the rival newspaper.

Got himself hired.

That was Phil Knight at 18.

Already refusing to accept no as a final answer.

He ran track at the University of Oregon under a legendary coach named Bill Bowerman.

Bowerman was obsessed with one thing.

Making shoes lighter.

He believed that every ounce you removed from a runner's shoe was like removing a pound of weight from their body over the course of a race.

He would cut apart his runners' shoes and rebuild them by hand.

Looking for fractions of ounces.

Phil watched and filed it away.

He went to Stanford Business School.

In a class about small businesses he wrote a paper that would change his life.

The paper asked one question.

Could Japanese shoe manufacturers do to German shoe manufacturers what Japanese camera makers had done to German camera makers?

In other words — could cheaper, high quality Japanese production destroy the German stranglehold on the athletic shoe market?

Adidas owned the world in 1962.

Phil Knight wrote a paper in a classroom saying they didn't have to.

Then he decided to prove it.

He borrowed $50 from his father.

Flew to Japan.

Walked into the Onitsuka Tiger shoe factory.

Told them he represented a major American distribution company.

He had no company.

He had $50 and an idea.

The Japanese executives asked what his company was called.

Phil Knight looked around the room desperately.

And said the first thing that came to his mind.

Blue Ribbon Sports.

They shook hands on a deal.

Blue Ribbon Sports didn't exist an hour ago.

Now it had exclusive rights to sell Japanese Tiger shoes across the entire United States.

He came home and started selling shoes out of the trunk of his green Plymouth Valiant at track meets across the Pacific Northwest.

Just Phil. His car. And a box of shoes.

Sales were $8,000 in year one.

Then $16,000.

Then $34,000.

Then $84,000.

Doubling every single year.

But banks wouldn't lend him money.

Every time sales doubled Phil needed more inventory.

More inventory meant more cash.

And the banks kept saying no.

Two banks dropped him as a customer entirely.

He was perpetually on the edge of collapse.

Payroll would come due with nothing in the account.

Suppliers threatening to cut him off.

He described those years as operating in a constant state of near death.

One wrong move away from bankruptcy.

Every. Single. Day.

For eighteen years.

Then Onitsuka Tiger tried to replace him.

They had watched Blue Ribbon grow from nothing to a serious operation and decided they wanted a bigger American distributor.

They were going to cut Phil out of the business he had built from $50 and a trunk full of shoes.

Phil Knight could have accepted it.

He had no money to fight back.

No manufacturer. No brand. No leverage.

He had nothing.

So he did something that should have been impossible.

He started his own shoe company.

From scratch.

He needed a logo.

He paid a graphic design student named Carolyn Davidson $35 to design it.

She came back with a simple curved shape.

Phil looked at it and said he didn't love it.

But he didn't have time to find anything better.

The swoosh was born.

For $35.

Today that logo is worth billions of dollars.

He needed a name.

His first employee Jeff Johnson woke up from a dream one night with one word in his head.

Nike.

The Greek goddess of victory.

Phil didn't love that either.

But again — no time.

Nike it was.

In 1972 Nike launched at the US Olympic Trials.

Phil announced that four of the top seven finishers had worn Nikes.

The first three had actually worn Adidas.

Phil Knight didn't care.

He was building a story.

And nobody builds a story by telling people you came third.

Then the US government came for him.

A letter arrived demanding Nike pay $25 million in import duties.

Twenty five million dollars.

Nike didn't have $25 million.

Nike barely had enough to make payroll.

The government claimed Nike owed taxes on every shoe manufactured outside America.

The fight nearly killed the company.

Three years of legal battles.

Three years of not knowing if everything he had built would be seized by his own government.

They settled for $9 million.

Phil called it an absolute war.

He survived it.

Then came Michael Jordan.

In 1984 a Nike executive pushed Phil to sign a rookie NBA player to an endorsement deal.

Phil wasn't interested in basketball.

Nike was a running shoe company.

He reluctantly agreed to meet the rookie.

His name was Michael Jordan.

Nike signed him for $500,000 a year plus royalties.

Unheard of money for a rookie who had never played an NBA game.

The NBA banned the original Air Jordans immediately.

Said they violated uniform color rules.

Nike paid Jordan's $5,000 per game fine every single time he wore them.

And turned the ban into the greatest marketing campaign in sports history.

The shoes that were too dangerous for the NBA.

Every kid on every playground in America had to have them.

Air Jordan generated $126 million in its first year.

Today the Jordan brand alone generates over $5 billion annually.

From one reluctant meeting with a rookie basketball player.

Phil Knight took Nike public in 1980.

On that day he was worth $178 million.

His first employee was worth $6 million.

Today Nike is worth over $100 billion.

The most recognized sports brand on the face of the earth.

Built by a man who borrowed $50 from his father.

Who made up a company name on the spot in a Japanese boardroom.

Who paid $35 for the most valuable logo in sports history.

Who operated on the edge of bankruptcy for eighteen straight years.

Who got sued by his supplier, dropped by his banks and hunted by his own government.

And refused to quit through every single moment of it.

The swoosh on your shoes right now started in the trunk of a green Plymouth Valiant at a track meet in Oregon.

Sold by one man with $50 and an obsession.

Just do it wasn't just a slogan.

It was the only strategy that ever worked.

Phil Knight’s memoir “Shoe Dog” is a very good read. Anyone involved with trying to grow any business would benefit from reading it.

My office was very close to Nike’s offices before they moved to their current headquarters. There was a restaurant/bar nearby that I would sometimes run into their employees, and ran into a few that were celebrating just after Jordan had signed.

I don’t think any of them ever imagined the long term impact it would have on the Company at that moment.