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David Abeles

David Abeles

CEO of TaylorMade-Adidas

Sep 1, 2026

56:34
How do you look at them? Do you look at them and say, wow, they did things with very little technological advances or wow, the technology that exists today is really helping the golfers?
56:49
Yeah, like technology and innovation is a constant evolution, right? I mean, one advancement leads to the next advancement.
56:58
Then you refine that advancement.
56:59
It leads you to the next advancement.
57:01
And so even, you know, when I look at the history of the game and you go back as far as hickory shafts to steel, and then you can go from persimmon and laminated woods to the first metalwood in 1979 from Gary Adams, who founded TaylorMade, and then the progression from a metalwood to ultra-thin cast titanium, which was the 300 series from TaylorMade, if you remember that, where there's three different driver heads with different launch conditions because not every player plays the same way.
57:27
So whether you were Jack Nicklaus or Arnold Palmer or Lee Trevino, they were in innovation cycles.
57:33
They just weren't perhaps as advanced then as they are now.

9 MINS LATER

67:02
But I'm kind of interested in the origin story.
RiggsHOST
41:58
Uh, h- how important is that, and what does that mean to you guys as a company?
42:03
Yeah, it's a great question.
42:04
You know, I- I've been fortunate, gents, to be in my role here as the CEO of the company now.
42:09
I'm coming into my 12th year.
42:11
Next year, but...
42:12
Sorry, so I'm finishing up 11 into 12.
42:15
And when we started this journey, we, we built a new management team here back in 2015, and we took a very, very honest look at our company, the things that we had done well historically, the things that we wanted to improve upon.

13 MINS LATER

speaker_11UNKNOWN
55:27
We do that all the time

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