Blake Mycoskie: Founding TOMS Shoes, Battling Depression, and Starting Over

I wish we had time to talk about all your companies.

For listeners, um, that don't know your whole story, your first business was in college doing laundry at multiple universities.

You started a cable news channel.

Uh, you started a driver's ed business.

Which ones am I forgetting?

I started an all-reality cable channel.

I was the youngest person next to Ted Turner, who started CNN, to ever start a cable network.

And so I started a cable network.

Well, unfortunately, it went out of business.

You know, I know we're gonna get deep into it and, and we can...

And this I think is relevant 'cause I've been having to do a lot more negotiating in the past two years than maybe in the last ten.

Because in the last eighteen months, I've co-founded four companies and started a podcast.

It's like I went from nothing for seven years to, like, busier than I've ever been in my life, and, uh, and I'm loving it.

But it has had me to start, you know, thinking about negotiations and business and you know, how I think about doing things maybe differently than I did when I started Toms.

Excellent.

Well, we're gonna get into the latter part of your journey.

You know, as you're saying that, I'm thinking writers get writer's block.

You actually had entrepreneur's block.

You had a seven-year period, no ideas were coming.

We're gonna talk about why in a minute.

But, um, look, you're a public figure with Toms.

It was a wild success, but it didn't start with a business plan.

Um, you were on a trip down in Argentina, and one of the things I say to my students when they ask me, "How do I figure out what I'm passionate about? How do I figure out what my career should be?" I say, "Do the things that you care about and you're gonna meet people, you might find co-founders, you might get an idea." You were down in Argentina, um, I think, you know, at a polo camp of all things.

Yeah.

And you got the idea.