Building Zipp with Andy Ording & Josh

Episode transcript: 

Josh (01:08.729)
All right, here, let me get started. All right, Marginal Gains listeners, we have a super exciting one today, one that I feel remiss it's taken this many years and 100 episodes to get to, although I think partly I've been doing the training to get to this particular episode. today I have with me my friend and my mentor, former owner of Zip, Andy Ording. Andy, it's so awesome to have you on the show.

Andy Ording (01:39.01)
Thank you for having me. Thanks for the invite. And I've listened to you a lot. I've listened to you and Heidi and the gang a lot. So it's fun to be here.

Josh (01:43.322)
It's fun. It is fun that I go places and people are like, I feel like I know you from your voice. And then you talk to friends like you on this. it's like, we do actually know each other. It doesn't always work out that way. So but yeah. So, know, Andy, for those of who don't know, Andy owned Zip from the time that I got there until it was sold to Sram. He and I have.

Andy Ording (01:59.199)
Yeah, that's right.

Josh (02:12.451)
traveled the world together sharing some of the worst hotel rooms known to man and the worst back of the plane seats and the worst rental cars and God knows whatever else and and then now Andy is my partner in Silke and he invested in Silke to help get it off the ground actually and he traveled to Italy with me to buy the trademark from Claudio so we yeah we have a lot a lot of history together but we'll get to that

Andy Ording (02:23.373)
to do.

Josh (02:42.335)
in a minute. let's start off with you. Obviously, our listeners can hear your accent. You are not from Indiana originally. so start us off with your amazing, I think, of origin story and how you got to Indiana and to Zip.

Andy Ording (03:06.114)
Yeah. Well, it's hard to believe if you just look at points in space. But anyway, was born in Zambia and my dad was a civil engineer after the war. came back to South Africa, he was in the second world war, came back to South Africa and was essentially building, doing construction projects all over Africa. Whoever had money in those days at that time anyway, it was mostly the mining organizations. so

So my dad was sort of roped in to build bridges over rivers. And that's how we ended up. have two sisters. We're all born in completely different places because wherever the work was, wherever the next bridge had to be done, we moved and there's photos of us getting bathed in a wheelbarrow in the middle of absolutely nowhere. And that's how we grew up. And by the time it was time to go to school, we were down in South Africa. So we'd moved down there.

And my dad was working obviously for South African based companies at that point. So I went to school in South Africa and then was mandatory military service and was lucky enough to get selected for officer's corps, went through that. But in the meantime, I developed a really expensive habit of off-road motorcycle racing. And of course, like most of us didn't have the money, like any cyclist, motorcyclist, auto racer, when you start, you have no money, but plenty of ambition.

And you think you're way quicker than you really are. And so I was doing that. And so I had this opportunity, my wife's folks are actually Dutch. So South Africa obviously is a melting pot of many European, many cultures, mostly European, but her folks are Dutch. After all, they moved to South Africa. Kids were born there, but her father was in drip irrigation.

which was in its infancy really in America, but was pioneered by Israelis. So he came over in the seventies, they were naturalized Americans and we had this opportunity for us to come to America, work for a couple of years and get some experience, get some international experience and then potentially, you know, go back to South Africa and go even back to our existing company, which was a big retail organization.

Andy Ording (05:23.821)
But in meantime, I had this passion for two wheelers. We all grew up on bikes. had, know, my high school I went to was 750 boys. Everything was competitive. Everything was a competition. Everything. But 500 of us or so came on bikes. There were bike sheds and bike racks and bike hooks basically everywhere. Not one person there actually raced bikes. just, it was transportation and you can't get a license, driver's license for the 18, right? So.

So bikes were your freedom, bikes, everybody had a bike, most everybody you knew had a bike and you could take them on the train. So there was no sort of limit to the distance. And then had this opportunity to come to America, be in the motorcycle business and we jumped on it and ended up in Southern California, completely naive and starstruck. We think about it now and think, how on earth did we get through that? We're just so naive, didn't know anything.

Josh (06:14.423)
Ha

Andy Ording (06:20.999)
and no credit, had no money, no credit, no nothing. But I pretty soon got myself a motorcycle, so I'm not quite sure how that happened. It's ridiculous. So, then, funnily enough, after five or six years, started to gravitate, mountain bikes were just coming out, and they were really rubbish. I mean, they were chromoly, rigid fork, rigid, really to them, just a chromoly frame.

Josh (06:29.154)
You found a way, right? You found a way.

Andy Ording (06:50.101)
with a pair of sort of durable wheels. I mean, really, that was it. Yeah, boy, that was horrible. And as dirt bikers, you get on it and ride it you think, my God, these things are horrible. How do people like riding these? Because you're used to 18 inches of travel and lots of power. But you do come around. You do come around. So eventually, worked my way into the bike industry through Alsop up in Bellingham.

Josh (06:53.398)
Right. Terrible geometry. Right. 50 pounds. Yeah.

Andy Ording (07:18.623)
Washington. So five years in Southern Cal, three years in Bellingham, and then Indianapolis ever since. So it's been a long ride in India.

Josh (07:28.554)
Yeah, yeah. So we've talked a lot on the show about how, you know, like I don't particularly love Indianapolis as a place to live, but it is just such a hub of manufacturing, right? And in your case and our case, composites and aerospace and race cars and all the other idiots like us who had hobbies that were way too expensive, right? Ended up here and a lot of them starting companies to make stuff that's way too expensive, you know, part.

Andy Ording (07:49.389)
That's right, exactly.

Josh (07:56.419)
partly maybe so you can get the discount on the thing. But so you're at Alsop. Alsop is working with Lee Sargent at Zip when he does the original beam bike that had the Alsop beam. And so you meet Lee and somehow he, how does Lee talk you into, hey, leave the West Coast for the beautiful flat windy Midwest.

Andy Ording (07:59.778)
That's right, Jim.

Andy Ording (08:16.781)
Wow. he's an Australian, which people may or may not know. So of course, Africans and Australians immediately are at each other, right? All the colonies are very competitive. And so we were actually building the trade show booth for Alsop in 1989 in Anaheim. And I was literally on top of the ladder, putting these walls together. And I heard a guy walking past.

with an Australian accent. And I said, well, those Australians are wankers anyway, know, loud enough that of course he heard it and turned around and that was it, right? That's how we started the dialogue. And then the relationship started to build. Once he looked at that all-soft beam, the soft ride, it was a, you know, as you remember, it was really revolutionary, right? Really unusual. Nothing like a bike other than a maybe Bowdoin space liner, right? I mean, the shape was even...

Josh (08:52.066)
Ha

Josh (09:07.106)
Yep.

Andy Ording (09:16.045)
incredibly unusual. based on that viscoelastic shear layer. so it was interesting. And it did afford bike builders this opportunity to build something with no seat post, no down tube, no, you know, just there was just nothing underneath there. So it was a was a revolutionary way to do it. And in that very first show, Lee came by and had the conversation with the old sub family and myself and looking at saying, well, how, you know, I think I can build a bike for that. And, you know,

And so he proceeded to then start prototyping and buggering around and over the next couple of years. that time, predominant marketing in our industry was trade shows. So, you you had two intervallic shows, you had cabs, you had numerous expos that you went to. So you were on the road a lot. So we saw each other quite a bit. Then we started to actually share a couple of athletes. that's really how it's and it was actually an athlete's husband that said one day, you know,

you should talk to him and he should talk to you about getting together because he's very good on the technical side and you know, you've got the front office figured out. So you should talk about getting together, which we did. And eventually that happened in 92.

Josh (10:27.882)
Okay, 92. So, yeah, so the bike happens, the threespoke happens, I love the stories of Lee at the trade show, would chuck the disc wheel on the ground and jump on it to prove to people that it was, how strong it was. I, it's weird, like I've heard a million Lee stories, I've never met him. Cause I got here just after kind of that was over. But so Zip innovates and people forget this, but Zip, I mean,

Andy Ording (10:39.83)
That's right.

Josh (10:56.632)
96 was it? Carbon mountain bike wheels first ever? Carbon mountain bike crank first ever? mean, and of course just in time for the mountain bike collapse of the 90s to happen. yes. So really, really nailed that one. And so here's Zip, it's in terrible shape, terrible shape. so when did you decide to buy it from him and say, I see something here, let me take it and...

Andy Ording (11:07.436)
Yeah, perfect timing. It's perfect. It's perfect timing. Yeah.

Andy Ording (11:23.466)
Well, yeah, great question. We, so we were getting hammered. remember, you remember Spenegy, right? The, the, how would you even describe it? Paired four stroke wheel. And we made a couple of major strategic errors. First off, we were very aware of whose wheels were on the market. We tested nearly all of them and some sort of lateral stiffness testing. We'd had them in the tunnel at least once or twice.

Josh (11:26.497)
Make it mine.

Josh (11:32.662)
Yeah.

Andy Ording (11:53.241)
And we were able at that time to actually discuss it with a potential dealer. We were only dealer direct. was, know, we were communicating with consumers, but not selling consumer direct. And it was during, you know, during that process that as we started to really try and get these things on the market, the spinogy came along and the rumor has it had significant venture capital behind them. And of course,

they upped their capacity and had finished product. The market really hadn't matured yet and they were flooding the dealers with consignment product. And this hammered predominantly head and Zip felt it the most, especially in the US market, potentially in Europe, think, you know, maybe Mavic with their Cobb and Cosmic. They probably felt it some and Karima was around at that point. They probably felt it some, but really that the damage was done by dealers that took in consignment product.

And that nearly broke the organization in 97. But it also nearly broke a lot of organizations. So because nobody had seen it and the space wasn't mature. Anyway, that, that, I, as I was the one on the road, speaking to athletes and dealers all the time, I really felt that there was a future that the sport of triathlon particularly was growing and that we really needed to focus and position the product. And of course the, the, the,

The dealer conversation is quite difficult because dealers at that point are mostly track, extract riders or road riders. Very technical, great, generally excellent mechanics can maintain everything themselves. And this new market called triathlon was coming along where triathletes have no mechanical capability and don't pretend to have it, right? They're quite happy to pay somebody to have, and that was a big shift in the market. So that's how we really started to push it. uh, but, but 97 almost broke the company.

We lost money for the first time in years and we were still very small, but almost broke the organization. And I then had a scram. In 98, I was absolutely convinced that we needed to stay in the game. And so I'd already invested what I thought was everything, but then, you know, had to sign away my house, my car, my, I sold motorcycles. I mean, that was the end of Andy Orting's previous life. In the beginning, it was something new.

Andy Ording (14:19.884)
And yeah, so during the course of 98, we, you know, I basically we went down to almost nothing. So and started again, so started with essentially zero. And that was a big build out, you know, when, when we found you or you found us, it was 99. And we just got into that old bank building. And I think at that point, it was still rubbish. I mean, we had stripped out all the stuff inside to use it because it was air conditioned and we needed that climate control. But other than that, it was not.

conducive to manufacturing. It just wasn't. But, you know, we were in it and it had air conditioning and we had space and we started to operate.

Josh (14:50.008)
Yes.

Josh (14:58.036)
Yeah. It's funny you mentioned the building yesterday. Phil Stevens, whose graphic design for us, had someone come up for lunch and enrolled in as Guy East. so Guy East was a six day track racer in Europe and had a successful career there. we knew his dad, also Guy East, was the guy who was constantly in the... mean, this bank building had these vaults in it and...

Andy Ording (15:09.41)
my gosh.

Josh (15:26.84)
I mean it was just a nightmare and guy was the guy that Andy would be like like hey we need to move that wall and ideally without permitting. And like how was the cheapest way we can make that happen that nobody knows about it and he'd be like we can make it happen for you. So it was just it was very fun. I'm like oh my god I I knew your dad really well. He's like I know my dad talks about you. He passed away a few years ago he said he used to talk about you guys all the time.

Andy Ording (15:41.74)
That's That's right.

Yep.

Andy Ording (15:55.666)
Yeah, that was a fun project because Guy Junior was in high school and so, or just barely in high school and or maybe even not. But Guy Senior said to me, you know, I think this would be an interesting project. I think Guy needs to get involved. He needs to understand how hard it is to work, you know, and we were trying to go from that initial space that you remember into what became the crank, you know, that crank section. And that's where the bank had built a building onto the building. And so the bloody wall was what?

Josh (16:00.031)
Yeah.

Josh (16:18.337)
Yup, yup.

Andy Ording (16:24.105)
five feet thick, because I'm four feet thick with all these different courses, brick courses. so, Geissina said, well, he's at school during the day, so if you'll help us in the evening, the three of us could do it. I went, okay, let's just do that. And there's the two guys and myself with sledgehammers and chisels and hammers and just whacking away at that wall every night, wheelbarrows out into the dumpster, go home at like midnight, you know, and sweep up quickly so that the next morning,

Josh (16:25.046)
Yeah, yeah.

Josh (16:36.728)
You

Andy Ording (16:53.383)
employees could actually walk through it safely. And then the next night, same story, we'd have a snack at 5.30 and start working until we got that wall finished and got through to that space. yeah, so that was, was a wonderful family, great family.

Josh (16:57.324)
Same again.

Ha ha ha

Josh (17:08.408)
Yeah, yeah, no, those were those were good times. I mean, I think of that that building. I mean, you added on to it. It used to be the joke that like, oh, shit, he's got a tape measure. He's walking around with a tape measure and all the employees in the back are just like, oh, God, what's he going to do now? And and of course, you know, and I learned I think we've also talked about on the podcast, but I learned from you this concept of like the P.I., the predictive index, you know, we.

Andy Ording (17:18.525)
That's right, I can't. Zoom. Zoom.

Josh (17:33.172)
you hire for personality and fitting personalities to roles. And I honestly thought it was total BS when I started. And then you, as you are one to do, you let me completely fail a time or two by going against it and then realize, he's right. But of course, you hire your manufacturing people for like continuity, consistency, detail orientation, not changing things. so...

Andy Ording (17:58.984)
Absolutely.

Josh (18:02.389)
you start walking around with a tape measure changing things and it's like this level of panic comes up in the building. mean, things like that, I mean, really like, my God, mean, the way I run the business is all stuff that you taught me, right? And I joke with my employees, like, my God, I aspire every day to just be half as good as Andy was to us. And so I would like to...

Andy Ording (18:06.227)
That represents big risk, huh? That's major risk.

Josh (18:31.473)
kind of, guess, pick into your brain. I mean, you ran a different type of bicycle industry business. And I think that's what really made Zip different. I think it's really what makes Silke different now. know, it's like when we hire, we're like, hey, you we are not the West Coast company with the two hour lunch ride or whatever. Like we are a business first, bike second. And, you know, competitive

Andy Ording (18:32.011)
That's very kind of you.

Andy Ording (18:52.651)
That's right.

Josh (18:59.135)
juices or whatever are now not focused on cycling anymore, but they're focused on running the best possible world-class business and with tools that I learned from you. so guess you were at Woolies for some years and I know had a lot of training. You've got officer training in the military. I how did you, where all did you pick up those pieces to kind of put the puzzle together with the way that, I don't know, I guess you saw the business should be run that quite frankly our industry just

up until that point hadn't been doing it.

Andy Ording (19:33.963)
Great. Well, I'm so good question, Josh, and thanks for that. that, you know, the, think the big thing is, you know, you come into, I come into the bicycle industry with more preconceived notions on how it's done, right? Never worked for a bike company. So perhaps that was fortunate. You know, I look at it and say, well, I need to, we need to figure out how to build a really successful organization, had learned something from the, the Wiltry days. And, but as you start to,

start to do it and especially in the end of 98 beginning of 99 when we get in that building and now you are you have to answer every question. The reality is you quickly adorns on you very quickly that you you it's not the stuff you know that's important anymore. It's all the stuff you don't Right. So so what is that? Well, well, pick pick a list, right? There's everything from which people do I hire? When do I hire them? How do I hire them? How do I plan?

How do I do the forecasting? Just all of those things. And consequently in the beginning, you do make errors. You just get it wrong. You've got to, you know, the Frank Williams thing, or you've to hurry up and fail. You've got to do something, make a decision, do it, and then learn from that. And if you're willing to learn from that and then find people to help you rectify, modify, or maybe completely change, you know, you're in a position where you're there to learn. And we were so fortunate in those early days. You remember

you know, Chris and Wayne that came in to help us with lean manufacturing and how they ground us on the questions. They were, what do you want? Well, we want to ship product faster. No, that's not good enough. What do you actually want? What do you really want? How do we know that we're helping you succeed? And they helped us pinpoint very precisely, you know, what that was. And now to make that happen, you have to have people, you have to have the resources, have to, everything has to be in alignment. And so your task, at least my task at that time,

was how do I facilitate all of those things? How do we stretch? Don't mess up what we already have. You you build a foundation, back to my dad's construction lessons of most of my life, that you've got to get this foundation in and set, and then you can do a lot. Once you have that really taking over and understanding the importance of selling something and not coming back and having an exceptionally low return rate, now you've got

Andy Ording (21:55.153)
something that is an annuity and you can now grow that. What do we do with that? And so I honestly don't have a clear succinct answer, which is why I'm waffling around on you. you know, I think you have to acknowledge that you're a perpetual student. I think still today, as we've talked about, I learn now from you because doing business today is somewhat different. There's many things that are identical. I you think about the P &L, the balance sheet, how you measure a company, that stuff.

Josh (22:06.615)
You

Andy Ording (22:24.36)
hasn't really changed. How you drive the company forward, how you position the company, where the technology comes from and the speed at which it can happen today is completely different. And so I think I just became a really good, not so much a leader, I became a really good student and then just learned quickly, as quickly as I could, and then try to take that and enact that, right? So how do we take this, what we just learned and put it in there and

And I heard years ago, you you need to hire people smarter than you. And Zip was a perfect example of nearly everyone that surrounded me was much more capable in their particular field than I could ever have been. And I was just super fortunate timing-wise to find those folks and for those folks to find each other, because you know, what we did there for the last seven years or so was really awesome. You know, we were on

We were running on nitrous once we got through that. Once we got over that thin ice, we went hard. We went hard and we were lucky.

Josh (23:22.105)
you

Josh (23:26.143)
Yeah, Yeah, no, was, no, that was just such an amazing ride. I mean, it's fun that people from that era of the company, some of them are at STRAM, some of them started their company, but it is fun. I think everybody who was involved, myself included, looks back and just like, man, those were like the glory days, right? I mean, it was like not sugarcoating it. It was so hard. And we worked, I mean, the hours that we worked, I...

Andy Ording (23:46.195)
Yeah.

Josh (23:53.152)
I don't think you don't find kids today that'll work hours like we worked then quite frankly. But I do think partly like God we were we had fun at it and I think to me I mean I didn't realize how lucky I was to have you until SRAM bought the company and then we all worked for SRAM now and you know the SRAM folks and especially management there at that time were just you know I said like just some of the nicest guys ever right and.

Andy Ording (23:56.263)
No, for my word,

Andy Ording (24:20.33)
Super.

Josh (24:21.183)
And you pick a group of guys to go drink beer with and that's awesome. But I had never experienced this larger company inertia thing of like, well, let's hold off on that decision till we have a little more information. And it was just, I didn't realize how lucky I was. We're used to say like, well, make a decision and if it's the wrong one, we'll change it quickly. now you know, like, we could wait a week for more information.

or we could take a decision and if it's wrong, we'll know tomorrow. And then we just do the other one. You're like, you know, and so I was oftentimes not loved at SRAM for those like, you know, going Jesus Christ people, just make a decision. And if it's wrong, well, you know, and then they all looked at me like I, you know, had a tinfoil hat in a crack pipe, you know, like, you know, what is this guy's problem? know, and so I just, feel so fortunate with that because you, you know, you empowered all of us. I mean,

Andy Ording (24:51.186)
Mmm. Mmm. Mmm.

Andy Ording (25:01.062)
Yeah. Yeah.

Andy Ording (25:09.226)
Yeah.

Josh (25:18.399)
myself, including Joe Von Desar, who was a building maintenance engine. mean, amazing guy. Todd Winschett, was a Todd's an engineer, marine. mean, just these guys could build anything out of anything. You know, here's a pack of gum and some bailing wire and some raw carbon fiber sheet. And like, awesome, you'll have a plane, you know, by tomorrow. And but it Joe's retirement, you know, Todd was kind of telling the stories of how

Andy Ording (25:26.154)
Amazing talents. Yeah, incredible.

Andy Ording (25:33.106)
Anything, yeah.

Andy Ording (25:42.44)
Yeah.

Josh (25:48.501)
You know, I would come up with like the really dangerous and terrible version of the idea. know, it's like, it's like, and then Todd would like come up with the more like, like, I think we can do it this way. And then thank God we had Joe who would be like, okay, here, I'm going to do this in a way that neither of you get killed, you know? And I said, Hey, you know, in, all of my years at Zip and Sram of the three fire extinguishers that were like released, I was only responsible for two of them.

Andy Ording (25:52.842)
You

Andy Ording (26:06.599)
That's right.

Andy Ording (26:16.61)
No!

Josh (26:17.822)
And, yeah, yeah. you know, but we had a good laugh. But I loved it. I you would, you know, I used to come, hey, Andy, I had to think I got this thing. And you'd just be like, yeah, do it. Why are you talking to me? I mean, you know, go do it. you know, I think of the, you know, like within my company now, I mean, we have a policy. Anything, anybody, I mean, you know, anybody on the floor.

Andy Ording (26:20.922)
A dubious honor.

Andy Ording (26:35.603)
Yeah.

Josh (26:47.03)
make it no matter what your job is if you're here and you have an idea that you think could improve something if it's under $500 don't even ask anybody just just do it like I just want you to be empowered you know and man I mean it's like the stuff that they come up with right and you know I'm sure I'm sure there's some failures out there that nobody wants to own up to but I mean you know oh hey we had an idea and we bought a thing and we did this and and we doubled the throughput of this process because we made this tool

Andy Ording (26:56.637)
Yeah, I love it. That's great.

Andy Ording (27:17.725)
Yeah. Remember, you do have to go, right? You do have to just give it a go. I mean, to this day, it brings a smile to my face when I think about how we were making, you know, originally when Leon, the company, of course, we were making discs in that autoclave of his, which is built for auto racing, right? So really designed it for that sort of thing. And we have to make discs, actual autoclave, right? So we don't...

Josh (27:41.076)
A real autoclave. A real autoclave, yes.

Andy Ording (27:45.098)
We don't have an autoclave. How on earth do you get a pressure vessel, you know, with temperature control, cycle control, a perfectly flat table and all the rest of it and how we modify those ovens and turn them into those zip-up claves. I remember Norm, remember Normie who was deep in his 70s, worked in maintenance. He was on two different pensions because he'd been at two companies his whole career, so long that they both retired him. And he was bored at home.

Josh (28:01.943)
god yeah.

Josh (28:11.083)
Yep. They both read it.

Andy Ording (28:15.241)
in the 70s and I come out one day, walked into the back and all I could see was that tube, it's like a tube on legs, know, three feet off the ground. And I see a boot on a leg hanging out of the oven and sparks just flying out of the front of the oven. I go and look over there, there's, Normie is in there, 70 something years old with these mask on and these hat and he's just grinding away and trying to modify those things. I think about it, oh my.

And then we built that thing and, we need a vacuum pump. Oh, hell, where do we get a vacuum pump? And so I think Mark or somebody sourced it at a secondhand place and we pulled that in and modified it and put a bigger platinum in it. Oh, it's working. know, so I mean, it's that kind of stuff. you don't, at least, you know, in our world as we lived then, if you don't have the bandwidth,

Josh (28:55.873)
Yeah.

Andy Ording (29:09.769)
to create those opportunities and people don't feel that they can really take a shot at it, they, in many cases, you mentioned PI, they have to actually overcome their own PI. They have to know that this is a risk and that we're totally fine taking this risk. And if it doesn't work, it's no problem. We'll learn, move on. And people don't believe it, right? They actually have to do it and they have to figure out that, I actually didn't get into trouble. And so over time,

Josh (29:31.541)
Yeah, yeah.

Andy Ording (29:39.658)
really capable guys. mean, you and Todd and Mike and people that really started to think up stuff that was, you know, some of it was out there. And, um, but if you, if you associated risk with every one of those ideas, we would never have done half the stuff, right? You've, just got to give people the tools and then the confidence to say, wow, that was awesome. Sorry, it didn't work, but hey, that's, you know, what do we do?

Josh (30:04.31)
No, I loved that.

Andy Ording (30:05.321)
What's up when you guys decided, we're going to freeze a giant gummy bear and put it in the wheel drop test. Now that.

Josh (30:11.478)
But I think that's just what happens when you really, I mean, we loved what we were doing and we were having, we had fun at it, right? And so having the ability to, you know, yeah, after hours, the guys want to screw around and have fun, like, well, shit, like, where do we have our most fun? At work, right? Doing, you know, and we have access to...

Andy Ording (30:26.409)
Yeah.

Andy Ording (30:36.669)
That's true.

Josh (30:40.134)
stuff, equipment, mean, lot of money's worth of things. that was a great one. Well, we talked about the comfort with failure. I mean, one of my favorite things you ever said to me was when we were working on the original that welded co molded clincher that, you know, that that patent turned out, you know, one of the more one of the harder products, but one of the more valuable patents in the history of the bike industry, right? I mean, that, but

Andy Ording (30:58.429)
Yes, yes boy that was Incredible.

Absolutely, absolutely.

Josh (31:09.814)
My very first one that I made, I preformed it myself, all that stuff, and it's like 630 at night, and I put it in that big old Hubble press, which is this massive, like, don't know, what was that thing, 100 tons or something, 400 tons, geez, I mean, was, you know, it had like a 18, yeah, like an 18 inch diameter hydraulic cylinder at the bottom, and this is a press that pushes up, right, so your tools are on the top, there's one on the bottom, but it activates up.

Andy Ording (31:22.793)
400 tonnes, 400 tonnes, 400 tonnes. Yeah, it was a cylinder like what 18 inches across.

Josh (31:38.569)
And I don't know if I didn't have the proc switch set at the right spot or whatever, but it closes and within like two seconds it doesn't think it's closed and it opens. And of course, you're putting it in, it's 400 degrees. The carbon's melted, there's just shit everywhere. There's a spiral staircase of carbon coming down. The aluminum is bent and it's laid and I've been working on this one thing all day. I'm just like, I just need a win and...

Andy Ording (31:54.707)
Yeah

Josh (32:05.032)
and you come out and it's clearly you have just walked into like a shit show of epic proportions. And I remember you said, boy, we're learning now. And you were so excited about it. I think like, I just got to tell myself, right? Like, well, we know that didn't work. Let's go on to the next thing. And then the reality of like, my God, I got a hand clean and polish a mold by myself.

Andy Ording (32:09.168)
yeah

Andy Ording (32:24.68)
Yeah. Yeah.

Andy Ording (32:32.552)
That's right. And you thought you were, that's right. You thought you're going to, you're going to knock out one room and go home. And that was just not how it worked. Yeah. Exactly.

Josh (32:34.462)
which takes like a couple of hours. I thought I was, yeah. yeah, I mean, but that attitude, I think if every company and every employee could be empowered with that, right, I think we would live in a different world. mean, I think people, so many people you come, and when we bring them into the company, I mean, I always feel like I'm indoctrinating them with the like, no, like I want you to fail. Like if you're not failing, it's.

Andy Ording (32:53.32)
That's right.

Josh (33:04.2)
stuff, you're not trying hard enough. You can't just do the, you know, now there's some jobs, know, like CFO, like, please don't fail at accounting. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I joke with John our accountant, I'm like, you know, let's not get very creative there. You we don't need any enroning, you know, but for the rest of the company, it's like, hey, I expect you guys to be.

Andy Ording (33:14.8)
That's right. We do need that one kind of right.

Andy Ording (33:26.248)
That's right.

Josh (33:31.39)
screwing stuff up and breaking stuff and bringing me ideas. And you if you spent your $500 on the thing that you thought would work and it didn't work, let's talk about it. Because there's so much learning in those failures that spark the next idea or maybe change the direction of the idea. Like, that path didn't work, but what about the perpendicular path to that? It really drives the culture.

Andy Ording (33:51.059)
That's right. Well, and that crazy stuff gives confidence. Right now, the group gains confidence collectively. The tacit knowledge in the building is just improving all the time. each individual is now going, well, when you tried that the last time, how did that work? What did that look like? Why did that fail? What happened here? And then try and work your way around it. And I think that's really, really important.

that Campagnolo contract we would never have got if we weren't out on the edge, right? We would never got that deal. And we only got it because Alcrank, Alcarbon Crank made it through their testing, which of course, as you remember, their testing became the bane of our existence within a year. But we would never have had the shout, right? We would never got the shout if we weren't doing the stuff we were doing. And I just think about things like that. So

Josh (34:22.42)
Hmm. Yeah, yeah.

Josh (34:35.35)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Andy Ording (34:47.218)
So when you push and you push the limits and you have a modicum of success and you can get it to the market and you're careful with what you make so that it's perfectly safe, generally speaking, that can create more opportunity. know, that sometimes it's customers, sometimes it's suppliers. I mean, you think about some of the folks that supplied us along the way and how capable some of those guys were. Incredible, right? Knowledge like.

Josh (35:10.806)
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, no, I mean, for me, that was an experience too. And I loved how, you know, like, hey, these guys know more, like, let's just ask them what they think you should do. I mean, it's funny, we think of how many of the problems, I mean, in silk world, we solve with like, just asking the supplier, like, well, what's the best possible version of this? Oh, it's that. Well, why doesn't anybody do it? Oh, it's expensive. How expensive? Oh, it's another 3%. You're like, shit, if I can have the

Andy Ording (35:13.297)
and

Andy Ording (35:37.776)
Yeah, man.

Josh (35:40.468)
best of the best for an extra three. know, now sometimes they're like, it's a thousand times more expensive. You're like, that's why nobody's doing it. But a lot of times they, yeah, you know, they've, they've got that, that knowledge. My God. Yeah. I think of the, God, who, who was it? Who were AC, who's our British? When we finally had scale and we got like the guys from the UK who were like the F1 guy coming over and like, like, no, here's the problem we're trying to solve. It's like, we have access to like,

Andy Ording (35:46.952)
That explains that, yeah.

Josh (36:09.457)
the guys. ACG, thank you. Yeah.

Andy Ording (36:09.945)
ACG. Remember ACG? Yeah, ACG. were unbelievable. Yeah. And we've been using that one supplier for all those years, you know, and we had that flipping, you know, we had that, that the heat, right? The heat, you've got this, I look at today's and go, my God, nobody's rim braking anymore. So you don't have any heat buildup on the rim. So now you can, there's no limit. Look at the wheels today versus the wheels we had to build because we had all rim brakes. We had a heat issue we had to deal with.

The defamation that comes along with that, you have spoke tension pulling in opposite direction. Everything was really, that was really a difficult thing to solve. That was hard. And remember, we pushed those guys to give us something with a higher TG that we just couldn't get out of them. when they did go up, if I remember that right, it got more brittle. We always had your loose toughness, it gets more brittle. Yeah, you got a higher TG, but you could also hit it on a pothole and...

Josh (36:45.609)
Yeah, hard.

Josh (37:00.959)
Yep, yep.

Andy Ording (37:07.623)
So there's always a compromise. And you're right, ACG comes along and goes, right, okay, I see it. Yeah, we have something that does that. Like, well, let's have that then, right? And I mean, we were buying a lot of material at that point and we just moved it all, moved all that business. So yeah, suppliers make a huge difference. I think about Prodigy and what Robert was doing and his capability with machining.

Josh (37:26.889)
Yeah. Yeah, that was.

Andy Ording (37:37.446)
Right. I mean, it was, he was bringing a machining tolerance holding capability that at up until that point, I'd never seen. Right. I'm like, unbelievable. And you were working on, think you, I think you even said, so one of the days, like, if you look at all of our products and all the revisions that we've made hubs exceed every product we manufacture. right. The hubs were such, everybody looks at, I don't think people give hubs the credit that they are due.

Josh (37:47.263)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Andy Ording (38:06.979)
And I speak purely from a manufacturing perspective, because they are so flipping hard to make a long lasting, smooth spinning hub. It's hard. And how many revisions you went through and how many times we had to do that. But it was worth it because we found a supplier that was infinitely more capable in that field than we were.

Josh (38:07.658)
Yeah. Yeah.

Josh (38:30.038)
Yeah, yeah, and changed a lot of them. We definitely had our teething pains, but I mean, look at, we really changed that generation of hubs in the future once. mean, there's so much, know, be at Type A show next month, and mean, every Type A show, you walk around and look and be like, wow, I remember when we did that in 2002, you know, and that's a thing now, right? So, so much of the ratcheting mechanisms and the...

Andy Ording (38:40.239)
Mm. Mm.

Andy Ording (38:48.576)
That's right. That's right.

Josh (38:53.974)
the ear, the hubs with the ears on them, instead of traditional flanges. We really pioneered a lot of that stuff. So, crazy.

Andy Ording (38:59.601)
Yeah.

And I think you could also, you know, was funny that remember that we had Richard Virenque or Richelle Veronk, who was, you know, the big climber with Festina and they wanted the lightest hubs possible. And we were building that 217 hub, had a bearing out, right? Which made it so flipping light. And they had a run on a bushing. And I can remember sitting with the guys, Bruno Rizzo who was running the team and we'd never worked with the team.

All they wanted was hubs. They'll bolt them into wheels, but they want the super, super light climbing wheel set. they were quite willing to work on the lubrication or anything else. And what a false sense of security that gives you because he's a professional with a professional team and they knew exactly how to maintain that thing. And he only used it on climbing days. And most climbing days in a Grand Tour are the decent weather because you're in the middle of summer, right? You're almost never in the icy weather. And you get...

You get lulled into this, wow, this is great, we should have a run, he doesn't have any problem. And then you give it to the average person who doesn't do any of the maintenance and it falls apart. Like, wow, you know, it's just, and that's how you learn. You just go, you know what, that's not going to work. We can't go to the market anymore with that product. Yeah. And then you just have to fix it.

Josh (40:02.933)
Right, right.

Josh (40:18.773)
Yeah. And in a sense, we were our own worst enemies in that, we took a race day only product and kind of ultimately made it the mainstream product. you know, it's, and that, I would say in the beginning there, mean, for as hard as we were trying to make that happen, when that switch happened, it was still a little bit of a surprise, right? In that of like, shh.

Andy Ording (40:33.669)
That's right, we did, yeah.

Josh (40:46.591)
shit. They're actually doing you know and you get the well yeah I hit a pothole and I broke these on my training ride. You're like you're what you know and how big are you I'm 225 like and you were doing what with them I was training where you know like Indiana like like that we weren't anticipating or yeah the early days of the company we weren't designing for that one you know you're twice you're to Richard Varenkis.

Andy Ording (41:08.487)
That's true.

Andy Ording (41:12.422)
No.

That's right, no exactly.

Josh (41:16.757)
You know, but no, those were just glory, glory days. So I guess we'll step into so you, you know, the silk opportunity comes up, you and I fly to Italy very quietly, not telling anybody we get this trademark purchased. And then Andy was with me really from day one. So those first few months were challenging me calling me like, how would you do that? I think I probably called you every day. What do I do here? What do I do?

Andy Ording (41:46.289)
We were sitting in the living room watching, assembling parts and this is so funny. But that's how it starts, right? That's how it goes. Yeah.

Josh (41:46.645)
Yeah

Yeah. Yeah, no, was amazing. so, so I guess let's, you know, we talk a lot about Socon this podcast, so we won't cover off on too much of that. But so you have, after sale of Zip, gotten into investing and a whole bunch of other interesting things. But I want to kind of take it to now you're in a

fund or I guess what's the right word to call

Andy Ording (42:20.774)
It is a private equity fund, based in Holland, partnered with guys you know well, Rene Wiertz, who built 3T, productionized gravel bikes, and Gerard Vrooman, was building Cervelo, basically alongside Zip, we were building the companies at the same time. He sold Cervelo to Pons, Rene sold 3T to an Italian investment group, and the

Josh (42:21.471)
fundraiser.

Andy Ording (42:48.858)
purpose of this fund, we talked about it, sort of sketching around and wanted to get into the new technology. So what is the new technology in what they now call mobility space? We used to just call it the bike industry. Now it's called mobility because everything is involved and some of it can be quite frustrating and some of it is absolutely fascinating because

Josh (43:02.805)
You

Andy Ording (43:16.102)
And I think you've heard me say this, but you know, in our bike industry, we are, if I'm building mountain bikes and I decide, or we decide we need a road bike, then we just go with a road bike. And then now we can check that box. have a road bike, we have a commuting bike, we have a cruiser bike, kids bike. And I think when e-bikes particularly came to America, you take a motor, you put it on a bike, but it's got bike, drive, train, bike, geometry, bike, everything. And then it's just got a motor to give you a hand. Well,

what that's done is it's actually when you know this controlling the motor is where is that's where the rubber meets the road right so what ECU are you using how is it delivering power and what and what dosage and at what rate and and that's directly proportional to you know range anxiety using up the battery and so it it brought and is bringing people from outside of the industry with absolutely no cycling background at all into the space and and that's the part that's fascinating some of them

We have conversations because we are now looking for early opportunity between the three of us. We've chatted to probably 800 companies, seen 800 decks so far. I mean, it's a lot. We've invested in, think, seven to date. We believe all of them are very early stage. They are all very early stage and we are trying to come alongside the entrepreneur, much like I've done independently of the fund. Come alongside entrepreneur and see if we can help, see if we can guide.

Josh (44:23.679)
Wow. Wow.

Andy Ording (44:45.67)
Yeah, because money is not, know, money is when you don't have money, it is a very valuable resource and can dominate all of your thinking and strategy. you might, you know, it's like you heard me say this too. you know, if I give you how much money do you need? Well, I need a million bucks. All right, I'll just give you a million bucks. What's the most important thing you're going to do? And most people go, oh, well, I'm going to do this and this and this and this. That's not the answer. The question is, what's the most important thing? Not

Josh (45:01.011)
Yeah.

Andy Ording (45:14.436)
Where are you going to spend it? And in many cases, ironically, in many cases, most folks cannot clearly define that, which is not a money shortage. That's a shortage of planning, right? You're not planning. If you were planning correctly, you would know exactly what the first order of business would be. And so there's those sort of things happening and occurring at the same time, meeting people that are

PhD in mathematics and mechatronics and they're now trying to explain to you how they've worked out the algorithm to control the drivetrain because gear ratios, they can build any gear ratio you want, right? I've electric motor and I've got pedals. I don't even need a connection between the two. I will just use the force to calculate with an algorithm, tell you what gear ratio you're in. And the guy said to us, this one particularly, he said, well, how many ratios do you want? You want 12, 15? I mean, what do you want?

Josh (45:55.305)
Mm-hmm.

you

Andy Ording (46:09.67)
send it to you this afternoon. It's such a completely different mentality, And bike component suppliers, the Shimano's and SRAM's of the world, I think they look at that and go, whoa, I mean, if this is real, right? If this is really gonna happen, that's interesting, right? That's a game, that is not a total game changer, but it's an impact. It's certainly an impact. So yeah, it's very interesting. We're dealing with everything from airbags, is the latest one.

Josh (46:22.323)
Mm-hmm.

Andy Ording (46:35.366)
which the UCI is pretty excited about. Some of the teams are very excited about, predominantly started with, we want the guys, it goes in the bib shorts and will expand using a CO2 cartridge. And then the way it's folded, which is where I believe the IP lies, it will, you know, re-collapse so that you can just put a new CO2 cartridge and you're off to the races. Unlike a car, once it's deployed, you know, it's over.

And the guys start, the teams were talking, hey, we want this for training. Now they're thinking, well, maybe we use it for racing too. You know, so it's, very interesting. That's very front end and lots of heated debates and lots of discussions, but something's going to happen there. You know, something is going to develop there. And, yeah, so it's, it's those kinds of things that are occurring that are, that are just fascinating. And, and it's changing, it's going to change the game. I think five years from now, not even 10 years, five years from now.

Josh (47:11.945)
Yeah, yeah.

Josh (47:19.349)
Hmm

Andy Ording (47:32.922)
things will be different.

Josh (47:34.185)
Yeah. Yeah. No, I love hearing you and I talk all the time, hearing all the ideas and the thing, you know, and some of it's some of it's really crazy and out there and some of it's like, yeah, we we need that. So I I love trying to put myself in that. Yeah, it's funny. You mentioned it actually just had the conversation probably three hours ago today where it said like, so Andy does this thing where he's like, OK, here's your million bucks. What are you doing?

Andy Ording (47:47.674)
Yeah. Yeah.

Josh (48:03.41)
And because because one of my guys wanted, you know, I just I need more budget. Well, OK, here's your budget. What what's the most important thing you're doing with that? Well, I'll get back to you like, no, no, no. If you can't tell me right now what the most important because it's hard. I I I do that to my to myself, right? I think if we just if we had more money, if I had. I've had more people, right? You know, you it's so easy to get yourself.

Andy Ording (48:18.488)
That's alright.

Josh (48:31.604)
hung up in the constraint and not really dial it back to like, what is the question? We talk a lot on the show as well about, I think a lot of times we do really good jobs at answering the question. It's just, we asking the right question? And so often it is like, have we really, really thought through what the question is and then strategized around the solution to that?

Andy Ording (48:47.394)
Yes.

Josh (48:58.662)
It's just so much easier to get hung up and they're like, if I only had a e-commerce expert and a million dollars.

Andy Ording (49:07.183)
But you know, I think money has become, having talked to now lots of entrepreneurs and you've seen it yourself, every problem, if the only tool you have is a hammer, then everything starts to look like a nail. Right, well, if you've convinced yourself that the only thing you're lacking is actually money, then all problems are solvable just through money. it almost is never the case because it's the

Employment of the cash that that is so important. Like where are you really going to put it? And you know, I'd never had an investor and when I bought when we bought Lee out of the company I had to bring in investors right now. I had to navigate that I'd never done it. I didn't know how it worked I would have definitely given them a low evaluation, but I didn't know at the time And guess what I was desperate for I was desperate for money, right? I was desperate for the money. So it's dang it I

Josh (49:57.045)
lessons learned. Yeah.

Andy Ording (50:05.765)
I only needed some money. What I really needed was a strategy to sell a lot of stuff. And I can remember sitting with Rick, you know, Rick Ritter, controller who helped me immensely. It's all the way through, but in the early, on the thin ice days, that was, he was amazing. And I would look at it and we'd worked through the whole thing of being there an hour and I go, well, Rick, are we going to make it? He said, well, if you hit your sales numbers, we're going to make it. Like, okay.

Now I have something concrete I can work on, right? You can take action. So now the most valuable resource is not money, it's time. Where do I put my time? When you have something that urgent and that important, you can go and you can invest your time, which is the one thing we never get back. I mean, you see it with tech companies, unfortunately, all the time. They raise unbelievable amounts of money and they can always raise more.

Right? But they can never get their time back. So if they set a goal to create this technology and release it to the market and they miss that, they might be able to raise more money. And if they do, now they really, really have to hit it right now. The pressure is really on. So at the end of the day, the thing that's causing the leverage is not the money that got lent to the organization or got invested. It's what are you doing with the time in the meantime? How did you deploy it? What did you do with it? What's the return on that time?

before you start worrying about the financial return. And I think in manufacturing and especially in product innovation, you guys, think your team there is amazing. I how much stuff they do. Every time I walk in the building, it's like, let me show you this. Let me show you this. And I think it's awesome, right? That's what it's supposed to be about. Innovating all the time, that there's always something new getting tried. And if you can do that, that's wise allocation of time. That's great use of that resource because you've got an opportunity then to deploy.

Josh (52:00.5)
Yeah. So funny, we're looking at CRM systems, right? Which is, for those of you who aren't salespeople, it's like a computer system that helps you manage sales leads and you're, in our case, our bicycle dealers. You how do we better service them? When are they ordering? How much? What are they ordering? What are the blind spots? All that stuff. And so we're, you know, there's a ton of companies that do this. And I'm sure you, actually thought of you when I got this deck, but I get a pitch deck from

Andy Ording (52:06.125)
Right.

Josh (52:30.324)
a CRM software, I guess, three, four year old company. The first three slides of this deck are them detailing out all of their different series A and B and C and D fundraising, all the money that they've raised. it just, it made me furious. like, I don't give a shit. And we've raised $150 million over six, right? I'm like, fuck you guys. I don't give a crap. Yeah, I don't care how much money.

Andy Ording (52:49.732)
That's absolutely...

Andy Ording (52:56.556)
And yeah, that's right. Don't care.

Josh (53:00.168)
That's not success, right? And that certainly has nothing to do with my success, right? I mean, my point of talking to you is, cause I want a tool to help me be successful. I don't care. I want a guy who's like, I'm a one man team in my mom's basement. And look how kick ass this thing is, right? That I've made that can do all of these cool things that can help your company. so, but it is funny you say that. think we joke about that being like a very West coast mentality of.

Andy Ording (53:11.192)
Correct.

Andy Ording (53:19.812)
That's right.

Josh (53:29.8)
like, like, we raise all this money, and we just keep raising money and, and, man, I, I don't know how often that works out for companies, but it, just seems like it can't work out that often.

Andy Ording (53:31.321)
Peace.

Andy Ording (53:42.149)
The thing is, know, with tech, particularly in tech, generally speaking, they get sold on a multiple of sales, right? There are very significant publicly traded tech companies that have never made a profit. They just kept, they just finally ran out of private investors, angel investors, venture capitalists, private equity guys. you know, and eventually they go like, the only option is to grow like mad so we can go public with it. Because if we can show continuous growth, then

We'll either sell to somebody or we'll be able to raise more money and drive our stock price up. And it's just a mentality that is, I understand it, intellectually understand it. can't really, I can't be a part, I have been a part of tech companies with a similar mentality. And I just, look, I cannot really contribute because the whole objective here should not be be one in a hundred that makes it. How about we be one of one?

that makes it because we used our time and money, you know, in a thoughtful way, in a strategic way.

It's just a different thing. And it's just a completely different thing. Like, well, okay, I'm not wired. That's not my world. I'm not wired very, I'm not wired, I was gonna say not wired very well. I'm not wired at all for that.

Josh (54:46.334)
Yeah. Right.

Josh (54:57.236)
Well, I feel super fortunate that you, however you're wired, you've rewired me in some way that I'm very aligned. I think we've, what in the history of Soka, we had a couple of months where we lost money, all of it at the very beginning. it was definitely the like, if the sales aren't there, you're like, well then stop spending or go sell, or go sell, right?

Andy Ording (55:23.249)
or go sell, go sell. Yeah, that's right.

Josh (55:27.038)
pretty rare that you can't find, well, certainly when you're the startup and you're completely broke and not sleeping anyway, like, well, I'm laying here thinking about it and not sleeping, I might as well go work. Anyway, well, I guess as we get to the end of an hour, I think back, there's so many things I wanted to, the CSE days and I don't...

Andy Ording (55:40.59)
Exactly. Yeah.

Andy Ording (55:53.304)
Those are cool.

Josh (55:53.479)
think about trying to, know we've had so much fun together, Trying to think of like picking stories, but do you, you know, I can throw a few out there, but if you have, what are some of, like a couple of favorite memories or just favorite stories, good or bad, from that zip era, or even in our silka era, we've had some good ones as well.

Andy Ording (56:16.494)
Well, one of the stories I tell that involves you was, it's just I think about it today and we would just handle it so completely different, but we had signed CSE early 2000s, I can't remember, two or three or something like that. And you got advised by somebody on one of the grand tours that, know, everything that happens on the tour is always the manufacturer's fault. I think about you doing your... So, okay.

Josh (56:42.021)
yeah, Scott the Bear, a trick, yep.

Andy Ording (56:45.06)
And you see, things like that. I can just remember, saw George, remember when George Hinkley fell on Perry Roubaix and the front steerer had basically the front wheel turned the wrong direction. He went over the handlebars and it turns out, oh, he fell twice before that, right? Had nothing to do, well, it had something to do with the steerer tube, but it had nothing, there was no problem there. It got broken. But nobody knows that. Everybody saw a trick, you know.

Josh (56:52.156)
Yep, stu-

Josh (57:04.231)
Right.

Andy Ording (57:10.02)
have a a hincapy fly off a track and so oh gosh there's something wrong there but i remember you going we never had phones uh what we might have and you went because we needed to check right where they were i think we're in dauphiné right or perinix i can't remember and

Josh (57:18.698)
my god, yeah.

Josh (57:25.256)
Was the Dauphiné? Yeah, we were so naive. We had sent them wheels in like December. And it's the Dauphiné is in June. like, well, I guess we should go check on them. And then you get there and realize like, God, all the other companies have like full time people with the team all the time. We were like, five months later. my God, that was terrible. Yeah, I remember calling you. Yeah.

Andy Ording (57:39.478)
It's shocking. It's shocking.

Andy Ording (57:50.22)
Yeah. Well, and those mechanics, they said to you, well, all the wheels that are bad, they're up in the front of the truck and you wait up there is like 40 of them or something or 30, but it's just a huge pile and you took the hubs apart and it all just fell out like, like coffee grounds, pieces of bearings, bearing races. I mean, just such a mess, such a shambles. You imagine today, you could communicate that so clearly with a couple of photographs and a quick phone call or FaceTime or whatever it is, you know, get through it.

Josh (57:59.667)
Yeah.

Andy Ording (58:19.971)
But that didn't happen. So you had to find a cell phone, not a cell phone, a phone on the side of the road or at the hotel or whatever it is and then, you know, and then recite the whole thing. We're like, no, come on, man. It can't be like that. It's not that bad. Surely. No, it's shocking. We will have no wheels in the tour if it carries on like this. And that's how we started to send Nick. Remember, Nick James, we sent him over to the service core to go through those things and just throw away everything that.

Josh (58:39.187)
Yeah.

Josh (58:42.791)
yeah, yep, send it.

Andy Ording (58:49.111)
And it was, you know, was education. mean, look at that. all, we looked at the pros think, hey, the pros can do, they know exactly what they're doing, the mechanics are, but they don't actually. They are doing what they've always done before, which now no longer applies to carbon wheels that we, that's certainly where we were building, but probably all high performance carbon wheels you can't do. You can't wash it in diesel and then use a pressure washer, right? You just can't do that. And so...

That education had to begin. And so there was a combination of just manning up and probably, can't remember exactly, but probably sending the team twice as many wheels as we originally committed to send. It probably took twice that much mostly because they didn't know how to do it. And every now and then somebody hit a hole or they'd break it, or they'd impact damage it or something.

But yeah, I mean, those are those crazy days. then Nick would go over there, another story all relative to that, right? And then he'd take those wheels and the guys in the sport service course would say, well, because they got a big stuff, all the smonies and all the rest of it, right? Well, could we ride those wheels? Oh, yeah, sure. You can ride those. Well, we could leave. So Nick calls us. said, well, yeah, that'd be great. They could ride the wheels. And then, of course, you go back to a race or Nick goes back to a race and he finds the wheels that he rejected are back in the truck. Then it was just like, can't.

Josh (01:00:02.387)
Alright, the wheels.

Andy Ording (01:00:09.373)
stop that behavior, right? You cannot, there's a certain amount of education you can give, but you can't stop that behavior because that behavior has been a part of cycling on the pro level for many, many years. You're just not going to do it. So the only solution was we have to break them, right? If they're, if we don't think they're good, you break the wheel, you put it in a dumpster and it doesn't matter what they say. And that's the only way. And that's what we did. And it, was very expensive, but probably talk about return on investment with time.

Josh (01:00:24.177)
Yeah.

Josh (01:00:32.935)
Yep. Yeah. Yeah.

Andy Ording (01:00:38.783)
Nick's time going over there and doing that. And he was going over what twice a year, at least twice a year to do that. But thankfully, thankfully, we had a wonderful experience in the tour eventually, once we got once we figured it out.

Josh (01:00:51.377)
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, after that, we never really had major failures. And yeah, that was, I tell that same story relative to like, our cleaning product. That was my first experience with chemicals. And I laugh, I just a week ago was saying that Norm, who 78 year old, whatever, you know, was the guy that taught me like, man, you know, you're

You get that when you're doing a lot of machining and work and your hands are so gross, know, he's like little MEK goes a long way. And so, know, like, oh, that's like magic, you know, and then of course, you know, that shit is banned globally. And so that's, you know, one of those I joke with my wife. I'm like between like cooking, you know, eating eggs cooked in Teflon pans and washing my hands with MEK, like, you know, my fate is sealed. But, but, but.

Andy Ording (01:01:31.401)
Do I really? man.

Andy Ording (01:01:42.467)
Ironic that you're in the chemical business today.

Josh (01:01:48.114)
Yeah, right. But it was that trip was the one where the hubs were turning black on the inside. And remember, Cervelo did not yet have a carbon bike. So that soloist was aluminum. the powder coat was just falling off of the chain stays and the seat stays in the bottom bracket. And so I took the cleaner, because I think the team was like a Morgan Blue sponsored team at the moment, but

Andy Ording (01:02:01.347)
Where's aluminum, that's right.

Josh (01:02:14.099)
They had this automotive cleaner that one of the mechanics had brought from another team where the guys were like, oh, this shit's amazing. It's so fat, right? Because that's their world. How quickly can we clean the bike? And because it takes a month for the paint to start falling off, they're not associating that chemical. But I I took with my very early digital camera, like 800 pixel, some rubbish digital camera. This is like 2002, yeah.

Andy Ording (01:02:23.507)
Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm.

Andy Ording (01:02:41.623)
It was cool.

Josh (01:02:44.337)
Like, yeah, if you hold it far enough away, you can see a picture. But I took a picture of that label and then when I got back, because again, the limitations, didn't have, I think that was maybe the first year we had GSM phones in the US. You used have to like go to Europe and get a SIM card or get a chip and do the thing. But you still, we couldn't send pictures. mean, shit, we were still faxing engineering drawings and stuff at that era.

Andy Ording (01:03:03.085)
Get a chip. Yeah, that's right. Yep. Yep.

Andy Ording (01:03:10.487)
Yeah. That's right.

Josh (01:03:13.715)
But I brought that picture back and I went, was Les Yocum at Alcoa, who's a senior aircraft and aerospace engineer. And it's like, what of this does aluminum not like? And he just like went, oh God, it's like, I think it was 10 % sodium hydroxide. he's like, sodium hydroxide is like the strongest etchant of aluminum outside of stuff you're not allowed to buy. And we just went, oh crap, like, okay. And that was the.

Andy Ording (01:03:19.863)
Yes.

Andy Ording (01:03:28.267)
All of it. Yeah. Yeah.

Josh (01:03:40.339)
beginning of the really having to take those deep dives and learn and educate. And I mean, to this day, you go over there and you find them using stuff. You're just like, guys.

Andy Ording (01:03:40.929)
Mm-hmm.

Andy Ording (01:03:50.347)
Yeah, that's right. And you know, and I think that's just the law of the jungle, right? That's the law of that jungle. That's how they do it. And they carry all that knowledge with them, that tribal knowledge. Now, whether it's good or bad, it's going with them. It doesn't matter. You just got to anticipate. That's right, we have.

Josh (01:04:00.967)
Yep. Right. That's true. Because we have benefited from that too, right? know, we've we've so coaxed at my previous team and now we're in some new team that we. Yeah.

Andy Ording (01:04:13.066)
Yeah, that's right. In your case, absolutely. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, fun. It's, there are lots of stories, lots of crazy stuff. But yeah.

Josh (01:04:20.28)
man.

Yeah, yeah, we should do this. Let's do this podcast again. We get together, drink a couple of beers. And man, that's my wife. So for our listeners, I was out in California at Andy's place last weekend and we rode e-bikes and had a heck of a time. But our poor wives, we get a couple of beers in us and the stories and they're just like, guys, can you stop? it's just the reminiscing is.

Andy Ording (01:04:26.562)
Then those stories get funnier.

Andy Ording (01:04:43.362)
yeah, but wait, did we tell you this already? Yeah, but wait!

Josh (01:04:50.451)
That's right. Like not only are we the funniest people we know, but we're the cleverest people we know. Two or three beers in. So, you know, it takes a little bit of time. Andy Orting, thank you so much for coming on the show. This has really been a fun one and I really hope. Let's do it again around with a round of beers.

Andy Ording (01:04:56.692)
That's exactly, Yeah. Yeah.

Andy Ording (01:05:14.15)
Okay, no problem. Thanks so much for having me. Really appreciate the opportunity and just fun talking rubbish about the old days. Fantastic. You're doing a great job, Josh. You keep it going. Silker is going from strength to strength. So I am so proud of you and know what you've done. It's awesome.

Josh (01:05:21.619)
Yes it is.

Josh (01:05:26.338)
thanks man.

Josh (01:05:30.48)
Well, thank you. Thank you for everything. I really, really appreciate it.

Josh (01:05:44.283)
And we were recording the whole time and everything. Between Hadi and I, we've each had an episode where we forgot to hit record.

Andy Ording (01:05:47.382)
Were we? Okay, there we go.

Josh (01:06:01.053)
Yeah.

Andy Ording (01:06:04.268)
Okay.

Josh (01:06:06.418)
Yeah, yeah. And if Fatty were here, he'd have three more. He's the most redundant recorder I've ever known. goodness.

Andy Ording (01:06:11.98)
Super. Yeah, super.