Phil Knight sketched Nike's business plan in a Stanford class paper
For a small-business course at Stanford, Phil Knight wrote a paper asking whether Japanese sports shoes could do to German brands what Japanese cameras had done to German cameras. He graduated in 1962, flew around the world, and in Kobe that November talked his way into distribution rights for Tiger running shoes across the western United States.
Knight had grown up in Portland and ran middle distance at the University of Oregon under coach Bill Bowerman, with a best mile of 4 minutes 13 seconds. As a teenager, refused a summer job at his father's newspaper, he took one at the rival paper tabulating sports scores and ran the 7 miles home each morning. After Stanford he worked as an accountant while waiting more than a year for the first Tiger samples, made by the Onitsuka company, today called Asics.
When they arrived, he mailed two pairs to Bowerman, hoping for a sale and an endorsement. Bowerman ordered shoes and also offered to become a partner and contribute designs. They sealed it with a handshake on 25 January 1964, founding Blue Ribbon Sports. Knight sold from a green Plymouth Valiant at track meets around the Pacific Northwest and only quit accounting for the business in 1969.
The branding came cheaply. Jeff Johnson, the first full-time employee, proposed naming the company after the Greek winged goddess of victory, and it became Nike in 1971. That year, design student Carolyn Davidson was paid 35 dollars for the swoosh; Knight admitted he did not love it but expected it to grow on him. In 1983 she received Nike shares and a gold swoosh ring. Knight later bought control of an animation studio, renamed it Laika, invested 180 million dollars, and saw it release Coraline in 2009.
He stepped down as chief executive in November 2004 and left the board in 2016, the year his memoir Shoe Dog appeared. His giving is vast: 105 million dollars to Stanford's business school in 2006, then a record for any American business school, and in September 2026 a gift with his wife Penny of 1 billion dollars to Oregon for an engineering school, the largest known donation to a public university.
Source: Phil Knight
