DEO Profile: Mark Dwight
President and CEO of Rickshaw Bagworks
Mark bounds into his office in San Francisco’s Dogpatch neighborhood like a ten-year-old kid. On paper, he’s the founder and CEO of Rickshaw Bagworks, a company inspired by creative energy, urban cycling, and a strong set of humanistic, environmental, and social values. In person, he’s a happy DEO who’s built his dream manufacturing “fort” and plays there daily with his friends.
We interviewed Dwight in the midst of the bustling warehouse where Rickshaw makes and sells its bags. Surrounded by the sounds of his business, he explained a career filled with equal measures of passion and iteration.
As a child, what did you think you’d be when you grew up?
When I was a young kid, I thought I was going to be a paleontologist. I was a big rock collector, stamp collector, and fossil hunter. I spent a lot of time kind of solo, marching around in a creek behind a tennis club that my parents belonged to. I even found a woolly mammoth tusk!
But I’ve always had some entrepreneurial instinct. Whether by birth or by nature or nurture, I felt bound to be an entrepreneur. My father was an early Silicon Valley entrepreneur. He founded the first laser company in 1962, so I grew up around Silicon Valley, startup companies, and the notion of being the master of your own destiny.
Do you think of yourself as creative?
I’m sort of like this left-handed engineer. I took mechanical engineering as my major at Stanford, partially because I never regarded myself as artistic enough to be a designer. Even though I write every day and I sketch, I never fancied myself as an artist. Although, ironically, I find some consolation in these books that reveal the notes of famous designers and architects — they can’t draw worth crap either.
Maybe a designer is sort of this mid-place between an engineer and artist. In collaboration with a junior designer and the rest of my staff, I really do all the design work here. I come up with the initial idea, then we start working through it. It’s always a sort of iterative process. You need other people. It takes a team.
Were you confident in your creativity at an early age?
In 1982, when I graduated, the design program at Stanford was in its infancy. Electrical engineers looked down on mechanical engineers. Mechanical engineers looked down on designers. That was engineering for poets. Design didn’t have as much respect back then. David Kelley (co-founder of IDEO) was actually an assistant professor in my ME103 class when I was at Stanford.
I felt that if I was going to get a real job in Silicon Valley and do right by my parents for the money they were spending to send me to Stanford, I should get an engineering degree.
I didn’t really get into design until I ran a small startup in 1992. I hired Lunar and let them do what they wanted to do. I was creative, but I wanted to let the designers do their thing. We came out with a really good result. When I left that startup, I spent some time with Lunar in business development. I figured I could sell design because I had been a good client. I met Brett Lovelady at Lunar and figured we were smart enough to run our own design firm. Be careful what you wish for! So we started Astro Studios.
Two years later, I really wanted to make stuff. I knew I had this gravitational pull of wanting to make things.
How do you recognize creativity in others?
I think that the most important trait for being creative is being open-minded and wanting to experience the world. When I worked in teams and had a budget to send people out to do design research or send people to the factory in China, I would tell them to take an extra day. What’s it to us? We’re already paying your airfare and most of your expenses, so take an extra day and just experience the place.
I think most good designers are in and of the world. They see all the things that are going on around them: the things that work, the things that don’t. It’s the synthesis of these observations that makes you a good designer. I love going to trade shows that are completely outside my realm of business because I see things I don’t expect. I could go to a building conference and see materials that I never expected. I could go to an equipment conference and say, “Wow, that’s weird. I never even thought of that.” It just opens your eyes.
I also believe that design is about connecting dots in novel ways. It’s not necessarily about inventing something from scratch. It’s about tweaking something or putting the elements together in ways that they haven’t been mixed up before. It doesn’t take much. I mean, in my business, some of the most interesting innovations are minor. You just have to find someone’s blind spot — something that someone never thought of before.
When did you first realize you could lead?
My first opportunity to lead was running a small startup with ten people in it. I really enjoyed that. I felt a great deal of freedom, but I was being managed by a chairman and a board, so I was always aware that this was sort of a false sense of independence. I was beholden to someone else. Rickshaw’s a manifestation of my personality and my vision and my values and my goals. It’s my dream.
What’s your leadership style now?
I like to think that I’m realistic. I’m self-directed, but I’m aware of my surroundings and the people around me, especially. And I appreciate the need to have my team participate and buy into the things that we do here. While it’s ultimately my responsibility, my decision, I don’t enjoy working by myself. I’m perfectly comfortable by myself and spend time alone, but I prefer to work with a team.
Did you overcome any hurdles in developing your career and building your business?
Oh, I’m not good at working for other people and that has been my Achilles’ heel. I mean, I’ve been fired three times in my career. So I’m proof that there’s life after being fired.
The first time, I was working for a company and I didn’t like my manager. I wore it on my sleeve and ultimately I got fired for not getting along with people. The second time I got fired, I was actually working with a mad scientist in a start-up. It turns out the guy was actually certifiably insane. The last time was with Timbuk2. I was completely misaligned in values with my new investors. We became financially focused and less brand focused, less creative — it became obvious that we weren’t going to work well together. And they held all the cards. So it was their way or the highway. I think each of those times I really came face-to-face with the idea that I didn’t want to be working for other people.
What I really like about running my own business is that I can just be true to my own values. Business editors ask, “What’s the future of Rickshaw?” And I tell them I’m not here to make as many bags as possible. I’m here to make as many bags as necessary to run a small, sustainable business. I don’t have any aspiration to be the king of the bag business. What I want to be known for is having started and run a successful business. Success to me is a profitable business that provides meaningful jobs for my team of people and provides me with a fulfilling and rewarding profession. And obviously pays my bills and everyone else’s bills.
Do you have processes or tools that help people collaborate?
I’m a fan of exploring the mild to wild. It’s my responsibility to rein it back in when it’s time to decide what’s within the realm of practicality and financial possibility, but I try not to constrain the situation too much upfront.
I try to use my own thinking outside the box to show people that there are other ways to think of things. My staff generally has trepidation about me going to a TED conference because they know when I came back there will be a flurry of “You can’t believe what I saw!
Here’s what we should do and here’s a bunch of new ideas.” They’re thinking, “Oh God, like we don’t have enough work already.”
Certainly one of my challenges is the shiny penny phenomenon. I’m fascinated by the next new thing. I love to start things. I’ve gotten much better at delegating because I know this now. I’m completely aware that other creative individuals can execute on the ideas that I think are interesting. Now that I have a design assistant, I’ll just take it to a certain point and say, “You go figure out that stuff and then come back to me and we’ll review it.” I don’t need to be down in the weeds of the execution anymore.
Are there any traditional management behaviors that you’ve outlawed at Rickshaw?
We’ve been conditioned, especially in Silicon Valley, around the concepts of hyper-growth and greatness and billion dollar markets. There’s this idea that if it isn’t a revolution, it’s not worth doing. But I believe that, ultimately, if you’re pursuing your passion and doing the great work that you want to do, whether it’s revolutionary or a billion dollar opportunity is irrelevant.
For everyone who shoots for the stars, most of them miss. For the ones who are successful, most of the time it’s just sheer luck. And you can’t go around hoping to win the lottery. We mythologize the serial entrepreneur. The serial entrepreneur really is someone who can’t keep up with these hyper-growth companies and gets fired all the time. I think that the tragedy of this kind of Silicon Valley hyper-growth model is that the CEO who can survive that is extraordinarily rare.
You open your company to the public for tours. Why?
One of my Markisms is “The difficulty is in the doing.” We roll up the doors every day and invite people into our factory to see what we do and how we do it. I think that narrative — the who, what, why, where, and how, being able to show people that we make stuff — is, frankly, one of our biggest assets.
We’re not just in the manufacturing business; we’re in show business. That show we put on every day is the thing that differentiates us from other bag companies. There are thousands of bag companies. We’ve tried to create products that have their own look and feel, or silhouette, as we say in the fashion business. But at the end of the day, one of the biggest things I’m selling is the fact that you can come here and see it. You can know us, the maker, not just the marketer. That’s why I also started the association SFMade. I really felt that we should celebrate this noble pursuit of making things.
When you’re gone from the scene, what three things do you want to be known for?
Generosity and passion — well, and integrity. You’re nothing without that. There’s no job worth winning, there’s no mistake worth covering at the expense of personal integrity and at the expense of honesty.
Cheaters never win. They never do. They win in the short-term, but they never win in the long-term. And it’s just a bad way to get ahead.
