Davis Smith: Entrepreneurship as an Adventure
What I learned from the CEO of Cotopaxi about risk-taking, building a brand, and finding purpose.
When I cold emailed the CEO of the iconic outdoor gear company Cotopaxi, I wasn’t expecting a response. You could imagine my surprise when, a couple of hours later on a Sunday night, Davis Smith agrees to an hour-long interview.
Yet, Davis is the kind of person who, despite being in the midst of finalizing a $45M growth investment, would make time to help a wide-eyed 18-year-old with hopes of starting a podcast. He is an authentic, adventurous, and innovative servant leader on a mission to better the world, and I’m excited to share some highlights from the interview. Here are 5 takeaways from my conversation with Davis Smith:
1. Follow Your Roots to Find Your Passion
Due to his father’s work, Davis spent his early childhood in Latin America and was faced with the realities of extreme poverty at just four years old. He saw kids his age naked on street corners and had to try and reconcile why his life was so different than theirs. It instilled in Davis a keen desire to help lift others out of poverty, but he lacked clarity on how to accomplish this dream. He considered nonprofits or teaching, but that changed when he met Steve Gibson, an entrepreneur and philanthropist focusing on economic mobility in the Philippines.
Davis wanted to expand Steve’s nonprofit to Latin America, but Steve convinced him that entrepreneurship was the most powerful way to incite positive change in the world. Davis took his advice to heart, but he didn’t figure it out immediately; it took him ten years, during which he went to business school at Wharton and founded two other e-commerce companies, before he was able to pursue social entrepreneurship with Cotopaxi.
The journey was not linear, but Cotopaxi brings Davis’ story to a full circle. The outdoor gear company is named after the volcano in Ecuador where he hiked with his dad and has significantly advanced poverty alleviation efforts in Latin America through supply-chain philanthropy, livelihood training, and increasing access to education and healthcare.
2. Develop the Traits of a Successful Entrepreneur
Davis points to four things that lend themselves well to entrepreneurship: rejecting perfectionism, developing grit, learning to sell, and focusing on people.
- Reject Perfectionism: Perfectionists struggle as entrepreneurs because entrepreneurship involves moving forward with something that’s not perfect and getting it to market at quickly as possible. If you aren’t constantly experimenting and iterating, you miss out on critical customer feedback and will be too slow to adapt.
- Develop Grit: Great entrepreneurs find a way to grind through hard things. They keep adapting and pushing through, even if it means pivoting and letting go of the initial idea.
- Learn to Sell: Entrepreneurs must sell themselves to investors, sell the company to potential employees, and sell the product to consumers. Davis spent two years as a Mormon missionary in Bolivia, where he strengthened his sales skills and learned to bounce back from frequent rejection.
- Focus on People: The best entrepreneurs are people who want to serve others and look out for the growth of those around them. Davis says that his single most important responsibility as the CEO of Cotopaxi is attracting and retaining great people.
3. Build a Brand Based on Experiences
Davis went to business school with the founders of Warby Parker, who disrupted a highly monopolistic industry by creating a compelling brand identity rather than a digital eyewear store.
Similarly, the outdoor gear industry had a multitude of established players. Yet, Cotopaxi became a market leader because, from the start, Davis focused on building a brand based on experiences. He recognized that most Millenials and Gen Zs don’t switch brands because of a slightly differentiated product, so the team took a different approach to marketing: An epic 24-hour adventure race in Salt Lake City that culminated with food trucks, live music, a rock-climbing wall, and llamas. Not only did the “Questival” (and their motto #dogood) go viral on social media with over 30,000 posts, but it created thousands of Cotopaxi evangelists with an incredible story to tell about the brand. From an ROI standpoint, conversion rates quadrupled and customer acquisition cost approached zero as a result of the event.
The Questival has since expanded across North America and demonstrates the importance of both online and offline brand experiences. Davis believes that the next wave of e-commerce companies will go beyond product innovation and create ways for consumers to intimately connect to the company’s mission and values.
4. Lean Into the Human Desire to Create
“The desire to create is one of the deepest yearnings of the human soul.”
This quote comes from a leader in Davis’ church (Dieter Uchtdorf) and has stuck with me since our conversation. It led to the realization that, generally, the most passionate and fulfilled people I’ve met are creators. While things like writing, music, and art may come to mind first, entrepreneurship is also defined by creating. Successful entrepreneurs create value where there was none before, build organizations from the ground up, and pioneer new ways of thinking.
To build a great company, entrepreneurs must ensure that every member of their team is empowered to create, take initiative, and serve as torchbearers for the company. Davis has done an incredible job of making this a core part of Cotopaxi’s culture—even the employees sewing backpacks in the Philippines have the autonomy to create; their only rule is to make no bag alike. Cotopaxi also puts on innovation tournaments every quarter, where Davis gives a challenge to the entire team and breaks employees into small groups to narrow down the ideas and present their favorite to the company.
Davis started implementing innovation tournaments to build a culture where anyone can solve problems, regardless of their seniority or where they work in the company. In fact, the winner of the last tournament was a 19-year-old young woman who worked in the distribution center.
5. Embrace the Adventure that is Entrepreneurship
Davis Smith has camped with jaguars in the Amazon, sea kayaked from Cuba to Florida, and visited over 70 countries. While it’s easy to separate these pursuits from his entrepreneurial endeavors, I believe that Davis’s adventurous spirit is at the heart of his success as an entrepreneur. During our conversation, we discuss how both entrepreneurship and outdoor adventures are defined by uncertainty, discomfort, and adapting to changing environments. Davis encourages young people to find unique, authentic travel experiences and venture off the beaten path.
In fact, Davis leads a group of 7 entrepreneurs in survival situations each year. These experiences prepared him to lead in times of crisis, which helps explain Cotopaxi’s incredible response to the COVID-19 pandemic. They repurposed infrastructure to produce over 2 million masks (in the classic style of Cotopaxi, they are colorful and contain the words “do good”) and provided COVID-19-related medical assistance to thousands of people in South America. Not to mention that, from a business standpoint, the company is thriving.
It’s easy for young people to lose sight of their passions in the frenzy of external expectations and other people’s definitions of success — it’s something that I grapple with frequently. Yet, Davis’ story is a testament to the power of blazing one’s own trail and unapologetically pursuing something that matters.
To hear the entire conversation (including Davis’ thoughts on business school, capitalism, and travel), check out our full conversation here. The audio is spotty on my end, but in the spirit of not waiting for things to be perfect, I decided to publish it anyways and adjust how I record for future episodes.
