Craig Dalton: Entrepreneur, Tech Founder & Host of The Gravel Ride Podcast
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Cycling has influenced Craig Dalton in business and life. He is the dynamic co-founder and CEO of DODOcase and DODOcase VR, and current VP of Portfolio a Founder in Residence at Collaborative Fund. He’s also the host of The Gravel Ride, a podcast that recently hit the one-million download mark.
His passion for the bike industry led him to Dean Titanium, and he then applied the lessons from the world of cycling to fuel his leap into the competitive tech domain, where he founded DODOcase. In this episode, he shares a story with host Andrew Vontz about shaking hands with President Obama in the White House while talking about American manufacturing.
In addition to his years as a consultant, entrepreneur, development expert, and MBA graduate, Craig is a board member and acting executive director of the non-profit Bike Index.
The Gravel Ride is a cycling podcast where Craig and guests discuss the people, places and products that define modern gravel cycling. You can find the show anywhere you listen to podcasts.
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Choose the Hard Way is a podcast where guests share stories about how hard things build stronger humans. Sign up for the newsletter to get the story behind these stories updates and more. If you’d like to suggest a guest or say hello, DM @hardwaypod on social or send an email to choosethehardway@gmail.com.
Host Andrew Vontz has spent more than 25 years telling and shaping the stories of the world’s top performers, brands and businesses. He has held executive and senior leadership roles at the social network for athletes Strava and the human performance company TRX. His byline has appeared in outlets like Rolling Stone, Outside magazine, The Los Angeles Times and more.
Today he advises and consults with businesses and nonprofits on high-impact storytelling strategies and coaches leaders to become high-performance communicators. Find him on LinkedIn or reach out to choosethehardway@gmail.com
In This Episode:
Craig Dalton Instagram | LinkedIn
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Andrew Vontz 0:00
All right. Okay, so now we're rolling. But how long did it take for you to realize that to get to that point of like, I'm just gonna cut out the awkward goodbye, and the podcast.
Craig Dalton 0:13
I think I feel like the first like 10 episodes or so of the gravel ride podcast, I obsessed over the audio in an unhealthy way. And with modern editing technology, obviously, there's a bunch of different ways in which you can cut out hums and ahhs and likes and I means, and I spent a lot of time back then. And this was before the good stuff that we have for editing right now. And I would polish everything. And then I think someone told me like, it just started to feel unnatural. So I was like, screw that. I'm just pretty much what you say is what you hear in the discussion. I think that flows easier. Like I might Polish something out here and there. If I feel like, you know, there was a mistake, or a dog barking or something like that. But you just got to learn to live with it. I think people who listen to podcast, like they want to be part of that conversation as if they're sitting at the table with you.
Andrew Vontz 1:05
I'm always curious about when people make a transition from being a consumer of something to being a producer of it. How did that happen for you?
Craig Dalton 1:15
Yeah, I think for me, I entered a period of my life where I had a commute into San Francisco from my home in Marin County and Mill Valley. And that finally opened up the opportunity to listen to podcasts. I had always obviously been aware of podcasts the last decade or plus, but I'd never had a commute. So I'd never really listened to it. And then I started riding my bike in with with an earbud in and listening to podcasts, and found myself addicted to the medium and then decided, hey, why don't I give that a try?
Andrew Vontz 1:46
Would you get competitive on your commute?
Craig Dalton 1:49
No know. I feel like I don't have enough candles to burn to get too competitive. There is a group, as I'm sure you're aware, like out of San Francisco, there's a bunch of riders that leave in the afternoon. And my sole desire to link up with other riders in the afternoon was to avoid facing the brutal winds through Crissy Field on my own. And that maybe got a little competitive, because those guys and girls would go a little harder than I wanted to go. But I was so desperate to not get a chin full of wind for an hour on my way home that I might struggle to stay on someone's wheel.
Andrew Vontz 2:22
And you made it home nonetheless. So once you have this idea of okay, I enjoy listening to podcasts. I want to give this a shot. What was going on in your life that led you to the topic? And did you take like an agile approach to this? What were you thinking? Was there a mission vision position out of the gate, like what happened?
Craig Dalton 2:42
So I had recently sold my company and I had this pocket of opportunity we can get into what that was. But as I was an E commerce company, doing a lot of stuff online, you know, we had a web property, we had a lot of social media stuff going on random manufacturing facility. And by the time that journey was over, I just wanted to do something that was none of the above. And I thought here podcasting is this thing. I can kind of scratch a creative itch if I learn how to do it. And so I did take a podcasting course was sort of a self serve Udemy course that taught you all the nuts and bolts of podcasting. As you know, there's a lot of nuances to, you know, setting up an RSS feed and having a host and all these things that you wouldn't think about if you're just used to running web properties. So figure that all out. It happened to coincide, I had been gravel riding for maybe 18 months at that point. As a commuter into San Francisco, I can ride the dirt almost all the way to the Golden Gate Bridge. And I purchased a bike gravel bike, a Niner, which I think we share that brand in our history. And it just wasn't the right bike. For me it was I think it was a 2014 model year, only to think 32 C tires, mechanical disc brakes just wasn't well suited. And I just thought, how the hell have I been around bikes and literally have worked in the bike industry at times in my life. And I bought the wrong bike. If I'm buying the wrong bike with all this experience, there has to be a lot of people questioning, what's the right gravel bike for me. At the time in which I started the podcast in 2018. It was still relatively early days in gravel events. There certainly have been some of the storied ones like Unbound, formerly dirty Kansa that were out there in the world. And that grasshopper series here in Northern California was 30 years old at this point. But there was just a lack of understanding about the equipment, the events and the people who were designing it and the athletes that are participating in it. So I just started out with started out with this basic vision. I'm going to interview product designers, athletes, and event organizers with the goal of just exploring how gravel cycling can fit into a cyclist life.
Andrew Vontz 4:57
And what have you learned from doing that?
Craig Dalton 5:00
Well, I mean, the sport has evolved pretty dramatically over the years, I think it's become a lot easier to make the right decision, or a fair decision when buying a bike, because the bikes have such a range of versatility. Back when I was starting gravel cycling, I think you sort of had to pick your poison, if you had a spectrum of on the one side, what I would call road plus, which is a basically an endurance road bike that just had a little bit of extra tire capability. So you could ride a dirt road here and there. And then on the other side, there was bikepacking bikes, and it was hard to find bikes that were in the middle. Most people at the time, you know, if we think back, like 2018, to 2020, you were generally buying a bike, if you wanted to have the most versatility, you'd buy a bike and you buy two sets of wheels, say you would go down to 650 be from a 700. So you get the widest tire possible in there. And I think that sweet spot was around, you'd have a 700 by 40, on the 700, C side, and a 650 by 47 when you got down to the smaller rim size, and that gave you a tremendous amount of versatility in terms of where you could ride the bike.
Andrew Vontz 6:12
And when you started out, what was your approach to interviewing? And how would you prepare to do your podcasts interviews?
Craig Dalton 6:19
That's another good question. You know, I've always been, I think I've progressively gotten lighter on the research. I let my personal curiosity about the sport, the athlete, the event, guide, every single conversation I host on the podcast, so I don't do much. And I think most of it comes from just general enthusiasm and awareness about the market. You know, as I read, cycling publications, obviously, like I'm aware when new brands come out with gravel bikes and look for those differences and sort of different approaches. And it's it's often those those bikes that come out with a different approach that I'm most eager to talk about on the podcast.
Andrew Vontz 7:02
And I don't know if my listeners know those because I don't think I've really talked about it much. But I also worked in the bike industry for a short period of time around. I think it was 1998 to 2000, I worked at a cycling publication, which I shared with you, Craig, and you also got your start in the cycling industry. And yet, you ended up in tech, you've reached the point where you can do cool things like say, when I sold my company, which is awesome. And I've had a lot of cool experiences along the way. But how did you get started out in the bike industry? And what drew you to that?
Craig Dalton 7:40
Yeah, so my My parents are both from England. And my father was a cyclist. So I'm sort of aware of cycling growing up, he didn't push it too much on me. So I didn't discover it on my own too much until I was in college, at which time he bought a mountain bike. And over I think is the summer of my freshman year just discovered mountain biking in Massachusetts and fell in love with it, went back to college in Washington DC started to work in a bike shop, essentially. So I could get a discount on buying my own mountain bike and stayed working in the bike shop as a part time job throughout college and became part of this early mountain bike scene in Washington DC. And for your listeners, it's sort of counterintuitive that there would be such a thing in a city like Washington, DC, but it's got a lot of green space. And once you knew how to connect them within the city, you could have these amazing sort of city riding experiences off road that there was a lot of gravel site or sorry, haystack mountain bikers going on in those days. And then you would travel not too far out to Maryland or Virginia or up into Pennsylvania to go to some bigger wilderness areas. And that's where a lot of the mountain bikes events were starting up. So I was doing that and sort of fell out of love with being in college but knew that I needed to complete my college degree. And I decided, Okay, I'm gonna continue with this business degree with the sole purpose of going to work in the bike industry. Because if I have to sell something, I'm going to sell something I like. So I set out to apply to a bunch of different companies and I remember writing letters, letters, yes letters. I'm old enough to write letters writing letters to Ibis in a town called Sebastopol in Northern California. I didn't actually have any idea where that was, but I wrote an ibis, and I liked Ibis. And then I was writing, gotten connected with a yeti in Durango, Colorado, and Dean titanium in Boulder, and ended up getting an interview with Yeti and had been in communication with Dean the whole time. And every three months I would check in with John secrecies what he was one of the founders at Dean and even a great call me in three months don't have anything for you now, but call me in three months and in three months, I would call them you know, three months to the day. And in hindsight, he mentioned to me like that was one One of the things that got me the job over there, because I was just following through, and anything I said I was going to do, I was going to do. The short version of the story is and maybe this is a funny aside, when I moved out to Colorado decided if I was managing a bike shop in DC, I could surance I'll do that in Boulder, if I needed to do that just packed everything up, moved to Colorado had the interview with Yeti. I'd been going to school in Washington, DC, Washington, DC 80% of the kids there are going into politics. And in politics, you wear a suit and tie and it's drilled into you. You're better to overdressed for an interview than under dress. And I had this internal struggle when I was in Durango, which anybody who's been to Durango should have realized you don't wear a suit and tie there but I put on the tie. I went into my interview with Yeti they all looked at me like I was a moron and needless to say the interview did not go as well that well and didn't get that job, but ended up moving to Boulder worked in a bike shop for about a month and then ended up getting the job as national sales manager for Dean titanium.
Andrew Vontz 11:07
We're gonna have to hit pause there because of a couple of critical follow up questions. We're gonna really get in the weeds here. You mentioned that you had an ibis at the time. I'm assuming you had one of the cromoly ibis, Mojo's Yeah, exactly. Okay, what color was it?
Craig Dalton 11:23
purple and black fade.
Andrew Vontz 11:25
Did you have any anodized parts on this bicycle?
Craig Dalton 11:29
Oh, yeah. I had some purple anodized parts on there. Grafting cranks.
Andrew Vontz 11:33
What are we like? What are we talking about?
Craig Dalton 11:34
We're talking some ringlet skewers. I was a cook's Brother Fan, because I did have a little BMX in my background. So I had cooks brothers cranks on there. I think it was a ringlet cooks, brother mix on that bike.
Andrew Vontz 11:47
Okay. And like me, I feel like you were of a certain vintage that perhaps you got to experience Riding Mountain bikes with platform pedals with toe clips, not because you wanted to do that. But there were no other technologies available when you started perhaps is that correct?
Craig Dalton 12:05
This is true. And my first mountain bike fully rigid. And for many, many years, I would advocate. It's the only way to start riding mountain bikes. It's the only way to develop the skills you're going to need, right suspension fork, even the front fork is something that you should earn before you get it.
Andrew Vontz 12:22
That's a cheat code. Yeah,
Craig Dalton 12:25
I mean, and now now with the full suspension bikes, I mean, you just can plow through stuff. You don't have to have that much skill.
Andrew Vontz 12:31
But pretty soon they're going to be saying the same thing to new gravel riders who are gravitating towards getting a suspension for it for their gravel reading. And when you went in for that job interview, at Yeti, we're talking this is peak Yeti. This is Julie for Tato. This is John Tomac. Era, I'm thinking am I right? Yeah, yeah. Okay. I'm
Craig Dalton 12:53
Parker, the founder was there. Yeah, definitely in that era. 1992.
Andrew Vontz 12:59
Okay, ash, and aside from the tie, did you feel like you bombed the interview?
Craig Dalton 13:06
Well, there was clearly not a bond between John Parker and myself. I felt like I got along with their existing sales manager, Dave Hahn pretty well. But when John Parker came in, don't want to disparage him. But he's, we he and I just didn't get along.
Andrew Vontz 13:23
Got it. Okay, so you end up you go the bike shop route? And then where do you go from there?
Craig Dalton 13:29
Yeah, so ended up at Dean titanium got called in. I said, John, I've moved to Boulder. You know, if something opens up, he's like, why don't you come in for an interview, I was like, great, head out to their office and gun barrel, ended up joining as the fourth person to their team felt like it was a lot bigger organization when talking to them on the phone and seeing their advertisements in dirt rag and mountain bike action magazine. What I learned, which was very interesting, was that Dean, up until that point, up until about a month ago, prior to my arrival, had been operating out of John's house. And every time that I called Tugg, who was the production person on the team would say, Hang on Johnson, the executive waiting, it's going to take me four or five minutes to get him. And what would happen is, Todd would put me on hold, take a broomstick hit the ceiling, which would indicate to John in the bedroom upstairs in the house, that he should pick up the phone. And that's what was going on in the backdrop but they always made it seem like there was a bigger organization there. And many years later, in hindsight, like I came to came to the conclusion that that was really a formative moment for me, because I started to understand that how you show up to the world, whether it's as a person or as a brand, you can kind of create something. And that definitely came into play when I started my own business. You have the ability to craft the narrative that you want people to experience and For me deemed titanium was this luxurious brand, that of course, they had a production facility. And of course, it took four minutes to get to the executive wing.
Andrew Vontz 15:08
What would I mean? And once you got on the inside, were you working out of that same house? Or did they move into an office,
Craig Dalton 15:14
they had just moved into their first office and gun barrel? Okay.
Andrew Vontz 15:18
And fast forward years later, you're starting your own company. As you mentioned, you picked up some lessons from your time in the bike industry. And from that experience, specifically, in aggregate, can you talk a bit about some of the other destinations and places where you worked within the bike industry and some of the lessons that you learned that you carried forward.
Craig Dalton 15:42
So definitely on on the the Dean titanium side was just creating a brand and how you show up to the world. As I mentioned before, that was the main takeaway, and the skirt, and that overall scrappiness of that business summit. I really felt the hustle there. And we all were aligned towards a similar objective, which, in my mind, translated to beat Merlin at that time, because Merlin was one of the bigger titanium brands and there's Lightspeed out there and we all had a little bit of a mini grudge match going on against one another. But it was a lot of fun. We did a lot of things, a lot of things like, you know, camping on the way to trade shows, and we just did things in a way that got the job done, and didn't spend a lot of money ultimately ended up leaving and moving out to California and I worked for Avocet, who made like computers at the time, as well as saddles and tires, worked in inside sales and moved to Palo Alto, California to race for a mountain bike team out here that we'll Smith voodoo team, which was a great experience it it, that experience sort of underscored that I was not going to be a professional athlete, which I suppose was good to get through my head. But working for Avocet was was good and ultimately ended up working for Veta over in Europe. So I lived in Switzerland and manage European distributors and athletes, which is a 25 year old was an amazing experience because all I did was travel around Europe and fumble my way through bike shops and talking to the distributors. But most excitingly, I got to go to the tour. I got to go to team training camps. It was the year that Lance Armstrong was diagnosed with cancer. And he was scheduled he was had joined the Cofidis team. And I was at the cofece training camp. And everybody was scratching their head like where's Lance Armstrong? The camp went on for a week. And then I think a few weeks later, we learned he had cancer.
Andrew Vontz 17:41
During that time, I wanted to go back to this moment you had where you realize you weren't going to be a professional athlete, did you think on some level, I might be able to do this.
Craig Dalton 17:51
I probably say not really, you know, I growing up racing mountain bikes in those college years out of Washington, DC, I became a competent expert class racer. But just as I was kind of climbing the ranks on the East Coast, that's when I moved to Boulder, and pretty immediately got a level set that there is a a two other three other levels of talent above me out here in Colorado, that even as I adapt to the different types of racing with the bigger mountains than we have on the East Coast, I really wasn't going to be super competitive. I'm not someone who had a lot of sort of ego in my bike racing, which could have been part of the problem. So I wasn't too broken up about it and always viewed as something that it was fun to do, like pinning a number on it like pushing the limits. And more more than anything else. I think I like riding in different places. And racing always provided that outlet on the mountain bike, especially on the East Coast. If someone put a put a race up in West Virginia, I just naturally assumed that that was a good place to ride and it was worth the car ride down there to go do it.
Andrew Vontz 19:02
You know, as some people say, Craig, there's the world tour, the highest level of professional racing, things like the Tour de France, the Tour of Flanders, which just happened last weekend, and then a level or two higher than that is riding a boulder. Did you find that to be the case?
Craig Dalton 19:21
I certainly did. I remember. I remember the first two days after I moved out there. There was I think a Tuesday night dirt criterium that went on as a training race. And I just got absolutely throttled and I convinced myself that it was me transitioning to living at elevation. But it turns out that wasn't the only problem with my athletic ability for as far as racing other Boulder Mountain bikers.
Andrew Vontz 19:47
And when you were working for these various brands, what did you learn about sales? Was that something that came naturally to you?
Craig Dalton 19:54
I think I'm more introverted than extroverted, which seemed As weird as I host a podcast and, frankly, professionally, I've always been in a sales and business development capacity. So I don't think it came naturally to me. But I think I took some of those lessons around how the brand showed up in publications that didn't actually match what was going on behind the scenes, and said, Well, if the brand can do that, I should be able to do that as well. So I knew that I had to kind of rise to the occasion. And if I was talking to a shop about making a sale of a titanium frame, I needed to play that role of a salesperson and learn those skills. And eventually it has translated so it becomes much more naturally for me to talk to people. And you know, regardless of you know, if we have prior experience together, I find it easy now to engage in conversations. And I know when to ask for the clothes, so to speak, to develop those skills over time.
Andrew Vontz 20:50
And what happens it takes you from the world of cycling and being an amateur ish aspiring pro athlete operating in the industry over to the world of tech, like what goes down?
Craig Dalton 21:04
Yeah, so I'm living in Switzerland and working for Veta. And this is back when you could have a plane ticket that had an expert expiration date. Veta, ends up getting bought by a private equity firm in San Francisco. At a certain point, my check stopped coming into my bank account. And I'm kind of freaking out because I'm not exactly sure I can make my way home. And my sole job, I have to spend money every single day in that job because I'm traveling, I've got this car. So I got to put diesel in it, meet hotels, etc. And despite like, going on the most budget conscious way possible, still spending a decent amount of money. We had an office in Italy, I packed up everything I was living outside of Geneva in Switzerland, packed up everything into my Ford mondial, which was the station wagon and went down to Italy. And I said, I need to get paid, or I'm going home. I had this ticket that expired that weekend. And I remember, I think Annamaria the woman who was running the office over there, contacted the home office and said, you know, Craig doesn't get paid. He's quitting right now. And I got paid, that I asked for, I'm gonna need $200 gas money to get back to Switzerland. And I need that advance to me, like, I can't continue to go in the hole for you. And they said, I can't do it. We don't have the money for you. And I said, Okay, I'm leaving. I'm leaving tomorrow. I had everything with me. Just took that plane ticket and flew home and ended up going down to Santa Cruz and working in Santa Cruz just kind of figuring out go to business school, at that point, ended up working for a year in Santa Cruz and then go into business school in 1998.
Andrew Vontz 22:45
Did you feel chill about all that going down?
Craig Dalton 22:49
Yeah, I did. I wasn't, I wasn't stressed about it. I mean, I think I'm, I'll acknowledge some sort of white privilege here. I felt like I had opportunity and wasn't super concerned. I had a girlfriend in Santa Cruz that I can probably live with for some short period of time until I found a job. And I'd always been self sufficient with enough money to, you know, make rent and eat ramen if I needed to.
Andrew Vontz 23:17
And what drew you to business school? And where did you want to go from there?
Craig Dalton 23:21
Yeah, so the bike industry had been volatile for me a little bit. I felt like it had Avocet bobbin been bought by a private equity firm, even though that didn't affect my, my tenure there. But then later, I just explained the that experience. So I said, Well, I'll go to business school, get a graduate degree, I got an MBA in Technology Management from UC Irvine. And I'm gonna go into tech because it's less volatile.
Andrew Vontz 23:45
What year was this?
Craig Dalton 23:48
2000 I graduated. Wow. Okay. Wow. So that did not pan out that did not pan out in terms of volatility. But, you know, got got a few skills under my belt ended up getting into a secure job with a small company that was actually started by a former bike racing teammate of mine, a company called Proteus that was working on this intersection of mobile, web and interactive television at the time, and this is so the year 2000 people in the US are still trying to figure out why to text message. There was this challenge of interoperability between the carriers. So if if you had Verizon, you might be able to send a message to another Verizon subscriber. But if you were an AT and T subscriber, and your friend was a Verizon subscriber, they weren't talking to each other. So there was this super important piece that was actually pioneered by a couple of companies in Northern Virginia. It's called inter carrier inter carrier interoperability. And it was basically kind of creating those pipes between all the different carriers. Once that had been completed, they still had to sort of show people what the use cases were going to be and obviously, you know, basic tech messages I'm on my way that kind of stuff came came easily for a lot of people. But what we did is we took more of an entertainment approach. So we developed the first TV to SMS voting technology. So we were this little company in Northern Virginia, but we managed to convince Fox Broadcasting to have this concept of virtual pit crew for NASCAR races. And they will put up a shortcode on the screen. And, you know, do you agree that they should go into pit yes or no. And people would send a text message back. And a bunch of these little kind of experiences, slowly taught people what they could do with text messaging, and sort of set that mobile world going. And it even though it was a really horrible time, as far as the economy was going, we were doing innovative stuff, and small enough of the scale that you know, we were a going concern and frankly, thriving through that period.
Andrew Vontz 25:49
Did you get to attend any NASCAR races during that period of time? Can you tell? Can you tell me a little bit about your first NASCAR experience, please? Correct.
Craig Dalton 25:57
So it was tough at Sears Point, that that the in Northern California or raceway that is not a normally a NASCAR truck, because it has turns in it. So it's the most in my opinion, because I appreciate drivers actually having to turn both directions. I thought it was the most interesting NASCAR race possible to go to. But we also did work with the Super Bowl. And although I didn't attend the Super Bowl, my colleague, and now current colleague, oddly enough, he attended the Super Bowl on behalf of the company with Fox Sports.
Andrew Vontz 26:30
Wow. And from there, when did you start to get this bug to be an entrepreneur? Like I know, there's a lot of time passes in the middle there. But when did you start to get this idea of? You know what? I think I want to start something.
Craig Dalton 26:48
Yeah, I think I was progressively going to smaller and smaller companies. So after I left Proteus, I went to a mobile gaming company and helped start their San Francisco office and grew that to about 50 people in the US, saw that company purchased, went to a very small startup and just got this present to a board of directors, got to watch the company run out of money, got to see kind of the the ugly side of entrepreneurship there. Which weirdly appealed to me. And opportunistically, when it came time to start my company, and honestly happened more opportunistically than anything else. I was getting laid off another one of these small startups that I was working with. And I called a friend of mine who was working on another project, and we were considering purchasing his company. And I had to call him and say, you know, all that time we spent together to buy your company, well, we're not going to do that, and I've lost my job. Maybe I can help you sell the company, or there's something I can do in the meantime. And he said, You know, that's great credit. But I've got this other project that I've been kind of incubating it's under a really tight timescale. And I need someone to to handle all the business side of it. So he was a mechanical engineer, and just needed someone to kind of incorporate the company, set some of the marketing strategy, set up the E commerce site, just a bunch of stuff and partner with him on it. And I didn't think of it as hey, I'm doing this, quitting my job and going to do this thing full time. It seemed interesting, it seemed opportune, I had maybe four weeks of severance that I could play with. So my wife wouldn't kill me. And just kind of went for it. So that that product concept was in April 2010, Apple was introducing the iPad. And unlike many Apple launches, which are incredibly secretive, whenever they launch a new new category of product, they typically do it at the worldwide developer conference. So this year, for example, it's expected that they may announce an augmented or virtual reality headset. It won't be available that day. But it's setting the intention that this is going to be a commercial product, hate developer start developing things for this product so that in September, or October, or whenever we decide to launch it, there's going to be applications and experiences available. So that's what was going on. At that time. Apple had announced the iPad, but was intending to ship it in April, what we realized was that one we had both lived through the iPhone launch and that a lot of people were naysayers. But I got an iPhone on day one. And I was in the mobile gaming world. And I was like This changes everything. People just don't know it yet. And we had that same sort of sense around the iPad. We didn't know exactly what it was going to do. We had this concept that people weren't going to be comfortable consuming content holding a hunk of aluminum. We had grown up reading books. This is we're tactile society. Now. All of a sudden, Steve Jobs expected us to hold this tablet. How do you hold it? How do you prop it up to watch something on it? There were all these questions. And we came up with this basic concept that if wealth if people like holding books Why don't we make a book bound iPad case. And so we found a DODOcase. on that premise, we found a local bookbinder, who basically, for your, for the listener, books are made out of cloth and board. So you've got a piece of cardboard, and then you wrap cloth around it. That cloth, maybe like a leather leather substitute. But more often than not, books are cloth. And you wrap that in, glue it onto those cardboard, and you have a spine, as everybody can envision in their head when they're reading a book. So the actual book side of it was not really an issue. We talked to a number of Bookbinders in the Bay Area. And most of them thought we were crazy. And there was one bookbinder in the Dogpatch. neighborhood who said, as long as your money is green, I don't care what you're asking me to make, I will make that thing for you. And it was only a component of the overall product. So the second piece in my partner's design was a bamboo frame, bamboo wood frame, that would hold the product in place. And the idea was that we were going to machine the bamboo in such a way, add a little rubber in the corners, and that was going to hold the iPad in place. The overall aesthetic of the product was going to be super elegant, you weren't actually going to see the iPad. When you close the book, you would see bamboo, which in some ways looks like paper. So it had this really cool effect. And there's sort of a, an eco story we could spin. And so we had that concept. We did not have access to an iPad, but we knew we needed to launch the day the iPad launched. So we basically did a mock up of what we thought the product was going to look like. took some photographs hacked a Shopify site. So we had a single page that basically was like DODOcase for iPad 5995. We went out on Craigslist. And the interesting fact you cannot post to Craigslist, there's no nationwide Craigslist, you post to San Francisco, you posted in New York, you posted Cincinnati, went out and picked major, all the major markets we could think of so Chicago, New York, Boston, Miami, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and I wrote ads basically saying, if you're if you're someone who goes out and has fun at Apple launches, we'd love to hire you. And we hired, I think it was 13 people to hand out flyers that we produced in 13 different markets and the basic, maybe it's less than that in terms of market. But the basic premise was, you're not going to make any, you're probably not going to make any money at this. But it's going to be a hell of a lot of fun. So we had people are handing out flyers. Turn on the website, the moment the iPad launched, and an order or two came in and asked to tell you and it is like one of those moments of like, holy crap, we just did something. Commit someone to come to a website and pay us for a product that doesn't exist. This like this was just like the mind blowing moment every ecommerce owner goes through when they actually transact with someone. So the orders were coming in and onesies twosies. And we were still trying to figure out, we went out and bought the iPad that day, and had a whole host of things to try to figure out. Kind of two weeks in we had shipped no product, but we had put on the website, it's going to ship in six weeks. And that was the best thing we ever did. So we have maybe, let's call it 100 orders in the first two weeks, we have this moment where we finally feel like we've got the wood chassis in a place where it's production ready. The bookbound cover in a place where it's production ready, locked and loaded. We got those pieces together, we set up a camera to do a time lapse of our big momentous day where we were going to get out maybe 20 units. And he's you see us start assembling. And then in the footage you see us kind of have this crestfallen look in our eyes as we realize something's horribly messed up, and it's all worthless. And we had to go back to the starting board again.
Andrew Vontz 34:05
So what happened?
Craig Dalton 34:07
So we we kept plugging away. And I think that's, I mean, that was the huge takeaway that I had many, many times in the DODOcase journey it was because we were doing it all in San Francisco, if something was wrong, we would just go fix it. And you know, we were doing stuff at small enough scale that like we weren't burning, you know, 10s of 1000s of dollars, we were burning hundreds of dollars if we made a mistake. And we were checking everything, every single product as it as it was kind of being produced to make sure that it worked and satisfied our our expectations for what the v1 of the product was going to look like. So eventually, we start figuring out like, okay, we can actually ship product, maybe it's like three or four weeks in, but on the 31st day of existence. We went from what had been sort of, let's say 100 orders every week or so maybe even less, to 1000 orders in One day. And we're like, what the hell just happened. We went through the kind of the the order queue and our Shopify admin and and discovered that one of those flyers that one of those people for no, basically no money had handed out, went to actually two of them went to the unofficial Apple weblog, which was like, a hugely influential Apple log reblog at the time, and then another prominent blogger in the space. So we ended up shipping product to them. In the court normal course of the order queue, they got the product, they wrote reviews that said, the DODOcase is the Royals Royce of iPad cases. And next thing, you know, like the orders went off the charts, we had no ability at that time to keep up with the orders, like our production output was, you know, in 10s of units a day. And now we have about 1000 units spike to try to get over. We're like, we're we'll figure this out. But we're a little bit after at this moment in time.
Andrew Vontz 36:04
And at the beginning of the journey, when you described, you partner up with this friend of yours, he has this idea. Had you all done any research? Or was this just your gut or intuition that people are going to want something that is book like, unnatural?
Craig Dalton 36:21
It was 100% gut and intuition. I mean, again, like I definitely had experienced those iPhone moments, and knew how passionate the apple community was, I think the other component was the apple, the apple fanboy community, they congregate in a very limited number of places. So from a product launch perspective, we knew if we could tap into those places, we could get the knowledge of our product out there. And if it landed, it would land and, you know, we have a, what I thought was going to be a side business on our hands.
Andrew Vontz 36:55
When you built that original web page. Were you thinking of that as a smoke test? Or was it hell or high water, we're gonna go to market with this thing. We were
Craig Dalton 37:06
committed to go into market with it. I think, today, when you when you hear about people doing like AV testing on landing pages, that products don't actually exist, we didn't have that mentality, our thought process was more, well, we're gonna make these things. And maybe that's only 100 things in life, and we'll send them out and be happy with that. Or maybe there'll be lots of these things out there in the world. But we're going to follow through with whoever shares their dollars with us, we're going to share that we're going to follow through with that commitment to deliver them the best product we can.
Andrew Vontz 37:36
And Craig, going back to your learnings from the bike industry, specifically a dean around storytelling is being a key element of differentiation and kind of creating this myth around your product, as I'm hearing you describe where you started, did you anticipate that over time, these will become commoditized products, there'll be a race to the bottom and that the manner in which you were framing the story would be a differentiator, and people would pay a premium because of the story you were telling how you position your product.
Craig Dalton 38:10
100%. And actually, we had a deep discussion, my partner and I about branding and the importance of it, and we realized like what we went to market with the DODOcase logo was supposed to be like, I think a horse maybe at the time, sorry, this was a dodo bird. But it looked like a horse, it looked like a chess piece. And it didn't render Well, the name, the name and the word mark, as we express it originally actually worked really well. But the logo itself just wasn't going to fly. It wasn't going to work on multiple mediums. It wasn't going to work and look, well embossed into the cover of the product. So we found a freelance branding advisor and went through an exercise we happen to find someone who was young and hungry, but great, who you know ultimately would go on to selling $100,000 branding, products, projects. And for $10,000. She went through this amazing exercise with us where he took my thoughts, my partner's thoughts, things that we were inspired things we love, like you know, we put we had this mood board and we put Brooks bicycle saddles and some classic kind of city bicycles from from the Netherlands, and we put maybe Levi's jeans and we put sewing machines and all these different things together. And this guy, put it all together and came came out with this exceptional brand and the way he expressed it and in hindsight like I've seen this many times in terms of getting a brand encyclopedia done, but he showed this what it's gonna look like on a product. This is what it's gonna look like on the t shirt. This is what it's going to look like on a billboard and just kind of expressed that the logo the word Mark could scale up and down, depending on where it needed to be and it felt very, it felt so good to Both of us that was the amazing part of this branding experience. And it really grounded our narrative and our mission around connecting craftsmen with consumers. Because the insight we did have, to your point about, hey, this markets clearly going to get commoditized. Over time, we felt like if we could make that connection where you felt like you were guiding the hands of a craftsperson in San Francisco, this was never going to be if asked the question, what's that covering your iPad? It wasn't going to be that's that's my case, it's going to be that to my DODOcase. And we saw this play out time and time again, that particularly in those early days, both entrepreneurs and creative professionals tended towards the products. And they were very vocal about it because it expressed a certain amount about their persona and their consciousness
Andrew Vontz 40:51
was part of your strategy to lead or when would that lead pin consumer who would be like the micro influencer among their peers, and they in turn would influence other people. And that would drive word of mouth?
Craig Dalton 41:03
Yeah, I think we benefited immensely from being in San Francisco. And both my partner and I having some experience in the tech world. So we were digitally savvy, we understood social media, we had connections through friends to big time entrepreneurs, like Jack Dorsey from Twitter, or I remember in the early days, Kevin Rose, had a company called Digg, and he had a big podcast or blog following. And he did a review on YouTube. And that was another one of those moments where, for whatever reason, that you know, the sales in a particular period was off the hook. And we'd go into Google Analytics, and we're like, oh, this is a YouTube video. And we found out it's Kevin Rose, talking about our product again, like we, he just bought it, we didn't know he bought it. And he just talked about it. And it went from like legit tech entrepreneurs talking to talking about our product. And keep in mind, back in the original days of the iPad, getting an iPad was hard, like they were scarce product, then the next thing that was hard was getting a DODOcase. There, our production was super constrained. So if you wanted to get one, you have to have put your hat in your hand and hand up and put your money down six weeks ago in order to get it shipped to you. So it became this sort of badge of honor to have a DODOcase around your iPad. And everybody always asked questions about them.
Andrew Vontz 42:27
It sounds like you ran into the really high quality problem of having to scale or hyperscale rapidly in response to that demand. And I have to imagine, that was probably incredibly exciting. I'm also wondering if there were ever any points where you and your co founder weren't completely aligned, or you had to make critical decisions for maybe you had divergent thoughts about where to take the business?
Craig Dalton 42:51
Yeah, yeah. 100% I'm, I'm more conservative by nature. And my my business partner, Patrick Buckley, it's kind of more of that mad scientist guy, great, great vision, you know, nothing's a problem, we can solve anything. And he also appreciated some good heavy duty equipment. So we originally, because we had a good partner on the bookbinding side, we had that on lock. It was really the woodworking side that we had challenges on. So the first kind of leap of faith was, we're gonna get a big production facility in Dhaka in the Dogpatch neighborhood, one of the few neighborhoods where you can actually manufacture in San Francisco and I think we took a 5000 square foot Bay, because we had a CNC router, a wood router that we needed a home for. So we had this little office off to the side, and then this massive CNC router that was grinding bamboo, all day, every day. And we we kind of got there progressively. So we found a woodshop in the Mission District that could do it. And we'd literally, Patrick, or a contractor would stay up overnight and use the machine when the gentleman wasn't using his machine. And we realized, I think Patrick always was able to bring it back to, hey, if we're selling, you know, order of magnitude, 1000 or 2000, whatever, a month, and we're paying this, we're paying for this contractor in this machine over in this other facility. It's pretty simple math to say, as long as we continue selling that many and it wasn't for that many months, this machine is going to pay for itself. So then we'd say okay, well, we need to get that machine. Okay, we need to get a lease on a warehouse. We need to hire some people at that point, because we were doing a lot of assembly that just kind of slowly went from there. And eventually we ended up experiencing some limitations with our bookbinding partner. And we brought that in house as well. So we were doing bookbinding we were doing the CNC routing. We realized because we were now a apple accessory company. There was all kinds of opportunity for line expansion. So we ended up building out a leather craft studio so we could do you know leather sleeves and other cloth based items as well as the book bound items. How did
Andrew Vontz 45:05
your sense of identity change during this period of time, your sense of who you were what you thought might be possible for you with in business and in life? Was it any different than it was before you did this?
Craig Dalton 45:18
Yeah, you know, it's a great question, because we were, I think the biggest thing in that in that ROM was that I was now running an American made company, like I was part of this, this resurgence of American manufacturing. And there was a lot of people behind that there's an organization called SF made, or San Francisco made, that was working on bringing manufacturing back to San Francisco. And they took immense pride in the fact that we were bringing manufacturing jobs back into the city. That also led to local and city government officials kind of having an eye towards this because we are creating jobs, we're generating revenue, which led to state officials in congress people, and then ultimately people in DC taking notice of what we're doing. So I went on this journey as as someone who was representing small scale American manufacturing, and I guess, the most interesting culmination of that, and I can get into how this happened. But I ended up going to the White House, representing DODOcase as a small American manufacturer. So how did it happen? Yeah, so we got connected through SF made to a lobbying organization called business forward in Washington, DC, and business forwards objective really was to be the voice of manufacturing in America. And they would host events with government staff. And we went on one occasion and spoke to didn't know if the role exists anymore. But there was a CTO of the United States government. And we sort of sat in a panel session with him and gave our opinion. And then, in one of the years, the one of the years of the Obama administration, there was a couple of government shutdown moments, you might have recalled when they couldn't agree on extending that the budget or the debt ceiling. And they wanted stories around. How is this affecting small businesses? Right, and so the business forward reached out to me and said, Hey, Craig, we've got a senior official that wants to get a briefing on how this is going to affect small businesses, you know, they want to spend some PR around, this is affecting real people. And you need to know and understand that. And I was a we had just learned that my wife was pregnant. And I said to my contact, how senior official are we talking about? Because I really needed to be here for my wife, but how senior are we talking about? And then, and he said, Don't quote me on this, but it's on Obama's schedule. And I was like, okay, like, if you're feeling like solid, then I will talk to my wife, and see if she's okay got to do this ultrasound. Well, I go to the White House, and I flew to DC, had that doctor's appointment on the phone to to, you know, to hear that I'm having a boy. And then went into the, I went into a group of, like, there's 12 small business owners in the Roosevelt Room of the White House. And President Obama walks in, goes around the room. And there's a little minor detail of this story that makes it even more special. President Obama is a customer of DODOcase. There's many pictures of him with a DODOcase in the Oval Office. So he goes around the room and he's shaking everybody's hand. And, you know, there was a woman who was a candle supplier to the White House, there's a event producer, and he's shaking everybody's hand and I'm kind of observing the protocol and seeing like, Okay, you shake the President's hand, takes about 10 seconds, and then he moves on to the next person. President Obama comes and shakes my hand. And I'm like, I'm Craig Dahl. I'm from San Francisco from DODOcase. And he's like, don't you keep shaking my hand and I'm getting like, feeling incredibly awkward. Now, because he's like, we've definitely extended beyond the 10 seconds. We're definitely like at 15 now, and he's like, oh, yeah, Craig. Guys, he's still shaking my hand. I love DODOcase Have you guys heard of DODOcase it's the most amazing product from my iPad. I use the product every day, shaking my hand shaking my hand. And, you know, basically announces to the whole room what we're doing and how much he loves our product. And yeah, it was amazing. goosebump moment for sure.
Andrew Vontz 49:37
So good. So good. And I mean, I have to ask, you're back in DC, since Apex life moment, meet the president. He loves He uses your product. He loves it. You've got a quote to go on the website. Probably. I don't know how you clear that. Did you get on a ride?
Craig Dalton 49:55
Now I did not go back to any of my old stomping grounds. At that time,
Andrew Vontz 50:00
that's tough, maybe, maybe one day, maybe at a future date. And so all this incredible stuff happens like your finger on the national political scene the business is taking off. And then what does this all culminate on? Where does it go?
Craig Dalton 50:14
Yeah. So ultimately, I mean, you sort of alluded to it early on, we discussed about like the journey this product was going to go on. And it was sort of inevitable that that space would get commoditized. And the people who valued that iPad, so much, it was just going to become a thing that they consumed content on. So we definitely saw the relationship with our customers changed and the type of people that were buying the product change. We continue to release products every year when Apple introduced the new iPad, because we had to change that the kind of holder effectively for the different shapes of the iPad. But it was pretty clear, we did have eyes wide open that we felt like the business had a seven year journey to it. And the first four years were going to be growth. In the next three, it was going to trail off and we needed to do something. So we did attempt to do and start a number of different businesses, I mentioned that we kind of widened our offering in the iPad accessory and iPhone accessory market. But that in turn was only going to get us so far. We started a few front side projects that didn't work out our basic thesis was, hey, we've got really smart people who are good at selling stuff online, we've got a manufacturing facility, why don't we just start another brand doing something that we can leverage our same manufacturing capabilities, leverage our talented marketing and ecommerce staff, but just spread that economic load across more products to bring in more revenue. We had a couple of fails in that in those efforts. And then we had one of the strangest wins that I never would have imagined. Google introduced this cardboard virtual reality headsets. At the Google I O conference in 2014. We recognize that more people than the people at that conference would want to try this thing. So within four hours of hearing the announcement, we put up a product page because they open sourced the design and put our hand in the ring saying hey, if you want one of these things you can buy from us. Next thing you know, within six weeks, I think we'd sold 10,000 units. And it was basically another bet on ourselves. We're like, we know how to design things. We know how to sell things, we can show us how to figure out how to produce things, as long as we give ourselves enough time. Fast forward, we ended up becoming one of the largest custom branded Google Cardboard virtual reality headset companies in the world. Because we developed a real streamlined process if you want to put your brand on it to use it for a giveaway, we could do that we had an outsource partner that was basically in the packaging world that could produce the cardboard to our specifications. We had some lenses that we sourced from China, and we had a process of putting it all together and making it so you could slot your phone in and see you know, 360 degree of videos or photos.
Andrew Vontz 53:02
What was going on with the rest of your life while this was happening and what was going on with you as an athlete.
Craig Dalton 53:09
Great question. So Cycling has remained a part of my life throughout this entire journey. Ever. I got the triathlon bug in 2002, I would say and ultimately ended up doing an Ironman in Canada in 2005. And an Iron Man in New Zealand in 2007. Mountain biking continued to be part of the jam as well. I realized I was best suited for endurance events. So did the trans Rockies up in Canada, which is a five day mountain bike stage race. Did the Leadville 100, kept a toe in the water kept enjoying the sport as I could. And as a recreational athlete,
Andrew Vontz 53:50
just with the most intense time consuming challenges that one could possibly imagine. Right? Yeah, yeah, just like super chill laid back five day mountain bike stage race Ironman, 100 mile mountain bike race. Take that to your very modest creg.
Craig Dalton 54:06
It helped out my business partner I knew through during triathlons as well, so he had at least an appreciation for doing crazy hard things who was faster?
Andrew Vontz 54:14
Me? Okay, did you rub that on his face from time to time? No, just let it speak for itself.
Craig Dalton 54:25
Just just let it speak for it. I've always been pretty. Let the legs speak for themselves.
Andrew Vontz 54:30
But the legs do the talking out all those different endeavors that you explored as an endurance athlete? Which one did you find that to be the most challenging?
Craig Dalton 54:40
That's a great question. I would say Ironman, just because of the three different sports you have to put together and then nutritional requirements. You really kind of have to stay on everything. There's just a lot of thought that goes into it. In order to be successful. That's not even saying going fast in order to just get to the finish line. and mountain bike stage racing difficult in that it's hard to get up every day and, and grind and race hard. And then do it again five days in a row. That's definitely hard. But as far as I think overall Ironman takes the cake just because of the different disciplines,
Andrew Vontz 55:15
and with Ironman and I ask all triathletes this question, did you find it to be hard to have to go out and when your shovel your shoulders were not covered with any material? Did you find it to be difficult to then put on arm warmers while you had naked shoulders and be out in public?
Craig Dalton 55:34
So I would having a cycling snobbery background, I would take the longest transitions, and I would put on full cycling kit. And then I would change out of it and put on full running.
Andrew Vontz 55:48
That's amazing. With these endurance sports. This is something I've thought about a lot. And I always like to ask people this question, who've been doing endurance sports for a while. Do you feel like over time, at an existential level? Do you continue to grow and learn as a person as you do more and more endurance events? Where do you get used to them? And it's just kind of becomes similar to you know, for someone else that might be the same as like, Yeah, I'm going to play softball this week. It's kind of a social thing. And it's fun and whatever.
Craig Dalton 56:20
I mean, I think there's so many lessons that you learn the hard way that you do sort of make adjustments and you do, like, have for me, it's like, I need to have a nutrition plan, I need to have a hydration plan. I need to do stupid things to remind myself not to be stupid, like I'll put an alarm that goes off every 15 minutes on my watch, just so I remember to eat and drink. That was my hack for nutrition during Ironman. But what I think that I've sort of rediscovered this in the gravel cycling world, something always goes wrong. And it's understanding that you can't control what it is that's gonna go wrong. But you have to have the mentality that whatever it is, you're gonna push through it. And what's important is that you're always moving forward. Right? So you may get a flat tire, you may bonk you may drop a bottle on a dissent and not have anything to drink. That happened to me, that happened to me in cash at the grow, do envies events in Utah, lost all my bottles, like a quarter of the way through super hot day. And I was like, I'm absolutely screwed. I was like, Alright, I'm gonna go, I'm gonna ride off course and go to someone's house. And I'm just going to ask them for water. When I arrived back on the course. And it all worked out.
Andrew Vontz 57:34
Did they give you water? Yeah, yeah.
Craig Dalton 57:38
I had a woman just get out of her car. She's like, I just bought these things at Costco, like, you know, plastic water bottle. So I took as many as I could fit in my pocket. And I was like, Alright, I'm back in the game. Good.
Andrew Vontz 57:48
That's, that's pretty incredible. Have you had a favorite gravel event that you've completed or computer done?
Craig Dalton 57:54
Yeah, I think I definitely enjoy technical gravel races. So usually, my favorite event of all time, it probably was in terms of experience was gravel mob in Ojai, California. And while it's it's punctuated, really by two large climbs, the final bit of it, there was a very technical singletrack descent that made everybody except for the sort of mountain bike background people hate hate their bikes, because if you didn't have your bike set up for some gnarly riding, that one section was going to make you miserable. So I really love that gravel mob event. And then the other one was this event in Utah, because it was in the high mountains, super beautiful out of Ogden, Utah. Very technical, at times, long and hard. Riding back into town just felt like there's no way I can keep the legs going. But you know, the body can always do more than you think it can, as long as you believe that you can get to the finish line.
Andrew Vontz 58:56
Personally, I struggled to be interested in the really big events, I feel a bit like I'm going to Yellowstone Park and July or something when I do those events. Equally, there's something amazing about them, right? And you know, but I do personally, I tend to enjoy the more underground kind of renegade events now that I live here and hope main. There's a series called The main gravel series. They're going to be less events this year, but just a small community. You're on. Like we write on snowmobile, what our snowmobile trails during the winter, and in the summer, it's like waist high grass and rocks. It's totally horrible. You have to get off your bike all the time and push and then you're on roads, but I love that kind of stuff. And then I think things like I haven't done unbound 200 But I've done the 100 a number of times. Really enjoyed that. And I also get kind of freaked out when like, oh, there are 1000 people and they're all within four inches of me and I can't even move have, you know,
Craig Dalton 1:00:01
yeah, I think I would be with you. And that would be my inclination, just as I was, if I was Craig Dalton, the athlete and making those choices. With the podcast, it adds this different filter to it. Whereas there's the added benefit of I go to these big events, I can usually do a bunch of interviews, whether it's with, you know, people at the expo are some of the pro athletes or the race organizers. So it tends to be a mix for me each year, like I'll do a lot, as many kind of lower scale ones as I can, and certainly the regional ones, and then try to hit one or two big ones a year just to kind of keep my name out there in the community.
Andrew Vontz 1:00:36
While you are Craig Dalton gravel icon. So you do have you have that heavy weight on your shoulders, man, I, I completely get it. But yeah, and I know you and I have been emailing a bit about some different events. I am hoping to get out to some of the newer iconic events I am rule of three curious, I have a side conversation going on about I know it's sold out. But if anybody's listening, I might try to find a way on and yeah, there are a few other races that I think are really interesting. And I just love that gravel scene is bringing a lot of different people into the sport. It's bringing people together, you can be a computer or a computer. What do you love about it, Craig?
Craig Dalton 1:01:17
Yeah, I mean, just before we jump into that, I do find it like the event organizers and course design, there's an artistry to it, right? Yeah, I think that's what I wrote, The Rule of Three really appeals to me as well, because there's so much creativity, I love when you should hate your bike and your bike choice at least once per event. And hopefully, like for me, I like a definitely err towards technical riding. And I love when I see people riding super narrow tires, and they just get destroyed in these technical sections. That's to me, that's what gravel riding is all about. But I know I'm a kind of a minority with that perspective.
Andrew Vontz 1:01:57
Right. And just more generally, what do you see happening with gravel? And like, where's it going to head over time? Because you're in what year five of your podcasts now? Your six?
Craig Dalton 1:02:09
Yeah, yeah, right. Yeah, I mean, certainly at the at the professional level, obviously, like with the ECI getting involved in a world championship, we're starting to have that thread. And USA Cycling has got a national championship this year for the first time, which I think was sort of inevitable. And I think, unlike the first UCI World Championship, which I don't think was well executed from a US centric gravel perspective, I do think USA Cycling has been listening. And the event that they've organized, I think it's in Nebraska, this year, has all everything you'd want write a good long enough distance that it's going to be competitive, there's parity between the men and women, the prize purse is the same for both categories. So I think it's pretty natural that even though like a lot of people in the gravel world, you know, want to keep the gravel spirit alive, whatever that is, it's pretty natural that these kind of more professional racing opportunities are going to kind of come to bear, what I don't want to see is for it to be more pack racing, more road style tactics going on. Because I don't think that's fun. And I do think that sort of goes away from my vision of the sport. And there's gonna be room for everyone, just as we were talking about the very beginning of this conversation in terms of the spectrum of types of gravel bikes that are out there in the world, there's clearly going to be a spectrum of racing. And I talked to plenty of race organizers that have a 250 rider cap. That's all they aspire to. And they just aspire to, essentially creating a course that's a love letter to their local riding. And that's that, and then you're going to have the bigger races with a lot of prize money. You're going to have UCI qualifiers and a whole bunch of other things going on, that can coexist peacefully. And I think a lot of people may have a couple of each in their calendar every year.
Andrew Vontz 1:04:02
And where do you want to take the podcast? You've been doing it for a minute, what do you have in mind?
Craig Dalton 1:04:07
Yeah, it's always been this journey for me about exploring the sport of gravel cycling in areas that I'm curious about. And there might have been a moment or two along the way, where I felt like it might have plateaued. But then new things come into the sport and new levels of interests have emerged for me. I'm certainly not a sort of a race podcast. Like that's not the intention. But I have enjoyed, for example, the introduction of the lifetime Grand Prix. I think it's just this nice grounding, and great financial opportunity for athletes to kind of be professional in the sport. So I think that's very interesting. I do think the introduction of suspension design in gravel bikes is here and is coming and has its benefits. And I think it's going to be very polarizing, because it's very easy to look out your doors to where you ride and say A full suspension or even front suspension. nonstarter. That's not what I think about when I grab a bike. Totally fine. But I do think there's a lot of markets where safety and performance increases with suspension on the gravel bike. And I think you're starting to see more and more manufacturers at least explore the idea of a front suspension fork on gravel bikes.
Andrew Vontz 1:05:21
I'm firmly in the please no suspension on gravel bikes category. However, I will say the last time I or two trips ago to the Bay Area, I'm trying to think about when this happened, but I did a ride. And I rode railroad grade and then cut across I forget what the name of the single track is. Maybe it's coastal trail. That would make sense right down in there. Yeah, yeah, which I've done many, many times. On my mountain bike back when I was doing mountain bike stage races and longer mountain bike races. So I've written that on a hardtail. I've written it on a full suspension bike, and I've run it on a gravel bike, it was pretty fun to do under bikes on the gravel bike. And on the coastal trail, I did think I kind of would like some suspension. Yeah, right.
Craig Dalton 1:06:08
I can't, if I can't convince any listener to get a suspension fork, which I realize maybe it's, you know, a tall mountain to climb, I will advocate strongly for you to get a dropper post,
Andrew Vontz 1:06:20
I cannot have. It's tough for me to hear that.
Craig Dalton 1:06:23
Andrew, I'm telling you, it is game changing road or off road on the gravel bike. If you have a dropper post on your bike, you will use it and you will have more control descending Yeah, period. And I would have if you asked me to decide, between a suspension fork and the dropper post that take the dropper post any day, that week, I think it's a critical component for safety and confidence. Again, you know, the mountains around here, they get a little steep for the gravel bike, if you're in your road position, and you're going down some of these hills, you definitely get kind of up in a way that is uncomfortable. And I see so many talented, like endurance athletes who are switching over from the road, that are terrified in those situations, rightfully so the scary moments. But if they could drop their saddle 75 millimeters with ease, they would be totally confident through some of these sections,
Andrew Vontz 1:07:14
that that actually makes a lot of sense. And I'm thinking specifically about some of the people I ride with. Here in the Midcoast, Maine area, most of whom are former ski racers, and when I ride with them, they're always going I grew up in Kansas City, Missouri, Craig, I wasn't ski racing. So when they're going down a hill, they're usually going down at a lot faster than me and in racing contexts. My main thing is I just want to have a completely intact body without a concussion when I finished the race. And as you know, when, particularly when you're in the really big events, you don't know you have no idea what you're about to write into. And I do think I personally would appreciate being able to drop the saddle, get my center of gravity a little lower. So you may have you may have convinced me I'm not gonna go fully on the record, but that but no,
Craig Dalton 1:08:05
I, I will say you can get externally routed ones and you can even get one that's sort of self contained. It has a little lever underneath your seat. So you just kind of grab that and jam it down. So if you're interested in sort of testing like Is this for me? Is this not for me, just get one of those externally mounted ones so you don't have to like deal with putting the cable through your tubes or anything like that and see if it's a fit. And I I would be surprised if you go back after after riding on that's all I'll say.
Andrew Vontz 1:08:33
I think you and I and probably three other people will understand the joke I'm about to make but Craig I think I might just get a height right?
Craig Dalton 1:08:41
Guilt guilty for running one of those.
Andrew Vontz 1:08:43
Yeah, there we go on the day. Awesome. Well, Craig, thanks so much for joining me today. If people want to learn more about you find the podcast where should they go?
Craig Dalton 1:08:52
Yeah, best best social channels, probably Instagram and I'm at the gravel ride underscore podcast. And then WWW dot the gravel ride dot bike can get you to my Spotify to iTunes. The podcast is available. Anywhere you listen to podcasts,