David Gelles
speaker
265 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2026
last heard 28 Jan
David Gelles’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.
Appearances
He became enamored and then became, in the 1950s, one of the great rock climbers of his age.
And in doing that, he became a blacksmith.
He did these big climbs, but he needed better equipment, so he hammered them out himself on an anvil he bought at a junkyard.
And thus begins his journey as a businessman.
Indeed.
1973, the same year he founds Patagonia, he writes his first check to an environmental activist.
It's just a little money, but he also gives him some office space.
And what this man, who I tracked down and spent time with, Mark Capelli was doing, was trying to protect the Ventura River, which ran behind the office of Patagonia in Ventura, California, and restore the native fish there.
That were once there, but that had been crowded out because of pollution and overdevelopment.
Yvonne loved this.
And that began a tradition of donating small amounts of money initially to grassroots environmental activists, to conservation projects.
And it was something that grew as the company grew.
Dave, it is not a neat and tidy story.
He is not a perfect man.
Patagonia is not a perfect company.
And over and over, what I found was that whether it was in business decisions, whether it was in personnel decisions, whether it was in their relationships with other companies that they partnered with, they had to constantly and continuously balance these many competing priorities.
He didn't, Dave, and this is another contradiction.
And while it's true that Patagonia embraced some very progressive human resources practices and really tried to give its employees time to enjoy nature, he not once ever shared profits and not once ever gave away stock in the company.
He was always incredibly protective of
of Patagonia's equity.
Showing 221–240 of 265 · page 12 of 14
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