Nick Stone
speaker
134 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Nick Stone’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
If you can't pay your rent and you're trying to build an organization, I think that's tough.
When I was starting Bluestone Lane, I had an extraordinary amount of people that said to me, it won't work. I actually never had ever made coffee at all. I just missed that feeling of being a local where I walked in and they knew my name, face and order. So we had to make a difference to the coffee culture in the US. I'm not really in the game of products on shelves that don't talk back.
I'm in the theater of humans working together congruently as a team. And when COVID hit, we lost 87% of our revenue. So we went from 51 stores to 14. We had to keep stores open for three reasons.
No, well, it's a pleasure to be here. I actually never had ever made, whether it was commercially, professionally, or even at home, I'd never made a coffee at all. I was also a coffee snob. It was entirely dependent on these great independent coffee shops and cafes making beautiful flat whites as we talk in Australia.
And yeah, Blue Stone Lane, we had to make a difference to the coffee culture in the US. We've made a little dent, but hopefully it keeps gathering more momentum.
Sure. So I grew up in Melbourne, Australia. I grew up playing a variety of different sports, but probably the one that I love the most is a football code that's Indigenous to and really only played in Australia. It's called Australian Rules Football, AFL of footy. My father played, my uncle played professionally, my grandfather played at a very high level.
So that was the one that I resonated with the most. And in my final year of high school, I got selected in the Australian Football League draft And I was drafted. So my childhood dream became a reality. And I played six years professionally. I played at three different teams. I got cut from three different teams. So effectively, you have your childhood dream squashed three times in six years.
And by the time I got delisted for the final time, I was only 23 years of age. I was very, very grateful that I went to university at the same time. pro and supportive of players studying at the same time. They will pay for your university education. They will make sure that clubs give you at least one day off during the work week to attend university.
So it took me a three-year full-time bachelor's degree. I did it over six years part-time. So when I got finally delisted by the third team, and I was very fortunate to be in Melbourne the whole time, I then transferred to, I began an internship at an investment bank and then that sort of kicked off my finance career and that led me to New York City where I arrived in late 2010.
It's a very good question, and I certainly think it helped that I was very young of age. I was, in many respects, naive, and there was a level of innocence about me that, oh, just dust yourself up and go again because I'm only 19. And there was a couple of things. Certainly I had the...
internal fortitude to believe that i could make it and that i was prepared to do whatever it took to make it i had the training commitment and i had an extraordinary amount of support behind me i had people saying i don't believe in you you can actually do it and even though in my first two years at the club i got drafted to i didn't play any games at the senior level i wasn't really expected to in the first year my second year i was but i sustained it quite
challenging injury. And that just led to essentially me being delisted and re-picked up by another team. But it's a combination. I think that you need to, and I've applied this to my banking and to Bluestone Lane, is I just became a student, a student of not only the game or the What could I really look at objectively and improve?
And I would be prepared to reach out and ask for coaching, ask for advice, even if it sometimes can be pretty critical and challenging. And then I was very lucky that I continued to invest so much in my relationships with my friends and family and old coaches. And they were the ones that said, you know, you can actually do this. I believe that you can do this. And yeah,
I believe in that case, a team will recognize it. So keep going, keep working on those lesser strengths. And that's really what happened. It was such a long time ago, but it was so formative for my life. And even though I look back at it and I think, oh, I didn't achieve everything I wanted. And I didn't enjoy the journey enough, especially given it was my childhood dream.
But it was so important for my next evolution and my next careers. There was so much transferable skills through that experience.
Well, New York was a dream as well. For me, I think we were fully finished. I set my sights on moving overseas. And a lot of Australians grow up thinking that they want to spend a year working in London because Australians are entitled to spend two years in the UK. But for me, I just had this burning desire to go to New York.
And I think a lot of it was because I was obsessed with New York rock and roll and indie bands. And back in the middle of 2000s, there was just this emergence of these New York rock and roll bands. And I used to play in a band when I was in high school. I played rhythm guitar terribly, but it was a cover band.
I just was fascinated with the fact that New York City is this melting pot, the capital of commerce, fashion, the arts, all amalgamating in one small island. I love this idea about density and going from one side of town to the other. And it was just enthralling to me. So I'd set my goal when football had finished and I was so determined not to have a less successful career.
I was just so hungry and desperate. Then eventually, I found my way to New York, which was also through an unorthodox way. It was actually via studying because at that point in time, I couldn't get a transfer with the bank I was working at because at that stage, the global financial crisis But my cards sort of fell the right way because I put myself in the right position.
And it was just simply sensational. And I lived in New York City for 10 years before I moved to California. And it was so much fun and something I highly encourage people if they ever can get the opportunity to chance their arm to live a couple of years in New York City.
Showing 1–20 of 134 · page 1 of 7
Next →