Name: Let my people go surfing
ISBN: 9780143037835

Let my people go surfing

The long-awaited memoir/manifesto from legendary climber, businessman, and environmentalist Yvon Chouinard, founder and owner of one of the world's most inspiring companies, Patagonia, Inc.Whether you care about adventure sports, the fate of the natural world, or pure brand maintenance and business success, Patagonia, Inc. is one of the earth's most interesting and inspiring companies. For almost forty years, its reputation for unsurpassed high quality, maverick innovation, and long-term environmental responsibility has put it in a class by itself. And everything flows from Patagonia's founder, Yvon Chouinard.Chouinard's creation myth is now an American business legend. As a child, he moved with his father, a French Canadian blacksmith, and the rest of his family to Southern California in the 1950s with little English and less money. He escaped into mountain climbing as a teenager and by his early twenties was among the best climbers in America, making famous first ascents of a number of notorious faces. When he decided he could make better climbing tools himself for less money and when his fellow climbers agreed and clamored for more, a way of life became a business. Some forty years later, Yvon Chouinard still summits peaks around the world (though he now spends more time surfing).

What Hacker News says

niwtsolApr 2026

Patagonia is up there for me in current day. Let my people go surfing by the founder is a great read IMO

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calmbonsaiMay 2025

I disagree on "Good to Great" and "Built to Last". In hindsight, they're classic extrapolations of survivorship-bias in a specific era of business instead of durable business practices. It should be more accurately titled as "Built to Fail" considering how those profiled companies have faltered or floundered.

I highly recommend Buffett's letters to shareholders https://a.co/d/cc1ufM4 and Goldratt's "The Goal" https://a.co/d/iJjTf1y and Taleb's "Antifragile" https://a.co/d/4bjC74J . Aside from his mathematical treatment's of uncertainty (which are free), I wouldn't recommend any of Teleb's other books.

"Let My People Go Surfing" https://a.co/d/2hq7ngp doesn't work for all business, but I really found it personally inspirational.

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ethnologicaJul 2024

Let my people go surfing - Patagonia

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a_cApr 2023

Braiding Sweetgrass was the book that introduced me the idea of three sisters. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17465709-braiding-sweetg...

In Let My People Go Surfing https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22155.Let_My_People_Go_S... , the author Yvon Chouinard mentioned that nature love diversity and hate mono-culture. While he didn't invent the concept, it was very profound to me.

Earlier here on HN, there was a post about "replacing bad systems with bad systems" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35476350 Sometimes I think to myself, maybe we started with the best system, the nature, and replace it gradually with partial understanding of the nature.

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tjomkSep 2022

Growth is not everything. I remember reading "Let my people go surfing" by the Patagonia founder where he mentioned multiple times that they were trying to artificially limit their growth by raising the prices for their products. You don't need to chace ever higher profits. Staying small and enjoying your life is also an option.

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BasilPHSep 2022

I'm currently reading Yvon's book "Let my people go surfing"[^1] and so far, I can highly recommend it.

The first, shorter half, is about how Patagonia grew, which is interesting from an entrepreneurial point of view. The second half is about their philosophies and contains a lot of wisdom on creating great, lasting products.

[^1]: https://www.patagonia.com/stories/let-my-people-go-surfing/s...

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