Adam and Ryan Goldston are mirror-image twins, former USC D1 athletes, and the co-founders of APL (Athletic Propulsion Labs) — the luxury-performance sneaker brand whose very first product was banned by the NBA for giving players “an undue competitive advantage.”

In this episode, Yale sits down with the brothers behind the brand to talk about obsession, category creation, brotherhood, and what it takes to quietly build a dynastic company from a 60-square-foot office to dreamy, gallery-like flagships in LA and SoHo.

It’s innovation, it’s identity, it’s accidental virality, and it’s very much a story of building the thing you wanted to wear — and then building a whole world around it.

They get into:

• Why obsession gets you where most people won’t go and why luck still matters
• A class business plan turned real, being told it would be a failure, and launching a $300 performance shoe that instantly made players jump higher
• Inventing “luxury performance”
• How Japanese soufflé pancakes inspired their FutureFoam midsole, how zip-lining over Dubai shaped the Zipline silhouette, and why materials and color theory matter as much as tech
• Twin dynamics that actually work
• Going to bed at 4 a.m., waking at 11, handling the day’s immediacy first, then designing the future when the world is quiet
• Ralph Lauren, Rolls-Royce, and why they think in decades and world-building — not hype cycles
• What’s next for APL

Find Adam, Ryan & APL:

• Brand IG: @apl
• Adam Goldston IG & X: @adamgoldston
• Ryan Goldston IG & X: @ryangoldston

Questions, comments…sharp takes? Shoot us a note at WhatsUp@officeof.world

Find out more about the Office Of Podcast

One more thing! Not all offices are created equal. See who else is part of our world and all of the unstructured, messy behind-the-scenes that comes with it on our Instagram & TikTok.

And! If you particularly enjoyed this episode – or any others – please subscribe and leave a rating and review on Apple or Spotify or where ever you get your podcasts.

Recorded at The Newsstand Studios at Rockefeller Center.

Thank you for listening.