As we send this issue to the printer, Rob Gitelis is close to finishing Tour 21, riding the entire Tour de France route prior to the pros with 10 other riders, raising over 35,000 pounds to help cure leukemia.
His journey back to the bike and to where he is now in business is unique and inspiring. Our conversation with Rob Gitelis is worth reading all the way through. Yes, it’s about bikes, living in Taiwan, the bike industry, riding toward health and healing, but it’s also a story about the human side of business, about how one person can change the lives of many and the sacrifices made along the way to success.
Rob, we tend to focus more on the human side of things at Fausto so let’s begin with your cycling history…. I grew up in Miami, Florida, which was one of those pockets in America where bike racing was actually a pretty well received sport. I think it was because there was such a strong Latin American community, as well as the European community that was already there. There were races like the Coconut Grove criterium in South Miami, and these had really big spectator bases. I was lucky that growing up in Miami I had a few close friends, and among them were Chris and Kevin Carmichael. Chris, who went on to become the first generation of American riders that raced the Tour de France, later became USA Cycling coach. I’m about seven years younger than Chris, so I was always like this little kid following him around back in those days, and then always trying to sort of emulate what he had done before me.
Later, I ended up becoming roommates with his brother, who was in medical school at the time. I was always lucky that I had people to look up to, that had gone before me in cycling. I had a career as a junior and as I developed through the ranks, I was probably one of the best bike riders in the state of Florida. Then moving on to the East Coast, the pond gets bigger and your results get a little bit less. But what I did find, even when I was a junior, was that the USA Cycling path was not really for me. I’d been out to the Olympic Training Center a couple of times, and I knew that that wasn’t going to really be the route I wanted to take.
I believe there was a little bit of antisemitism at the time from some of the coaching staff. I never really spoke about that. I don’t really want to get too deep into it, but there was always this underlying tone there, you know, when I was being referred to as the little Jewish boy. That was definitely how I was referred to in 1985. And so, I chose to go to Europe on my own rather than trying to go through the USA Cycling system.
What team did you ride for in Miami? I raced for a team that was related to Postobón, the Colombian professional team, which then led to us being part of ONCE.
So, you moved to Europe on your own? Yeah. I went through the ranks in Spain and Italy until 1996 when I came to Taiwan to visit my girlfriend at the time. She is from Taiwan, my teammate’s wife’s best friend. One thing led to another, and I met this gentleman who invited me to race the Tour of Taiwan…several months later. I agreed to come back and do the race as long as I could bring a friend and former teammate from Motorola, Michael Carter. We ended up racing the Tour of Taiwan together—and he won the race.
This gentleman who was translating for us was saying things to the press like I was planning on getting married to a Taiwanese lady, which wasn’t true; that I’m planning on living in Taiwan, which also wasn’t true. He was just kind of building up this story that I was going to be staying in Taiwan, and because of that, I was contacted by a carbon-fiber factory that made golf club shafts. They contacted me and told me they’d really like to try to make bicycles.
I had been planning on continuing to race, but I was like, well, maybe now is a good time to do something different. I pondered it for probably all of maybe half a day. I was also very much in love and didn’t want to leave my girlfriend, who ended up becoming my wife. And so I took the opportunity with this company called Advanced Composite Design. They were essentially the very first carbon-fiber factory in Taiwan, which means they were before any of the ones in China. And so, really, this was sort of ground zero for carbon-fiber bikes in Asia. One of my first jobs working there was to do a technology transfer with Look—Look wanted to have bikes made in Asia. We wanted to learn how to make bikes. So, I went and spent some time in France learning from Look. Our engineers came back and we started our production line, basically supporting Look—we also worked with Bianchi and a few other brands.
Absolutely. I think that it still helps. For this Tour 21, they were asking people their favorite part of riding your bike? I love the freedom it gives me. I love what it gave me as a kid. It saved my life as a kid. It saved my life as an adult. It’s freedom. It’s time to think. It’s help.
So, you were in Taiwan making bikes and parts for other brands. Is that what made you want to start Factor in 2016? I worked for Advanced Composites for a couple of years. I felt like I learned what I could there. They were located all the way in the south of Taiwan, which at the time was very polluted. And I really wasn’t enjoying my lifestyle there. Also, I couldn’t yet speak Chinese, and it wasn’t a great city to be in. Then I was offered an opportunity to work for U.S. company Profile Design, to move their production from the U.S. to Taiwan. All of these things were before you could go online and figure it out. Whenever I was given these opportunities, people would ask, “Hey, can you do it?” And I’d be like, “Sure, I can do that.” I had no idea whatsoever what I was doing. But it was always sort of the ”fake it to make it” thing. And so, I think that, you know, I was presented opportunities and a lot of times I would just say yes and then just figure out how to do it.
How did you begin to dream about starting Factor? I worked for Profile Design for a couple of years, and from there I started my own company, PMG, with a Taiwanese business partner. We started the company with the premise that anything that was currently being made in America or Europe, we could produce here in Taiwan, obviously at a lower cost. And so our first customers were people like Columbus, 3T, a few other brands in, you know, the component space.
We hadn’t really gotten into frames yet, but when I was working at that Taiwanese carbon-fiber maker, late one evening I was still in the office and we got a phone call, and there was somebody speaking English on the line. So, they just handed the phone to me, and it was these guys from Canada. They had a bunch of questions about, what would it take to make a carbon-fiber frame. I talked them through the mold cost, how long it would take, you know, various things. It turned out that at that time it was too expensive for them.
I continued to stay in touch with these two guys. When I started my own company again, I reached out to them and I’m like, “I’ve started my own company. It’s called PMG. If there’s anything you need to buy in Taiwan, I’d be happy to help you with that.” And they responded, “This is a really good time. We are ready to start to buy some aluminum frames from Taiwan. Can you help us with that?”
It turns out it was Philip White and Gerard Vrooman from Cervélo. They were my first frame customer. My company basically had to grow up in order to support Cervélo, because Cervélo had sort of this astronomical growth, and we grew together to support them. Everything that Cervélo bought in the time that Gerard and Phil owned the company they purchased it through my company in Taiwan. That was a great opportunity and a great chance to work with them as engineers and learn more about the space. A couple of years into having PMG, we started our own carbon-fiber factory. We started to produce bikes for Cervélo, and we were one of the first to actually have a factory in China. But, you know, at a later time, it was Cervélo and Focus and Trek and ENVE and Zipp and Bontrager and BH and Santa Cruz. It was pretty much the who’s who of the bike industry was buying their carbon components or frames from my company.
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