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You may wonder why Rob Langstaff, the one-time president of Adidas Japan and Adidas America, would leave one of the largest and most successful shoe companies in the world to go off and start his own business. Simple: He recognized that the market lacked men’s footwear that could work in both a casual and business setting. So in June 2008, Langstaff launched RYZ Footwear to fill this niche. Langstaff quickly built his business through “crowdsourcing” — the act of taking tasks traditionally performed by an employee or a contractor and outsourcing them to a group of people or a community.