FOR 16 YEARS after World War II, Dick Van Dyke was just another starving performer. Then, in 1961, he hit it big with The Dick Van Dyke Show and moved his family into a Southern California estate. He's never forgotten the contrast between lean times and wealth, and he's devoted a lot of energy to charitable causes that help children and the homeless. During a phone interview from his home in Malibu, he said his oldest son seemed to absorb the same lesson early on.

"Chris had a strange sense of fairness right from the very beginning," he said. "For such a young man, he had this sense of what was reasonable."

Chris Van Dyke spent summers as a teenager doing volunteer work for a church group and considered entering the seminary. Instead he became a lawyer and, at 29, was elected district attorney in Marion County, Oregon. In 1981, in his first murder trial, he convicted the I-5 Killer, whose serial crimes extended up and down that western-states highway.

Van Dyke always enjoyed sports. He skydived during law school and later took up open-water sailing and mountain biking. He went to work at Nike in 1983 as a lawyer but

"We're hoping they live and prosper," Patagonia CEO Casey Sheahan says of his new competitors at Nau. "But we have a 30-year head start, and we're not resting comfortably, by any means."

ended up wearing various hats. During 16 years of employment, he served as company founder Phil Knight's speechwriter, as a public-relations director, and as an inventor, co-developing the highly successful Aqua Sock watersports shoe. In 1999 he started a three-year stint as Patagonia's vice president of branding and marketing. Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard taught Van Dyke to surf and drove home the notion that the world's oceans and landscapes required stewardship if they were to be preserved.

Van Dyke temporarily retired in 2002 to surf and sail. Then, in September 2004, he met Reynolds, who'd heard about him from Patagonia staffers.

"I thought, Here's this huge opportunity to do well by doing good," Van Dyke says. "Make money for shareholders, find better ways to build product, and create our own corporate culture? It was like getting a whiteboard to design a business from the ground up."

In December 2004, he signed on. Six months later, Reynolds would move to Portland, where the company could continue to mine experienced help from northwestern brands like Nike and Starbucks. Galbraith, Yolles, and other past and present Patagonia employees signed up, too; before it was over, 55 percent of Nau's senior management could boast of having worked at Patagonia.

The transfer of power caused a fuss in the outdoor industry. Was something seriously wrong with Patagonia?

No, but according to one former Patagonia employee, who requested anonymity and is not affiliated with either company, Nau was attractive because everything about it was still a work in progress: "At Patagonia, you get to this point where you want the work to be about your vision, and it isn't going to happen. It's always about the Chouinards' values [Yvon runs the company with his wife, Malinda]. If you have a vision you want to implement, you have to leave."

Nau wouldn't be confined by institutional ideologies. And while its clothing line and charitable side invite direct comparisons to Patagonia, Van Dyke believes that Nau, with its extremely ambitious retail plans, will reach a wider audience.

"We'll take what we've learned and spread the word," says Van Dyke. "If we're successful, I think our company will be one of the greatest sources of pride for Patagonia."

The reactions emanating from Ventura don't quite sound like parental joy, however. It's more like sibling rivalry.

"When all those people left it was a blow," says Rick Ridgeway, a Patagonia VP. "They were friends, and they still are. But let's think of the business part. They're going to be our competitors."

"We're hoping they live and prosper," says Casey Sheahan, Patagonia's CEO. "We also have a 30-year head start, and we're not resting comfortably, by any means."

Quarter-billion-dollar Patagonia has plenty of advantages. Nau will come out of the gate fully formed, which is both expensive and risky. The Chouinards and Knight grew their brands organically. A full-bodied startup is thrilling, but there's little room for error, and the actions of its many decision makers can create uproar, if not catastrophe.

Van Dyke discovered Nau's potential combustibility shortly after taking the helm. In May 2005, he and Yolles went to Manhattan, met with a guy running a billion-dollar hedge fund, and persuaded him to take a $5 million flier. Before any money changed hands, one of the fund manager's lawyers called Van Dyke. The attorney took exception to some language in Nau's charter, which states that Nau has an obligation to address the needs of society—not just its shareholders. The lawyer complained that such a demand would increase his client's risk.

"There were about ten of us working for the company at that point," Van Dyke recalls. "We voted on whether or not to remove that language in order to get the money, and the vote was a unanimous no. The lawyers ended up caving and we got the $5 million. It was the company's first crux moment."

By the summer of 2006, Nau was enduring another test. Reynolds had recently left Portland and moved back to Boulder, distancing himself from Nau's day-to-day operations while remaining one of the company's largest stockholders. He'd gone to Oregon as chairman of the board and felt that he'd done enough to establish the business. But in reality, the startup was still struggling.

Was Reynolds's depression dragging him down? He later insisted that wasn't the case.

"I never felt I was qualified to run something this important," he told me. "I know what my talents are: to dream big."

Meanwhile, for Van Dyke, the business of raising money for the dream still wasn't going well. After making dozens of additional pitches since visiting Bay Partners, he'd netted zero additional investment dollars. As of early July 2006, with his confidence eroding, he had six months to raise $17 million.