10 Years of How I Built This: A Decade of Innovation, Risk and Reinvention

We get support from U.S. Bank, a question I love asking founders. What's the one decision you almost didn't make, the one that changed everything? Because it's never the obvious stuff. It's never, I decided to start a company. It's the small, boring, Tuesday afternoon decision you barely remember making until you realize it's the reason everything after it either worked or didn't. Say you're 18 months in. Business is growing. You've got expenses coming from six directions. Gas for the van, office supplies, your phone bill, team lunches that are actually client meetings. And you're putting it all on whatever card you grabbed in year one. You're not thinking about it. Why would you? You've got bigger problems. But here's the thing. Path A, you keep going like that. End of the year, you're sorting through statements, trying to figure out what went where. You've left hundreds. Maybe thousands on the table and rewards you never earned. Money that could have gone back into the business. Path B, you pause and get the U.S. Bank triple cash rewards Visa business card. Now you're earning 3% cash back on gas and EV charging, office supply stores, cell phone service, and restaurants. You pick up an extra $750 cash back as a bonus. And you've got a low APR on purchases and balance transfers for $12. While you're scaling. Same business, same expenses, two completely different outcomes based on one small decision. Visit usbank.com slash business to learn more. The creditor and issuer of this card is U.S. Bank National Association, pursuant to a license from Visa USA, Inc. Some restrictions apply. Our presenting sponsor today is Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Every founder on this show started with a heart. It's a hard question. Not the marketing plan, the 2 a.m. kind. Is this idea any good? Am I the one to build it? Should I quit my job? Anthropic got built the same way. A public benefit corporation founded on one hard question. How do we make sure AI goes well for people? So they asked over 100,000 people their hopes and their fears. And are publishing what they find. Even the uncomfortable parts. Me? I've got my own hard question about AI. Here it is. If everyone has access to something that can help them write the business plan, build the prototype, analyze the market, maybe even come up with the idea. What separates the people who actually build something from everyone else? I don't have a clean answer yet. So I've been sitting with it with Claude. There's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at Claude.ai slash H-I-B-T. If you travel often, you'll want to hear about this unprecedented offer. For the first time ever, new Delta SkyMiles Reserve American Express card members can earn two Delta Comfort round-trip flights for travel within the 48 contiguous U.S. states, Puerto Rico, or the U.S. Virgin Islands. Plus, you can earn 50,000 bonus miles towards your next getaway. And who doesn't appreciate an elevated airport experience? Delta SkyMiles Reserve. Delta SkyMiles Reserve card members get access to the Delta SkyClub, your pre-flight oasis to recharge, with 15 visits and four one-time guest passes each medallion year when flying Delta together. That's up to $950 in annual value. Value estimate based on $50 per visit rate to purchase additional visits or bring a guest to the Delta SkyClub. Make every trip feel more rewarding with the card that upgrades your travel. Apply today at Delta.com. Card Social. Offer ends November 4, 2026. Minimum spending requirements and terms apply. Flights are fulfilled as flight certificates valid for Delta Comfort or Delta Main to select domestic destinations. Book 21-plus days in advance. Up to $80 per person in taxes and fees apply. Other restrictions apply. Show button here. Football is finally back. And PrizePix is going crazy with the deals to start the season, giving out promos every day in September. On PrizePix.com. You can make all the picks you want, all in the same app. And now, PrizePix is available nationwide. So what are you waiting for? Lock in for kickoff, because everyone and everything is on PrizePix. What you want? Download the app today and use code WONDERY to get $150 instantly in lineups if you win your first $5 lineup. PrizePix. Run your game. There's so many things to worry about in business, including what you don't know. And so I am always kind of panicked. You know, fear drives me. You know, now I'd say it's a digestible fear. Back then, I had everything in this thing. And if it went away, such a giant thing that I had built would have been just, you know, wiped out. I'd have nothing. I always say, like, the thing that I believe puts companies out of business is yourself. I was terrified. Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built. I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, it's our 10-year anniversary. And we're listening back to some of our favorite moments, a decade of lessons and stories about struggle, doubt, failure, joy, catastrophe, and, of course, success. So 10 years ago, we started How I Built This. And the idea was actually pretty simple. I was just really curious about the people behind businesses and how they actually built them. Because when you really get into these stories, they're kind of amazing. Things go wrong. People make mistakes. People run out of money. Relationships fall apart. They get rejected, sometimes over and over again. And then. Sometimes, miraculously, something works. And I think what we all realized on the show pretty early on was there was just so much to learn from these stories. And not just about business, but about taking risks or dealing with failure or solving problems or figuring out what to do when you have absolutely no idea what to do. Over the last 10 years, we've talked to more than 600 founders, people like Jensen Wong and Sarah Blakely and Howard Schultz, and also the founders of Netflix. And Airbnb and Chipotle and so many others. And I have learned a ton from them. And I hope that somewhere along the way, you heard something on the show that helped you or inspired you or maybe just gave you a little push to try something you weren't sure you could do. But mostly, I just want to thank you for listening. Because 10 years is a long time. And the fact that so many of you have stuck with us and spent all these hours with us, it really means a lot. So for this anniversary show, we went back through hundreds of episodes and we pulled out some moments that have stayed with us, things that surprised us and things we learned and things we still think about. And to help me do this, I invited Jamie Siminoff, the founder of Ring, to come back and listen with me because Jamie also happens to be a huge fan of the show and a careful listener. And you also heard Jamie's voice at the top of the show talking about how fear actually motivated him to keep going. It's funny to listen to yourself saying that stuff. I think the most important thing in that clip, which I still think is so true, is we put ourselves out of business. It's more us than anyone else. And the problem for entrepreneurs is they can't see the light at the end of the tunnel, no matter what you tell them. And so we're trying to show them that there is light there, that you can keep going forward and further. And so I think it is important because once you've gotten there, you've probably had someone else help you get there. It's like you pay it forward. There's a real vulnerability. And what you say here, which I think is emblematic of what we hear on the show, you're like, fear is real. There's this cliche about being an entrepreneur, being a successful business person, you know, like, oh, fearless. I jump out of airplanes. And some people are like that. That's true. And occasionally we've had people on the show like that. But I think in general, I think fear has to be real. I mean, it's a human instinct. It's there to protect us and to make sure we don't actually die. And I think if you can, if you are like. If you're like me and you have a lot of fear, I think you can use it to fuel yourself. And I think a lot of times fear can also have the opposite effect, which is it sort of, you know, you like, you sort of panic attack it. Like you just, you get like seized up and you can't move, you know, 3 a.m. There's something about 3 a.m. I wake up when I'm, when I'm in that sort of mode. I mean, on the dot, like 3-0-0, like, I don't know what it is, but there's like a. There's a 3 a.m. panic button in our, encoded in our genetics. And I'm sweaty. Yeah. And I, and I'm like upset and I'm like scared and my brain is freaking out. It's the worst. All right. So a lot of people will ask, well, how do you start? How does a business start? And my, one of my very simple answers is, and I know you have a version of this, is what is a problem you have that other people have too, that you can solve for yourself and many other people? And this is really what, you know, we sort of call the light bulb moment on our team when we're producing the show. We want to. Find. We're looking for that light bulb moment of the world needs X. And so I want to play a clip. This is of. Sam Calagione, he was the co-founder with his wife, Maria, of Dogfish Head Beer. And this was the moment that he decided to start brewing beer in his apartment in Manhattan. As I was walking to my apartment, my homebrew kit, I passed a bodega that was having a sale outside on like all this moldy or just squishy like fruit fly covered fruit. And for some reason, I was like, oh, my God, look at all those cherries. Look how cheap that is. What if I take this pale ale kit and squish the cherries into it? You know, it's not the recipe, but I wonder how that would taste. So that was kind of the moment, you know, for me, I took that kit home and started boiling it in our little tiny apartment. Little did he know that he would he would eventually, because of that, create like a global, like world class award winning beer that, you know, had a huge impact on craft beer making. And I mean, I love how he even describes it like, you know, the flies. And he doesn't. He doesn't sort of hold any punches. It's just like I walked by this, you know, crappy thing, saw this sort of like toss away stuff and thought, why don't I just do this? You know, I think it's why so many startups start in garages. And I'd say like his apartment in this case kind of was the New York version of a garage. Like, I think what a lot of times happens when people start businesses is they so quickly get to where they're forced to try to make the business work that they don't have that time to have that experimentation. And the garage is like sort of this embodiment of that. Totally. Yeah. I mean, sometimes it's also a reminder that, you know, when your eyes are open, you start to see things. Right. It sounds like it's self-evident, but it's sometimes important to remind ourselves of that. I mean, there's also also founders on who, you know, and there's nothing wrong with it. They want to make money for whatever reason. They have a passion for figuring out how to make money. And this was a story we came across. It was a great episode. We told the story of Kinko's and Paul Orfala. And he was at USC. And he noticed really long lines outside of a copy store. This place called Magic Machine. It was right by USC. They did Xerox copies for three cents a copy. And there were lines, unbelievably long lines. And this is in like 1969. And photocopy machines were like these giant things. And it took like a photograph. Like it was like there was like a flash of light for every copy. Right. Yes. At the time? Yes. And you could just see so many applications for it. I could just see it mushrooming. And what does a long line mean to you when you see a long line? Money. Jamie, what do you think? I feel like nothing in business is complicated. It's hard. Like Kinko's was hard, but it wasn't complicated. And I think the problem is when we take this approach of that something's complicated, it scares us. We can't do it. It's too difficult. Versus like when you heard. It's like, yeah, there's a line. And how many times, I'm sure you've experienced this, you're somewhere, something happens, you know, like, why don't they make a, you know, this thing like that? Like, you're sitting around, you're like, why doesn't somebody make a coffee cup that's, you know, square shaped or that has like a gyroscope on the bottom so it never falls over something, right? Why doesn't X exist? But then there are people who actually do it. They're like, yeah, it's like you. You're like, why can't we see who's ringing the doorbell, you know, when I'm in the room? And it is, it's like, the hard part is like, it's like walking into that dark tunnel. When, again, when you simplify it, it's like, not that crazy to try it. Like, it's just like, it's like, just do it. One of the things that I, I love that comes up from time to time is, you know, we'll have, there's a certain type of founder and I don't want to say, I hope this sounds, this doesn't sound like I'm typecasting them, but it's like somebody goes to business school and they're, a lot of them still today go into, you know, business school. They go into consulting or to venture and finance. And occasionally we've had founders who were, went into venture out of, out of, you know, graduate school. And they're the ones who are like the analysts. They're the low level analysts, just vetting all these people, pitching ideas for money. And that was a story of Katrina Lake in Stitch Fix. She was at a VC fund in the Bay Area and she would listen to people pitch ideas to her all day. I probably met over a hundred entrepreneurs in the time that I was there. And the most important learning actually was that all of these people were just like super unqualified, normal people with lots of ideas, just like I was. They weren't like these superheroes with like, they were just really good at, I guess, kind of like making the case for their idea. Yeah. And so I think it was actually the more powerful thing was that I realized that if I have all these ideas about what should be happening, like I don't need to be in the peanut gallery lobbying my ideas at people, like I should just do it myself. And that I could do it myself. Yeah. It's a cool story. And she was one of the first founders, female founders to take a company public. And it was a great, great story. I mean, it, you know, Stitch Fix went through its ups and downs, but yeah, I mean, that's a thing like that. Just being in that position thinking, I think I could do that too. Yeah. I call it like the country club effect. It's like, you don't know what's behind the wall because like you're not a member. And it's, I think, you know, she saw it in her way. I hope the internet, YouTube shows like yours are demolished. They're democratizing this more and more so that young people feel like these walls don't exist and they can just do it. But it's hard. And it's not like, like we're not a hustle culture show. And again, I hope it doesn't sound like we're just promoting the show. That's not what I'm, but what I think, yeah, sorry. But being able to hear stories like, like she, you know, she was at a VC, which typically that's how you had to hear these stories. You've allowed it to be democratized to, to like kids listen to it on their, on their iPhones or whatever. And I just think it. Once you hear enough of them, you're like, oh, I, I can relate to these people. Yeah, exactly. One of the things that we, we talked about this a little bit earlier about this idea of fear that really does animate a lot of these stories. And one of the stories we told in the early days was about Sam Adams beer, Boston beer company founded by this guy, Jim Cook, who's just a lovely, wonderful person. And he was a consultant. He was at Boston consulting group. He had a stable job, you know, he's, he just, but he was bored and he, he wasn't happy and he decided to quit. And it's the difference in life between things that are scary and things that are dangerous. And there are plenty of things that are dangerous, but not scary. Yeah. Those are the things that get you. I can give you a climbing analogy from outward bound. Like one of the things we taught people to do was repel off a cliff and they're really, it's a very, it's a very scary thing. It's a very scary thing to do, but you're also held by a belay rope and that rope will hold a car. So walking off the cliff backwards is scary, but not dangerous. Yeah. Okay. Walking across, you know, a 35 degree angle snow field on a beautiful afternoon with this blue sky. It's not scary at all, but it's very dangerous. Because the snow is melting. Eventually it's going to find a layer of ice. The water will lubricate that and you have an avalanche. That is dangerous, but not scary. And in my situation, staying at BCG was dangerous, but not scary. And the, the danger there, the risk was continuing to do something that didn't make me happy and getting to, you know, 65 and looking back and go, oh my God, I'm going to die. Oh my God, I wasted my life. I've thought about this quote so many times over the last 10 years in my own decision making, like, am I going to regret not doing this in five, 10 years, even if it's scary? I think to be fair, the young, this is where the younger you are, the less dangerous that slope is, you know, of, of the thing, because you have less, you know, as to be fair to people when they're, you know, I do feel bad for someone who's 45 and has, you know, a three kids and a family and you say like, oh, leave your job to do this thing. It's like, you're starting to get to that point where that's not just, you know, you can't just do that. You have other dependents. Yeah. That being said, we do love founders who start businesses after 40 and we've done many, many, maybe if not half of our episodes, um, have been with founders who started later. And again, I, I agree. I respect that so much because it's harder, but you also have advantages when you're over 40, you know, you've, you've made connections in business and in life and you've got more credibility. Cause you have experience. I could say firsthand. I mean, my son Oliver was three when I started ring and I remember the times when, you know, like, it's like, well, this thing's not going to go well. And like, I'm going to have to like move my family out of a house. Like the weight of that is extreme. Now, by the way, it sadly also maybe pushed me. So like, it was that fear of that also pushed me. Um, but I wouldn't wish that on anyone that, that emotion, I don't, I certainly don't wish that on anyone, but yeah. Right. Um, one. One of the stories, it's one of the very few nonprofit stories. A lot of people ask me why we don't do more nonprofits and it's not because I don't like them. Nonprofits are awesome. It's just in general. And I, I'm not going to get letters from people, but in general, the stakes are different because if a nonprofit fails, usually there isn't a lot of money that people have put on the line. Um, you know, that's catastrophic, but we did tell the story of Khan Academy, um, early on and, uh, maybe five, six, seven years ago, but, but Sal Khan did take a massive risk. I mean, he was a guy, he went to MIT, he went to Harvard Business School. I mean he had tons of massively lucrative offers. He did work in finance for a while. I mean he's a guy that decided – and again, this is a kid who grew up with almost nothing. I mean he was raised in – just outside of New Orleans in Louisiana. He was like a scholarship kid. His family were immigrants. He had nothing. And I remember him telling me the story about – explained to his mom that he was leaving this lucrative job and how stressful that was. You can imagine my mother who – when I told her I'd quit my job, I still – her first word was, what? It was literally in that tone because I had now fallen into a really lucrative career. And then to give that up and to do that for something that was like not something that she could tell her friends at the next Indian party. Not only was there a monetary aspect to it, there was probably a shame aspect to this as well. Oh, my God. I mean – and it's not only like – and this story comes up oftentimes especially with people from immigrant backgrounds. But I remember, by the way, when I first started my career back in the late 90s, I started out working at NPR. But at the time, my parents didn't know what it was. I didn't grow up listening to it. And I remember just feeling like, God, they – I thought it was a big deal. But they really – when their friends would ask, they'd say, is we're going to a radio station in Washington, D.C.? So, I know the feeling. I mean, I went and made doorbells. So, I know the feeling too, which is, you know, it's easy to forget that when, like, you know, when you started with a doorbell at that time, it was like a joke. But, like, it's – what he did is unbelievable because he did. He left such a lucrative thing to do something that – like this democratizing of knowledge, intelligence, learning, like all these things. I mean, he is a foundational piece of that that has changed. It's really – I think it has changed the world. You know, whatever we're talking about, whether it's a piece of apparel or food, we really get into the garage, so to speak. And one of the things I just love about getting into the garage is the obsessive experimentation and iteration, even with things like peanut butter. I would do a peanut butter and grape jelly, peanut butter and strawberry jelly, and I'd mix them together in the food processor. So, very quickly, I had 30 or 40 different jars. We did Justin's nut butters. And Justin – Justin Gold, the founder. He was obsessive about – and you're thinking peanut butter. What's so – you know, what do you – but actually, he was making so many different kinds of peanut butters and ways to make it and trying to – because it is a complex product. There's oil and, you know, all the stuff, and you want to add flavors. Let's just say you wanted to make honey peanut butter. It sounds simple. Three ingredients. Right. Peanuts, honey, and salt. Right. All right. Well, what type of peanuts do I want to use? Because at the store here, there's Valencia peanuts, there's Virginia peanuts, there's Spanish peanuts. Right. There's runner peanuts. And then do I want a light roast or a dark roast? It's funny because you're looking at it from the – like, you're listening to him and saying the product. I'm listening to him and I'm saying, just like I look – like, again, I didn't really know it at the time, but home security. And I figured out a way to get the thin edge of the wedge. Like, I figured out a way to, like, slice razor into home security. He figured his way out to get into the peanut butter business. Like, all these peanut butters, this huge market. And he figured out how to, like, get his wedge in there. And then – and now – It's a huge peanut butter business. One of the things that we really grind in on is the early prototypes. And one – I remember a conversation I had. We talked to Eileen Fisher, who is an amazing fashion designer. And she was and is super introverted. And she, you know, she just wanted to make very simple, elegant clothing for women. She was not super experienced. This is the early 80s. And, you know, she decided to go to a trade show. And she was – she just felt so unprepared for what she was about to face. So I thought, well, I will – I committed to a booth, a small section, just like a one wall of a booth. You thought, I'm going to go there and show my clothes there? I'm going to go there and I'm going to show my clothes, right. And did you have – No, I had no clothes. I had – Did you have a name for the company? No. I had no name. I had no clothes. I had no fabric. I had no styles. I had nothing. You had designs, though, right? No, don't get carried away now. It wasn't really a fashion line to start out with four garments. So what did you end up calling it for that show? So I called it Eileen Fisher because I couldn't think of anything else. And I was so freaked out. The first day, I literally couldn't speak. I just stood there. People would ask me questions like, how much does it cost? What's the style number? And I, like, froze. I just want to give you a hug and say, it's going to be okay, Eileen. It's going to be okay. I was like – Jamie, did you remember feeling that way? Oh, I mean, like, I remember I went to CES and I took my wife's Jeep and packed a booth that we made out of all the boxes that we taped up on the wall that we got a – you know, so it was like the charity booth. They, like, gave a booth to, like, this poor company that, like, couldn't make it. The CES gives you, like, the back corner. And, yeah. And, like, the basement, like, three floors down and, like, the Venetian hotel. It's so embarrassing, like, because you do have friends. You have friends that you know that work in industry that, like, come over. They're like, oh, you're doing really well, Jamie. And it's like you're, like, in this, like, corner thing with, like, it's dark. And it's horrible. And so, you know, to your – you said, like, I wish I could just give you a hug. When people ask me, like, what would you have done differently? It's not what I would have done differently. I just wish someone had come to me and said, it's going to be okay. That's the – it is what you want. You want a guy hug, like, when you're there and you're, like, in this thing. And it's, like, you just – You're just fighting through it because you got to put your face on. I mean, these people are coming over. Yeah. And it's just so hard to keep that face of, like, I'm doing great. And it's, like, you know you're a total loser. Like, you can – it's obvious. Yeah. Well, and I hear you get emotional, and I really appreciate that. And you did in our conversation, too, because you feel it. You remember it, you know? And it's, like, if somebody was there, you're just, like, it would have been so helpful. Yeah, like, I want to go. I want to hug her. Like, I totally know that feeling. It's, like, just awful. Like, it does bring it back. It's, like, all this stuff. And it is emotional. It's an emotional journey. When we come back in just a moment, more lessons, stories, and ideas from 10 years of this show. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This. Stay with us. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. And me and Jamie Siminoff are looking back at some of the highlights from the past 10 years of the show. So one of our earliest episodes was with Mike Krieger and Kevin Systrom, the founders of Instagram. And they talked about how when they first put it out into the world, they were totally overwhelmed. Before you knew it, we actually had overloaded our system, and it was a very small, naive system. It was a single computer and a co-location. It was based somewhere in L.A. Everything was on one computer? Yeah, it was nothing more exhilarating than seeing all those people stream in and nothing more crushing than then seeing, you know, people posting on Twitter or on their blogs and saying, like, oh, another startup that doesn't know how to scale. Like, oh, like, so clowny. We were both, I mean, at that point, like, running on zero sleep for two days, just devastated. And I was like, this is it. We've built this great thing, and we totally messed it up. Jamie, you know, you had this situation where you had sent rings to people, and they were failing. They were failing in their home. Like, they were trying to install them, and they were failing. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I mean, but that's a lot of, in a lot of cases, people think that's it. It's over. We are done. And similar story, by the way, with Squarespace, who we had on the show years ago. He had to, like, drive up to a server in Delaware and fix it because it had gone down. And, like, people's websites, this is the early days of Squarespace. People couldn't, their websites went down. The crazy thing is there is a balance, though, of, like, you heard about Instagram more because it was crashing. Now, if they never got it fixed, people would just sort of stop using it. But there is a, sometimes there is this weird thing that, like, some of that patina and those bumpy things do, like, Squarespace. Like, I remember hearing about Squarespace going down, but also, like, oh, there's a place that I can build a website. Right, because Instagram initially was, like, for, they put it out to journalists and designers and photographers. But then people hear about this failing, you know, server, and they're like, wait, what is this thing? You can get pictures on your phone, and they look cool? I want that. Yeah. It's almost interesting if you could go back and see if they launched it and it worked perfect, if it would have actually taken off the way it did without the sort of, you know, bumps. It's a good lesson about failure, which I really, I hope people hear in every episode that there are moments of failure and even longer than moments of failure. And you have to experience that failure or setbacks in order to understand how to make something that works. And one of the best stories we told about failure was a story. The story of James Dyson, of course, famously known for the Dyson vacuum cleaner and many other things. And he was already in his early 40s, you know, when he was still experimenting with how to make a bagless vacuum cleaner. He spent five years on this thing, and he built thousands of prototypes in his backyard shed. So, and I've learned that with developing new technology, that when you feel like giving up, it's precisely the point everybody else gives up. So, it's at that point. that you must put in extra effort. so it's funny you don't know this but that episode came out early 2018 and it was when i was doing the amazon deal to buy ring and this was you know before it was announced and there's a term called pencils down in a deal when sort of like a side decides they're going to walk away and amazon that week went pencils down on us and my uh president leila ruey said jamie you need to just get out of the office and like go for runs and like we'll figure this out and that episode came out and i can still remember being on a run listening to it and thinking like he was my hero james dyson was like my hero well i did not know this story that's amazing to hear and came out i mean that that's and dyson was someone who i looked at for ring is like to build the brand i mean obviously not copying but like you know how he put himself out there and i i did the same thing like i i used sort of james dyson i've never met him but i kind of mimicked a lot of things that i saw him do i've always looked up to it hey sometimes things happen for a reason it came out right when you needed it yeah um one of the things and it's you hear dyson's story you hear it and even howard schultz everyone's story is how scrappy people were at the beginning of their careers and they're building this brand out they had to be scrappy because nobody took them seriously nobody would take their phone calls you know um and one of the actually i was our first episode of how i built this back in 2016 was with sarah blakely the founder of spanx and sarah she comes up with this product this undergarment this shapewear um that is still it's she has to introduce this idea to people and she's just her and but she has a prototype and she finally gets through to a buyer at neiman marcus and um and so she flies down to dallas to meet with the buyer in the middle of my meeting with her i could tell i was losing her and i got i just knew i just want my one shot so i said you know what diane will you come with me to the bathroom i want to show you my own product before and after and she she said okay and she walked down the hall with me and i went in the stall and i had on my cream pants that were the reason i invented this without spanx on and then i went in the stall and put spanx on underneath and came out and she looked at me and she goes wow i get it it's brilliant and she said i'm going to place an order and i'm going to put it in seven stores and see how it goes and and at that point you know like a lot of people listening might think oh you're set you got neiman marcus but not really right like that is not a guarantee that you were going to make it oh my gosh that is the biggest mistake that entrepreneurs make that is when the work begins first of all i i paid people basically friends to go buy the product and create a buzz about it because i i was like you know i gotta have these things move off the shelf or the buyer's not going to give me any any more chance wait i'm not going to give you any more chance you paid people to buy them yes and called friends that i hadn't even spoken to since fourth grade and you know kind of like hi it's sarah remember me from fourth grade um do you mind going to the store and buying spanx and i'll send you a check did you ever get people to uh to order rings like that uh no comment guy uh i take the fifth amendment sorry i'm not testifying um yeah of course i did i mean god that clip is just it's just founder like that's just every part of that like from setting up the meeting to being in the meeting to showing it to getting in the store to realize it's like every part of that clip there's like 30 things you can learn from that clip but they all come down to like founder like nothing was going to stop sarah from succeeding that's it and she by the way later told a story about how she would go into neiman marcus and she would find the spanx alongside pantyhose whatever and she removed them and put them in a little display she would bring next to the register like when no one was looking or they would just assume that she was uh you know allowed to do that she was and by the way when you're small you can get away with anything i mean but don't like break the law but like but like going into a store and like moving your product like like you're small like it's fine like i can't do that today with ring like i get a lot of trouble but like yeah yeah i mean that's the thing like you have to be creative and scrappy a story that always comes back to me about like just really thinking creatively about product was sun bomb tom rinks um he was based in grand rapids michigan right a freezing cold place not something you think about when you think about sunscreen so he didn't want to put like you know grand rapids michigan on the bottle you know as as the the address or the place where i was coming from he wanted to put somewhere where people would think oh that makes sense sun bomb is from this place so he decided to basically set up the brand in coco beach florida coco beach just sounded like a good place for a sunscreen company right like coco beach exactly and that sound good so we like that so we got a p.o box in coco beach and then we uh you know all the calls were getting transferred up you know and then we yeah we had you mean the customer service calls yeah customer service calls they were getting transferred up to grand rapids to grand rapids yeah like in the middle of winter yes so we'd be on the phone i you know nobody ever lied but we we did say you know if they call and ask how the weather is you know just tell them it's unbelievable if it's snowing outside or whatever because then you're not lying it's unbelievable right and they'll think you mean unbelievably good but it's unbelievably bad i think it just comes down to there's this like weird line that we get close to as entrepreneurs of this reality distortion and i think we all have it and i love that he said like we didn't lie but they also certainly didn't try to like tell them they were in grand rapids michigan freezing their tushies off one of the one of the stories that we have told actually more often than than people may realize are of products that we're not inventing something new it was a new way of introducing the product to people things that people would say oh that's a saturated market why do you want to get into that and one of the best examples of this was um mike cesario founded a water brand and when he entered that space water was it still is to some extent totally dominated by you know four or five multinationals and what there was a wormhole there was an opportunity to take this thing that everybody drank and you know lots of people buy and turn it into something at least in someone's mind that was much more interesting a beverage called liquid death like when i finally decided hey i want this thing to look like a beer like that was kind of the concept i remember calling one of my best friends and telling him i'm like hey i want to put water in cans that look like cheap beer and that felt right to me because i'm like you know everybody wants stuff they're not supposed to have you know it's like they say hey if you want teens to think something's cool you actually market it to people in their 20s so then but from like a naming perspective i thought some of the craft beers had some of the most interesting like brand names there was like a skull crusher ipa there's like arrogant bastard ale yeah yeah and the only chance this has that survival is it has to be something that people naturally want to share on social and that's where it's like you literally start trying to think of what's the craziest thing you could think of and that's where it's like start there yeah do the opposite of what you think you should do but i remember thinking like liquid death like there is no chance someone's not sharing that if they see that in a store it's a simple product and a brilliant way of thinking about it because i remember when i first saw liquid death in the store i thought it was malt liquor i didn't realize it was water until i looked at them but i went to the bar because i started whole foods and i was like why is whole foods selling tall boys of beer or malt liquor and then i looked at it and said you know mountain spring water it's just so weird to me it's an invention like he invented this brand differentiator that let him cut through this giant shelf of just all these waters that are already out there but i just think it's like there's something like about that not just product but like invention um one of the things that we get asked a lot about is money you know people say i don't have money i don't i'm not wealthy um i don't have access to parents who have money or and the reality is actually most people who have been on how i built this don't either um money is always really challenging where do you get it from who do you ask um and i remember we interviewed gary hershberg he's the founder of stonyfield yogurt and also a pie one of the pioneers in sort of natural foods and this is a fantastic episode just full of failure if you want a great hear a great failure episode that of course resulted in the success of the end this is the end of stonyfield yogurt and you know early on he raised money from friends and family and he you know he would be calling his mother-in-law for loans oftentimes while his his wife was asleep nearby and it was hard for him and by this point it was a half a million dollar business and i never had cash in the bank that night before payroll never just this became our way of life uh thinking meg was asleep in our bedroom which was about 50 feet from my office i would on many occasions tiptoe over to the office to call my mother-in-law to have a chat to see if i could borrow another 3500 or 2500 to make ends meet and eventually meg got onto this and one night i heard the click click of call waiting on my mother-in-law's phone and meg was calling from the house to say mom don't do this wait your wife was telling her mom not to lend you money for the business right because right because she didn't have confidence in it well look she's living in a nightmare i mean she saw how crazy it was i mean we had chimney fires we had the well pump would go out the the power i mean we're This hilltop farm a long way from anywhere. Was Meg saying to you, let's just ditch this thing, let's bag it? I mean, or did she, because it sounds like maybe she didn't believe in it. Well, she had no reason to believe in it. It was insane. It was insane. They were making really great tasting yogurt, but it was a failing business for many, many, many years. And part of this process is just the psychological weight of knowing that all these people, whether you know them personally or their family or their distant relatives or their friends of friends of friends who happen to have, you know, $5,000 or whatever, that not only can you be held accountable for that forever, but like the person that introduced you to them is always going to be like, I introduced you and you just like lost all their money. Yeah. And the thing I think he doesn't talk about in there, but he infers is like, you know, it's like. She says like, she would have loved to shut it down. I don't think that was an option at that point. Like my guess is shutting down at that moment, they would have probably eviscerated everyone's capital, including their own. So like, you know, you do get to this point where like there's a one-way street, like you either get out of this one-way street by being successful, which means taking, you know, grabbing some more money along the way or you're dead. And, you know, we, we've come across this story so many times with founders who are so, who've built businesses. That are so well-known that you're like, how could people have said no to it? But of course, in context, it makes sense. A lot of these ideas were outlandish or they didn't make sense or there was no track record. And this was the case with, with Whole Foods in the late eighties, John Mackey and his co-founders, they opened a few stores around Austin. They were like what you would think of as like a seventies food co-op with like bulk bins. But they were doing well and they were looking to raise money to expand it out. The concept out further. We hired a banker and we. We began to try to raise venture capital money and we got rejected again and again and again. And we trying to talk to the venture capitalists, they just couldn't get what we were doing. I mean, one guy who turned me down, he said to me, he said, you know, John, I see you got a pretty good business here, but it looks to me like I looked at all the stores and you're just a bunch of hippies and you're just selling food to other hippies. And I don't think that's a very big market. I mean, he wasn't wrong, right? That's what it was. Of course, it turns out that hippies were. There were baby boomers and that was the like biggest potential market, you know, in modern history. This is, by the way, this is all play another clip. This is also the story. So believe it or not, with Airbnb, I mean, they had a prototype product that they had out there and they had a little bit of traction. And so they were like, OK, let's go. We thought, well, this is a great time to talk to investors. Our numbers are up. Yeah, look, it's actually working. We have stories that we can share. We've got press. We get introduced to 20 investors in Silicon Valley. Ten of them replied to our email. Five of them eat us for coffee. Zero invested in us. Wow. It was completely demoralizing. Like 2008 was the worst year of my life. Like, Jamie, you're listening. You're like, oh, my God, I wish I was on that email list. But, you know, but I probably would have. Sadly, I probably would have said the same thing. Like, it's like you. That's what makes it so hard being. By the way, it's hard being on the other side, because even though you believe in it, you still question when someone intelligent says to you, like, this thing can't expand. You're like, you're not on to something like it does. You do say like, oh, well, maybe I am crazy. So, like, I heard it with, you know, with Ring. And you see it with all these companies. I mean, it's amazing the doubt that happens. And that's what makes it so hard to build something great. And Mark Cuban, I think he turned down an opportunity to invest with Uber. And, you know, he's kind of poked funds himself for that. But I think the point of this is also to remind people that, like, when people turn you down, it doesn't necessarily invalidate the idea. And when people give you money, it can feel validating. But the other side is that it may not always be validating. The point is, is that when you're starting a business and you want to raise money, you have to expect that if you're lucky, two to five people out of 100 will invest. And so 95%, you know, no rate is not invalidation. It's not saying your idea sucks. I would say it's kind of the opposite. Which is that the businesses that have the easiest time raising money are usually the worst. And the ones that have the hardest time are usually the best. Now, of course, there's like different things in those. And it makes sense because real invention, real sort of market changing things are not obvious. Yeah. And the, again, like knowing that you've got to go to a lot of places is part of the game, right? We talked to Kathy Hughes, who founded a radio network called Urban. One back in the late 70s and grew it to the largest black owned radio network in America. An incredible entrepreneur, an amazing story. She was a single mom and she really built this incredible media empire. And she was trying to raise a million dollars in the late 70s to buy a radio station. And that was really hard. I mean, she's she's a black woman with no real background in business. She'd worked at radio stations and she was ambitious and smart. But, you know. It was really hard. She had no collateral. She went to 32 banks and every single one of them said no. And finally, she found the 33rd bank. She found a banker there who happened to be a woman as well, who agreed to do the loan. She said yes. And I just kept by now. My presentation should have been taught in colleges because it was flawless. I mean, after 32 times of perfecting it. OK. I mean, I was I should have gotten an Academy Award. I was so good at it. I kept convincing her. And she said something to me that I teach all my salespeople. She said, please don't sell past the close. And I never forgot that because that was another one of those slap in the faces. I was like, wow, she's absolutely correct. She said yes. I couldn't believe she had said yes. When she said yes, you kept selling her. I kept trying to convince her. And she said, Miss Hughes, let me give you a little advice. Never sell past. You know, sometimes when people hear this, it's like, oh, I have to talk to 33 banks. It's like, no, she was going to talk to a thousand banks like she was never going to stop until someone said yes. She didn't know after 32 that 33 was going to say yes. She just wasn't going to stop. When we come back in just a moment, more from the past 10 years of the show, including that question that some love, some hate. Is it luck or is it skill? Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This. Hey, welcome back to the 10-year anniversary episode of How I Built This. And I've been listening back to some of the highlights with our friend Jamie Siminoff from Ring. You might have noticed that we're leaning pretty heavily on the early years of founding a business and, you know, all those moments of difficulty, doubt and failure. But as Jamie and I were talking about that, he was saying, you know, it's good that we're telling stories about how tough it can be because it's very real. It's part of the problem of like, especially these larger companies, these PR departments is like we've just sort of like whitewashed reality. And it's not good for like mental health because people are sitting. They're sitting out there alone and trying to do this and they're real. And like when they hear someone who's just crushing everything and great at everything and perfect, it's like you do want to hear like that James Dyson almost gave up and that, you know, all these people that you look up to that like you've done these amazing interviews, these people that you're like, listen, you're like, oh, they're, I'm not different. I just, I'm just not successful, but I'm not different. Yeah. You know, one of the reasons why we focus on the challenges and just the grind is because I want people to understand that. There's a huge price that you have to pay personally and professionally. And there's also the physical toll on your body and your health. And that's something that when I talk privately to founders and to groups, I'm always saying that's the only thing that you really have. And we did the story of Banana Republic, which is a great story. Mel and Patricia Ziegler founded the story actually in Marin County here in Northern California. You know, they were making a lot of the clothes themselves. And then they start to make this what became this. Iconic catalog to promote it, which some people remember in the 80s, it had like safari themed and jungle themed. It was really cool, but they were working nonstop at the time. I remember going to the East or San Francisco to the printer to put out our latest catalog. And I hadn't, I hadn't slept in like three nights. I think I was just up around the clock and I was driving home across the Golden Gate Bridge. And all of a sudden I hear this honk. And I wake up and realize I've veered into the oncoming traffic on the bridge. You were falling asleep. I was falling asleep. I was so sleep starved. And I went home and I just broke down. The good news, Jamie, is that today there is a physical barrier on the Golden Gate Bridge that I use all the time. And so you can't, you can crash into a barrier. You don't use the barrier all the time. You use the Golden Gate Bridge all the time. I use the bridge all the time. But if you watch, if you watch like a Dirty Harry movie or like, you know, a Steve McQueen movie from the 70s, when they show that people driving over the bridge, there was no barrier. It was just a painted line in the middle of the Golden Gate Bridge. Yeah. I mean, the only tool I found. found, because you do need some mechanism or something to keep yourself healthy, is I tried to run every day. Like that 30, 40 minutes a day, you have to take that time out because you stop making good decisions. And that's usually like failure is, it's us. Like it is, like we started this, like it's on us. And so the failure usually comes down to making a bad decision, not working harder. Yeah. You know, the idea of like being in this black tunnel, this tunnel with no light, and then starting to see the light. And, you know, as we talked about, it can be years before that happens. I remember we had Hamdi Ulukaya on the show a few years ago, founder of Chobani. Another amazing story. I know I say this about every story, but really they are. They're all amazing. And he, you know, an immigrant from Turkey, he spoke no English, like he just started making yogurt. He was able to finance this dilapidated yogurt factory that had been sitting there vacant in upstate New York and got a really good deal on a loan. And but it was a real struggle for many years. And also to convince people to eat Greek yogurt, Greek style yogurt. There were some brands, but Chobani, it brought it to like the masses in regular supermarkets, you know, and, and, and I remember him talking about like, after like five, six years that he starts to see some of that light as they start to sell, they start to sell their product. And it felt like I'm in the soccer game. I'm in the middle of the soccer game and I love it. And I'm into this game in such a massive way. And I'm completely elevated. First time in my life, I feel like things are coming out of my being that I didn't even realize it existed. It's like, I'm wondering what is behind that mountain? What is behind that mountain? I have this enormous amount of curiosity and I feel alive. You feel alive. Maybe it's a ray of light. It's a ray of light. Maybe it's a distant light coming through a part of that tunnel. And it is, it's just these little boosts that you do need along the way. And it is, you're in that tunnel. Maybe you see like, just like, it looks like it's getting a little, like little sort of brighter ahead. Like it's not, it's not, you don't know if it's the exit, but like it, like at least there's like, maybe there's an escape hatch or something. Yeah. Yeah. You know, Jamie, I want to get back to something that, that we talked about a little earlier, which is raising money, right? Because for a lot of founders, that need just never goes away. Like it can be an ongoing part of the story, right? Because the company keeps growing and then it just needs more and more cash. And we've had episodes like the story of Serena and Lily, the furniture maker, where, you know, the two founders, they had to raise a fair amount of money because furniture production is cash intensive. And they were in the Bay area where investors were used to, the investors they were talking to were used to just, you know, funding software. So a lot of their money, they were taking from traditional VC who wanted growth, growth, growth, but it was challenging when they weren't growing and they needed more money. And the VCs were like, well, we've gave you the money. So they found themselves in a position where they had to bring on another investor who unfortunately had very different goals. We still, because of this cash incinerator of this growing company, we brought in more of a private equity type of investor on the, now this is a third major round. And so they wanted profitability. They wanted slowing down the growth. I mean, could you have done that? Could you say, we got to do this? We got to conserve cash. We're going to slow down growth. Or was that just not an option? I think the answer kind of resides in the middle. More people around the table were more in favor of the growth. And this at the time, that was the model. Grow, just grow, grow, grow. Because you were not profitable yet. I mean, you were not profitable. You were not profitable. You were not profitable yet, I imagine. No, we were slow growers. I mean, the hard part is you got to raise money. Like the company will go out of business without money. So sometimes you go out there and it's like, it's nice to say that you want people to have conviction. But at the end of the day, like I would have taken Satan's money for ring, you know, if I had to, like, because I needed money. Like I do love when she said cash incinerator, because people just underestimate, like a growing business looks so good on the outside. But like when you're in the physical hardware business, which, you know, they were in a physical business, growth like that is just, it is a cash incinerator. And sometimes it's not always critical to scale, scale, scale, scale, you know, a really successful small business that generates, you know, $4 million in sales a year, but is totally profitable. And the founders are walking away with a million dollars. That is a better business than, you know, a huge, you know, multi-million dollar business that has never, ever made a profit. I mean, a lot of times the slower number two makes more money. I mean, the bigger number one looks like they made more money, but actually the slower number two, like the people actually make more money because yeah, less dilution, all of these things. Yeah. And so there are some brands that we've had on the show that did not take any outside investment. One of the stories we told was about a brand called Title IX, founded by Missy Park. It's a women's sports apparel brand. She was a collegiate athlete in the seventies. And so she was inspired. She was inspired to create a brand for female athletes. And so she never raised money in part because she wasn't so focused on like growing, growing, growing 500, 10, you know, a thousand percent. She talked about this idea that, you know, you can have a really great sustainable business, like in her case, apparel that didn't have to be as big as Lululemon or, or Athleta or another brand like that is okay. For me, I'm just like, I'm going to just stay in the game here. I'm going to kind of keep hitting little singles. And I think it's, it kind of goes to basically a business philosophy. It's just, if you hit singles, which we do and we're good at, you're not going to hit a grand slam. Yeah. And that's just, you need to make your peace with that. And I think I would take the staying in the game of singles to striking out a whole bunch and every once in a while getting a grand slam. I think the most important thing is knowing who you are, because if you're going to be singles, don't raise big venture capital money, because it's going to force you to have a company that does singles. That's going to try to hit grand slams. That's bad. And on the flip side, if you're going to go for the grand slam, raise all the money. Like I see people try to go for grand slams, but hold back on the raise to try to maximize their ownership. It's better to own 2% of a hundred billion dollar company than a hundred percent of a tiny thing. But she owned a hundred percent of a, probably a deck of, you know, tens of millions of dollar business. And like, that's still great. A dilemma in some cases, in some cases, it's not a dilemma is whether to sell your company. And in many cases, it works out great. It worked out great for you. You're still at ring, of course. But sometimes it's really hard. And we've had founders who sold their brands and had a hard time finding themselves after, because it was their identity. It was their team, the camaraderie, you know, it was like going in every day and then it was gone. I remember we had Bobbi Brown on the show. And of course, you know, she started her eponymous cosmetics company in the just a few years after the brand was launched to Estee Lauder. And she had stayed on. She stayed on as the chief creative officer for 25 years after the sale. But, you know, towards the end, she talked about how it got harder and harder for her to be at a big company. And so she had to decide what to do. It got so big. The company got so big. The corporation got so big. They bought so many other companies. It was growing. It was huge. I am not a follow the leader kind of person. I am the leader. OK, I can't help it. And if I see things not working where it makes sense to me and wasting energy and time, I don't like it. And I like to try new things and invent new things. So, yeah, it was always a struggle. And so then the last couple of years were really tough. Like what happened? Oh, my God. There was just, you know, they start and I used to hire, approve and hire and interview every person that walked in that brand. And then I didn't anymore. And all of a sudden there were people working on my brand that I never met before and that I might not have hired. And, you know, it was a struggle. And I tried to let go of the details. But then I realized the details were what makes the company so special. It was a different story for you. You hadn't a different experience. You were obviously you. So it was overwhelming to sell the brand and exciting. And you stayed on. Yeah. And I it's like there's one of these things you know, should you sell? Should you not sell? In some ways, the fact that I'm still here just says that I'm a super frustrated person who can't find something they love as much as the business they started. Like I love ring. I asked Jensen Wong of NVIDIA. You know, he famously went through many years of just being in a trough and their stock price was in the dumps. Their investors were frustrated because they were making a computer. For video games. And he saw potential in that to do many, many different things, things that that he couldn't imagine yet. But he knew that there would be something to it. And so he was investing a lot of money. This is like 2005, six, seven. You know, when the idea of A.I. is it's on the minds of like science fiction writers and some thinkers, but it wasn't practical yet. And, you know, it was just it was years of dealing with. A failing business until, of course, it became the most valuable business in human history. history, but that happened only in the last five or six years. So I asked him, I said, you know, would you, knowing, you know, what you know, knowing about the struggle, would you do it again? And this is what he said. When somebody asked me, would I do this again? If your question is knowing how NVIDIA turned out, knowing the contribution we've made to the world, all of the benefits that we have accrued as a result of our success, do I love those things? The answer is yes. But that wasn't the question. You know, the question is, suppose I knew everything then that I now know how hard it is and all of the pain and suffering and all the embarrassment and humiliation and all the setbacks and you compress all of that. And you just told that 30 year old kid, listen, this is going to take a lot longer than you think. And you're going to be the person who delivers. Most of the most horrific financial return news that anybody's ever explained, you know, so on and so forth. You'll be going out of business. You'll be, you have to lay people off. Would you start again? The answer, absolutely not. I love that. Because you think of this guy, you know, Jen's and, and he talked about the sacrifices. He didn't get to see his kids growing and missed a lot. And he got quite emotional talking about that missing out on, you know, sports games and birthdays. And, you know, there was a lot that he didn't get. And I think, you know, it's an incredible story of someone who like, just was so convicted without knowing what that tunnel was going to end. Like, I mean, like to your point of AI, like he was building stuff that other things had to happen in order for him to be successful that no one knew were going to for sure happen, but he believed it would. I do love his honesty of like, if I really actually saw it, like, and not knowing it was gonna be successful, like he probably would say no, because it was just too hard. There's so much wisdom on the show from different founders in a very different way. And I think that's, I think that's a really important thing. I think that's a really important thing. I think that's a really important ways, you know, like we had, I remember Danny Meyer of Shake Shack, you know, talking about, he's the founder of some amazing restaurants, and then of course, Shake Shack. And he talked about in his view, what, like, why he's been good at business. I think about this a lot, because it, it's very simple, but it does still require a discipline. Let's cut right to the chase. This is one of the greatest piece of advice I got from my, my late grandfather, Irving Harris. He heard me complaining one day, soon after Union Square Cafe opened about how hard something was, or he said, you know, stop complaining about problems. He said, problems is the definition of business. Yep. And he said, the people who do best in business aren't the ones with the least problems are the people who solve their problems better and have more fun doing it with better people. I love that. They have fun solving them. It's hard to say how you have fun solving problems all the time, but I think it's true. I mean, one of the things that I wanted the show to be is a compendium of mistakes on how, how people solve problems that you might not exactly deal with if you're, you know, starting ring or an apparel business. And you're listening to a guy who's got a hamburger joint, but actually a lot of the problems that he solved are problems you're going to have, you know, how to deal with personnel, how to deal with difficult conversations, how to deal with a challenging investor, how to get people to believe in this idea and want to try it. Yeah. And I think if you're, you're looking at it in that way, like he said, like, it's like surrounding yourself with like the people that want to help solve these problems. That is the cycle time. That's how you get like business to, to move forward and build great companies. In the last 10 or 15, maybe 20 years, there's been this kind of philosophy around business that it's a family. And I think that's starting to change and shift a little bit back to, but this idea that, oh, you know, we're a family and, and, and I will say, you know, at the end of the day, in my view, a business is valuable because people, it gives people a sense of purpose. It enables them hopefully to build a stable and secure life. And hopefully for a lot of people. But I remember when I talked to Paul Orfala, the founder of Kinko's, he had a very refreshing take, you know, he was just very straightforward about the idea that a business is not your baby, that you should have some emotional distance from it. And I'll tell you something that bothers me is when a business person says, I love, my business. That's absolute bullshit. You love your family. You can enjoy your business. But once that becomes a love affair, you lose your objectivity. I never loved my business. I could enjoy it, but man, your business is an instrument to make you happy and you own it. It doesn't own you. I just love this guy. Like, it's just like, why is there a line money? You know, it's like, it's like your business. I actually disagree on this one. I think, I mean, for me, ring is much more than that. And I'm not saying that's healthy. It's just, that's what it is. Like, that's just, it is a part of my family and me and what I, you know, I am linked to it forever. And I care about it deeply. And when I saw it not performing as well, I wanted to help it again. But, you know, in some ways I wish I had his ability to say, I don't care. Like, I wish it was just like, I own it. I don't, ring does own me. Yeah. I think there's a healthy attitude in what Paul says, you know, and definitely it's hard for a lot of people to have that view. I understand why, because there's an emotional part to this. But it is refreshing. I mean, it is a new way of looking at it. You know, I would say the most controversial thing about the show, Jamie, is my last question that I ask people. I say, what do you think is the reason why you succeeded? Was it luck? Was it skill? What do you think? And I started this from early on, maybe the first, I can't remember, one or two, and it was just a throwaway question I asked. And it just, became organically the thing that I ask at the end. And I, in a few episodes, I didn't ask it because I thought, okay, you know, because occasionally on Twitter or somewhere people would write in and say they hate that question or, but when I didn't ask it, people were like, what is going on? Like the overwhelming response. And I realized that those occasional voices who were like, I hate that question. So stupid. Okay. You know, this comes in territory. The thing is, is that I'm not actually asking, and it's important for the listener to know the context because I have just interviewed that person in a way that for most of them, the vast majority of them is the deepest, most intimate interview they've had in a public setting ever. They've bared their heart to us. And so I'm at a vulnerable moment. I'm sort of saying, okay, now answer this thing. But it is also interesting and revealing to see how someone's mind works. I interviewed Tom Campion, the founder of Zoomies, snowboard shop that you see in malls. And it was, and I still is a successful company. So I asked him, I said, you know, at the end of Tom, what do you think? This isn't luck. It has nothing to do with luck. That's not arrogant. It's not luck. It's about measured discipline, hard work going forward. Yeah. Luck may be very small part of it. It's hard work. It's why not a lot of people do it because you know, it's hard work. And he's not wrong. I look at luck as, every hour I work, I get another lottery ticket. So I have to work for it. Like I'm not getting luck by just sitting back. I'm working for every lottery ticket, but I'm also not guaranteed to actually win. Because I've seen people work super hard and do everything right. And just, you know, again, just bust their ass and not make it. And so I think just saying it's hard work and skill is not fair to, especially if you're trying to build something big and impactful. Yeah. I interviewed Toby Lutz, the founder of Shopify, and he really leaned towards luck. And, you know, he had started a business that was designed to sell snowboards and he couldn't find a good website and to put snowboards online. So he built it himself. And it turns out that it was so good and it was so easy to use that other people were asking him if they could use the template. And that turned into Shopify. That's what turned into the business. And it really wasn't planned. And so for him, I remind myself how much of his was luck. The incredible timing of when we started. Like, this is not a kind of company that could have been started even two years later, right? It needed to be started right then, and it needed to be ready and good by the time the opportunity around the financial crisis came around. Luck is such a major component of the entire journey. So, like, why am I the person who ended up, you know, winning the lottery five times in a row? I don't know. He bought a bunch of lottery tickets. But he put himself out there. He worked on it. And this is also where, like, small things can become big things. It's like the cherries. Like, you walk by the cherries and you see that. I always think about Weber, the grill company, started as a machine shop. They basically were welders. And they welded open a 55-gallon drum in the parking lot to barbecue from. And that became a grill company that became, you know, a massive, still today, like a massive business. And so what Toby said, like, he'd almost get struck by light. But he did. And most founders, I would say, talk about it being a combination of those two things about luck and skill, which is, you know, a version of what we're talking about here, putting yourself out there. And Drew Houston, who founded Dropbox, he had a really nice analogy, I thought. It was in the way he described why he thinks it worked for him. So I think about it like surfing, like, that waves will come. And in our case, like, we have a lot of people that are like, oh, my God, we had, we caught this tidal wave. You know, we're just sort of feet off the ground but inevitably that wave like slows down and then it's like about catching another one and another one and another one so i think there's luck in terms of when and how any given wave shows up and where you are on your board but then there's a lot of skill and staying on and and finding the right wave i love that analogy i think it's right so the funny thing is i've actually i've actually surfed with uh drew so oh yeah so so like it's a really visceral uh Metaphor. Way back in the day, way before Ring and really early Dropbox days. Wow. It's so fun. I mean, we've just scratched the surface of what we've had on the show over the last 10 years. You know, hundreds and hundreds of founders, and we've just touched on a few of them. And I'm listening. I'm like, oh, God, we don't have this, or we missed this one, or what about that? But then we would have like a 10-hour episode. But all the episodes are in archives, and anybody can listen to them. And, you know, and I hope people do, and I hope people continue to get a lot out of it. Because when I started the show, you know, I remember having conversations with people, and we were like, are we going to run out of stories to tell? Are we going to run out of it? And the answer is no. Like, I hope we are talking about this in 10 years from now. Because I really want people to build stuff and to bring their creativity to innovating. And I'm a believer in entrepreneurship, and I think it's what powers and fuels. Good things. It's not just starting a business. It's entrepreneurship in any job you have and how you approach things. It's a thought. It's a way of doing something. And I think that when people can unlock that, they achieve the highest and best in whatever their area is that they're in. So, you know the question I'm asked most frequently from listeners? Guess what question. Who's your favorite episode? That's number two. Okay. That's number two. I'll tell you. They ask me, so what do you attribute this experience? Success of how I built this, too. Do you think it's luck or skill? They turn it right around back to you. So, Guy, I'm going to ask you, what do you attribute the success of the last 10 years of how I built this and the impact? Is it luck or skill? I think it's – there's a lot of both of those things. And skill is not the right – I don't think I'd use that word. I think it's work. We really try to give people a credible and honest account. And we're not going to get every detail right. But we really sweat. We don't want to take the details. So that takes a lot of work and a lot of effort. But we also got lucky. I started in podcasting in 2013 when very few people were listening to podcasts. And I've been so lucky to be part of that wave and to have started the show 10 years ago when we could still reach, you know, reach through the noise. There was just a lot more noise today. So, yeah, I mean, I think had we waited a year or two to start how I built this, it might have been different. But, you know, when we launched it, it was also this kind of wave, this post-financial crisis wave of money coming into startups and all kinds of people trying new consumer products and direct-to-consumer. Now we're changing. There's a shift into AI and to different ways of doing business. And so we're going to have amazing stories that are happening. People are writing their stories right now, which hopefully we'll be able to tell in five years or more. And that, to me, is so exciting. Well, it's just so great. Like we talked about, it's not complicated. It's just hard, you know, and it's like it was a ton of work and a great team and all the things you have to do. And then those waves, like Drew said, you know, like you were out there paddling and the waves kept coming. Jamie, thank you for joining me on this. There's nobody better I could have had as a partner here. Thank you so much. That's Jamie Siminoff, the founder of Ring. And thanks so much to all of you for listening to the show this week and every week. And you can hear the full episode. Any of the stories we talked about, wherever you get your podcasts, just scroll through that feed and you'll find them. And as always, please make sure to click the follow button so you never miss a new episode of the show. This episode was produced by Casey Herman and edited by Neva Grant with music by Ramteen Ereblui. A special thanks to Teresa Mondria-Tarol, who helped us excavate and organize hours and hours of how I built this audio. Our engineer for this episode was Robert Rodriguez. And finally, a shout out to the incredible. team of people who have helped make this show over the years, including Jeff Rogers, Sanaz Meshkenpour, Julia Carney, Rachel Faulkner, James Delahousie, Liz Metzger, and Randa Abdel-Fattah. And our current team, Chris Massini, Alex Chung, Sam Paulson, Carla Estevez, J.C. Howard, Catherine Seifer, Carrie Thompson, John Isabella, and Elaine Coates. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This. How I Built This