Bob's Red Mill: Bob Moore

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I lived just one mile from the mill. And I was up on a hill and the mill was down in the valley. And when I came around the corner and I could see this fire reaching into the heavens and realizing that that was my business. From NPR, it's How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements.

I'm Guy Ros and on today's show, how Bob Moore's Passion Project to Grind His Own Flower turned into a whole grains empire called Bob's Red Mill, one of the biggest names in natural foods. On the show, we've heard the stories of a lot of tech entrepreneurs. But today's story, it's about as low tech as it gets. It actually goes back to the Paleolithic era and a technology invented essentially by cavemen, grinding seeds and grains into flour.

And as an actual industry, people have been making a living off of this for at least 10,000 years. So we're not talking about a disruptive idea here. Bob's Red Mill mainly sells whole grains and flowers. And not just wheat or corn, but things like millet and sorghum and kamud, and who actually knows what kamud is.

And even though it wasn't his intention, Bob has turned all of that grain into gold. Bob's Red Mill is a $100 million a year business. Go to most supermarkets today and there is a good chance. You will find Bob's Red Mill products.

Just look for Bob's friendly white bearded face on the package. And what's really amazing about this story? Bob started the company after he basically retired when he was almost 50 years old. Right around the time he decided to study theology at a Christian seminary in Portland, Oregon.

And at the time, Bob was not a rich man, but we'll get there. For now, here's what you need to know. Bob grew up in the LA area during the Great Depression. His dad drove a truck selling Wonder Bread.

And around the time of the Second World War, all the young men went off to fight. Bob wasn't quite old enough to enlist, but he was old enough to work. Absolutely. I rounded up a job from the May Company in Los Angeles, which was their headquarters, I believe.

I got a job in the warehouse. I got a master warehouse that fed the other May Company stores. And because there wasn't men around, the people that were running the warehouse were all old guys, at least in my mind, they were really old, and they weren't draftable. And I can remember after working at the May Company warehouse for quite some time, I was called down to the office.

And his name was Mr. House, and he smoked cigars, and he was ominous in my mind anyway. And I knocked on his door, and of course, I thought they were gonna fire me. And I was shaking, I was so nervous to go in there.

Mr. House said, well sit down, Bob. And he asked me if I would like to have a department of my own at 16 years old. Wow.

Guy, that was probably the greatest thing that society did for Bob Moore was to give me that kind of responsibility when I was that young. And I almost cried. And he said, we will pay you a dollar an hour. Gosh, that was a lot of money at that time.

But I walked out of his office. I didn't walk out. I flew out. I was just in seventh heaven.

It was probably one of the most magnificent moments in my life was having that happen to me. After Bob finished high school, he joined the Army for three years. And when he got back to Southern California, he met his wife, Charlie, and eventually they had three boys. For a couple years, Bob worked for an electric motor company, and he thought that's what he would do for the rest of his life.

But then his dad died unexpectedly. I have a picture of him in my office that was taken the same year he died. He looks as fresh and normal as anybody at 49 years old. And he didn't look like he was ready to die.

And he just keeled over one day. And the doctor said he was dead by the time he hit the ground. He had a massive heart attack. And to this day I missed my dad immensely.

You were, I guess, in your early 20s when he died. How did that change your direction at that point? Well, Dad and I were always going to go into business together. Well, that didn't happen, of course.

And one day I was driving down Crenshaw Boulevard in Los Angeles, and they had just put up a big sign on a corner that said, I was driving soon a mobile gas station. And I wrote the phone number down and called it. Because I wanted to find out how much it would cost to get a gas station. I didn't even think there was enough money in the world for me to do that.

But they came through with a figure that seemed fairly reasonable to me. And so we put the house up for sale and sold it immediately and got the money we needed to buy the gas station. And that's what I did. How much did you need to buy that gas station at the time?

Oh, it was about $6,000. And I can tell you that the excitement of having my own business, it's still with me. Guy is still with me. It fulfilled every single thing my dad and I had talked about.

And only I didn't have my dad. So if you were enjoying things at the gas station, you should mention it. You sold it a couple years later and got out of LA. Why did you do that?

Well, LA had a lot of problems. It was very smoggy. It was so intensely uncomfortable that we talked about, well, now that I have a gas station, we could really move anyplace. We could get a gas station in any town.

And we decided that Mammoth Lakes was the right place to go. The Mammoth Lakes Lodge had just built a big ski resort up at the top of the mountain, which I believe is still a very active ski area. And so I sold my station and we sold that house. So we had enough money.

I think with the time we had about $17,000, which in 1959, oh, Guy, it was a lot of money. And so you moved your family out to Mammoth Lakes. I did. And how'd it go?

Nothing. No business. It was crazy. There was already a shell station up there that had been there for years and years and years.

And everybody loved them and went there for their gas and for everything else. And frankly, a guy by the almost one year to the day, we just ran out of money. And there's only one way I could go and has to get ourselves out of there, which I did. And Charlie and I and the three boys took off for Sacramento, where I changed my direction in life.

So what did you end up doing? So a year after this thing failed. One year almost to the day we got down to Sacramento. And I got a job at Sears and Robot in the hardware department selling everything.

I mean, lawnmowers and all the stuff that was there to sell. When you moved to Sacramento, what was your family's financial situation? Well, I think we were at the lowest point. We moved in.

We had a minister of the church that we decided to go to at the time. He was caretaking an apartment, three unit apartment. And one of the units didn't have a shower that worked. And he said, well, Bob, I can let you and Charlie and the boys live in that for a while.

And we took him up on it because we didn't have any money. I remember the kitchen was very small and Charlie and I put a mattress in the kitchen and slept on the floor. And the boys, the two youngest boys slept together on a fold up bed. And can the oldest at that time slept in a sleeping bag.

And that's how we slept. We didn't have any furniture. So that was about the lowest point in our life when we were living on somebody else with the three boys. You know, when you get down, you feel helpless like a baby.

Yeah. You know, there's no strength left in you. You don't even know how to retaliate or fight. We really, we needed a helping hand.

But at some point, maybe it was in the earlier mid 1960s, I read that you came across a book that I think it's safe to say, probably change your life. What was that book? Yes. A book called John Goffey's Mill, written by George Woodbury.

I have it in front of me right now. And George was a very well educated archaeologist. He got a letter in the mail that said that he had inherited his family's mill, which is about 600 acres in Bedford, New Hampshire. Well, I mean, if you got a letter like that, you're going to go down and see what you had.

And that's exactly what George did. He went down to the mill and spent the next 10 years of his life restoring John Goffey's mill, which is still down there. And so this is like a memoir of his life restoring this. That's exactly right.

And that book somehow struck a chord with you? What? All of a sudden, he makes a statement in the book that the most delightful thing was whole grains. When he ground all these wonderful whole wheat flour and whole rye flour and cornmeal and all this, that the public beat a path to his door.

I remember those words. I underlined them and tagged them and showed it to my wife. If we could do this, if we could get a mill and do the same thing, the public would beat a path to our door and we would be in business. So you get really interested in this idea of maybe starting a mill and lots of people get interesting ideas and get obsessed with things for a time being.

And so what did you do? Did you start to think, well, how are we going to buy a mill? Did you start to talk to your wife to Charlie and say, let's look for a mill to buy? Yeah, I did a lot of talking.

I did a lot of talking to Charlie and the boys were all in their teenagers by that time. And I got them interested too. And one thing I did was I went to the library and they had a 12 volume group of American manufacturers of equipment and in there they had pages of companies who made flour mills and equipment for mills. And I wrote some letters rather naive because I really, I was talking about stuff in the 1800s and asking them about stone mills.

And I wrote about 10 letters and I think I only received a response back from about two of them. One of them gave me the name of a fella who they knew had a stone mill. His name was Dewey Sheets and he lived in Muncie, Indiana. And he had been in the milling business for a lot of his life.

And Dewey was such a help. He found me a mill that was to be torn down in Fayetteville, North Carolina. So I ended up for not a whole lot of money with my garage, stack full of old, very ancient stone mills dated 1870, 1860, 1880. Let me just understand what you had.

You were bringing like large stone wheels and just all the equipment you need to grind up grains into flour. That's right. And I guess with the intention of eventually actually getting it up and running and starting a mill, but was anybody, I don't know anybody that you knew saying thinking this guy Bob is kind of losing his mind. I mean this hobby thing starting a mill, it seems like he's taking it a bit far.

You know Guy I don't know why I didn't have much resistance. I didn't feel that I had to back up to anybody or apologize. I think that I felt it was time for healthier food to come along. Our world needed better food, needed more whole grains.

Needed most of the nutrition put back in the food that we were feeding people through the grocery chains. And the whole thing began to take on a real form and make sense to me. And when I talked to people, certainly my wife and others, it made sense to them too. So well, maybe you should try it.

I guess after a couple of years, you started to save some money and then you were able to buy. My wife started to save money. She started to save money. Okay.

I never was good at it. But after a couple of years, you were able to move to a small farm, like a five acre farm. You have a mass all this equipment. I guess the late 60s, early 70s at this point.

First of all, how are you going to get the cash to find the land to build a flour mill on? Well, we didn't build a flour mill. We rented a piece of property that had a building on it. There were so many things that happened in our favor.

I got a job at Pennies, J.C. Penny Company in Reading, California, opening a brand new auto center. And so we ended up in Reading, California. There was a delightful old quonset hut on the south end of town.

And it was vacant. And we built walls inside, built a store, a real quaint store with cedar planking on the walls. We covered the whole front of the building, made it try to make it look like a flour mill and called it Moore's flour mill. And we converted this building into what was a reasonable facsimile of a mill.

And we had three stone mills that we set here and there and began the process of grinding flour, whole wheat flour, cornmeal. So, so this is 1974. You open the doors to Moore's flour mill with your boys. And you're making wheat flour, corn flour.

What else? Oh, actually, I created the 10 grain cereal that we're using now. We ground whole wheat. There's a lot of kinds of wheat.

There's a durum wheat, which is a hard white wheat. There's a red wheat, which is high in protein and makes wonderful bread. Oh, and then soft wheat. There's a soft white wheat for pastries and biscuits.

So you get a little knowledge of what grains are and how to use them. Then you create some recipes and put them in a bag. And then you peddle them. And that's just what we did.

We had large windows across the wall from the store, into the mill room. And they could see it one or two or three mills running all the time. So this was like almost like an artisanal, mom and pop kind of store front. It was never designed to be anything bigger than that, I guess.

Oh, no, no. I kept my job at Pennies for two years. And Charlie, of course, she worked the store and talked with people. And she was a great believer in whole grains.

And it was all very nice. We were having a great time. Okay, but you must have still been kind of restless because you, I guess it was around this time you kind of made a radical shift. You decide to retire when your son's takes over the mill and then you take off to go study at a seminary.

That's right. I had an intense desire to learn to read the Bible in the original languages, Hebrew and Koine Greek. And we did a little scouting about and found here that Portland, where I am right now, was one of the greatest spots for seminaries. And we enrolled in one of the seminaries here and began to learn to speak Bible in its original languages.

I mean, this is interesting, Buck, is that at this point when you decide to completely change directions and just go and study at a seminary, you are about 50 years old. So just a little bit older than the age when your father died. Yeah. And this was going to be, this was going to be your retirement, the beginning of the, you're sort of winding down from work, I guess, right?

Well, I counted all my buckets that I had. And I said to Charlie, I think we could last, we could live this way for four or five years. And I think I could get my education. And once I got that, I would get some kind of direction.

I felt whether it was spiritual direction or what. And would be able to reroute my life into something that was worthwhile. And we both agreed that that's what it appealed to us both. So that's what we did.

So you start at seminary school and we did it. Did you love it? Did it fulfill all of your dreams and hopes and wishes? No.

Oh, no, what happened? Well, it's hard work. When you haven't been in the languages, it's tough when actually I had to do a lot of studying and Charlie was right with me. What really changed the whole thing was one day we were walking along, we were reading vocabulary cards back and forth.

We had Greek verbs on one side and nouns on the other. And so anyway, one day we were walking down a particular street and much to my surprise, I looked over and there was a mill and I'd been there for a long time. And in front of it was a four-sale sign. I couldn't believe it.

I said, Charlie, I said, Han, that is an old mill. We walked over. There's probably six blocks from the seminary. And I went up on the steps and I looked in the window and I could see bucket elevators, grain cleaners.

I could see all the milling equipment. I could not believe what I was looking at. And there was a phone number. And I called the number and I got a hold of the guy that owned the property.

And when I told him I was interested, he says, what are we talking about here? He owned a lot of property. I said, the old mill, mill, mill. Oh, he said, yeah, that property.

You see, we're going to tear the building down and we're going to have the property as two acres and we're going to have it for sale. So it's going to be a really good buy without that old mill on it. I said, what are you going to do? They're that milled up.

And I thought, this is just the most fantastic thing in the world. I can't believe what's happening. So well, basically I bought the thing and changed my entire life. Let me come back, how Bob opened his new mill, started to grow the business and then stood on a hill and watched the whole thing go up in smoke.

I'm Guy Ros, you're listening to How I Built This from NPR. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This from NPR. So it's 1978. Bob and his wife Charlie stumble across an old mill about to be torn down and they decide to save it, to create a new company.

And they call it Bob's Red Mill. I took three months, I gave myself three months to the day to get the doors open. And I began a concerted effort to make my life what I thought I was capable of doing with this building now. The building was everything.

It was just a godsend, to be honest with you. I think that's a good term. But how did people, like when you opened the doors after three or four months from the moment you bought it, three months from the day and you're processing grains and you know how to do this stuff, how did you get the word out of it? Were you just waiting for customers to show up and buy flour and grains?

Well, I had a lot of help. I put, every Tuesday was the food ads in the local paper and I put a two column, the mill is now running, coming and enjoying fresh stone ground, whole wheat flour and I'm a pretty good Shouter. I can yell it out pretty loud and make it work pretty well. And Channel 2 here came out with Kathy Smith and within two weeks of opening the mill I was on the evening news with Kathy saying the nicest things about Bob's Red Mill.

And then I could fill a parking lot in no time. And people were buying your grains, your oats, your flowers just coming in and buying all that stuff? Yeah, but what else came in was we had a group of markets here called Fred Meyer, one stop shopping center and their buyer came in, he was a vice president and he said Mr. Meyer would like to open health food stores in all 44 of his stores and he'd like to put your products in there.

And they gave me a list of the grains they wanted, the flowers they wanted and of course with the Fred Meyer chain, others came to us, Safeway I Know and Elbertson's and some of those and ask us if we had enough production to keep them going. And without too much effort, we got pretty good business going. And this is, I guess we should say this is the mid 70s. So this is like really when the health food craze kind of starts to take off in America.

It's really, we had a lot of help like Reader's Digest came out with an article on brand and why that was so healthy for you to keep your bowels in good order. And just one thing right after another kept coming out and of course everybody had a TV and there were shows on health and we really began to realize that we had a kind of a tiger by the tail over this whole thing. There's a lot of revelation in this stuff. We didn't start out with any huge intent or anything.

It just seemed like the right thing. First off, we were eating that stuff ourselves and we all felt the benefits of all this. So that's one thing that you're in a business that you believe in and I think that's one of the biggest things that made this thing work. Yeah.

So Bob, I'm going to just jump ahead because the first 10 years of the company were growing slowly and steadily. They were still pretty small. Yeah. But about 10 years in after you launched Bob's Red Mill in 1988.

Oh, I'm going to see here. You had a fire completely destroyed the mill. Yeah, I did. And it was intentionally said it was set by an arsonist.

Well, you know, it's kind of crazy people running around. I didn't know this person at all and it wasn't any like an ex-employee or anybody mad or with any grievance or anything. I don't think any of us knew what was coming and boy, I'll tell you with that old wooden building that was really old, you know, why it really caught fire and it was full of grain. It was a very active company, lots of paper and just everything.

Where were you when it happened? I mean, how did you find out about it? Well, I got a call in the middle of the night, Bob, Bob, your mill's on fire. So I got up and put my clothes on, jumped in the car and got on down.

As I went around the corner, I lived just one mile from the mill and I was up on a hill and the mill was down in the valley. And when I came around the corner and I could see this fire reaching into the heavens and realizing that that was my business and you don't know what to think. You don't know how to think. You don't know whether to cry or what I just got down there pretty quickly.

The fire chief came up to me who I knew. They used to make inspections of the mill and he said, we got all the water we need. But if you could tell me what part of the mill is the most precious that would keep you going in business, I can direct a whole fire department at that point. And of course, the millstones were the most important part of the whole thing.

We walked over to the mill. It's pretty hot there. But the fire departments were throwing a lot of water on the building. But we walked over and I pointed out on the building, side of the building where the mills were inside and they immediately had a saw.

They just whacked a big square hole in it and he planted one of the firemen there on the ground with the fire hose aimed through the hole. And for the entire time of the fire, he kept a direction inside the mill room which actually saved all three mills. So when the fire was put out and you're looking at what was left of Bob's Red Mill, which I'm assuming was not awful a lot, did you immediately think we're going to rebuild and start up again really soon? Or did you think maybe this is a sign to pack it in?

Well, that's pretty much what I thought. But there were some things that changed my mind. And even that very night, David, at that time my oldest employer, his wife came down. Eileen was such a lovely lady.

She worked at the bank where we banked and that's how David met her. And we took them the two kids on their first date together for dinner. And they got married, we went to their wedding and everything else. And David had been with me almost 10 years by that time and that night within a few minutes of my arrival there, Charlie came.

And she and Eileen were talking and I overheard them and Eileen told Charlie, oh Charlie I don't know what we're going to do. We just signed the papers on our home. David doesn't have a job now. And you know that sunk in pretty deep.

Charlie looked at me and I guess what she was saying and what I was thinking in my mind is that there's probably not going to be any thoughts of not continuing this thing. Somehow we make it work. There's an awful lot of things that have motivated me over the years. And a lot of those things came out because of David and Eileen and the fire.

So I felt that I had a weighty responsibility staring me in the face. And there's a lot of things that go through your mind in those kind of situations. And certainly I had every thought you could think of. But you kept it going.

You decided to keep it going. We tried first of course to rebuild the mill and that was impossible. But I had a warehouse across the street about a 10,000 square foot warehouse directly across the street. So even though the mill burned down I had some resources.

I was able to save the mill stones. So we almost immediately moved across the street to the 10,000 square feet that we had. It wasn't enough but we tried it. And I had the business.

Guy I had awesome business. People wanted our products. They kept bugging me when I was going to open my retail part which of course burned up. But we just kept trying and trying to keep the machinery going.

Remember now I started many years ago with my sons in Red in California. And my wonderful son Bob had a milling operation that we had all built as a family. And he allowed one of my people to go down there and grind my whole wheat flour and corn meal and things like that at night. And then they put it in a truck and brought it back up.

So all these things began to work almost immediately. It gave me a pretty good degree of comfort with getting things going. One of the really interesting things Bob, it seems that after the fire is really when the business started to take off. I mean, in the sort of 10 years after the company almost just like goes out of business because it's fire.

What happened? What's the reason why? I mean, was there a strategic decision that you made? Was there someone you met?

Was there a lucky break that you guys got that just allowed Bob's Red Mill products to go national and then beyond? Well, actually there was. I was told that I'd never go anywhere or be anything unless I became a part of the national natural food industry. So I joined that and wasn't very expensive.

And we went down to Anaheim, California where I just got back. And famous is a famous natural food expo. That's correct. And we got a little 10 by 10 booth at the back of this thing.

And we brought all the products that we were making. There's quite a few, actually several hundred. And I tried to have all natural whole grains and every form of them. We could take one item, corn for instance, and we could make corn grits.

We could make fine corn meal, regular corn meal, coarse corn meal. I ended up with six or seven products over one basic grain. I did the same with wheat and I did the same with oats and everything else. So I mean, it was a unique way of doing it.

I wanted everything. I didn't sell as well, some sold better than others. When the industry down there in Anaheim saw this, I had some people come to me and they said they wanted it. And who's your distributor?

And I said, well, I don't have a distributor. So those people, the distributors were there at the show too. They went and got their distributor and they brought them down. They said, we want these products.

So they took my products on. So almost overnight, we kind of hit the jackpot and we had to go back and work pretty hard to catch up with their orders. So once you found distributors and you started to, the products started to really take off. It wasn't that long before you really started to.

I mean, the revenue for your company was growing. I think by 2007, your sales topped $45, maybe $50 million. Did you, I mean, I know you didn't go into this for money and, but did you ever look at that number? Did anybody, your CFO over just say, hey, look, this is a revenue.

And do you ever just think, that's crazy. This little mill is doing this kind of revenue. We did pretty good. Pretty good guy.

People were always wanting to buy us. I mean, it was just a constant. You were getting offers from companies to. Oh, yeah, yeah.

Different investors who wanted to invest in me and actually different companies that just simply wanted to buy me. It was a lot of that. And you just said no, every time. No, I said no because all right.

I didn't. It wasn't any money anyway. Besides, I knew as soon as they bought me out, even though they always tell you that everything's going to stay the same, that everything changes. And I didn't want my life to change.

I thought it was really swell. It was a good life guy. All right. So you have this company.

It is now doing at least a hundred million revenue a year. Yeah, it is. It's well, well over a hundred million dollars. And I think it was in 2010, you, you announced that you want to hand the company over to your employees and they, they now own like two thirds of it, right?

That's right. And you are also giving away a lot of, or most of your money. So it sounds like, and you've a long time to get a long life ahead of you, but it sounds like you are slowly, it sounds like you are slowly aiming to, to end, you know, to end your time here on earth as a, as a poor or a, you know, relatively poor guy, a guy with no money. Guys, there's anything I can tell you, I'm giving it away because I want to.

I mean, the Bible to me was so clear to do it to others as you would have them do unto you. Now that's the basis of how I think and how I feel. If you do these things, the feeling, the return, your life is appreciably improved. And I have that feeling.

That is, it's a different feeling than I had when I was 50 years old or. Yeah, yeah, of course. How much of what, of what you experienced throughout the course of your life and incredible success with this company do you attribute to luck and how much to just hard work and your intelligence and your skill? Oh, guy, I've always worked hard.

I'm crazy. I get up at six here. I am almost 90. I give it six every morning.

I go down to my own store, my own restaurant and have cereal. I don't like anything besides hot cereal. And then I get in a bit early, but I work till five or six every day. So I've always worked hard.

So if working hard is a secret to success, I've done that. I know what it feels like and I probably never will do anything different. Bob, you talked a little bit about about your faith and your Christianity. And I'm just wondering like how much, how much has it guided you, you know, over the years, like your decisions and your thinking?

Well, I think it permeates me as far as that's concerned. The whole concept of whole grains I got from the very first page of the Bible. You know, when you go to seminary, they start you off with the first page. So I have it with me.

I can read it to you. There's only a couple of lines. God said, behold, I've given you every plant yielding seed, which is upon the face of all the earth and every tree with seed in its fruit, you shall have them for food. And I read these words in 14 different translations and I learned to figure it out in the original Hebrew, it still says the same thing, simple, unequivocal, comforting.

Just made perfect sense to me, a guy. And the fact that I could establish a business around it was just unbelievable. I'm not doing too bad at it. It's working pretty well.

Bob Moore, founder of Bob's Red Mill. In 2007, the company moved to a bigger facility just outside of Portland where they make about 400 different products, still using the old quartz millstones from the 1800s. By the way, Bob actually keeps a mason jar full of the very first product to come off of those stones, red wheat flour, ground in his original mill more than 40 years ago. And please do stick around because in just a moment we're going to hear from you about the things you're building.

Hey, thanks so much for sticking around because it's time now for how you built that. Today's story starts back in 2015 when Mike Bolos was working as a lawyer in Chicago and then moved to a new firm and a new office. My new desk was just one of those typical desks that's kind of mounted to a wall. But yet in downtown Chicago, I had these beautiful floor-to-ceiling windows out to my right overlooking the city.

Now we might not all have floor-to-ceiling windows in our office, but we can relate to the main problem, right, in office desk that is not in the right place. The perfect place to be would be the window, get this beautiful view, get the natural sunlight, and like there's got to be something out there for that. What Mike was looking for was a desk, a ledge, really, that could be mounted directly to a window. I was looking online, couldn't find anything, and that's when kind of like I always like to do, I headed to Home Depot in Amazon and started to buy the parts I need to build it.

Okay, so first thing on Mike's list, suction cups that could attach a desk to a window and could support what's on the desk, laptops, books, you know, that type of stuff. So I shopped and I found some good suction cups that held about 40 pounds, I said mounted them with some string that I bought from Amazon and created this really rudimentary, almost kind of cat-bed looking thing. And it wasn't too bad for us to try, but it was bouncy and it was too narrow to really work as a desk. And it was at that point that I stepped up and I found the types of suction disks that they used to install commercial gray glass windows and high rises.

I was like, this is perfect, these are ultra durable, ultra strong, and intended for this purpose essentially. Okay, so Mike now had the critical suction he needed to affix the desk to a window. And from there, he built 18 prototypes, and finally he had the desk he'd been dreaming of. People started walking by my office and saying, what is that?

I want that in my office, that's cool, where did you buy it? And that's when kind of the light bulb clicked and I was like, well, I should really think about mass production and really bringing this to market. And around that time, Mike went to a party where a guy named Jason and told Jason about the desk he built. Immediately the light bulb went off in my head.

Yes, more light bulbs. It turns out Jason Grohowski was a real estate advisor and it was his job to help businesses improve the design of their workplaces. So Jason's our real potential in the desk that Mike had invented. Here's Jason.

I've seen how culture within spaces is changing, how all the new buildings are glass, how everything is about bringing in the natural light for employees and just productivity and health and wellness within spaces. And so I just got super excited as we need to do this. We need to take this to the next level. Mike and Jason soon started working with a design firm in Chicago and made even more tweaks to the desk.

And by January 2017, they had a prototype ready. So they launched a Kickstarter that April and made $25,000 in just the first day. After we close out the Kickstarter, we had to fulfill these orders. So then it was, let's go get this made.

They had all of these orders and no manufacturer yet. So a month later, this is May of 2017. They found one in Singapore. And by November, Jason and Mike went there to check on the desks before they got shipped.

And I look at the unit and like something doesn't seem right. And I play with it. And the lever snaps. At that point, we had 2,000 units already made.

All the components made. And we were like, this is something that we can't let out the door. So after a month of sleepless nights and many design revisions, Jason and Mike finally got the lever right. In December, they started shipping their desks from their Singapore manufacturer to their customers in more than 40 countries.

They're now both working full time on their company. It's called DeskView. And their desk comes fully assembled so you can install it on your window in just a few minutes. And then enjoy the view.

We focus so closely on our computers. All of our workday is just straining our eyes to look at close objects. And you're actually allowing yourself to relax your eye and look out further. If you want to find out more about DeskView, head to our Facebook page.

And of course, if you have a story about something you're building, please tell us all about it at build.npr.org. And thanks so much for listening to the show this week. If you want to find out more or hear previous episodes, go to howigultus.npr.org. You can also write us at hibt at npr.org.

And if you want to send us a tweet, it's at howigultus. Our show is produced this week by Rachel Faulkner with original music composed by Rumpteen and Ruble. Thanks also to Noor Kootsey, Neva Grant, Sana Sebastian-Pour, and Jeff Rogers. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This from NPR.