Guy, how many people have you interviewed in your life? I would say over 20,000. And you started a smash hit iconic show called How I Built This. Why?
What's the mission behind that show? I wanted to give people access to the greatest entrepreneurs I could find in ways that they might not have access to them. And I wanted that wisdom and those stories to be available to anyone at any time for free forever. Give me an idea of the kinds and caliber of people that you've interviewed over those 20,000 interviews.
Everything, everybody from rural shepherds and Afghanistan to soccer players in Europe to celebrities in the United States or leaders, entrepreneurs and founders, businesses to ordinary man on the street conversations. I'm really curious. You know, we talk about building something. The seemingly impossible, most difficult part of building anything seems to be going from zero to one.
And you've sat with people who have gone from having an idea to putting that idea in motion. And it's not a huge journey to travel, but it seems like the hardest journey to travel because it requires so much of a shift in mindset, requires confrontation of fear and apparent danger. And there's something about these people that makes them decide that it's better than not starting, taking action is better than not taking action. Have you been able to figure out what that is in people and how we can cultivate it?
There's several sort of the Venn diagram of founders coalesces around a few common traits that by the way, many of us have intuitively, naturally or can develop, right? So curiosity is an obvious one. This desire to grow and to learn and to look around you and to try and absorb the lessons around you. But the other ones are a little bit more hard edge, like a fear of regret, of not trying something.
So many years ago, I interviewed a guy named Jim Cook. I actually interviewed him recently again. He really kind of revolutionized the beer industry in the United States. Like the reason why Europeans drink American beer today is because of Jim Cook.
Like in the 80s, it was a joke, right? There was actually a famous Monty Python sketch where it's something about, you know, a rather drink piss than American beer, something like that. Well, in the 80s, he kind of revived the beer industry in the US with the beer name Samuel Adams. And he really kind of supercharged what became this, you know, craft brewing industry in the US, IPAs and all these really interesting beers that to this day are, you know, some of the greatest in the world.
He started his business, Sam Adams, in his 30s. He was a consultant for Boston Consulting Group. He was making good salary. He had a family, but he, there was something about his life that felt unfulfilled.
And part of that was he wanted to build something on his own. He wanted it to be his. He didn't want to work for somebody else. And he felt that if he didn't try, if he just continued on to be, he would make a lot of money.
He would make millions of dollars and he could have a, you know, a very stable, good life. But he felt like he would be unfulfilled if it wasn't his own thing that he had to try. So he took a risk. He left.
But he felt that if he didn't take the risk, it would be dangerous. And he actually uses this paradigm dangerous versus scary. It was really scary to leave his job at BCS, but it would be dangerous if he stayed because the danger would be that one day he'd get out of bed and he'd be 60 and he would regret not having tried. And I think that's a big factor for a lot of founders.
It's the idea that they don't want to feel intense regret. And so they're willing to take the risk, even though it might be catastrophic. The idea of building something, of owning something, of creating something yourself that is yours is a hugely powerful pull. And that's, it's like, you know, that's that magnetic field that they're all attracted to.
They're all kind of moving in that direction. I think many of us who are entrepreneurs or aspire to be entrepreneurs feel that magnetic pull. What does self-belief play, and what is that? Because in your book, you talk about how it's not always the case that they have huge amount of confidence and knowledge, is self-belief essential to get going?
And from all the people you've interviewed, they're widely successful. Did they have that self-belief or did they have something else that got them over that first hurdle? It's interesting. Sometimes there are people who are born sort of, they have this kind of, this natural confidence and you know people like that.
You've met them, right? People that just seem to exude confidence and self-assurance. And I think those people are rare in general. Most healthy entrepreneurs experience self-doubt.
It is a really natural and I think important and necessary trait. To be able to sort of in your mind say, am I doing the right thing? Is this the right thing? Am I making a mistake?
The difference is that while it's healthy to ask yourself those questions and to interrogate your decisions, because it's going to inevitably lead to better decisions and force you to justify things to yourself, you have to have a willingness to power through. I think some people have instinctively, but there are other entrepreneurs who develop that skill over time. I'll give you an example. One of my favorite stories that I've told on the show, it just happens to be the case that out of the 500 interviews or so, I don't know how many, but we've had quite a few founders who are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Okay, no, better known as the Mormon Church. It's not a term used anymore. The church prefers to use the previous term I used. And there is a very strong tradition of entrepreneurship in that community.
We just interviewed Jason Worsland, the founder of TheraBody. You know the Thera Gun? He also grew up in the Church. And I always wondered what is it about these members of the Church and the connection to entrepreneurship?
Well, virtually every young Mormon member of the Church at 18 goes in a mission. They're sent somewhere around the world with books of Mormon, with a suit, bicycles, and they go door to door to door in every country around the world preaching a book of Mormon. Now, 99 out of 100 houses that you knock your door on, you knock on their door, slam in your face. But one door will open.
And after two years of having 99% of the door slam in your face, you understand that it doesn't matter. You're just going for that one door. And they come back to the United States and they've developed this incredibly thick skin. They have withstood all of these nose for two years.
And so when they go to start a business, whether it's Code of Paxi, David Smith, or JetBlue, David Neelman, you know, or Joel Clark, Kodiak Cakes, or Jason Worsland, TheraBody, TheraGun, they've heard no for so long on these missions that starting a business seems like a piece of cake, because now they know that all they need to do is withstand those nose. And no happens to be the most important word that an entrepreneur will ever hear. And I guess they also know how yes happens. Yeah.
And I think that's like, as you were saying, I was thinking about a lot of young people will say to me, Steve, I've tried to get the job. I've tried to start the business. I sent 10 emails. Yeah.
And they think they assumed that the 10 emails or the five emails to the job they wanted would be enough to get it. But in that case, with the members of the Church of Latter-day Saints, they know that no comes anywhere between one in 100. No is the default. Yeah.
Sorry, they know that yes comes anywhere between one in 100. Yes, exactly. There's a great story that I came across recently. And it was an interview I did with a guy named Isaac Larian.
Isaac is the owner of the largest privately owned toy company in North America called MGA. In the year 2000, he launched a doll called Bratz doll, B-R-A-T-Z. And that doll was the first doll to challenge Barbie. Barbie had like 90% of market share in 2000.
And within three years, Barbie's market share went down like 30%. Bratz became a $3 billion a year brand. It's an amazing story. Now, Matt now rewind back to the early 70s.
He comes to the United States from Iran, penniless, two, 300 bucks in his pocket, no English. To Los Angeles. He came here to Los Angeles. We're talking.
And he worked as a waiter. Eventually, he started to import cheap consumer electronics from Japan in the early 80s and sell them to independent electronics stores. What he would do is he'd go to Japan with a suitcase. He'd buy Sony Walkman.
Stuff his suitcase with Sony Walkman. Come back to LA and sell them for a 40% markup to consumer electronics stores. Eventually, he got successful enough that he could bring in shipping containers full of these Walkman, right? By 1985, 86, he was doing $4 or $5 million a year in revenue.
So he had a significant business importing Japanese consumer electronics and selling them locally in the US. He's on a trip to Japan in 1986. And he sees children playing these things called Game and Watch. It was a rectangular game with an LED screen and two buttons.
And it was a craze all over Japan. And he said to himself, I got to sell these in the US. So he gets on trying to Kyoto, takes a bullet trying to Kyoto, which is where Nintendo's headquarters are. He goes to Nintendo headquarters and he asks the receptionist to meet with the head of export.
And she looks and she says, sorry, because I'm Mr. Kobayashi. I don't remember the exact name, but she said he's not available. You have to book him a point with him three, four months in advance.
Isaac says, look, I'm here in Kyoto just for the day. Can I just five minutes have five minutes of them? She said, impossible. So he says, now remember, he's got a successful business, $5, $6 million business.
He says, I will wait here in the reception. When he comes out for lunch, can you point him out? She says, I'm sorry, I can't do that. He sits down in the reception and he waits and he waits and he waits.
And at 5 p.m. A man walks out of the elevator. He whispers something to the receptionist. He's been there for six hours.
Isaac. He says, may I help you, sir? He says, my name is Isaac Larian. I understand you're in charge of export.
He says, I am. He said, I would like to get the license to export the game and watch. He says, impossible. We're not interested.
And who are you? And you need to make an appointment once in advance. He said, well, can we just have a quick chat? He said, no.
So can I get your business card at least? He hands him his business card. Isaac goes back to the United States with his business card. He goes to his bank and asks for a million dollar line of credit in the name of this guy.
We'll call him Kobayashi. He sends him a telex because there's no email back then. With a million dollar line of credit and he calls him up as a business card. He says, did you receive my line of credit letter?
And the man says, yes, I told you, Mr. Larian, we're not interested in working with you. We're not interested in exporting these toys. Not interested.
He said, what if I pay all cash? He said, we're not interested. He calls him again a few days later. He says, I want to order a million dollars worth of these.
He said, we're not interested. He said, please, the guy in Japan says, we're not going to change these in English for you. He says, don't worry. Send them to me in Japanese with instructions.
I'll repackage them. Exhausted. The guy finally says, fine, one off. In year one, they sell $25 million worth these game watches in the US.
They sell $25 million worth $25 million worth $25 million worth. I said to Isaac Larian, you walked into Nintendo. You sat there. Your dignity was challenged.
Your self-worth was challenged. Your ego was challenged. They said, no to you repeatedly. And he said, ego, dignity, self-worth, all that stuff is nonsense.
Pride. If that's what you care about, you will never succeed. The minute somebody says no to you is the minute the negotiation begins. And that's how I run my business.
And that's how I have become the entrepreneur. I've become. He's a multi-billioner today. And this is an amazing example of why that word no is so powerful.
Some people naturally can withstand it. Some people have to develop the skill that it takes, like those more missionaries, to hear no hundreds, thousands of times before they have that thick skin and they can break through. So interesting. So powerful.
And a wonderful reframing of what that moment of rejection means that everyone will go through. When I think about these other entrepreneurs I've spoken to, who end up getting to where he got to, some of them have to take what I call No Man's Land, where they start something, it appears that no one cares. They do that thing for five years, sometimes 10 years. Doesn't appear that anybody cares.
And then, I don't know, the world conspires or luck shows up or timing happens and that person has liftoff. That's also a sort of similar path. Have you seen that in any of the people you've interviewed in the stories you've seen? And what is the driving force that pushes someone through No Man's Land for a couple of years, three, four, five, six, seven years when it's not working, but they have something to persist regardless?
It's amazing because it does happen. I mean, again, going back to this example of Thurgon, this guy Jason Wurshland came to Los Angeles to become a chiropractor. And it was a difficult time in his life. He had his marriage had broken up.
He had two small children. It was very painful for him to leave Salt Lake City, Utah, to come to Los Angeles to study to become a chiropractor. Eventually, he got in a very, very bad motorcycle accident and was badly injured. And he was a chiropractor.
So he knew and understood what was going on inside his body. And one night, the pain was so severe that he decided to take a jigsaw. It's a saw that you used to carve wood. He took the blade and he bent it and he taped it up with duct tape.
And he thought, what if I just try this on my muscles and he put it on his muscle and he started to pulse on his muscle. And it actually felt pretty good. It actually, that percussive feeling started to give him relief. And over the next several months, he started to experiment with this on his patients until it got to a point where people said, hey, you're onto something here.
It would be another seven and a half years before Thurgon was actually marketed as a product. And during that entire time, he worked, he talked to everybody he could about it. But all they saw was a jigsaw with duct tape on it. Right?
They saw this weird product that just didn't seem like it was anything useful, but people were feeling real benefits from it. So he had on one hand, he had people saying, this is weird and I don't see a home for it. On the other hand, he had patients, people he was working on who were feeling real benefits from it, real relief. And that was driving him.
He knew that if he could figure out how to find a partner, how to get the money, he needed the money to launch this thing. Today, it's a multi-billion dollar business. But it took seven years. And during that seven year period at any given time, he was broke.
He could have, you know, he could have just walked away and given up. But he had this feeling and he had this feedback that convinced him there was something there. One thing you were known for is asking people about luck and the role that luck is played in their lives. Do you think these successful people believe in luck?
What role do you think luck is played in making them who they are? What sort of trend have you seen? Because I believe you asked pretty much all of your guests to this question about luck at the very end of the interview. Yep.
So you must have a big data set to think about. Luck plays a really important role. Luck is a weird word because it's an intangible and it's like a superstitious word. It's like, you know, fate.
Right? It's one of those words that I think in our modern age of science, a lot of people are resistant to that word because we believe that we can engineer outcomes, that humans through the sheer force of will can engineer an outcome. And that might be true in some cases, but you can't discount this notion of chance or fortune or luck. You know, you, like, can the U.S., or can the U.K.
when you were two or three years old single mom built a business. What are the chances of that happening? What are the chances of that happening? The chances of you being in a different circumstance are greater simply because of the statistical realities of that circumstance.
But the sheer force of will and some luck, here you are. You can't discount it. So how do you think about luck? Because I've often punted this.
I've thought, well, the luck in my life, where should I, where do I find it? Is it in the me meeting my girlfriend through some sort of chance encounter or is luck much more of a fundamental thing in the case that you've described with me coming to the U.K. Because it's true, if I hadn't come to the U.K. when I was two years old, then, and I was still in Botswana, everything's different.
My education's different. Might be very successful there too, but you just don't know. It's probable that I wouldn't have had the freedoms in my life and the opportunities I've had if I was still in Botswana. So as something that I didn't have any control over, because I was two, I look at that and go, that's a really fundamental luck.
But I had parents that loved me, they moved me to this country where you have healthcare and all these amazing things. That is lucky. Like, that is just huge fortune that I had no involvement in. Another kid could be moved to the U.K.
at two years old, and they might be in prison now. And I'm trying to understand, because when I get really deeply about it, I go, maybe I'm responsible for nothing in my life. Because it's all nature and nurture. It's my DNA and it's the circumstance that that DNA would put in.
It's the environment that DNA was put in. So if you really think about it, maybe I'm responsible for nothing. You're responsible for a lot, and then you're not responsible for some as well. And here's the thing.
You didn't go to Oxford or Cambridge, but you know a lot of kids who do go to Oxford and they won't be a fraction as financially successful as you might be or me or anyone else that they know. And that's not because you're better than them or they're worse than you. It's not that at all. There are traits, there are circumstances that give everybody different powers.
And having the right kind of personality is also luck. I mean, you might be the smartest, most educated person on the planet, but if you cannot withstand hearing no again and again and you're trying to run a business, you're not going to make it. If your ego is so enormous that it gets in the way, if your sense of dignity and pride is so important to you that it's an immovable object and you can't see past it, then it doesn't matter how intelligent you are. You can be a horrible student, a failing student, but have those traits, a personality that enables you to talk to anybody, open mind, kindness, friendliness, and you will be a hundred times more successful because that's the role of the dice handed you those traits.
You might not be book smart, but you got those other things. So there are all these factors that are intangible and we all have bits and pieces of these things. It's just a matter of how we use them. You've been to Richard Branson, right?
So have I. And one of the big things I took away from Richard was it sounds like a crazy thing to say, but he admitted how many things he's really not good at. And he admitted that he's only really good at a couple of things. And this kind of bucks the trend of what you think when you think of successful people because you assume that especially CEOs and entrepreneurs are these sort of Swiss amazing Swiss army knives that just get at everything, everything they touch turns to gold.
Richard taught me that you don't actually have to be good at that many things to be wildly successful. You just need to be good at a very narrow thing and then mitigate your downsides through delegation. But that's what he's good at. That's his talent.
Richard Branson's talent is in spotting talent in others and empowering them to go out and build and trusting them. I did a show for many years, Col, from the top. You can still hear it's available on, you know, podcast. And that show was a CEO show.
I interviewed CEOs. And one of the CEOs I interviewed was a guy named Mark King who for years ran Adidas is North American operations. He ran Taylor made, which is a golf brand and then Taco Bell is a CEO of Taco Bell. And marking made this exact point.
He said, you know, I'm not the smartest guy in the room. I'm not the most intellectual. I'm not, you know, the most capable and competent when it comes to, you know, but I'm really good at finding the people with the answers. I don't have the answers most of the time, but I'm really good at finding the people who can get the answers.
And that's, that is what a great leader can do. CEO or founder or entrepreneur. It's figuring out who can find the answers and inspiring them together around you. This is one of the things I've learned really late in my business career.
I say really late, but I mean, I learned it probably at 28. And then for the last three years, it's been front of mind is that the game I'm playing as a founder and entrepreneur isn't how smart am I and how hard do I work. It's about realizing I'm a recruitment company. Every business I start is a recruitment company.
And I have this like crazy analogy I sometimes use where I say to people, if you had hired Elon Musk and got the best out of him, right? So hired him and got the best out of him. You would have, you would be worth trillions theoretically. You would be hired at Steve Jobs and got the best out of him.
You would have created an apple or something else or a Pixar. If you think that though it's an extreme, largely impossible lens to think through, it illuminates the fact that much of the job of a founder is to find these exceptional people and get the best out of them. That is like the easiest path to value creation versus hoping that you can become the best at design and computer programming and all of these kinds of things. And honestly in my life it's been like this really big fundamental reframe which has caused me to reallocate my time where now I'd say I spend 20 hours a week of recruitment whereas before I might have spent half an hour.
And this is why I asked you earlier about people telling and how important that is to the game of building a company which by definition is a group of people. And what you've seen in great founders there. Have you ever spoken to Walter Isaacson? No.
The guy likes to fully speak to him. Yeah, of course I know what I mean. Brilliant, right, I haven't. Yeah, he talks a lot about how Steve Jobs was exceptional at that.
I remember him saying that before Steve Jobs died, he asked him in his backyard, what is the thing in your life that you've built? What is the product that you're most proud of and Walter responded to the team? Yeah. And I see that now in great entrepreneurs.
I see how obsessed they are with culture and people. Yes. I mean, as Peter Lynch says, culture beats strategy for breakfast, right? What is culture in your view?
Culture is, it's many things. It's a common mission. It's a belief in a way of doing things, not in the way that there's only one way, but a way which could mean innovation, risk taking, but a shared belief in a common mission, right? And now a lot of people will say, well, all right, well, what about Coca-Cola?
What's the common mission there? You know, making a sugary soft drink, you know, sugary beverage? And I would venture to say that if you talk to somebody who worked for a company like Coca-Cola, they would have probably a generally a common vision or a common view of why they do what they do. And it's not about a sugary soft drink, but a lot, it's about being part of something bigger that has impact.
Strong cultures are places where people feel like they're working towards a common goal. We talked earlier about failure and people's relationship with failure. What about quitting? So failure is kind of like involuntary quitting.
But quitting is like when you make the decision at some point in the journey that you need to pivot, this is not working. And it seems to me, like in all the stories of the people that I've interviewed that have become successful, there has been several moments where they've made a decision to quit something which was either objectively not smart or terrifying. But I've always come to learn that I think quitting is actually a skill that winners have managed to really sharpen. And obviously there's that phrase isn't that like quitting is for losers.
But the more people I've interviewed, the more I've come to learn that quitting is a bit of a skill. And I think recognizing when to quit as well, you know, in my 20s, there were periods of time where I was a reporter at NPR at the time and there were periods of time where I was frustrated, I want to quit. But I didn't. But really got close at times because I was covering the Iraq war on Afghanistan.
I was in and out of war zones. I was scared. And how do I quit at that time? My life and career would have been totally different.
I don't think it would have been as interesting. I think it's important that I waited to the right moment when I did quit and stopped working for a big organization and started my own business. I needed to have that experience in my back pocket. I needed to feel like I was ready.
Was it scary when I did it? When I left the safety of a big organization with insurance and a retirement plan and a guaranteed income, it was really scary. Two kids. You know, my wife had a small salary.
But I felt like I could take that risk because it was the right moment. It was something that told me it was the right moment. So I think it has to be a thought through process. And a lot of times people say to me, should I quit?
I'm out of business. And I always say, no, start your business slowly. So 99% of your job, 1% of your business, 95% of your job and 10% of your business and 90% of your job until you get to a point where maybe your entire evening and weekend is spent on your side project. And then it's time.
Yeah, I followed this one apart from my life. I've been quite aggressive prolific quitter at the same time. Really key moments. And I don't think I've ever really thought it through to a fault sometimes.
But sometimes it's just been a feeling you have. You feel like you've reached the end of a flow chart of options. And for me, it's like, when I can't change it and it sucks, I have to quit. Or when the effort it would take to change it isn't worth the reward on offer.
So I have to quit. It's like this flow chart I have in my head. And it's funny because throughout your story, you've started these moments where someone was unfulfilled. You said that three or four times, like they were unfulfilled.
They knew they could do something better. It didn't change. I've wondered what the role is in reaching rock bottom in your life as a catalyst for change. And I've actually said a few people whether sometimes we just need a bit more pain.
Yeah. And it doesn't sound like a nice thing. I think that rock bottom or version of that is often a catalyst for change, right? It goes back to this idea of framing.
It's very hard. Failure or setbacks that are intense and severe are really hard. But they are often necessary to trigger the change that needs to happen. I mean, I can tell you I'll never forget the day.
It was 2011. When I found out I was still working as an employee at National Public Radio and I was told that I would not become the weekday host of all things considered. That was my dream. I started there as a 20-year-old kid hoping that one day I'd be the main anchor.
It's like the Today program on BBC, except an evening. And that's all I wanted. I was a foreign correspondent. I covered 50 countries.
I'd take all the boxes. I covered the Pentagon. I was the weekend anchor of the show. I did everything right by the book.
Everything I thought I had to do. But when it came down to making a decision, I was not the person that they wanted. And that was a low point. I really believed my career was over.
And during that time, while I was looking and searching for a way to leave the news world because I was convinced I was finished, I had heard of an opportunity to create a show with the people who do TED docs. And I jumped at that opportunity. And that changed everything. That prompted me eventually to leave, to start my own business, to start creating podcasts.
I would never have been in the podcast world had I done that. I would have been on the radio doing news today. And without that low point, I wouldn't have had the trigger to force me to find the next thing, to find something different and do. And that failure changed my life.
Partners, co-founders, people, talent. What have you come to learn about the importance of finding a co-founder, finding people to go into business with as it relates to where you'll end up? I'll be 50 this year. And a lot of young people ask me, younger people ask me, what's the best piece of advice you can give me in life?
And my advice is always the same. Find a partner in life. Now, different from a business partner, which I'll get to in a moment, but I want to talk about a life partner. I believe that there is a partner for everybody, whether it's through Tinder or Hinge or Bumble or at a church or at a bar or wherever.
I believe there's a partner for everybody. And I believe that you are much more likely, not just that I believe, but statistically it's true. You're much more likely to be successful if you have a partner to share and build a life with. Is the single most important thing you can do as you build a life.
Now, in a business, I give the same advice. You can build a business as a solo entrepreneur. It's happened and we have had many solo entrepreneurs on the show who've built businesses by themselves. Well, with others helping, of course, but as the only founder.
It's harder, not because it's technically harder. It's emotionally harder because there's always going to be a point along the journey and you've experienced it and I've experienced it where you say to yourself, I suck. I'm a fucking failure. And there's no one else to say to you, you're just feeling that today.
You're just feeling that now. But tomorrow, you're not going to feel that. And I, as your co-founder, might feel that and you're going to need to tell me that I don't suck. That's beauty and importance of having a co-founder because they are there on the journey with you.
You are going to go into a crucible of fire. When you start a business, you are going to hit moments of incredible stress near failure and you're going to need somebody to be there in the trenches with you. Now, can you do it alone? Yes, you can.
It's just harder. And the success rates of co-founder businesses tends to be higher. That's why, and I mentioned this in my book, that came out a few years ago, the legendary investor, Paul Graham, one of his criteria for investing in companies is co-founders. You have to have a co-founder because that is a stronger guarantor of success than a solo entrepreneur.
What do you think people should be looking for when they're seeking a co-founder? Is it a personality thing? Is it a skill crossover? Are they looking for someone similar than themselves?
And where do these co-founders come about? Where do you find them? The question I always get, where do I find a co-founder? Yeah.
I mean, I think it's like dating. You know, oftentimes co-founders find each other. You know, each other in college or university or at school, or they meet at a company. Sometimes they are looking for a co-founder.
Sometimes they are looking for somebody to start a business with. And there's no sort of formula that you can just kind of take every box. I think a lot of it is instinct. A lot of it is luck.
You might have two people with totally disparate skills, a technical co-founder and a marketing or operational co-founder, or a fundraiser co-founder, visionary, and then sort of the operational side. And that might be perfect, but they might have a personality conflict. There might be a point where they have very diverging views. And so so much of it is about compatible personalities.
It's like a marriage, by the way. You can marry somebody. You can love somebody, fall in love with somebody, and decide to marry somebody who is going to be more of a nurturer. And you're maybe more of a disciplinarian when it comes to building a family or vice versa.
Really compatible sort of family building skills. But if your personalities aren't compatible, over time that marriage won't last. If you can't grow together. Oftentimes co-founders, when they start a business, the most successful co-founders grow together too.
They start a business and then they grow it together and it becomes stronger over time because they also grow together. They also learn mistakes together and figure out how to recover from those mistakes together. And in some cases, had a failed business before. We just had an episode of our show with the founders of a Breakfast Year called Magic Spoon.
These guys met at university, Greg and Gabby, and they decided to start a company together, a protein bar company. Protein bars made out of crickets. It's called Exo Bars, E-Exo. And it was an amazing idea because crickets are very nutritionally dense, high protein, really good for the environment or require a lot of water.
You can turn them into a tasteless powder and they really pursue this business for seven or eight years together. And the business failed. For obvious reasons, which is in our society in the United States and the West, we're not yet ready to consume insects. There's a psychological barrier.
So that could have been the end of their partnership. But they decided that they wanted to continue building something together because they believed in each other. And they moved on to a completely different product, also high in protein, but breakfast cereal, high protein, no sugar, low in carbohydrates. So a keto kind of brand of breakfast cereal, which is now in 20,000 grocery stores in the United States and may even be in the UK.
But that's an example of this part, a partnership where they fail together, but which allow them to then build something that saw success. One of the other sort of central questions I get as it relates to that starting phase is people are currently working in a full-time job. They have an idea, but they're not sure how to pivot from the full-time job to the idea. They quit their job and then pursue the idea.
Did they stay in their job and do it part? That's what I can under of how I go from idea to execution while I'm in a full-time job that I need to keep the lights on. You talk a little bit about this in your book as well. It's an idea of how you leave your comforts own safely.
Yeah, I mean, of course, it depends on the company. If you're coming up with a technology and you're working at Google, it's probably a better idea to quit first because otherwise Google is going to claim ownership over that idea. And many companies operate that way where they'll argue that, well, if you work for the company and you have an idea, we own it. So there are examples where you want to leave the company.
We have had so many examples on how to build this. A founders who have kept their day job while pursuing this other idea, because they had to pay their bills, they had to feed their families. We did a story a couple years ago. This is actually a UK-based company.
It's an amazing story. It's a story of a guy named Christian Tapan, you know, who is from Finland and his wife, Dorena, who's Scottish. And they were both sort of educational consultants in the UK. They met at college and they had an educational consultancy and they had various jobs.
But Christian was a tinkerer and he dreamed of building something. He wasn't sure what it was. It happens that he was a home cook and he had a problem because this is where all great businesses start. I have a problem and maybe other people have that problem.
And if lots of people have that problem, maybe I can solve it. His problem was he couldn't cook a pizza at home. Why couldn't you cook a pizza at home? It has to be really hot.
That's how you get this beautiful crusty Neapolitan pizzas with a blackened crust because they cook for a minute at very high heat. Home ovens don't go that hot. What did he do? He started to pound some metal together and he built his own pizza oven that was wood-fired.
Well, today that pizza oven is uni pizza ovens. One of the best selling pizza ovens home pizza ovens in the world. They're between three and 500 bucks. They're pretty affordable.
You can make out wood versions. They've got gas, propane gas. They've got an electric version. These guys kept their day jobs years into building this company because they didn't know if it was going to work or not.
That's a billion dollar company. An example of somebody who really didn't had one foot in one place and one foot in the other place and once this other thing was real, they felt that they could take the leap and go for it. So here's the thing. A lot of people assume that entrepreneurs are these kamikazis.
You know, you'll know I'm going to jump out of an airplane, no parachute and go for it. And that's a myth actually. There are some who are like that. But in general, most entrepreneurs calculate the risk.
So they do take risks, but we all take risks every day. It's that they mitigate those risks by in the case of uni, yes, I'm going to keep my day job for a little while and build this thing. And then it is a risk to jump out of my day job and to pursue this full time, but it seems now I can see where this is heading. And that's the moment where you can take that leap.
It's interesting as well because that story doesn't fit the mold because there was a lot of patience and the patience seemed to come from someone that was really focused on actually solving a problem versus getting rich. And someone that's focused on getting rich would have taken a much more kamikaze approach, I think, than someone who was really just focused on a problem they genuinely wanted to solve. And you said, you know, it ended up being the best pizza oven. And it's probably because he was so focused on, as I said, he was so focused on solving the problem that he spent on in five, six, seven years making the best pizza oven and worried later about whether people would want it or whether they would make it rich from creating it.
But typically it's the other way around. With entrepreneurs that come up to me when I'm in the gym or in the street, the focus and the priorities clearly, how do I get rich? I'm thinking of selling this or I'm thinking of selling this. And I guess this brings up the question, like the role of passion and genuine curiosity in creating truly valuable things that will then make you rich or remain rich before.
So there's nothing wrong with wanting to be rich. There's nothing wrong with wanting to make a lot of money. This is an engine that powers innovation, right? I mean, incentives breed innovation.
And so there's a reason why the United States, for example, is one of the most, if not the most entrepreneurial society in modern history because there are incentives to grow your business. That being said, I would say about 95% of the people that I've interviewed founders of businesses, in virtually every case are not primarily motivated by money. Of course, money is important. We all want to have financial security.
But what they're motivated by is solving a problem they have or looking for an opportunity in the marketplace to solve a problem that lots of other people have. And virtually every case, because what I do and how I build this is I mainly interview founders of consumer products, products that are either American sort of cultural icons or global brands. And in virtually every case, it is somebody who's trying to solve their own problem. We did a story last year about an amazing entrepreneur named Rene Rodriguez.
Her mom worked at an administrator at a hospital in the South Chicago. She grew up. Single mom, her dad was in a jail on drugs. And she managed to go to nursing school.
So when he became a nurse, which was a huge achievement, raised by a single mom in a tough neighborhood in the South Chicago becomes a nurse. And within a couple of years of doing that job was feeling unfulfilled, but she was always dreaming of something. And Monique had a problem, which was she could not find hair care products for her hair. She was a black woman.
She wasn't able to find really good consumer products on the shelves. So she started to experiment with essential oils. And eventually she started to mix essential oils and play around with her hair, avocado, and you know, George about all these different things, or oh, I can't remember, no, no, it's pronounced. And she started to make Instagram videos, you know, this is like early Instagram.
She had at the beginning 10 followers and then 20 followers and she would show people what she was doing with the oils and using our hair and show how it was improving her hair. Over time, people were writing in the comments, Hey, where can I buy this stuff? Well, after a couple of years of people saying that to her, she still was a nurse. She asked herself the same question.
Well, how can I do this? So with almost no money, she launched a brand called Myel Organics, which was hair care products for women with textured hair. Fast forward to 2023. She sold that business to Pratran Gamble for reportedly for half a billion dollars.
This is a woman who started a hair care products company in her apartment in Indiana, she was in Indiana at the time with no experience in the industry, with no connections, but just a passion to solve a problem she had. And that was the beginning of an empire. And that's a story that I see again and again. You can never ever substitute passion with a desire for money.
Passion is always going to trump a desire for money. It eats desire for my to paraphrase Peter Lynch passion eats desire for money for lunch. What is breakfast? What is passion doing that just a desire for money wouldn't do for along that journey?
If you think about her in that apartment, if we take her and we drive her with passion and we see where she ends up, $500 million and then we take her and we drive her with a desire for money and we see where she ends up, why would she end up in different places? What are the steps? Yeah, I'm not sure she would end up in different places. There's no question that money can be an engine and a motivator, but with passion and a belief in what in the thing that you're building, having the ability to solve the problem for many, many people, if you're building something that just solves your problem, it's not enough.
That's not a business. That's a hobby. But if you build a product that solves a problem for millions of people or could potentially solve problems for millions of people and you have a passion to build it because it's solving your problem, that is going to drive you. That's going to motivate you to keep moving forward.
Whereas if it's simply a profit motive and it doesn't land quickly, you're unlikely to keep with it. You're unlikely to have the patience. You're going to move on and try something else, which is fine too, which is fine too. There's something in there in the case of a pizza guy who made the pizza ovens where because they're so passionate about it, they understand the problem so deeply that they're able to truly innovate.
Whereas if I was trying to start a pizza oven business now, frankly, I've never experienced pizza ovens before, never used one, never failed at using one, never succeeded at using one. So my information would have to come from Google. It's one of the things I see a lot of entrepreneurs is how they manage to think for themselves. The force that makes them think for themselves and not just accept the conventional way of doing things.
Someone like Elon Musk is a prime example of a first principle start from zero, sort of blank sheet of paper. Very hard to do because conventions like filling all of our brains are very, very difficult to do. I wish there was some way of teaching that. Yeah, I mean, it is hard to do.
But I also think that part of the process and part of building something is a willingness, not a desire, not a hope, not the enjoyment of, but a willingness to experience failure. That's really hard. Elon Musk has experienced a lot of failure. I mean, put aside his quirks and I think challenging parts to him, there's no single person on the planet who I believe who had a bigger impact on reducing climate emissions.
I mean, say what you want to about him, but between solar power and cars that are emissions free, he has had a bigger impact on global climate emissions and virtually every other individual on Earth, which is quite a remarkable thing if you think about it. You know, there's a lot of people really hate him, but at the same time, he's had a huge impact on climate. He's also had a lot of failure. You know, we did the story of PayPal on the show many years ago and told it in great detail.
A Max Legend really was the creator of PayPal. He's now the founder of a firm and Max Legend and Peter Thiel started PayPal. Elon Musk had X.com. They merged into PayPal and they actually kicked Elon Musk out of the company.
And Max Legend tells the story about the day the board kicked him out as the head of the company and Elon was crushed, you know. Tesla, for the first what, 16 years of its life was a money losing business. Nobody believed in it. And I think part of his, you know, part of his bravado and part of his, I think, maybe part of who he is today comes from those scars of people not believing in him.
I think that he, but he also was and still is prepared for failure. I mean, when a rocket launches and fails, he doesn't like it, but he moves on and he, you know, he goes, he continues. I did an interview not that long ago with Hillary Swain. She was 17 or 16 when she came to Los Angeles with her mother from Washington State to become an actor.
Penny, I mean, literally Pennyless, they literally slept in her mom's car for weeks at a time while she went to high school and then auditions. I mean, they were, they knew money. She went to audition and for additional get bit parts here and there, only at the age of 25 that she get a breakthrough role on barely Hills, nine or two and a half. It was in the nineties.
It was the height of that shows popularity and she finally gets a recurring role on a television show. It's a massive breakthrough. What happens? 16 episodes in they kill her character.
Her contract is done. She's out of work. Her entire career blows up and she's finished and she was devastated at the time. She thought her career was over because that was the ticket to cruising altitude in Hollywood.
A couple of weeks later, her agent calls her and says, hey, there's an indie film. They're doing open audition. It's not a lot of money, but it's something. Why don't you go do it for an audition?
This is a small indie crew. She auditions for the role and she gets it. She gets offered the role and it's going to pay her nothing. She's going to make like three to five grand on this film.
But she has no other options and she had the time because she wasn't doing that or two or no anymore. So she could actually do this role. Well, the role was as Brandon Tina. The film was Boyst on Cry.
She was nominated for the Academy Award. We became one of the youngest nominees and then winners of the Academy Award that year and was catapulted into Global Start-Up. And then a few years later, one or second Academy Award is Bachelors Actress in the company of Meryl Streep and Sally Fields and a few others. I mean, an amazing story.
Had she not had that failure on 902 and 0 or what felt like a failure at the time at the time, she would never have had the opportunity to audition for this film. What can we learn from these stories and these people? We can learn that failure can be a blessing and it's all about how we frame it. Now I'm not saying I am perfect at this.
I hate failing. When I fail, it's painful. When I have failed in my life and career. It's been really hard.
The hardest part about it is reframing it. And that's what takes all of my strength and energy. I think for anybody to reframe it and to try and convince yourself that there's a reason. There's a plan, whether it's God or a force or karma or something.
There's a reason why it's happening. And in my life, in every case of failure, every case, it's happened for the right reasons. An opportunity came about because that failure moved an obstacle aside. Because of how you framed the failure.
Because of what you did after the failure. Because it's conceivable that if you take any of one of your big failures in your life and you had down tools, you'd let the failure get the best of you. Then it wouldn't have turned it. And this is kind of what I was thinking.
It's saying about the force or the God or whatever. It's maybe we are the force and we are the God. I'm not meant to sound like narcissistic or anything. But it's just thinking there's probably a couple of stories of people that had the character killed in a movie that decided to forget this.
And we don't tell those stories now because they said forget this. So they didn't get the Academy Awards. But in that story, she sounds like she was her own force. She made the decision.
It's interesting because in that moment when you find out your character's killed and you come home and tell your friends your character's killed and you feel the shame. There's no apparent light at the end of the tunnel. So it can't be that. It can't be that that drives you on.
It's got to be something else. It's got to be something else. And it is. But it is a force.
I mean, this is not a show about faith or religion. So it depends on what anyone believes in. But I'm a believer in faith. I believe in it.
I don't think that it happens without intervention on our behalf. Like, I don't, you know, that we put effort into it. But whether you believe or not, whether you believe in a higher power or not. I believe in a force and it doesn't happen automatically.
We also have to engineer it. But I believe that there is some kind of guiding force. One interview I did about a year and a half ago was at Tom Hanks. And Tom Hanks is probably the greatest living actor maybe in the English language.
He is the Spencer Tracy of his generation. He's been in so many films. He's won so many Academy Awards when he was ready to start his career, his acting career. He desperately wanted to be in a very prestigious Shakespeare festival in Sacramento, California.
And that was going to launch his career. And he didn't get any roles. He didn't get a single part. And so he had to find other acting roles.
One day, he finds out about an open audition for a new sitcom that ABC was going to possibly produce a pilot show based on two guys living in a apartment together in New York. Show was called Bus and Buddies. He auditions for the part. Hundreds of people are auditioning.
Tom Hanks is a nobody. He gets the part. But now they're just going to make a pilot. They make the pilot.
And the show actually gets launched. But even then, there was no guarantee that after that show ended, his career would continue. His co-star, Peter Scalari, didn't not have as successful career as Tom Hanks did. Tom Hanks was on that show, Bus and Buddies, for a few years.
He was moderately successful. But he became the superstar. And his career began as a series of failures. And so part of it is his own, his own will is the sheer will of just keeping, keep on keeping on.
Part of it is fate. Part of it is luck. Part of it is God or whatever you want to call it. There's something there that said to him, these failures are going to be important for you.
You're going to need them in order to get to the next place. What are you thinking about this subject of work, life balance? You've interviewed a lot of very successful people, billionaires. They apparently have it all as it relates to material success.
But it must have illuminated the sacrifices they've made in other areas of their life. What have you come to learn is most important. And what is the warning that you might pass down the ladder to other people that are looking up and thinking, I want to be a billionaire like Richard Bransing or someone else that's wildly successful? I mean, there's always the perception that we have or outsiders have in the founder and the internal perception that within the family.
So we saw Steve Jobs differently than Steve Jobs' family saw him. I think he was a loving father and partner and was seen not as Steve Jobs founder, but Steve Jobs' dad. There's no question that in many examples, in many interviews I've done, the sacrifices that the founders have made to build their businesses have meant that their personal lives have been challenging. Their marriages have collapsed.
They've had difficult relationships with their children. It's happened for sure. Is this a big regret you see in the people that you've spoken to? Sometimes.
I think sometimes there are some cases where there's a bit of regret around that. They're missing big chunks of their kids' lives. Isaac Larian, who's a wonderful man and very close with his kids, because of the success of the Brat Stalls and the threat that it posed to Mattel, he became the subject of endless lawsuits and then counter lawsuits with Mattel. He was wrapped up and tied up in court cases with Mattel, the maker of Barbie, for virtually a decade.
When he finally won on appeal, the last judgment, he got $300 million on judgment against Mattel, his son was asked why a reporter, aren't you so happy that your dad won? He said, I'm sad because I didn't have my dad around for 10 years because he was wrapped up in this trial. And of course, Isaac was there for his family, but the point is that they're massive sacrifices. In my case, in a much smaller version of a business I run, I have always wanted to be and I've always tried to be there for every sports game, for every school event, for every paired teacher conference.
We as a family have dinner together every night. We run a family meeting every Sunday night. My kids don't love it, but we sit down and we talk about the weekend. We talk about our goals a week.
We go over, it's just going to sound a little earnest, but we have a codified list of family values that we wrote down. We all four of us wrote them down and decided what our family is, what kind of things we're going to do. Gratitude, generosity, forgiveness. So if just happening the other day with my son, he got really mad at me because I yelled at him and I apologized and I said, I'm sorry, that is stressful day.
And he was still mad and I said, hey, on our family values is forgiveness. Remember it says forgiveness, except an apology and move on. Curiosity, respect, taking responsibility. There's value in reminding yourself about the things that you aspire to be.
And I think in the case of a family, it's to build a strong family, you, it takes work and commitment and time. And that means that you're going to sacrifice other things in order to achieve that. Why are you still doing what you're doing? Because you feel you're 15, almost 15 years in, right?
And how about this where eight? In podcasting. Yeah. Yeah, 2012.
Sorry. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I am really privileged because I get to learn every day, you know, I get to learn from people that I talk to and exchange ideas with people.