There will come a time where you will want to give up, where you will run into a roadblock, and you will say, is this worth fighting for? And you will say to yourself, it's not. It's better for me to just move on, give up. But the person who you co-founded the company with will say, we got this.
We can get through this. And there will be other times where those roles are reversed, where you are the person with the optimism. I have experienced that hundreds of times. Hey everyone, welcome back to On Purpose, the number one health podcast in the world.
Thanks to each and every single one of you that come back every week to listen, learn, and grow. And I'm so excited to be talking to you today. I can't believe it. My new book, Eight Rules of Love, is out.
And I cannot wait to share it with you. I am so, so excited for you to read this book. For you to listen to this book, I read the audiobook. If you haven't got it already, make sure you go to 8rulesoflove.com.
It's dedicated to anyone who's trying to find, keep or let go of love. So if you've got friends that are dating, broken up, or struggling with love, make sure you grab this book. And I'd love to invite you to come and see me for my global tour. Love rules.
Go to jshedytour.com to learn more information about tickets, VIP experiences, and more. I can't wait to see you this year. Now today, we have an extremely special guest, because his ability to understand, assimilate, and synthesize knowledge, insights, and information about building successful businesses, about finding our calling and following that calling are just second to none. Now, I'm talking about none other than Guy Raz, the author of the new book, How I Built This, and the host of the NPR podcast of the same name.
He's a connoisseur of entrepreneurs having interviewed hundreds of successful self-starters and researched what makes them successful. For years, Guy was a foreign correspondent for NPR and was the youngest bureau chief ever at the age of just 25. I can't wait to speak with Guy today and share this conversation with all of you. Guy, welcome to the podcast.
It's so great to be here, Jay. Thanks so much for having me. No, thank you. I remember just a few months ago when we were just DMing on Instagram, and you kindly invited me to do your live event for How I Built This, which was unbelievable, and I'm so grateful for that opportunity.
But I've been more excited about today, because I want to hear from you. I was so excited to have you on. It was so fun. We got incredible feedback.
And I mean, I love your book. So I love what you do. And so it was great when you reached out. I'm so I'm so glad that now we've, we know each other.
We're going to be come friends. Absolutely. I love it. And I want to actually start off with with it.
Hopefully a different question than you get asked often. And it's what was the first thing you ever built as a child? How did your family, friends, parents respond to your first ever thing that you built? I grew up in a fairly traditional, I'm not religious these days.
I have a lot of respect and immense respect for people who are religious and who are observing and practice religion. But I grew up in a kind of an observant Jewish home as a kid, my parents were immigrants. And it was really important for especially my mom to keep traditions. And so Friday nights were very important in my home as a kid.
That's the Friday to the sundown. It's the Jewish Sabbath. And Saturday, you kind of take a day of rest foreshadowing. I do that today, but for different reasons.
And as a kid, it was really important that our house was clean and bright and ready for the Sabbath. It was just part of our tradition growing up. And so I was expected to clean my room and tidy it up. And every Friday afternoon after school, I would spend hours building these elaborate villages out of Lincoln logs, Lincoln logs.
Are you familiar with Lincoln logs? You know, those are it was a classic, they're still around, but it was a classic American toy, Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln. You know, the myth was that he was born in a log cabin, which is kind of true. And so they were these logs that had little grooves and niches in them.
And you could build these elaborate homes and structures out of them. And I would build these villages in my bedroom as a kid for my dad when he would come home from work. Who was not? My dad was not particularly observant.
It was my mom, really. But this was part of our tradition at home when I was a kid. And so I would spend hours building these elaborate villages out of Lincoln logs and then eventually legos. And I loved it.
It was like a wonderful creative outlet. Of course, you don't think about that when you're, you know, eight or nine years old. But it was a way for me to kind of express myself and also, you know, show my parents something I was proud of and then feel proud when they were excited about it. Yeah, that sounds awesome.
I remember doing similar, I used to play a lot with Lego and play mobile and some of this similar style of toys. And I remember creating lots of villages and castles and boats. And I actually miss it now that I'm talking to you. But I know, I'm like, I want to go build a train track.
Yeah, I need to go and get back into it. It was so it was so interesting building it out. And I feel when I go to places like, I don't know if you have that in the US, we have in the UK, we have Legoland, which is like, yeah, there are a few in the US. Yeah, there's one San Diego.
Yeah. Yeah. And whenever I go to those, I'm like, oh, this is so cool. Like there's just such a fascination towards building a city or a town out of something very small.
So I love that. Thank you for sharing that story. And I noticed recently also on Instagram, you posted an old press pass from your high school newspaper. And so you've been, you've been a journalist and a reporter and a interviewer for a very long time.
Do you remember the first story you ever covered? Yeah, it was my Hebrew school newspaper. Again, I grew up having to go to Hebrew school. It's like going to Catholic school, you know, you sort of something that you do and then some people kind of, but it was really, you know, an important thing when I was a kid.
And I was the I was the reporter for the Hebrew school newsletter. So it was, you know, about some, some, some, it was like some, one of the classes did performance and sing songs and I wrote about that. I was, I was a journalist, kind of a journalist. I was interested in journalism from a very young age.
And I don't say that to sound like, you know, some kind of, you know, precocious kid. It's not that I was precocious. What it was Jay was that I am, have always been, as a kid, I was, still am, even though I do these very public jobs now, I am. And I think you have a lot of this too.
I'm super introverted and actually quite shy. I'm not the kind of person that can easily go into a room and just start shaking hands. You know, it's a very, it's a very American characteristic, by the way, that charisma, which is something that I can find and have found over time as I've had to do public things. But it doesn't come naturally to me.
What journalism gave me was a pass, was this kind of psychological pass in my mind to talk to anybody. You know, naturally, I'm not the kind of person that would just go up and say, Hey, I'm Guy Ros, can I? How are you? Nice to meet you and make small talk.
It doesn't come easily to me. But when I had a notepad in my hand, and this was going back in all the high school, I could, I felt like as a high school kid, I could go up to other kids in high school and ask them questions because it was for the newspaper. I was a reporter. And so I was doing a job on behalf of something bigger than me.
And that was what attracted me to it. It was this idea that it was like it opened a world to me that I couldn't access without, without that notepad, that safety net. I love that answer. That is such a brilliant way of thinking about it.
And I can agree with you more. We definitely have that in common. I feel like when I told you about how my parents forced me to go to public speaking classes, it wasn't that after I finished the classes, I was just happy being a public speaker. It was not until I actually discovered the Bogadgeta and the Vedas and the spiritual texts that I studied that I felt like I was speaking about something more than me and beyond me and far more fascinating and interesting than I was.
And so then I had the confidence to share it because I thought I'd come across this treasure mine of wisdom. And I had to share that wisdom with the world. And so I can identify very closely with that. It's this thing that there's no explanation to it because why did I feel empowered with a notepad and then eventually a microphone in my hand?
I mean, it's just something in my brain clicked and it enabled me to feel safe and comfortable approaching people and having conversations and not being worried about being judged because I was gathering information. And that was a strong gravitational pull for me. It's what attracted me initially to this profession and later on it would evolve and I would do it for other reasons. But that was really the beginning.
So yeah, I've got my high school press pass still to this day. I just happen to have it. But it really is what I eventually would do with my life. Yeah, you've encouraged me to go dig up some old things from my life.
I think it's always fine looking back. For anyone who's listening and watching right now, I'm talking to Guy Raz, how I built this, the unexpected paths to success from the world's most inspiring entrepreneurs. Here is the book. We've got the link in the description so you can go and grab a copy anytime while you're listening.
Guy, when I'm fascinated by it, and I was saying this to you earlier, I think you've done a phenomenal job of breaking down the entrepreneur journey. I mean, you've done so many interviews with so many incredible people. And I can't imagine how you'd even start to write this book. But I do want to honestly say that I thought everything from the titles to the chapters to the structure was just wonderful to see.
And I'm not joking at all. I'm thinking about pursuing a new business venture. I'm going to follow your book while I do that. And I can't wait to tell you how it goes.
So that's a side note. But one of the first things I wanted to talk to you about is a question I get asked a lot. And it's about this idea of how do I know if this is the thing I should be doing? And I think we hear this a lot.
I'm sure you hear a million times and people are like, well, what do I start with? How do I know if this is what I love? How do I know if this is my passion? How do I know if this is the idea?
And you start off the book by telling people to be open to ideas. Tell us about how someone finds the answer to that question. Probably the question that people ask the most, I'm sure you get this question and most of almost any question, which is, how do I know? How do I find an idea?
The answer is, you don't always know right away, right? And the reality is that most of the time, the way we come across an idea is because we have a problem ourselves, a problem we need to solve for ourselves. And as we begin to interrogate how to solve that problem for ourselves, it starts to crystallize our mind that maybe that problem is a problem other people have and could solve other people's problems. So a great example of this is my friend Tristan Walker, who was on how I built this.
Tristan is an entrepreneur, a brilliant entrepreneur. And he is a black man. And he knew and knows that razors were not designed for most black men because most black men have curly hair. And when they shave, oftentimes the hair and their beard grows back into their skin.
And most razors in the United States and sold around the world by Gillette and other companies have four or five blades that are designed to cut the hair under the skin. The problem is when it grows out, it grows back into the skin, especially for men with very curly hair and it affects mainly men of color. And he knew that this was a problem for him. And he knew it was a problem for his friends, but nobody was addressing this problem.
And in his mind, he thought, why isn't there a beautiful product as good as a Gillette razor, as beautifully packaged, available in the same aisle where Gillette razors are available? Why does it not exist? And that was the genesis of the Bevel razor, which is now part of the Procter & Gamble Company, one of the biggest multinationals in the world about the company interested in as a CEO. It's a great example of a problem that he needed to solve and that solved the problem for millions of men whose day-to-day routine was, in many cases, it was not just painful, but it was also psychologically painful because of the scarring that occurred and just the physical pain of dealing with that.
And that is how you begin to come up with ideas. You begin by interrogating your own problems, the things that bother you or that need to be improved. And we see these all the time, Jay, how many times have you been somewhere? And I know anyone listening to this experience this, you're waiting in line somewhere for coffee or you're at a restaurant or you're in a shop and you think to yourself, God, they could do X so much better if they did it like this way.
Or, man, you know, if they just tweaked that, then the outcome would be so much better for the customer. That's when you start to kind of connect the dots and say, wait a minute, maybe I can do that. You know, Howard Schultz loved coffee and he loved this one little coffee place called Starbucks in Seattle. But guess what?
They didn't sell coffee. They only sold coffee beans. They sold great coffee beans, but you had to go brew it at home. But he wanted to have the coffee there.
And so when he bought this little shop, he decided to turn it into something much, much bigger, which today is I think the second biggest food company in the world. And it was all because he saw a problem that needed to be solved. I think that's such a great place to start for anyone who's listening or watching right now, because it's something you experience. It's not something you have to think about.
You don't have to do a brainstorm. You don't have to get a pen and paper out. You don't have to be reading lots of books. It's something that we do almost intuitively.
I think my biggest problem that I would love to solve right now is me and my wife never know what to watch on any of the streaming platforms. And I spend every night flicking through, like, do we want to watch this show? Oh, what's this trailer? What do you think?
Oh, no. All right. Do you want to watch this? And it's we spend the whole night and I'm not coming up with a solution for this, but it is interesting that that would be a great starting place.
Exactly. If I wanted to, because it's something that caused me a lot of pain on a daily basis, I'm sure it causes a lot of people a lot of pain on a daily basis, at least friends that I know. And therefore, it would be a good thing to start on. This is a huge challenge discoverability with not just with video content, but with audio content too.
And so many people are trying to figure out how to solve this problem. I think for most of us, we go by recommendations from friends. You know, in my case, watching things is really challenging, Jay, because I am sort of a weirdo when it comes to watch. Like, I don't like anything violent.
I don't love things. I mean, I'm personally very open and to the world and ideas. But I got two little kids, so it's hard to watch things with a lot of like sexual content or violence or not only because they're around, but I don't really want to see that. You know, it's hard for me to see it.
I can't, like I appreciate Quentin Tarantino as a genius, but it's hard for me to watch these movies because they're so violent, even though there's sort of cartoonish violence, breaking bad. I stopped watching it after three or four episodes was too violent, even though it's amazing. So I agree with you. I hear you.
Like, I have a really hard time figuring out what to watch. I end up watching like, you know, like a Wes Anderson movie or something. That's fairly innocuous, you know. Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely.
I think the closest I've got to a solution is I really trust votes on IMDB. So I believe that if anything is above eight on IMDB, it's going to be epic and it always fits. And if anything's above seven on IMDB, it's usually a good watch. If it's a six, I'm setting myself up for a bit of disappointment at the end of the night.
And if anything lower than a six, it is going to be the biggest waste of my time. But I love your answer of starting with the problem. And that takes us inward straight away. It stops you from worrying about like, will this be successful?
How much money will this make? Will I be able to exit this company? You know, all the things that with the people you spoke to, and obviously they all went from a problem point of view with a couple of examples that you've so beautifully shared with us and so many more in the book, how many people were really thinking or vocalizing or verbalizing their focus on the result? How many people started with anything to do with the result?
Almost not. I mean, the reality is that in virtually every case, for virtually every entrepreneur I've interviewed, they had a vision and an idea. And that vision and idea became something slightly or extremely different from how it started out. I mean, you know, one of my favorite stories is the story of Slack, right?
And by the way, Jay, I will add to that, I have never interviewed anybody who is purely motivated by money. Because if you're purely motivated by money, you're probably better off going into finance or getting a job as a lawyer, because you will eventually make good money. Being an entrepreneur is super risky in terms of, you know, going for the gold. I mean, yes, you can make a lot of money.
But virtually everybody I've interviewed is motivated by a problem and solving a problem and trying to fix something or build something. And the best evidence for that is the vast majority of people who sell their businesses after 10 or 15 years, go and start something else or continue to work for the company that bought them out. Because it's, it's not the gold they're chasing. It's the, it's the challenge.
And it's the team, it's the collaborative part of it. It's going into the office every day. I've interviewed people who have sold their businesses and then, and then were kind of pushed out of the companies and they became very, very miserable because they lost that connection to the people around them, right? So in terms, but in terms of like thinking of an idea and becoming something entirely different.
I mean, one of the best examples of this is Slack. I mean, this is a product now that is used by so many people, especially in the pandemic era, right? My team uses it to communicate. Slack began as a multi player, multi player, massive, multi player online game was called Glitch.
Stuart Butterfield wanted to create a game, a video game. He is a gamer. He's a friend of mine, is a wonderful person, and he loves games. And he brought a team together.
He had already had a successful business called Flickr that he sold to Yahoo. So he had a track record. He got investors. He brought this amazing team.
They built this amazing game. And it wasn't successful. Nobody wanted to play it. Even though it was a beautiful game, it was way ahead of its time.
And this is 2012. So they had to shutter the company. But, but what they realized, very late in the game, was that they actually built something entirely different, which was an internal communicating communications network that allowed the software developers and the sales reps and the development people and the back end people and the business people to communicate, just an internal, but a friend of Stuart from outside of the company saw it. And he was like, this is amazing.
Can we use it for my company? He's like, Oh, here it is. Here you go. That became the product.
They did not realize that the revolutionary thing they were making was was that didn't even have a name. They were trying to build this game. But once they realized that they built something completely different that was really useful. That was the revolutionary product.
So sometimes the idea sneaks up on you, you know, and you have to kind of go through the other stages to get there. You know, we just did a story about, and I can talk on and on about these stories. We did the story about the largest Mexican American paleo food company in America called Siette Foods. It was started, started several years, great company, started several years to go by a brother and sister from Laredo, Texas, Miguel and Veronica Garza.
Now it's the whole family's involved. They had no money. They really started this out because they built a CrossFit gem in Laredo, Texas. The family ran it and the CrossFit gem basically ran out of the money in the end.
They couldn't keep it going. But Miguel's sister, Veronica, used to make tortillas for the customers of the CrossFit gem out of cassava flour and almond flour, because if you do CrossFit, there's a good chance you're eating a paleo diet. You're not eating grains. But you're in Laredo, Texas, which is like one of the capitals of Tex-Mex food.
And if you love Mexican food, you're going to eat wheat and corn and beans. Well, she was going to these CrossFitters at their CrossFit gem and saying, hey, do you want to have a paleo tortilla? You want to buy some? And that's how their business began.
So it began as a CrossFit gem, which eventually morphed into a food business. I had no idea about that. And I love that brand. Me and my wife love their sources and their dips and their chips.
And they're incredible. Yeah, they're really tasty. And we love them, too, when we don't want to eat grains or exactly the same, like paleo diets. It's like, it's a great brand.
I had no idea that was their story. And I love how you shared that point about the pivot and the discovery of a product is not how you expect it. One of my favorite chapter titles that you have in here, which in and of itself answers the question, but I really want to dive deep into it, it's chapter three, and it's called leave your safety zone, but do it safely. I just thought that that was just told perfectly because whether it's been in my own journey or when I'm speaking to people, and again, another one question is, well, when do I know to quit my job?
Like, should I quit my job and go all in? Is it because I'm not all in that it's not working? Or when do you know that, you know, now it's time to bootstrap and get stuck in. And when you wrote that chapter, leave your safety zone, but do it safely.
I wanted to understand how does someone practice that? How does someone bring that into reality? Because I think at one point or another, everyone gets to, okay, I know what my problem I'm trying to solve is. I've started the process.
We started to create something, but now it needs momentum, it needs money, it needs investment, whatever else it needs. How do you leave your safety zone, but do it safely? You know, there's a myth about entrepreneurs that they're all these kind of kamikaze, that they jump out of an airplane with no parachute. And the reality is that's just not true.
The vast majority of entrepreneurs, as you know, Jay, mitigate their risks. I mean, look at your own story. You didn't just one day wake up and start making videos based on the teachings and learnings that you had assimilated as a younger man. You didn't just go off and start doing that.
You were working for a bigger company, and you were making content for the company. And through that experience, that content was recognized by somebody else, then you got a job at the Huffington Post, you built an audience, and then you had the confidence to go out on your own. Because you knew by that point, you had amassed this experience, and you had built a platform on which to stand. This idea of leaving your safety zone, but doing it safely comes from Jim Cook, who is the founder of Boston Beer Company, the company that makes Samuel Adams Beer.
And Jim Cook was a, he had a very safe job. He had a career at Boston Consulting Group, but he wasn't happy. He wanted to do something else with his life. And he thought about creating a great American craft beer.
This was in the early 80s, when American beer, I mean, Monty Python was making jokes about American beer at the time, right? It was, it was a joke. I mean, today it's crazy to think about because American craft beer is the envy of the world and loved, beloved in Europe, but at the time in the early 80s, it wasn't. So he started to experiment and research this idea on the side, but he kept his job.
And he kept his job for a long time. And he kept working on this side project for a long time as well, until he started to dip first one toe and then two toes and then five toes and then the whole foot and then a leg and then eventually he became comfortable and confident enough. And it saved some money from his job that he gave himself the permission to leap and to take the leap and to try it, always knowing, by the way, that he could go back to his old job if it didn't work. Now that doesn't mean that, you know, it's an excuse not to try hard.
It just means that there are ways to, to take risks and to take the leap, but to do it in a way that if it all falls apart, it's not going to be catastrophic. You know, we, there's a fetish around failure, especially in Silicon Valley. There's a fetish, fetishization of failure. And people say fail big, fail fast, fail, you know, the reality is that, when people talk about failure, especially at a place like Google or, you know, Facebook, they can talk about it because those companies are already successful.
The people working inside them have already had some successes. Failure is really important for all of us to experience, but failure can happen in small ways and medium ways, and even in big ways, but it doesn't have to be catastrophic. Failure should always be something that you can bounce back from, even if it's painful, it's super important to experience failure, but it's, it's almost never a good idea to put absolutely all your chips on the table without some kind of mitigation plan. Not to say it's not important to take risks.
You have to take big risks, but you also want to take those risks in a safe way. Guy, tell us about some of the risks you took in a safe way, because you, like you were sharing about me yourself, you've been a reporter, a journalist, you've been an interviewer. And so, you know, today you're obviously known for being the incredible brand and the incredible host and of how I built this in the name of the book and just you have all these amazing relationships where people open up to you and interviews and share their stories very vulnerably. Tell us about some of the risks you took to get to that stage as well, because I think often it gets forgotten that you've had to live all of this in your journey too, even though you're telling the stories of others.
Yeah, I mean, look, most of my career, I worked for one or two organizations, NPR and CNN, and I was a reporter and it was a wonderful life and a wonderful career. But through those experiences, I was able to gain more and more experience. I was a foreign correspondent for seven years. I covered four wars.
I was based in three different countries. I reported from 50, 60 different countries. I was able to go to places I could never have imagined and meet people who were in desperate circumstances, but were also so incredibly generous. I know you've seen that in places like India.
You find that in the most deprived places in the world, people are actually most the most generous. Those are the most generous people and the kind of people. And at a certain point in my career, I had to decide whether I was going to pursue this life as a news person and pursue the life of maybe becoming a news presenter, and there's a lot of prestige that goes with that. But about 10 years ago, it began to occur to me that if I was going to do something that was more meaningful to me, it had to be different.
It couldn't just be about reporting the news. It had to be something that people connected to on a visceral level, and that was really the beginning of a journey that I started where I wanted to tell stories about human experiences and not stories about things that happened just at the moment, but stories that were evergreen, that were long-lasting, and it was very scary for me to leap outside of the safe, comfortable job that I had and to start production companies and to try this on my own. But by that point, I already had developed the experience and a platform, and I did this later in life. I didn't do this when I was in my 20s.
I did this in my late 30s, early 40s, and by the way, most first-time entrepreneurs are 42 years old. There's another myth that it's all people in their 20s. It's not true. And there's a lot of reasons why it can often make sense to gain some experience before you leap out on your own.
But that was a scary thing to do, not just to leave the news, but to kind of go off on my own and eventually to start programs and then create a kid's company that I now have with two amazing friends. We run a kids media company, we make children's shows, and we do live shows, and we're making all kinds of content. We've got books and so on. And it's scary because you're on your own.
You're sort of out there in the world without the safety net. But there comes a time, and I can't quite articulate it in words, but I think it's like you know it. You just kind of know it. There comes a time in your life, and I know you had this experience where you say to yourself, you know, I can do this.
I got this. And I am not a risk-taker. I am not a kamikaze. I am somebody who really needs that assurance.
I didn't grow up with a lot of family money. Financial safety was always important to me, having health insurance, those kinds of things. But there came a point in my life where I felt like I could do it, and I can't explain why, but I think it's because I had spent so much time in the trenches learning the craft and getting trying to get better at it, and I continued to try and get better at it every single day. And so it was very intuitive.
It was like there's this little angel that landed on my shoulder and says, now's the time, you can do this. And I think that's, it's not a very scientific answer, but it's something inside of us that just gives ourselves permission to make the leap. Yeah. Well, I think you did answer actually really well.
And it's something I think a lot about. And I think it's something that's not talked enough about. And that's partly because of humility and modesty of some of the people we sit down with, even yourself today. I mean, you know, you're, well, you just said of like mastering the craft.
I think that it's so, it's such an untold story of repetition, and actually building a skill. Like you developed skills, you developed a craft. And when you do that, your self-worth and confidence is natural, and it's effortless in one sense. And it becomes something that you can share with others, and it becomes contagious.
I find that one of the biggest things missing in the journey of entrepreneurship today, at least in how it's being shared, is the point that at one point, you have to actually have a skill. You actually have to master whatever it is. And your skill may be knowing how to iterate the best. Your skill may be, the skill doesn't need to be, you know coding inside out.
Like that's not the point. The skill could be, you know how to bring together a coder and a creative to make magic. And I think that that's just being so undervalued today, like you were a phenomenal reporter with lots of experience that therefore meant, when you went out, you had confidence. And I think that's where that intuitive feeling calling comes from.
I agree. I mean, and I, by the way, I'm not a businessman. You know, that's not my core competency. And you're exactly right.
Like your skill might be, you are a great people person, or you develop the ability to identify really smart people who can make things happen, or you get really good at getting people to do things for you because they believe in you. I recently interviewed Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple, and his descriptions of Steve Jobs really brought that home because Steve Jobs's talent was of course, he had an incredible eye and incredible sensibility of what would work, what was beautiful. And he had a sense, great sense of beauty and also functionality. But you know, he didn't invent the Apple too.
He didn't invent the Mac. He didn't invent the iPod or the iPad, but he, they wouldn't have happened without him. You know, Steve Wozniak created the Apple 2 computer and all the software. But Steve Jobs looked at that thing and said, let's make a beautiful case for it.
Let's make this really easy to plug in. Let's make this really simple to use. And he couldn't code it, but he understood what people wanted and he could direct people to make that happen. And that was his genius.
He was not going in there with a soldering iron or tapping the keys with his fingers. His genius was he was conducting an orchestra. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And there's that, there's that beautiful part, I believe it's in Walt's Risingtons book or maybe in one of the other stories of Steve Wozniak looking at Steve Jobs and he's saying, what do you even do?
You're not a coder. You're not a marketer. You're not an engineer. What do you even do?
And Steve Jobs supposedly replied, musicians pay their instruments. I play the orchestra. And you know, that idea of he wasn't a musician. He didn't know how to play the instrument, but he knew how to bring it together.
Speaking of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, you have a whole chapter on here in the book called Finding Your Co-Founder. And it's so interesting because that's actually a stage at which I'm at right now in something I'm wanting to pursue. And I like you as you said, I don't consider myself a business person. That's not my core competency or skillset.
It's not the part I find interesting or fascinating. It's something I've had to learn, but it's people that I've surrounded myself by to support me in that space. When you think about finding a co-founder, tell me about some of the biggest mistakes people may have shared and tell me about the solutions to finding a good co-founder because I think we're also living at a time where, and I'll be open, when I was launching my businesses, a lot of people said to me, they said, Shay, why would you have a co-founder? You can have 100% of 100% and you have a brand, so you should protect that.
I was always like, hey, I'd much rather have more people involved and get excited and have more energy and more enthusiasm and build more things because we have other people. And so I've always had that mindset, but I think we live in a mindset today where it's like, no, 100% of 100% and don't trust anyone. What are some of the mistakes we make and what are the solutions? I mean, there's a famous investor in Paul Graham and his rule for investing in a startup.
I mean, this guy is the founder of Y Combinator. He's an investor in Airbnb and all the companies that came out of Y Combinator. His rule of thumb is he only invests when they're co-founders. Now, not every business has more than one founder and some work just fine with one founder.
What I have found in interviewing hundreds of entrepreneurs who have co-founders, who started with, who have businesses that they created with another founder or more than one is, it is going to be extremely hard. Starting a business, it doesn't matter what business it is, will be very hard. It doesn't matter who you are. It doesn't matter if you're a celebrity.
You know, LeBron James, by the way, has Maverick Carter. They have a partnership and they created a business around LeBron James, which is a billion dollar business. Having a business partner or partners is crucial for the one simple reason, which is there will come a time on any journey where you will want to give up, where you will run into a roadblock and you will say, is this worth fighting for? Is this worth trying to get around?
And you will say to yourself, it's not. It's better for me to just move on, give up. But the person who you co-founded the company with will say, we got this. We can get through this.
And there will be other times where those roles are reversed, where you are the person with the optimism. I have experienced that hundreds of times with my children's media company. I have two partners. Meredith Halperin, Ranser, and Mindy Thomas.
We make kids content and we make, we have live shows and we do all kinds and we're about to enter into a phenomenal partnership. There have been so many times on that journey over the last four years where one of us is just feeling so dejected or low or we had a setback or we tried to raise money and it didn't, we got a term sheet and then it was pulled. It's all these things have happened. And at every step of the way, there was one out of the three of us who was like, we got this guys.
We've got really low points and really incredible high points. That is absolutely crucial. You need somebody in your life who can reassure you because you will have moments where you want to give it all up. How you find that person is partly luck and but partly it's about finding, of course, somebody who has complementary skills, somebody who can do things that you cannot do as competencies that you don't have.
But most importantly, you have to find somebody you like you trust, respect, and can get along with because ultimately the thing that breaks partnerships up in every case, professional partnerships is the same thing that breaks up romantic relationships up. It's differences of outlook. It's an inability to communicate. It's an inability to work through tension.
There will always be tension with partners. But when you have a partner with whom you have agreed that you will be transparent, open, and communicative with, you will be able to work through that. We did we did an episode about seventh generation, the non-toxic cleaning products company. That was started by two partners, Alan Newman and Jeffy Hollander.
Within three years, they had a falling out, a very bitter falling out. But they began as intense friends, fast friends. But they didn't do the hard work before they came to realize that they should be partners, which was to really interrogate what each person was wanted out of this and why. I think that was the mistake.
But on balance, I believe having a partner gives you more, creates a higher probability that you will succeed. Yeah. I love that you compared a business partnership to a romantic relationship or a marriage. I think that's such a great way of looking at it.
Because in the same way as we have a honeymoon period in our relationships or we get carried away with chemistry and not really forming a real connection or compatibility, we do the same in business. Like you said, when you become fast friends and you fall for each other and things seem to be going perfectly, and then all of a sudden, you're met with that moment where you realize that you don't have the same values and you haven't communicated effectively. And I think what you said, doing that mature work of setting your values in the beginning, setting your systems and standards, I think we all want to trust people more. We all want to love and trust and have this open relationship.
But actually doing that hard work up front seems to be the long term sustainable option. And by the way, it's really important to give yourself that time and to give yourself the opportunity to decide that maybe the partnership isn't right. I've been in the process of developing a partnership with a friend, well, somebody who's now really a friend, become a friend, but somebody I knew over the last year, and it's regular calls, it's weekly conversations and also developing the idea. And that has been absolutely crucial because you will be tested.
There will be so many moments on that journey where you will be tested. And you're going to need to know that the person with you is a person of integrity and a person who is in this with you, in the trenches with you. And it's, as I say, there's an element of luck there too, but you can also control that control for that by really taking the time to interrogate that relationship and to understand that this is the right person. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.
This is so helpful, Guy. I'm enjoying this conversation so much so far. We've got so many more questions I want to ask you, but I did want to take a quick pause because I just want to let you know that your ability to share these stories and people you've interviewed with your ability to share your own experiences is just it's magical. It honestly is.
And I know that you've had a lot on this week and last week with your summits and the live event. And but you're just so present right now right here with these stories. And I want to thank you for that. And I applaud you for being able to share these stories in such a practical way that everyone who's listening and watching right now.
I hope you're all taking notes, by the way, because I'm taking mental notes. And I honestly believe that you've given us the pathway to building a business in a book, which is actually really, really difficult to do. So one of the things that I think you shed a lot of light on, and I'm sure a lot of your guests have also spoken about, is that there seems to be a lot of mysticism around fundraising, right. There's a lot of mysticism about how much money you need to actually get started.
And then when you need a certain amount of money, I remember being one of those people who would sit and dream with my friends in London, and we'd be like, Oh, you need like a million dollars to do that, or you need like five million dollars to do that. And then you always postpone it in your head. And it's always like, everyone's always like, when you see a app idea launch, you know, Oh, I had that idea like seven years ago, like, Oh, they're just, you know, there's a big difference between the idea of a company actually fundraising, how much you need. Can you, what are some of the myths around fundraising that you think we have in society today?
And what did you actually learn from speaking to the people that actually did it effectively? I mean, I think the biggest myth is that you need it, right? And by the way, sometimes you do, but I think there's an assumption that you have to go out and find money now, because that has been the path for several of these billion dollar unicorns. But the reality is building a business is not about building a billion dollar unicorn.
Building a business is about building something that is sustainable and gives you fulfillment and might actually provide employment for other people. I mean, look at your own, your own life. You didn't have any money to make videos, but you had a friend who shot weddings and he said, I'll help you out. And he happened to be really good.
And at four, two in the morning, four, five in the morning, six in the morning, he went around London and he got these great shots because nobody was out there and you didn't get permits to do it because you were just in and out quickly filming. And you built that up slowly. And then you got to a point with such a huge audience, huge audience that you could then muster the resources and the capital to deploy for better, larger scale productions. And so you built it up like a pyramid.
And that actually is a very simple way of thinking about any business. It starts here and then you kind of progressively move up. Now, there are some businesses that are pretty much impossible to do that way. I don't think you could build Tesla without going to investors.
But the reality is that Elon Musk, when he started out building x.com, which was his payment company, he didn't have funding. He had to start on his own for several months and then eventually had to find people who were willing to give him a thousand bucks here, a thousand bucks there. Now, here's the thing. Most people don't have access to Sand Hill Road, Bencher Capitalists.
They can't just walk into Sequoia Capital and say, Hey, here's my idea and I want a million dollars. The vast majority of people don't have those networks. By the way, the vast majority of people don't just have a rich uncle or rich parent who can write them a $10,000 check. So the idea that capital is accessible to everyone is just not true.
But I do believe that virtually all of us, if we need to amass some capital, do have access to some of it and ways to get it. So one of the things I talk about in the book is the concentric circles that we all inhabit. We are at the center of our own circle, right? We're sort of egomaniacal, selfish creatures.
That's not really fair to say, but we all have our own, we're all living our own movie, right? That's our consciousness. It's our own movie. And we're at the center of our own world.
But around us, there are these circles of close and loose ties. So imagine you want to start a business and you start to talk to your friends and you start to tell them the idea. And one friend might say, you know, my boss actually might be interested in hearing this or another friend says, you know, I'm in a bowling league with or whatever it might be. The way to kind of build that those circles is by really, you know, testing your idea out on people, talking with people and trying to get feedback from people and asking people, do you know anybody?
Is there anybody you think I should meet with? One of the best ways that founders that I've interviewed have raised money is by going to a meeting with somebody and not going with the intention of getting money from them, even though in many cases they would love that outcome. But saying to them, who should I talk to? Who should I go see?
Can you give me three or four names? And you very quickly build this network of people that you have a connection to and tie to. And that is really how many founders who don't have access to venture capital or, you know, big money is how they start to build the funding to create their businesses. And so it's a very, it's very possible.
It just requires a commitment and work and time and a willingness to put yourself out there. I love that question though, because it puts yourself out there without having to put yourself out there. So when you ask someone the question of saying, hey, do you know anyone that I should speak to about raising funds for this or introducing for this kind of manufacturer or product designer, you give that person the opportunity to say, oh, I want to be involved. Let me know.
And if they don't, that's fine. They introduce you to their friends or their network. And so I feel like it's such a healthy way of being able to ask for help and put yourself out there without actually feeling that kind of awkwardness or weakness or feeling like you don't have it figured out. You have a great knack of asking good questions.
You've developed the art of asking fantastic questions. What has been your favorite question to ask people that has given you the answer that was most fascinating? The reason I asked this is a few years ago, I used to say to people, I was like, if you see someone you admire, go up to them and don't ask them for a picture, ask them for a question, ask them a question, because that picture will last a moment. But the question will give you a story to tell forever.
And what question do you think people should ask people that they admire and people that they respect? I think it's more about a tone rather than a question. I'll give you two answers to this because I will give you a question. I love it.
I think it's more about listening to somebody. I actually get much more information by just being an active listener to what somebody is saying. And there's a wonderful book actually. It came out about 30 years ago.
It's called How to Talk to Your Kids, So They'll Listen to You, something like that. I can't remember the name of the book. And it's basically designed as a parenting guide. And it basically says, when your kid comes to you and says, I'm so mad at school today, Johnny was so mean to me, you shouldn't say, well, don't worry about Johnny, go find another friend.
That's the instinct that a parent has. This book said, no, he's got it all wrong. When your kid comes to you and says, Johnny made me so mad today, I'm so angry, just listen and say, oh, I'm sorry to hear that. Don't give advice, just listen.
And what you find is that your kid will give you more and more information. That principle applies to adults too. If you are talking to me and you're telling me your story, Jay, and I'm with you on that journey. And I am not just with you, but I'm expressing empathy.
I'm like, I feel you. I'm really like, God, that must have been so hard. That sometimes that's my response to somebody. I don't say, and then what happened?
I'll say, and it's not a strategic thing. I'm not doing this in a calculator. I'm just saying, that must have been so hard. I can't imagine how hard that was.
And that person says, and then they go on and I continue to tell you to tell you their story. So a big part of it is active listening, but if you have one shot, you find somebody you admire, and you've got one question for them. I think you can always ask a person, what is something, if you could go back in time to the younger version of you, what would you tell yourself now? What would you say?
You will almost always get an interesting answer from somebody. Yeah, that's beautiful. I love that. And I'm so glad you raised the point about tone and listening, because it's so refreshing to hear that as well, because you also get a different, you can ask the same question with a different tone and get a completely different answer.
And you can almost feel it when it's a technique versus when it's a true seeking of individuals like heart and mind. And you can tell when they're obsessed with that question versus when they think it's a good question to ask. And I think that applies to the listener, the receiver who's going to answer the question as well. Tell me about when you are putting this book together, and you're obviously trying to compile.
I mean, I don't know how many interviews you've done. How many is it? Do you have a number? Do you know?
We've done for how I built this total about 400 in-depth interviews with founders. Incredible. Okay, so 400 interviews, you're trying to compile it. What do you think has been the craziest, most outlandish story or pain that you came across in these 400 interviews that has stayed with you so strongly that you just think, this is almost like a movie.
I can't believe this was someone's actual life. I try and think of every episode in a cinematic way. I really do, because I'm trying to unfold that story and create a visual experience for people. I want people to go to just completely get lost in the story.
I think of what I think of what I do is, and by the way, you're right. I mean, tone and listening is such an important part of it, because how you talk to somebody, how you ask questions, it's not what you ask. It's how you ask it. That's not how you elicit information.
It's not the actual words you use to ask a question, because if it was so simple, you could just give people a list of questions. Sometimes questions are very effective, but it's how you ask them. I think that for me, I'm always looking to help somebody tell their story in a way that you could imagine as a movie. You could imagine, because human stories are movies.
Every single one of us is a movie. Many people think, I'm not that interesting, or my life isn't that dramatic. What they don't realize is that it is. My job is to show you that, is to know so much about you ahead of time, that I can pull that out of you, because I know that.
I can see that. That's the advantage we have as outsiders. We can see other people in ways they can't see themselves, and it gives all of us a superpower. I think a story that sticks in my mind is a recent one we did about a company called McBride Sisters Collection.
It's the largest black owned wine business in the United States, and one of the largest in the world. It was started by two sisters, Robin and Andre McBride. They both shared the same father. He was African American, and they both had different mothers.
Neither of these women knew the other existed until they were in their 20s. Their father died, and they were informed by relatives that the other one, each sister was informed that they had a sister. Andrea was raised in New Zealand. Her mother was Kiwi.
She had met Andrea's father in Los Angeles and then emigrated to New Zealand. Robin's mother was from Monterey, California, and raised also a white woman, raised her daughter in Monterey, California. These two women did not know the existence of the other until they were in their 20s, and the story of their reunion is so emotional, it's so powerful. We were all crying, and we were recording the interview, because it's almost impossible to believe that it's true that it happened, through just a random miracle.
Not only did they come together, not only did they love each other from the moment they saw each other, but they both grew up in wine-growing parts of the world, Monterey, California, and New Zealand. They both had this incredible passion for wine, and they both decided that they were never going to be a part again, and Andrea moved to the United States to be with her sister. They went on to create this business. They started it 15, 16 years ago, very small, with no money, with no connections.
In a world dominated mainly by white men, and they created this incredible business. You can find McBride's sister's wine in virtually every grocery store every Walmart around the United States today, and how they got there is an epic. It's a hero's journey. It's as good as any movie you've ever seen, and it's all true.
That's incredible. I need to go back and listen to that. I've not heard that one, so definitely excited to dive back into it. I hope everyone who's listening will go off and listen to that episode as well.
It sounds absolutely phenomenal on how I built this guy. I want to come towards the end of our conversation here. I want to talk a bit about how this book and your work massively helps people who don't want to be entrepreneurs, because I think that all the lessons you've shared today, all the lessons in the book are applicable to each and every person, whether they're an entrepreneur inside their organization, or whether they work at their parents' business, or whether they are just working a regular job and going out there and doing it. I think what you're sharing and the things that me and you care about are things that are applicable and useful to anyone and everyone in a skill set.
Often, the entrepreneurship journey has today been made very sexy and attractive, and it's almost like everyone feels the pressure that they have to be an entrepreneur. I remember with one of my mentors, who I absolutely love, and he was a mentor for me when I was at Accenture. He would always tell me, he'd be like, Jay, you're an entrepreneur. I'd be like, no, I'm not.
I'm just like, I'm not an entrepreneur. I'm like working for people. I just want to make videos. I just want to make content.
I'm more of a reporter, generalist kind of person. I don't want to, and he's like, no, no, you're an entrepreneur. He keeps saying it and I go home. I'll be like, this guy just doesn't understand me.
And now I'm like, oh, you were right. You were right. But if someone's sitting here listening and they're like, oh, guy and Jay, I don't really want to be an entrepreneur. I don't think I have it in me.
It sounds too scary. What can they take away from these conversations, your podcast and this book? Because I think there's so much for them to take away. And I don't want people to miss out just because they don't want to be an entrepreneur.
Yeah. So probably only about 15 or 20% of our audience are actually traditional entrepreneurs. People have a brick and mortar store or an online store who have a shingle outside and are running a business. The vast majority of people who listen to how I built this may not think of themselves as traditional entrepreneurs, but they are.
The reality is that entrepreneurial thinking happens all of the time. It happens every single day of our lives. If you are a parent with kids, trying to think of creative ways to manage your household. If you are a single person thinking entrepreneurial about how to fill your time, one of the most innovative products in modern human history is the iPhone that was invented by Johnny Ive inside of Apple.
Would you not say that was entrepreneurial? That whole product was developed by people within Apple who wanted to connect people through a handheld device. There was no dictator mandate from above that said let's do this now. It was part of a process that developed and created these amazing products.
Entrepreneurial is a mindset. It's not about hanging a shingle outside of your door. It's about thinking creatively. It's about thinking collaboratively.
It's about trying to do different and new things and improve ways of working within your own team. It might be coming up with a whole new system for how you hold each other accountable. It might be a small nudge or twist or change in how you approach your own role or how your team is organized. It's the same thing as leadership.
Leadership can be a title, but having a title alone doesn't make you a leader. What makes you a leader is when you share your experience with others. We do this on our teams, especially on how I built this. It's a small team of producers.
But from the very beginning and we really work to promote people from within, from our interns eventually become producers. And we have a system where we encourage the sort of the lowest level person from a title perspective. We encourage that person to take a leadership role. So we have an intern.
The intern gets guidance from the previous intern who's now a producer and other producers who may have been interns two or three years earlier, but who are now leaders? We now have a former intern who is mentoring a current intern. That's a leadership position. That is a leader.
Once you start to behave as a mentor to other people and you don't have to be much older than them, you might be a year or two ahead of them. You are a leader. You are an innovator and you are an entrepreneur. That is what it's about.
It's a way of thinking and operating. It's not about selling a product and inventing a product and hanging a shingle. It's a mindset and everybody has the potential to adopt that mindset. I love that guy.
Thank you so much for sharing that. So clearly, both through this interview and in the book and in all of your podcast episodes, we end every episode of On Purpose with a Final Five or Fast Five. So these answers have to be in one word or one sentence maximum. I break my own rules all the time.
So be ready for me deviating. But Guy, if you're ready, we'll get going. All right. So question one is, what is the best piece of advice you've ever received?
It's hard to give one answer, but it's a variation of dance like no one's watching, which means be open to all kinds of experiences. Don't limit yourself. I love that. Great piece of advice.
What's the worst piece of advice you ever heard? Stay in your lane. Interesting. Okay.
Question number three, what is your metric for success, your personal metric? It's very simple. To create kind, responsible, warm, and loving humans, I'm a parent. I have one job to do.
It's to pass on my values as best I can to my children and hope that they become good, kind, loving people who contribute to the world. It's that simple for me. It really is. That's it.
That's my purpose. Yeah, it's beautiful. Question number four, if you could have invested in a company or person aligned with your values at the beginning that you've now got to know or that you've interviewed now, who would have been? It would have been Salkant, even though he runs a nonprofit, he inspires me in infinite ways.
I mean, what he has created with Khan Academy is life changing. It educates 30 million people a month for free. Anybody listening or watching, if you do use it, please contribute to Khan Academy, because it is a gift to the world. That's beautiful.
And the fifth and final question guy is if you could create one law that everyone in the world had to follow, what would it be? You must visit another country. I love that. It's a great answer.
And we've never had it before. So it's also unique in a return on site. I love it. Everyone, Guy Raz, the author of how I built this, the unexpected path to success from the world's most inspiring entrepreneurs.
Go and grab your copy. We've put the link in the description below as well. I hope that all of you read this. Use it.
Don't just read it. Use this book. Use it if you're someone who's stuck. If you're trying to find a pivot, if you're struggling to figure out which is the right idea, if you're trying to find your co-founder, having issues with your co-founder.
Literally, this book covers the whole gamut of the journey of an entrepreneur or an entrepreneur. And I couldn't recommend it more. Guy, it's been so much fun spending so much time with you over the last couple of weeks. I honestly want us to turn this into a real friendship.
I can't wait to hang out and spend time together and get to know each other's families as well. Is there anything that I haven't asked you to share that you'd love to share right now? I would love to hear it from you. No, but I just, I can't even begin to thank you for your generosity.
And also, I'm a little bit uncomfortable with how kind and generous you've been about what I do and the show. I really, I have one really simple rule, which is I never want to do anything. I never want to appear anywhere. I never want to make content or a show if I feel like it wastes someone's time.
I always want, if somebody is giving me their time, if someone's listening to this interview right now on your show, and they're giving me something extremely valuable, which is their time, and I never want to waste that time. I always want to be able to give somebody something that is valuable or useful. And so that's what I do. That's why I do what I do.
That's what I aim to do. And, you know, you're just so generous and the things that you said about the show and what I do, it means a lot. I mean, that's why I do it. Absolutely, Guy.