Guy Raz interviews the world's best-known entrepreneurs to learn how they built their iconic brands. In each episode, founders reveal deep, intimate moments of doubt and failure, and share insights on their eventual success. How I Built This is a master-class on innovation, creativity, leadership and how to navigate challenges of all kinds.
Two founders who went to the same tiny high school coach three small brands. The best answers are to sell shirts in the sunscreen aisle and to take as little investor money as you can.
Two co-founders built a green household brand that Unilever bought for a reported $600 to $700 million. They also lost their friendship over one unwritten sabbatical, and both tell the story together.
Danny Meyer says culture is the wanted behaviors you celebrate minus the unwanted ones you tolerate, then applies that hospitality lens to three founders on brand, channel and customer choices.
A wheat sensitivity, a kitchen experiment, and a kidney stone turned into the first chickpea pasta on the market, then a viral pesticide scare nearly undid a decade of trust.
Beyond Yoga's co-founder tells three early-stage founders how to turn interest into bookings, rebuild burned client relationships, and sell an emotional experience on a website that can't replicate an in-person pitch.
A dream job at L'Oreal, a friend's death at 24, and three years of rejection from every major retailer before a single viral video turned Karissa Bodnar's cause-driven cosmetics line into a $150M business.
The Container Store co-founder who once pegged growth at exactly 20% a year for four decades takes calls from three early-stage founders, on a viral bedsheet brand's copycat problem, a personalization business deciding where to invest next, and a solo founder with no ad budget.
Kim Vaccarella quit her beach bag business after a defective $30,000 shipment, then a hurricane and a Facebook group of strangers talked her back into it. Ten years and one board fight of her own making later, Bogg Bag sells close to five million bags a year and does more than $100 million in sales.
Olipop's founder on why taste beats every clever benefit you're proud of, how to smuggle a hard-to-explain product past consumers, and why proving traction has to come before raising money or chasing e-commerce.
For seven years Late July limped along on organic crackers and money-losing cookies. Then, with a $3.5M loan called in and her father just dead, Nicole Bernard Dawes bet the company on one adjacent product. Tortilla chips took it from $8M to $100M in three years.
FUBU founder and Shark Tank judge Daymond John joins Guy Raz to coach three founders through the moment their business outgrows what got it started, a salsa maker weighing farmers markets against retail, a protein bar brand debating whether to drop its niche origin story, and a kitchen-linens company trying to win B2B accounts from competitors.
Roy and Ryan Seiders built a $300 to $400 cooler for a market that was happy paying $40, got rejected by the retailers built to sell that $40 cooler, and found a product-market fit playbook that a $30 cup would later blow wide open.
Razor USA's Carlton Calvin takes calls from a party game inventor, a stationery designer stuck on Etsy, and a spirits distillery burning cash, and gives all three the same underlying advice, prove traction, then focus ruthlessly on what's already working.
Laura Modi set out to build a better infant formula and got a national FDA recall within two weeks of her first sale. She explains why a public apology, not a legal fight, is what saved the company, and why owning a factory still didn't fix things overnight.
Everyone hears the same episodes.
Few can do what they describe.
