Stay ConnectedGuy 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.
New episodes release on Mondays and Thursdays.
Over nearly 50 years in the luggage business, Charlie Clifford has built two premium brands and weathered three existential crises: the recession of 1982, the travel slowdown post- 9/11, and the extreme aftershocks of Covid. His fist luggage company, Tumi, was inspired by his time as a Peace Corps volunteer in Peru. Charlie began by importing hand-crafted leather duffels from South America, but quickly pivoted into more durable and distinctive ballistic nylon bags. Business travelers loved them, and by the 1990’s, Tumi was spreading to Europe and Japan. Today, Tumi is owned by Samsonite and its stores are in airports and shopping malls around the world. Meanwhile, Charlie—unfazed by the challenges he’s faced over the years—has launched another premium luggage brand, Roam.
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This week on How I Built This Lab, we're throwing it back to our very first Lab episode.
In this episode, Guy sits down with Colin Rosenblum and Samir Chaudry, or better known as YouTubers Colin and Samir—a pair of creators who create content for other creators. (We know, pretty meta.) The creator economy barely existed a decade ago, but has quickly become a multi-billion dollar industry with a massive global reach. Colin and Samir discuss their 10-year business journey, and share insights on how to break into this rapidly-growing industry.
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In 2011, when Emmett Shear pivoted the live streaming service Justin.tv into the video game platform Twitch, people warned him that gaming was just a niche. But unlike his first two ventures, video games were something Emmett instinctively understood: he and his co-founder Justin Kan had been playing them together since they were kids. Emmett built a user base on Twitch by asking streamers exactly what they wanted and giving it to them: revenue opportunities, streamer fan clubs, customizable emoji. As it grew, Twitch attracted users from the darker corners of the web, but Emmett believes the site is first and foremost a way for people to come together and build supportive communities. In 2014, Emmett sold Twitch to Amazon for just under a billion dollars but stayed on as the CEO. Today, the platform has 31 million daily visitors who stream trillions of minutes of live video every year. Not bad for a niche business.
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Chelsea Fagan got her first credit card when she was a senior in high school. She quickly maxed it out, racking up debt that would burden her through her early twenties. Then, in 2014, Chelsea started a blog as a way to keep track of her spending habits and get her financial life back on track. She called it “The Financial Diet.”
This week on How I Built This Lab, Guy talks with Chelsea about how she turned that blog into the multimedia personal finance business it is today. Plus, Chelsea shares why she prioritizes employee satisfaction over growth and explains her judicious approach to brand partnerships.
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One snowy night in Boston, Leah Solivan ran out of dog food for her 100-pound yellow lab. She wondered: shouldn’t I be able to resupply Kobe without going to the store? That was the origin of TaskRabbit, an online errand service that matches users with “taskers” to do deliveries and other chores. When Leah left her IBM job to start coding the service, the peer-to-peer economy was still in its infancy. But she saw that three important developments—mobile, location services, and social media—were about to converge. She recruited errand-runners from Craigslist, and took an expensive gamble on a 15-minute meeting with Tim Ferriss to get advice and investors. After some management hiccups and a difficult rebranding, TaskRabbit sold to IKEA in 2017.
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When Donnel Baird was a child, his parents would regularly use the oven to heat their Brooklyn apartment — a dangerous and energy-inefficient practice that’s unfortunately not unique to New York City. As an adult traveling the country with the Obama for America campaign, Donnel saw countless homes and apartments wasting power and jeopardizing resident safety because of dated infrastructure. He founded BlocPower in 2014 to address this precise problem, focusing on low-income communities so often overlooked by innovative startups.
This week on How I Built This Lab, Donnel talks with Guy about BlocPower’s work to modernize buildings nationwide and transition them to clean energy sources. BlocPower has raised more than $100 million from Wall Street and Silicon Valley investors, and has partnered with cities across the country to create greener, safer spaces for their residents.
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While she was a student at business school, Shazi Visram ran into an old friend—a new mother of twins. The friend confided she felt like a bad mom because she had no time to make her kids healthy meals. That gave Shazi her initial idea: why not make organic pureed baby food, and sell it frozen instead of jarred? People told her she was crazy to take on Gerber, but she convinced dozens of friends and family to invest in Happy Baby. Nearly 20 years later, the brand is known as Happy Family Organics and reportedly makes more than $200 million a year.
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According to the 2022 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world needs to cut carbon emissions drastically to avoid the worst effects of global warming. But that’s not all. In addition to reducing emissions, we also need to remove 6 to 10 billion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year by 2050.
This week on How I Built This Lab, Guy talks with Jan Wurzbacher, co-founder and CEO of Climeworks. They discuss how Jan and his team built the world’s largest direct air capture facility, which filters carbon dioxide from the air and stores it permanently underground. Plus, Jan’s optimistic vision of how humans can achieve the goal of reversing climate change.
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Jimmy Fallon may talk like a comedian, but he thinks like a restless entrepreneur. In addition to his day job as host of The Tonight Show, he runs a TV production company, writes best-selling children’s books, and creates products you never knew you needed, like all-day pajamas and “hands high” jerseys that show the name of your favorite team in the armpit. As a kid, Jimmy was obsessed with perfecting his impressions of Richard Pryor and Steve Martin, with the goal of one day starring on Saturday Night Live. After an incredibly successful 6-year run on that show, he tried to make it in film, only to eventually find his way to one of the most coveted jobs in television. Today, he’s constantly generating new ideas, whether for a new TV show, or a Christmas tchotchke called Elvis on the Shelvis.
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YouTubers Kelsey MacDermaid and Becky Wright – better known as The Sorry Girls – have always had an affinity for production. When they met as film students back in 2010, little did they know that the DIY videos they were creating for fun would eventually lead to full-fledged careers co-founding and leading their own media company. But building to where they are now, with over 2 million subscribers and counting, didn’t exactly come with a blueprint…
This week on How I Built This Lab, Kelsey and Becky talk to Guy about pursuing the uncharted territory of a YouTube career, their philosophies on navigating brand deals, and their take on growing a business in the creator economy without compromising on values.
Check out The Sorry Girls on YouTube and try your own hand at DIY: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheSorryGirls/featured
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