Guy Raz

“A lot of them want to sell their business, and many of them want to sell their businesses for a relatively small amount of money. Sometimes are also willing to mentor whoever buys it, and so there are some really interesting opportunities out there.”

“Virality is borrowed attention, right? And so the question is, and it's a good question is how do you, it's not how do you maintain that momentum? You won't be able to get a hundred and ninety seven million views again and again and again. But it's how do you …”

“When it comes to the knockoffs and the copycats, I mean, it's gonna happen. I would be really careful not to let it distract you and obsess you, because as we've seen on the show in the past, it can really damage Businesses. TRX, you know, that, that was, they…”

“So many businesses, and Kurt, you know this, so many businesses are focusing on customer acquisition, and costs are through the roof now. I mean, what used to be shooting fish in a barrel, you're now spending 80, 90, a hundred dollars more on customer acquisit…”

“The guys that, that created that brand were really targeting, you know, men who were going to the gym who wanted to, like, hit a protein. The majority of their customers are moms, on-the-go moms, and that's what they started to see very rapidly.”

“And ultimately, the people who are afraid that AI is going to create an influx of so many low quality and cheap alternatives to actual real voices, I think what they're not seeing is that in that environment, if that environment does happen, the value of a con…”

“And you can really only outsource once the variability of your product is low. You know, in other words, once you're like what people are ordering, the demand is predictable.”

“When it starts to feel like doing this part-time is riskier, that's when you know. When you start to say to yourself, actually, it's safer for me to jump into this full-time, you will know that.”

“It's actually critical to building a sustainable business, because down the road, you really want, you don't want a fifty-fifty, you want like 80% of your money coming in through the shop, because that's, you own that. You don't, YouTube owns the algorithm, ri…”

“You know, Liquid Death launched its brand with a 1500 dollar video.”

“You go to a restaurant, it might be packed, but the margins are thin, and you go to a yoga studio, and it might be packed, but it's just, the capacity is limited. You can only fit a certain number of people in, and they're really hard businesses, unless it's a…”

“In response to guest feedback, they started offering bike trips only for people who want to do it the old-fashioned way, with no electricity and just legs.”

“Consumers, they rarely champion a category unless there's a brand to rally behind, right?”

“In, in, within five years, AI generated podcasts will be, they already are pretty good. They will be so good that people will make money out for them, and my value will probably be going, doing things live.”

“Because to be an acquisition target, you're going to need to hit. Twenty million or more in sales, right?”

“I don't believe in saturated markets. I believe in really good branding”

“And the secret to the success of that store is inventory management. They're just obsessive about inventory management.”

“Fundraising for food is hard. We know that, we hear that on the show all the time, and many businesses won't even get serious investors looking at them until they hit ten million dollars in sales.”

“There's a lot of evidence to show that late Sort of entrepreneurs who are older, not late, but older, have a much higher rate of success because they come to the table with a lot of experience”

“You know, what I'm hearing from investors right now in the food space is they're waiting, they're really looking for brands to hit 50, really a hundred million dollars in sales. You know, a couple years ago, it was 20. If a brand hit twenty million dollars in …”

“The thing about sports bras, to me, I would say you should go for it, because you've solved, you've already solved the underwear problem, and I would imagine, and again, I'm a guy here, so I don't, you know, know this as intimately as the two of you, but I wou…”

“At the end of the day, the vast majority of consumers They just don't care about that. I mean, we wish they would care more, but they don't. They really want to know, what does this do for me?”

“This is why we very rarely have guests on the show who are under 30, because not, not that they're not smart or interesting, even if they made hundreds of millions of dollars, it's just, You can't buy time. You can't buy, like, life experience, and so we often…”

“I think that, that the more it's used, the less actually authentic something or someone is. And you often see this on social media where people say, be your most authentic self. And I think to myself, You're standing in front of a camera, and you are acting, a…”

“But I do think that if there's one thing I've seen in, in almost 700 episodes of how I built this is that virtually every entrepreneur on the show has figured out how to get over that and how to ask for help.”

“One thing that, that has been successful for us at Tinkercast, we have a, an online platform that teaches kids you know, critical thinking skills using our audio podcasts, is we basically, every time somebody buys a the, you know, a membership, we gift one to …”

“Mike Cesario didn't have a big budget when he launched that brand. He spent 1500 dollars making a viral video that went, truly went viral.”

“Journalists are entrepreneurial in many ways in how they operate, but very few of them think about starting a business. They don't have that perspective for a variety of reasons.”

“Yeah, and I've seen it more and more in California. I see more and more people wearing helmets, and I think in 1020 years, it's just, we're gonna look back and be like, people didn't wear helmets surfing? That was, it's like skiing.”

“That year, a year and a half after you launched, you sold 11 and a half million US dollars worth of product”

“Even, even if she gives up half of the business, it's worth it because this is really a turning point. And if you find the right person who understands the opportunity here, I mean, this is a, and you know, ice cream is a Pretty crowded space”

“The people who really appreciate it, even if it might just be a thousand people or 500 people, those are your force multipliers. Those are the people who are really going to lean into what you're selling and tell other people about it.”

“I don't read ads. We do have ads on the show, but my voice is not as an ad reader because kids don't differentiate between, I'm a character on the show, and they wouldn't differentiate between my voice on Wow in the World and me reading an ad, and so we're rea…”

“Monique Rodriguez started out with like 200 followers on Instagram talking about haircare products, and she scaled it to a business that she sold for, you know, four or five hundred million dollars many years later.”

“I read that within six months of starting The Ghost Kitchen, your revenue is four million dollars.”

“We're often pitched on this show, and I understand founders who are like 25 of businesses, or, you know, and that's fine. I mean, and it's a great, great, often great stories, but we generally prefer to talk to founders you know, in their forties, fifties, and…”

“Having 3000 people Regularly coming to your podcast, your website, or whatever, that is massively powerful. That is a, that's 3000 super fans. I mean, there are people who have 50 thousand fans or a 100,000 fans, and if they have 3000 super fans, those are the…”

“By the way, if you've ever wondered how much ice it takes to ship thousands of boxes of beef, pork, chicken, and seafood across the country, ButcherBox uses about twenty six million pounds of dry ice each year.”

“After two years of straight, like getting a no from all the NJ investors or VCs or even friends, It became clear. And the reality was, Guy, that we didn't have much money left in the bank. I remember we had, like, 2700 dollars”

“And according to the company, since its launch, Springfree has sold nearly half a million trampolines worldwide.”

“Over the next year, on average, the entrepreneurs who had been trained to think like scientists, randomly assigned, brought in more than 40 times the revenue of the control group. That is a staggering effect. And the major mechanism behind it is they were more…”

“When people come on to How I Built This, before they come on, we do a call, and I say, I'm gonna need you to surrender.”

“I think about two E's a lot, Guy. Expertise or escapism. So if somebody's listening right now, two things that have always worked to Guy's question is, do you have expertise in what you're talking about? And you have to have humility here and self-awareness. L…”

“In 2019, the site had 1.5 billion views, but it rose to more than 9.6 billion views in 2020.”

“I attribute all of it to my training as a monk and my strategic training that I got from my parents and then school. I don't really believe in luck.”

“Yeah, we should go over that this year.”

“He forced himself to do one uncomfortable thing every single day, and on the day I interviewed him, three years ago, he dyed his hair bright red and spiked it up into a mohawk, just because it made him uncomfortable.”

“I think the number of applications for Employee identification numbers has increased by half a million this year compared to this time last year, and that's the first step in starting a business, as you know.”

“A lot of journalists are committed to the idea of spreading information and truths with the hope that the more people know those things and understand them, the better the national conversation will be, and the more engaged people will be, and the more ration…”

“We have one precondition for everybody who comes on the show, and it's very simple. It's, we don't accept any preconditions.”

“And had that not happened, you know, I wouldn't have gone on to collaborate with Ted To do the TED radio hour, and then create how I built this, and wow, co-create wow in the world”

“Somebody working on a construction site works harder than anybody in Silicon Valley. Somebody waiting tables works harder than any billionaire, because it's a really hard job. So hard work alone isn't enough, but it is important and it is a factor.”

“I think in five years time, I'm going to be doing tons of interviews with people who came up with their ideas during this period.”

“Since we first ran this episode last February, Lyft's valuation has more than doubled to over eleven billion dollars.”

“The company has grown from just the two of them to almost a thousand employees with revenue of more than three hundred and fifty million dollars a year”