Guy Raz

#tbt i know a little late, but back in October, i had such a blast getting to be on @jimmyfallon . He’s the real deal: kind, smart and a generous interviewer. Heres the clip /watch?v=7rdTlLlsFYE

I cook (almost) every day of the week. It’s my love language—to my family and my friends. Around 5:30, I stop working for a few hours. I get to work prepping and dinner is usually done by 6:30. It’s one of the few hours of the day when I can be alone. Being in the kitchen…cooking…coming up with ideas based on what’s in the fridge (and what’s growing) fires up my creative spirit. Cooking is like a form of meditation for me. Everything in its right place. Most nights…after we eat as a family…I get back to work for a few hours and start to prep for my interviews the next day. #cooking #whyicook #meditation

Even if it wasn’t his favorite podcast...Even if he hated How I Built This...I’d still love this man.

🚨 🚨 NEW EPISODE ALERT 🚨 🚨 John Gabbert didn’t build Room & Board because he wanted to disrupt furniture retail. He built it because one trip completely changed how he thought about the business. John grew up inside his family’s furniture company in Minnesota. By his twenties, he was already helping run it. Then, in the 1970s, he traveled to Sweden and visited a retailer that barely existed in the American consciousness at the time: IKEA. What fascinated him wasn’t just the furniture. It was the system behind it: modern design, direct manufacturing relationships, lower prices, and products built for a younger generation furnishing their first apartments and homes. John came back convinced that this was the future. So he started experimenting with a small modern furniture concept inside the family business. That experiment became the early version of Room & Board. But when it came time to inherit the larger company, his father refused to sell. So John made a difficult decision: instead of taking over the family business, he walked away from it. He traded his ownership stake for the small Room & Board division (roughly $800,000 worth of inventory and assets) and started over. At first, the company resembled IKEA in many ways: affordable modern furniture, flat-packed products, self-assembly. But over time, John noticed his customers changing. As they got older, they wanted something different. Furniture that lasted. Better materials. Better craftsmanship. A more permanent version of modern design. So Room & Board evolved too. The company shifted toward solid wood, full-service delivery, and partnerships with smaller American manufacturers. Today, more than 90% of its furniture is made in the United States. And after building the company into a business doing roughly half a billion dollars in annual sales, John made one more unusual decision: He gave it to the employees. Room & Board is becoming 100% employee-owned. It’s a story not just about modern furniture — but about recognizing when the market changes, and being willing to evolve with it. Hear the full story on How I Built This with @guy.raz .

🚨 🚨 NEW EPISODE ALERT 🚨 🚨 Gregg Renfrew didn’t build BeautyCounter the way most startups were being built in the 2010s. At a time when every consumer brand was chasing the direct-to-consumer playbook: Facebook ads, sleek websites, endless customer acquisition… Gregg went the other direction. She built relationships. Before Beautycounter, Gregg had already worked across fashion, media, and consumer brands, including roles connected to Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia and early conversations that helped shape The Honest Company. So when she launched Beautycounter in 2011, she understood something many founders overlooked: beauty products are often sold through trust. Instead of relying only on e-commerce, she built a massive network of independent sellers — women hosting gatherings, introducing products to friends, and growing the brand community by community. It worked. Within a decade, Beautycounter had tens of thousands of sellers, nearly 100 products, and hundreds of millions in annual revenue. In 2021, The Carlyle Group invested roughly $600 million, valuing the company at $1 billion. And then things unraveled. Gregg was pushed out. Sales declined. The company eventually collapsed into foreclosure, wiping out Carlyle’s investment. Most founder stories end there. This one didn’t. Because after losing control of the company she built, Gregg got an unexpected call: did she want to buy it back? She said YES. It’s a story about growth, power, and what happens when a founder loses the company that once felt inseparable from their identity. Hear the full story on How I Built This with @guy.raz

🚨 🚨 NEW EPISODE ALERT 🚨 🚨 They didn’t start a fashion brand. They just hated wearing ties. In the late ’90s, Shep Murray was on Wall Street. Ian Murray was in PR. Same routine. Same commute. Same uniform. And the same thought every morning: Is this really it? Every tie looked identical—dark, serious, interchangeable. It wasn’t style. It was a signal: you’re playing the game. Then on a trip to Anguilla, they had a different idea: What if a tie didn’t feel like work? What if it felt like freedom? No fashion experience. No investors. Just $8,000 on credit cards. They quit. Bought a Jeep. Filled it with ties. And started selling them out of the trunk—beaches, bars, anywhere someone would stop. But they weren’t really selling ties. They were selling a feeling: “I’d rather be somewhere else.” That feeling became Vineyard Vines. $1M in sales within a few years. Hundreds of millions today. 100+ stores. Still owned by the two brothers who started it. They didn’t follow the dress code. They rewrote it. Hear the full story on How I Built This with @guy.raz

Daniel Lubetzky didn’t start @kindsnacks because snacks were exciting. He started it because everything else was falling apart. Before KIND, Daniel was running a company built on a big idea: that business could bring people together. His brand, Peaceworks, sold products made by communities on opposite sides of conflict zones. One of those products was a simple snack bar made of nuts and fruit. Customers loved it. But then the company producing the bar was acquired. The new owners changed the ingredients, cut corners, and the product lost what made it special. Almost overnight, Daniel’s business unraveled. He was running out of cash. People were depending on him. And he needed something that would actually work. So he went back to that original bar — and decided to make it himself. This time, he focused on transparency. A bar where you could literally see the ingredients. Whole nuts. Whole fruit. Nothing hidden. That became KIND. Daniel poured everything into it. Slowly, it gained traction — first getting into Starbucks, then expanding into major retailers like Walmart and Target. What started as a last-ditch effort to survive became one of the most recognizable snack brands in the world. Eventually, KIND was acquired by Mars for around $5 billion. It’s a story about losing a business… and using that loss to build something better. Hear the full story on How I Built This with @guy.raz .

🚨 🚨 NEW EPISODE ALERT 🚨 🚨 They were building robots for war zones, minefields, and even space… —and then Roomba happened. Cleaning your living room? Not even close to the original plan at iRobot. When Colin Angle co-founded iRobot out of MIT, the vision was bold: build robots that go where humans can’t. War zones. Disaster sites. Other planets. Serious stuff. But everywhere they went, people kept asking the same question: “When are you going to make a robot that cleans my house?” At first, it sounded…small. Almost beneath the mission. Until they tried it. Small team. Small budget. Side project. In 2002, they launched the Roomba. And suddenly everything clicked. Because this wasn’t a product you had to explain. You saw it… and instantly wanted it. That little disc didn’t just clean floors. It turned iRobot from a deep-tech robotics company into a household name. And it created an entirely new category. Sometimes the breakthrough isn’t the most complex idea. It’s the one people understand in five seconds. 🎧 Hear the full story on How I Built This with @guy.raz

🚨 🚨 NEW EPISODE ALERT!! @wingstop 🚨 🚨 Antonio Swad built a global chicken empire. He just didn’t eat chicken. As a teenager, he started out washing dishes. By his early 20s, he was managing restaurants, learning the business from the ground up. Eventually, he saved up about $11,000, moved to Dallas, and opened a small pizza shop that would become Pizza Patron. But the bigger idea came from something simple he’d noticed years earlier. Every time a restaurant ran a wing special, the place packed out. So Antonio wondered: what if you built a restaurant around just wings? Most people told him it wouldn’t work. The menu was too narrow. The category too small. But Antonio wasn’t thinking like a traditional operator. And because he was a vegetarian, he focused obsessively on the sauces — dialing in flavor instead of relying on the product itself. In 1994, he opened the first Wingstop. It took off. Within a few years, the brand had scaled to over 150 locations and sold more than a billion wings. The simplicity of the menu became the advantage, not the weakness. But success came with a cost. Antonio began to feel conflicted. As a vegetarian, he couldn’t shake the reality of what it took to sustain that kind of growth. Eventually, the tension caught up with him. In 2003, he sold Wingstop for around $20 million. Today, the company has grown into a global powerhouse with thousands of locations. It’s a reminder that sometimes founders build something incredibly successful… even if it pulls against their own values. Hear the full story on How I Built This with @guy.raz .

Marc Lore built a business that, at first glance, looked completely broken. He was buying diapers for a dollar… and selling them online for less. Every order lost money. And because diapers are bulky and expensive to ship, the losses only got worse with scale. The more he sold, the more he burned. An investor once summed it up perfectly: “So you’re selling a dollar for ninety cents?” Marc’s answer was yes. Because he wasn’t trying to win on diapers. He understood something most people overlooked: diapers are a gateway product. Parents don’t shop for them occasionally — they need them constantly. And wherever they buy diapers, they end up buying everything else too. So instead of optimizing for profit on the first transaction, Marc optimized for habit. In the early days, he and his co-founder were literally driving to Costco and Sam’s Club, loading up carts with diapers, and shipping them out themselves. It was scrappy, inefficient, and seemingly irrational. But it worked. Because once customers trusted the platform for diapers, they came back for everything else — wipes, formula, toys, clothes. That company became Diapers.com, the largest online baby retailer in the United States. And eventually, it caught the attention of Amazon — setting off one of the most intense competitive battles in e-commerce history. What looked like a flawed business model was actually a strategic one: lose money on the front end, win on lifetime value. Hear the full story on How I Built This with @guy.raz .

🚨 🚨 🚨 NEW PODCAST EPISODE OUT 🚨 🚨 🚨 For decades, eggs weren’t really a brand. They were a commodity. You’d walk into a grocery store, grab a carton, maybe choose brown over white, and move on. No story. No loyalty. No differentiation. Which is surprising, considering Americans consume close to 100 billion eggs a year. Matt O’Hayer saw that gap. In 2007, he bought a small piece of land outside Austin and started raising chickens on pasture. His belief was simple: if you treat the animal differently, you get a better product. Hens roaming freely, eating what they’re meant to eat, producing eggs with richer color and flavor. But when he tried to sell them, no one cared. Chefs told him the same thing: an egg is an egg. At one point, Matt was driving around Austin with cartons of unsold eggs in the back of his car, giving many of them away just so they wouldn’t go to waste. Then something shifted. People started tasting the difference. They started asking where the eggs came from. And slowly, what had always been treated as interchangeable started to feel distinct. That small farm became Vital Farms — a company that turned eggs into a premium, story-driven product and built a brand worth over $1 billion. Matt didn’t invent a new category. He reframed an old one. Hear the full story on my podcast How I Built This with @guy.raz available on all podcast platforms.

Aaron Krause didn’t set out to build the world’s favorite sponge. He just liked solving problems. Growing up outside Philadelphia in a family full of high achievers, Aaron says he was the “tinkerer.” The kid who couldn’t stop taking things apart and trying to improve them. After college, he started a car detailing business — and one day accidentally damaged a customer’s paint job. Instead of panicking, he redesigned the buffing pad that caused the problem. That invention eventually turned into a real product business, and he sold it to 3M. But the bigger idea was still sitting in a scrap box. While working in the detailing shop, Aaron had created a strange foam scrubber to clean grease off his hands. No one wanted it. So he tossed it aside. Years later, his wife asked him to clean their grimy patio furniture. A normal sponge scratched the paint, so Aaron dug the old foam prototype out of storage. That’s when he noticed something unusual: in cold water it became firm, and in warm water it softened. One sponge. Two textures. Even better, it rinsed clean instead of trapping grime. Aaron realized he’d been using it for the wrong purpose. It wasn’t for hands — it was perfect for dishes. He added a smile-shaped cutout that could clean both sides of a spoon and punched in two eyes for grip. The result was unforgettable: Scrub Daddy. Sales were slow at first. Then Aaron started demonstrating it on QVC. The turning point came when he appeared on Shark Tank. After the episode aired, the product generated more than $1 million in sales in a single day. The irony? 3M had already bought one of Aaron’s inventions — but passed on Scrub Daddy. The product he once threw in a scrap box became one of the most successful consumer products ever to come out of Shark Tank. Hear the full story on How I Built This with @guy.raz .