ButcherBox: Mike Salguero

Back in 2015, when Mike Salguero set out to buy some grass-fed beef for himself and his wife, he had to meet a farmer in a parking lot, who handed him the beef in a trash bag. Naturally, Mike figured there had to be a better way. At the time, he was running a company that was slowly cratering, and he didn’t know the first thing about sourcing or packaging meat. But he had a hunch that if he could figure it out, he could build a successful home subscription business, shipping humanely-raised meat across the country. Mike connected with farmers and packers, launched a Kickstarter campaign, and began working with food and fitness influencers to promote ButcherBox. Today, without taking on a shred of VC investment or even a bank loan, the company does roughly half a billion dollars in revenue. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Guy Raz?

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• 0:46Guy Raz?

  build the prototype, analyze the market, maybe even come up with the idea, what separates the people who actually build something from everyone else? I don't have a clean answer yet, so I've been sitting with it with Claude. There's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai/hibt. We get support from U.S. Bank. A question I love asking founders. What's the one decision you almost didn't make? The one that changed everything? Because it's never the obvious stuff. It's never, I decided to start a company. It's the small, boring, Tuesday afternoon decision you barely remember making until you realize it's the reason everything after it either worked or didn't.

• 1:32Guy Raz?

  Say you're 18 months in. Business is growing. You've got expenses coming from six directions. Gas for the van, office supplies, your phone bill, team lunches that are actually client meetings, and you're putting it all on whatever card you grabbed in year one. You're not thinking about it. Why would you? You've got bigger problems. But here's the thing. Path A, you keep going like that. End of the year, you're sorting through statements, trying to figure out what went where. You've left hundreds, maybe thousands on the table in rewards you never earned, money that could have gone back into the business. Path B, you pause and get The US Bank Triple Cash Rewards Visa Business Card.

• 2:14Guy Raz?

  Now you're earning 3% cash back on gas and EV charging, office supply stores, cellphone service, and restaurants. You pick up an extra $750 cash back as a bonus. And you've got a low APR on purchases and balance transfers for 12 months while you're scaling. Same business, same expenses, two completely different outcomes based on one small decision. Visit usbank.com/business to learn more. The creditor and issuer of this card is US Bank National Association pursuant to a license from Visa USA Inc. Some restrictions apply. If you travel often, you'll want to hear about this unprecedented offer.

• 2:58Guy Raz?

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• 3:40Guy Raz?

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• 4:23Guy Raz?

  And it reminds me a little bit of the founders I talked to on this show, because the best ones obsess over things their customers will never see. Tiny details, invisible improvements, relentless iteration. And not because anyone's watching, but because it makes the product better. That's what the mobile brand does. It engineers fuel the same way great founders engineer their products. Mobile Supreme Plus Premium Gas helps keep engines three times cleaner, which can mean better performance and improved gas mileage. It's for people who care about what's under the hood, even if they never see it. Three times cleaner compared to mobile regular gas in port fuel-injected engines. Actual results may vary.

• 5:07Guy Raz?

  Visit mobili fuels.com for details.

• 5:15Speaker 01

  I gave that thing everything. And it's hard, when you're in failure, to not take it personally, to not be like, this is my fault. Like, I'm doing something wrong here.

• 5:25Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 5:26Speaker 01

  But so often, it's really the business itself is like, does the business want to be a business or not be a business? And like, so often, it's not up to us. And if I could talk to my scared self back then, you know, just be like, a failed venture is not a failed entrepreneur.

• 5:54Guy Raz?

  Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

• 6:06Guy Raz?

  I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how Mike Salguero walked away from a failed business, figured out how to source and ship grass-fed beef across the country, and built ButcherBox into a $500 million brand.

• 6:25Guy Raz?

  When I sat down to write this introduction, I needed to check on how many subscriptions I have. And I was kind of shocked. There's Apple TV, New York Times Cooking, Amazon Prime, Pandora, Audible, Wondery Plus, Spotify, Netflix, Disney, Hulu, YouTube, Sirius XM, The New York Times, several wine clubs, and that doesn't even include my phone bill or the fact that I still pay an annual fee to use Microsoft products. And I'm just scratching the surface. According to one survey from 2021, the average American household spends almost $240 a month on subscriptions.

• 7:07Guy Raz?

  And businesses love this model because it essentially allows them to predict recurring revenue. And it means that if they do it right, if they offer a great product and great service, their subscribers stay and there's less volatility for the business. And sure, from time to time, you hear talk about subscription fatigue. But the business model, according to an analysis by McKinsey, is still in its early stage of growth. Between 2012 and 2020, subscription businesses grew more than 500%, or about five times faster than the revenue of S&P 500 companies.

• 7:49Guy Raz?

  But like anything out there, podcasts, YouTube channels, coffee shops, burger joints, to really stand out? Well, you have to stand out. And the obvious way to do that is by finding something people want and making it easy for them to get it. One of those things is grass-fed beef. And in 2015, when Mike Salguero came up with the idea for what would become ButcherBox, he was really thinking about serving people like his wife, Carleen. Her thyroid condition led both of them to seek out an anti-inflammatory diet with foods that included grass-fed meat.

• 8:30Guy Raz?

  Now, at that point, Mike had walked away from a failed startup, a marketplace for custom woodwork. He had spent six years of his life on it and was left with very little money. When he launched his new venture, he had no experience in food. He also didn't know how to source meat, or where to slaughter it, or how to pack it, let alone ship it across the country. But he knew one thing, something he learned from his previous experience. Mike didn't want to deal with investors ever again. So he went to Kickstarter. And with the money he raised, he launched ButcherBox. And it turns out, there were lots of people looking for an easy way to get grass-fed meat, including CrossFitters and people on keto diets.

• 9:15Guy Raz?

  And this year, ButcherBox is expected to reach nearly $600 million in revenue. Mike Salguero was born in Paraguay. Both of his parents were South American. They divorced when he was a baby. And Mike's mom moved him and his siblings to Massachusetts to be closer to the grandparents. And by the time Mike finished high school, he had a pretty clear sense of what he wanted to do.

• 9:40Speaker 01

  I knew I wanted to be in business. I didn't know what that meant, but I knew I wanted to be in business. And so I started Boston University in the business school. And when I got to Boston University, one of the things that I realized pretty quickly was that the academics were not going to be very challenging for me. And I didn't really care that much about excelling in academics. And I decided to make the city my education.

• 10:06Guy Raz?

  What does it mean, what? How so?

• 10:09Speaker 01

  So essentially, I worked almost full-time, starting by my freshman winter. I was working as much as possible, had a lot of really interesting odd jobs.

• 10:20Guy Raz?

  What would you do?

• 10:22Speaker 01

  Well, I would say the two most interesting jobs my freshman year, one was I worked behind the counter at a magic shop. So I would show people different magic tricks. And the second was, I started working at the stadiums in Boston. So I worked at the Boston Garden, which was then called the Fleet Center. I worked at Fenway Park. And I was one of these people that walk up and down, screaming peanuts and throwing peanut bags at people.

• 10:48Guy Raz?

  And you get a commission on every sale, right?

• 10:50Speaker 01

  Yes, you get a commission on every sale, and then you also get tips on top of it. And people pay more for you to be a little more lively. It's a great way to learn how to sell because if you stare at someone long enough, they usually buy. And really helped me realize that I loved sales. And I did that. I mean, there's 80 games a year for for baseball, so I did that a lot.

• 11:15Guy Raz?

  That's a lot. I mean, that's a lot of games. So you were, I mean, you were kind of, I would imagine not really focused on schooling that much at all. Because if you're going to the Boston Garden or Fenway, you know, a couple of times a week, like, that's a that's a commitment.

• 11:29Speaker 01

  That's right. Yeah. Yeah, no, I mean, I graduated with a stellar GPA of a 2.9.

• 11:36Guy Raz?

  Acceptable, reasonable.

• 11:38Speaker 01

  Barely.

• 11:40Guy Raz?

  So you graduate from Boston University, I think in 2003.

• 11:45Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 11:45Guy Raz?

  I read a story, an interview you gave where you talked about at one point, like, you were kind of an activist. Like, you were protesting, like, globalization. Like, this was a big thing in, like, the late 90s and early 2000s. Still is in some places, but in the US it was. It was a lot of, like, anti-globalization. And you kind of took part in some of this stuff.

• 12:06Speaker 01

  I did.

• 12:07Guy Raz?

  Like anti-capitalism, anti-corporate stuff?

• 12:11Speaker 01

  Corporations are going to rule the world and.

• 12:13Guy Raz?

  Yep. Tell me about that.

• 12:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the protest that I went to was in 2002 in New York City. And it was the World Economic Forum protest. Well, the World Economic Forum was in New York City and there was a big protest against it.

• 12:31Guy Raz?

  And why did you, what was interesting to you about joining? What attracted you to that?

• 12:35Speaker 01

  I just felt like the world was not going to be in a better place if we just let corporations do whatever they want. And I remember reading a book when corporations rule the world. And I remember being very scared about corporations being allowed to do whatever they want to do.

• 12:54Speaker 01

  And so I go to this protest and I'm holding a sign. I believe I was outside the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. I was outside some hotel in New York City. And I'm sitting there with my sign being like, hey, hey, ho, ho. You know, corporations have to go. And I just got this, this, this voice almost in my head that said, you won't change the world from this side of the fence. And that was a turning point in my life where I decided to dedicate my life to being on the other side of the fence, to, to running companies and to try to prove that you can do well by doing good.

• 13:30Guy Raz?

  Yeah, I mean, if I was standing next to the protest in 2002 and you're like, you know what, guy? I think I'm inspired to join the other side. I've been like, Mike, you're a sellout. What do you mean? Stay on this side of the fence. Don't be a, don't join those corporate pigs.

• 13:45Speaker 01

  That's right. That's right. Yeah. Uh, I think, um,

• 13:51Speaker 01

  unfortunately capitalism is, are the rules of the game. And in my opinion, if you want to make a change to the system, you need to know how to play in the system. You know, I, I spent school, yes, saying, oh, there needs to be a different way. And when I got out of school, I, I really got focused on how can I build myself up to be one of these suits and actually have a seat at the table and be able to make a difference.

• 14:19Guy Raz?

  All right. So now let's find out how you sold out for the next hour and a half.

• 14:28Guy Raz?

  I mean, I know you, you, you mentioned you kind of were interested in, in maybe getting into business somehow, but, but you didn't. You went into, to, you went to work for like a real estate company at first?

• 14:39Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 14:40Guy Raz?

  And what was the company? What, it was just a, a standard real estate agents or Realtor?

• 14:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. So it was a rental office in Alston, which was the place where BU students went to get housing.

• 14:52Guy Raz?

  Okay.

• 14:53Speaker 01

  And so I graduated early. I graduated in January, so three and a half years. And I was looking around for a job and what I really wanted was something that would help me hone my sales skills. Like I wanted to get a little bit more professional in my sales skills. And I, I saw an ad in the paper and it said, East Coast Realty. And it was like two blocks from my apartment. And so I went into East Coast Realty and the owner, John, was there and they were playing Grateful Dead.

• 15:19Guy Raz?

  You were like, oh, my God. I found my people. They're capitalists, but they're playing Grateful Dead. All right, I'm in.

• 15:27Speaker 01

  Yep, exactly. And so, you know, he's like, well, if you want to work here, you have to go get a license. You have to get a real estate license. And I was like, okay. Took the 15 hours of class and took the test on Monday and by Tuesday I was working there.

• 15:41Guy Raz?

  You were certified Realtor, like you could sell homes?

• 15:45Speaker 01

  I could sell homes, but I didn't sell homes. I rented apartments.

• 15:48Guy Raz?

  You was rented, okay. And it's interesting that you say you wanted to get experience in sales because a lot of people graduating college who want to get into business don't think about, you know, about sales, but sales is like the fundamental building block of how to start a business. And you thought to yourself, I don't know what to, I'm gonna do, but I need to learn how to sell stuff?

• 16:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, I believe dealing with the rejection of not being able to sell is really important. And those lessons that I learned either at Fenway Park or as a Realtor have stayed with me because when you're running a company, everything is sales, whether you're trying to sell another client or you're trying to sell your company on what you're doing. And the other thing that I love about sales is it's one of the best ways to tie how hard you work to how much you can make. And that doesn't really exist in a lot of places. Like, there's a lot of jobs where you can just work harder and harder and harder and you just make your salary. In sales, if you're working harder and you're lucky and you work smarter, you can actually make a lot more money.

• 16:53Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 16:53Speaker 01

  And so when I started in this real estate office, I was really good at renting apartments.

• 16:57Guy Raz?

  You would, you would basically rent apartments to students and you were good at convincing them that this was the right apartment for them? I mean, how, is that basically what you were doing?

• 17:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. My perspective was that I was never gonna try to sell somebody on a house or an apartment. I was just gonna find them the best place and I would just keep looking until I found them the best place. And apparently that was a refreshing perspective. Most people didn't take that approach.

• 17:28Guy Raz?

  And from what I understand, that job turned out to be really important because of some of the people you met there.

• 17:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, the manager, the kind of office manager, is this guy Seth. Seth becomes my co-founder of my first company, Custom Made.

• 17:43Guy Raz?

  So Seth Rosen.

• 17:44Speaker 01

  Seth Rosen, yeah. He's also working there.

• 17:46Guy Raz?

  Okay.

• 17:47Speaker 01

  So we become best friends. Also, my second or third client I ever had was my wife, Carleen.

• 17:54Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 17:55Speaker 01

  Who was a freshman, looking to move off campus. And, you know, sparks flew and we didn't start dating for years later. But it's just amazing how this like, saw that in the newspaper, was like, okay, this feels like the right spot for me, how much that one decision set up, I found my wife and I found my co-founder.

• 18:16Guy Raz?

  Wow. All right, how, and so you're there, and how long did you end up staying there at that company?

• 18:22Speaker 01

  So the real estate season in Boston is essentially from January until September.

• 18:27Guy Raz?

  Okay.

• 18:28Speaker 01

  So I worked that season. And then I actually went to live with my father in South America.

• 18:35Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 18:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I had reached out to him and had said, like, you're half of me and I don't even know you, and I want to get to know you. So between the middle of September and Christmas of 2003, I lived in South America and spent a ton of time learning who this man was, who I didn't know.

• 18:56Guy Raz?

  And what was that like, that experience of living with this person who is half of you that you didn't know?

• 19:04Speaker 01

  It was fascinating. The most interesting thing was just how nice and caring he was and how genuine he was. And then I would see these like faces he would make or these gestures he would do that reminded me like, oh, that's my brother Andy, or that reminds me of my sister. And it was just a real mind bender. I didn't have the conversation with him, like, hey dad, why did you leave me?

• 19:33Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 19:34Speaker 01

  I just didn't, I just wanted it to be good. Like, I just wanted to like, get to know him better. And it's a really, it was a really fascinating time.

• 19:42Guy Raz?

  All right, so you spend that time with him. You come back to Boston in 2004?

• 19:48Speaker 01

  Yep, back to real estate.

• 19:50Guy Raz?

  Okay.

• 19:51Speaker 01

  And I run another season in real estate. Although in June, I went with my friend to Israel and I had made this T-shirt, kind of as a joke. This is when Fahrenheit 9/11 came out. And the T-shirt said Buck Fush on it.

• 20:11Guy Raz?

  Instead of F. Bush?

• 20:13Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 20:14Guy Raz?

  As in George W. Bush?

• 20:16Speaker 01

  As in George W. Bush.

• 20:17Guy Raz?

  Okay, so Buck Fush.

• 20:19Speaker 01

  Buck Fush.

• 20:20Guy Raz?

  In the logo of George Bush?

• 20:22Speaker 01

  It was a, it was a blue T-shirt with white writing Buck Fush.

• 20:27Guy Raz?

  And you made this on a trip to Israel?

• 20:30Speaker 01

  I was, no, I, I made it before I got on the plane to Israel.

• 20:34Guy Raz?

  Got it.

• 20:35Speaker 01

  And my friends wore these T-shirts to the movie Fahrenheit 9/11. So I get this call or an email while I'm in Israel and they're like, we sold all the T-shirts, because I'd, I'd bought like 50. We need more. And so here I am in Israel and I'm deciding to make a lot more Buck Fush T-shirts.

• 20:57Guy Raz?

  You were gonna get into the T-shirt business?

• 20:59Speaker 01

  That's right, that's right. And I, you know, I was not a George W. Bush fan and I thought other people in Boston weren't George W. Bush fans either. So I thought it could be an interesting, an interesting shirt. And so we set up booths at the Democratic National Convention. And I found salespeople. And so I had people coming to my house who would buy the shirts for like $7 and then sell them for $10. And I also got into a few stores. So I had a few stores that would, you know, buy 30 shirts and then they would sell them for whatever they sold them for. And so, you know, things were starting to move.

• 21:36Guy Raz?

  How many, how many of these T-shirts did you sell?

• 21:40Speaker 01

  By the end of it, I sold 17,000 T-shirts.

• 21:42Guy Raz?

  17,000 T-shirts? That said Buck Fush? And, and, and did you, it's, I mean, I have to assume you made quite a decent amount of cash on that.

• 21:55Speaker 01

  I actually ended up with no cash whatsoever.

• 21:58Guy Raz?

  You made no money off of that? How is it possible you made no money off of that?

• 22:03Speaker 01

  I was asking myself the exact same thing. How is this possible? And, um, you know, really what was clear to me was I didn't know what I was doing. I, I didn't know how to account for it. I didn't, I just didn't know what I was doing.

• 22:15Guy Raz?

  Hmm. Um, all right. So I think this is around like 2004 or 2005 ish. And, and I guess you decided to, to go back to the Boston area and sort of get like a stable job.

• 22:29Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 22:30Guy Raz?

  And you eventually do get hired by a, a commercial real estate company, um, outside Boston. I mean, it must've been okay, right? Because you, you, I think you wind up staying there for like three years or so. Is that right?

• 22:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. I, well, I ended up getting my MBA at night. They paid for me to get an MBA. So one of the reasons why I stayed for as long as I did was because, um, they were paying for me to go to school. But I also, uh, me and my, my buddy Seth, we're best friends at that time. We were looking for something to do.

• 23:03Guy Raz?

  Like a business idea.

• 23:04Speaker 01

  That's right. We were looking for something to buy. We were looking for a business to start, like anything. I mean, we tried.

• 23:10Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 23:11Speaker 01

  We looked at a number of different things and nothing panned out until we stumbled across custommade.com.

• 23:17Guy Raz?

  What, tell me the story of, about what was custom made?

• 23:21Speaker 01

  Sure. So, yeah, this is, um, 2007. Seth is, has moved into an apartment and decides that he wants to get a fancy coffee table and he wants to custom make his coffee table. And so he's doing his research and he's on this website, custommade.com. And that ends up getting this beautiful coffee table from a woodworker in Maryland. And he's talking to the woodworker and the woodworker's like, I get all my business from this website, custom made. It's amazing. And I pay $35 a year for my membership. And a light bulb goes off in Seth's head. And Seth calls me and he says, hey, we should buy this website, custommade.com. You know, this guy gets all of his business and he's paying $35 a year.

• 24:05Guy Raz?

  It was a guy who was a woodworker, like a carpenter?

• 24:09Speaker 01

  Yes. So custommade.com, when we purchased it, started in 1996 by a woodworker, Ted Wheaton Kraus, and it was a listing service for other woodworkers. But this is built in 1996. And so the website, actually, if you, as a woodworker, wanted to update your content, you had to email Ted, who was the webmaster, to put up photos for you or to like, help you manage your profile.

• 24:36Guy Raz?

  So it was like an old school directory?

• 24:38Speaker 01

  That's right. With an amazing SEO footprint, just tons and tons of customers going to the website, because when you would type in custom bookshelf into Google, custommade.com came up first.

• 24:50Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 24:51Speaker 01

  And so the investment thesis was actually like a real estate investment thesis. We called it a shack in Manhattan. It's like, this place gets tons of foot traffic. And all we need to do is rehab the shack and jack up the rents, and we'll have a nice little cash flowing business on our hands.

• 25:07Guy Raz?

  In other words, you take this like GeoCities quality website, you update it into something that looks a little nicer, you charge people more to advertise their services, and you got a nice cash flow business?

• 25:21Speaker 01

  That was the idea. The number one thing was, people need to be able to manage their own profiles. I mean, it's 2008, for God's sakes. Like, people should be able to log in and manage their own content without having to like, email a webmaster.

• 25:34Guy Raz?

  Yeah. How many people were listed on this site?

• 25:38Speaker 01

  There was about 350.

• 25:39Guy Raz?

  350? That was it?

• 25:41Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 25:41Guy Raz?

  Okay.

• 25:42Speaker 01

  So the business had a top line revenue of $34,000.

• 25:47Guy Raz?

  And so you thought, wow, there's just opportunity here. All we need to do is just get more people listing their services, and we can actually make a lot more money?

• 26:00Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 26:01Guy Raz?

  So, all right, so you presumably approached the guy who owns the site, and what, what'd you say?

• 26:09Speaker 01

  I reached out to this guy Ted, and I said, hey, if you're ever interested in selling, we'd be interested in buying. I didn't hear anything from him.

• 26:18Speaker 01

  Meanwhile, this is 2008 and the real estate market had crashed.

• 26:23Guy Raz?

  Yes, really beginning to 2009.

• 26:25Speaker 01

  Everything's unraveling.

• 26:26Guy Raz?

  Worse, but yeah.

• 26:27Speaker 01

  Yep. And so I ended up getting laid off at the real estate office. And must have been a week later, this guy Ted actually wrote me back and said, I'd be interested. Let's talk. And so Seth and I put our heads together and we send him an offer for a hundred forty thousand dollars. Was four times revenues.

• 26:50Guy Raz?

  It's pretty good. Yep.

• 26:51Speaker 01

  And we put down a $5,000 deposit and we wanted 90 days of due diligence.

• 26:59Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 27:00Speaker 01

  And the 90 days of due diligence was really to go find the money because we didn't have enough money to actually buy that website.

• 27:05Guy Raz?

  And he agreed to that price, basically.

• 27:08Speaker 01

  He did. Yep. Meanwhile, the, the economy is collapsing and Seth and I are running around Boston with a logo on a BlackBerry. Trying to raise money for this idea of a woodworker listing service. You know, 5,000, 10,000, $25,000 slugs at a time.

• 27:30Guy Raz?

  This was not an easy time to raise money, 2008, 2009, right? Because lots of people lost a lot of money and we're losing money.

• 27:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, literally our investment thesis was like, well, you could give it to us and maybe we'll make you money. Or you can leave it in the market and lose 30%.

• 27:45Guy Raz?

  Yeah, but you did manage to raise the money.

• 27:48Speaker 01

  We did. We raised $500,000.

• 27:51Guy Raz?

  Okay, so the two of you are like, all right, you get the money, you buy this site, 2009.

• 27:56Speaker 01

  Let's do this.

• 27:57Guy Raz?

  You've got custommade.com and the, the plan was still to be just a better listing service.

• 28:05Speaker 01

  Right. Allow people to list their own products and then slowly increase the prices.

• 28:09Guy Raz?

  Okay, so first of all, 350 listings is not enough to, to create a business that's going to make you some significant cash. So what did you do? How did you get more woodworkers to join?

• 28:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we are.

• 28:24Speaker 01

  List or our forecast was we could get about 45,000, there were 45,000 custom woodworkers in the United States. And then we knew with a domain name like custom made, we could move into other verticals, whether that's jewelry, or glass, or ceramics, or other things. And so the first thing we did is we built a website. And while I've been a tech entrepreneur now for 15 or 16 years, I knew nothing about building a website.

• 28:52Guy Raz?

  And you presumably you had some money to hire a few people with that $500,000?

• 28:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, we, exactly. We brought on, the original team we brought on was mostly paid in equity. And then we had a couple people who kind of helped us, helped us build.

• 29:09Guy Raz?

  Okay.

• 29:10Speaker 01

  But what we launched was a total disaster. Total disaster.

• 29:17Guy Raz?

  Why, what was it? I mean, the plan seems pretty straightforward. You're gonna make the site better, you're gonna raise rents, and you're gonna go after more woodworkers to advertise.

• 29:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the first thing that happened is we just completely destroyed the search engine optimization, the SEO.

• 29:32Guy Raz?

  By doing what?

• 29:34Speaker 01

  We didn't tie all the pages to each other like they were in the original site. And so, over the course of a few months, these makers are calling in, they're being like, first of all, I can't use the site, I can't upload photos in the backend, I can't log in, blah, blah, blah. And all the business has dried up, I'm not making any more money. And so, we are frantically trying to fix the website, while at the same time, working to sign up more and more people onto the website that was in dire need of fixing.

• 30:07Guy Raz?

  But you, I mean, you eventually do wind up fixing the SEO and revamping the website. And, I mean, because you also managed to raise another round of funding, I think, in 2010. So, I mean, at that point, how was the business actually doing? Were you actually, I mean, was there cash flow coming in based around this model?

• 30:27Speaker 01

  There wasn't cash flow, but we got it up to about $20,000 a month in-

• 30:32Guy Raz?

  Not bad.

• 30:33Speaker 01

  -in subscription revenue.

• 30:36Speaker 01

  And yeah, we needed more money. So we went out to a couple of venture places, but nobody was interested in talking with us. And so we did another round and raised an additional 600,000.

• 30:52Guy Raz?

  But really, still at this point, the model was purely like the idea was we're just going to make money off people paying to list on this site?

• 31:01Speaker 01

  That's right. Shack in Manhattan.

• 31:03Guy Raz?

  We're not going to take a cut of a sale or anything?

• 31:07Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 31:07Guy Raz?

  Okay.

• 31:08Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 31:09Guy Raz?

  So I can understand why, why it might have been challenging.

• 31:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:14Guy Raz?

  I mean, I mean, not to disparage the model, but I mean, it's, it's kind of limited, right?

• 31:18Speaker 01

  Especially when you're going to venture capitalists who are like, you know, they just want bigger bets than like a woodworker listing service.

• 31:27Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 31:28Speaker 01

  So we were just on the road trying to sell and everybody said, no, I mean, it was like, no, no, no, like listing service, no way.

• 31:36Guy Raz?

  I mean, I mean, I know that at some point you, you broke through because, I mean, you were finally able to raise some money for custom aid. So how did you do that? How did things turn around?

• 31:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, and there was a moment, we were in Polaris, Polaris Ventures, and we had launched this feature called the job board. And the way the job board worked was we actually launched it so that we could sell members because one of the questions we would get when we're calling these potential woodworkers is like, well, how do I know that there are any jobs on there? And we created this thing called the job board where somebody could say like, oh, I'm looking for this in this area.

• 32:13Guy Raz?

  I'm looking for like a chest of drawers in the, in the Albany, New York area.

• 32:19Speaker 01

  Correct. And so we would say, hey, let's go to the job board and like, look at Albany, look at these jobs. If you, if you had a membership, you could bid on these, on these jobs.

• 32:27Guy Raz?

  I see. Okay.

• 32:29Speaker 01

  And so I'm in this meeting and I'm like, pull up the job board. We pull up the job board. I'm like, all we need to do is stand in between these transactions and we can be the largest marketplace for custom stuff. As soon as I said the word marketplace, everything changed. This is 2011, Airbnb had just kind of started and people got excited about the concept of being a marketplace for custom stuff and the venture capital came fast.

• 32:56Guy Raz?

  Right, because once you are the sort of the middleman and you are controlling the relationship between the artisan and the end user, there's all kinds of things that could happen. You could take a cut, you could, right? You could, you're basically the platform to get, and of course, that model would be huge, Airbnb, Uber, et cetera, et cetera.

• 33:16Speaker 01

  Right. And so we attracted first round capital into the round and then first round capital and Google Ventures led our first institutional VC-backed 1.9 million dollars. My co-founder Seth announced that we closed it at my rehearsal dinner for my wedding.

• 33:36Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 33:37Speaker 01

  And it was very exciting. It was amazing.

• 33:40Guy Raz?

  You were now a venture-backed business, having raised a few million dollars, but presumably your business model had to change because you couldn't just charge an annual subscription fee, even if it was 50 bucks or 80 bucks. Like now, you had to figure out other ways of making money. So what did you start to think about doing?

• 34:00Speaker 01

  That's right. So the charter of that money was to build out a marketplace where we were going to no longer worry about subscription fees, free to join, and then we were going to take a 10% cut of the transaction.

• 34:18Guy Raz?

  Okay, that makes sense.

• 34:18Speaker 01

  From the maker.

• 34:19Guy Raz?

  Yep.

• 34:20Speaker 01

  But the reality is that the model didn't work. And, you know, I used to call this like the trade show phenomenon. Like if you go to a furniture show or a trade show and there's like all these booths. Most of the makers are like sitting in the back, like doing something or they're not out there selling. And you know, you think about the psyche of a woodworker, oftentimes these are people who were maybe a bit of a loner, not necessarily super sociable, didn't necessarily like writing, like obviously this is generalizations, but the written word is not necessarily like their strong suit.

• 34:58Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 34:59Speaker 01

  And now we're asking them to put themselves out there to like sell their expertise.

• 35:05Guy Raz?

  And to bid on projects.

• 35:06Speaker 01

  And to bid on projects and to get rejected a lot and to put a lot of work into like, here's a sketch and I could do this for $2,000 and then the customer just doesn't go anywhere.

• 35:15Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 35:15Speaker 01

  Getting something custom is an incredibly intimate back and forth conversation that can be, you know, dozens of back and forth communications before anything actually happens. And we tried to like put ourselves into the middle of that and it didn't, it just didn't work. And you know, despite that, we're out like, well, let's just raise more money. Maybe we can make it work.

• 35:38Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 35:38Speaker 01

  And we tried a number of different things, like we, we built a whole concierge team. So like kind of take the pressure off the maker and, and we would do the back and forth. Tried a number of different things to make it work. I mean, we, we pushed that boulder up the hill for years trying to make it work. But the reality is that the whole premise was wrong. It, we just went on that premise because that's the only way we could get funded.

• 36:02Guy Raz?

  But what was the, I mean, was, I mean, if you had 12,000 makers on this site, that's a lot of makers and you had, you know, tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of people coming to the site every month. And by the way, did you?

• 36:17Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 36:18Guy Raz?

  And let's say a 5% of, of those site visits resulted in a transaction, why didn't you make money? What, what was the problem?

• 36:27Speaker 01

  The big issue with the model was very few of the people who posted a project to something they wanted would actually transact on that project. And what you're doing is you're essentially taxing all of these makers who have to like, say, "Hey, I'm Joe and I'd love to work on this," and put themselves out there. And they only have the capacity to do that a little bit. So there were a number of people who were quite successful. We have lots of maker stories of people who did incredibly well.

• 36:54Guy Raz?

  But they had to hustle.

• 36:56Speaker 01

  They had to hustle.

• 36:57Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 36:58Speaker 01

  Actually, most of the people who did incredibly well were not necessarily the best artisan, just amazing at sales.

• 37:06Guy Raz?

  So you were the CEO and you were running this company and was getting, you were getting more and more cash coming into the business, but you were burning through the cash?

• 37:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, we were burning it at about $600,000 a month at our height.

• 37:22Guy Raz?

  And that was mainly on hiring software engineers?

• 37:25Speaker 01

  Yes, it was mainly on staff. So designers, product people, engineers, marketing people.

• 37:34Guy Raz?

  And how much was coming into the, in, into the business every month?

• 37:38Speaker 01

  Oh, like 30 grand.

• 37:43Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 37:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:45Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 37:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:46Guy Raz?

  And, and as you're, I mean, having Google Ventures and Schooner Capital and some of these big, you know, first round involved, were they getting in your business? Were they like, "Okay, you just gotta do this, you gotta do that," or were they kind of leaving you to just run it?

• 38:01Speaker 01

  No, they, they were definitely getting into our business. I mean, so Google was like, "Hey, if you want, we can bring our technologist over and he can talk with your technology team," or, "Hey, if you want, we can have our user experience person come over."

• 38:14Guy Raz?

  Of course, and you're like, "Are you kidding me? We love that."

• 38:17Speaker 01

  We're like, "Great, that's amazing, come on in, see everything." And you know, right after we raised this money, Google's position was that our team was not good.

• 38:30Guy Raz?

  Who on your team? Your, your, your techno, your technical team?

• 38:34Speaker 01

  Essentially, everybody. Because, you know, like, from the VC's perspective, there wasn't a question about whether the marketplace was the right concept. Like, that's what they invested in. It was really a question of like, well, we must have the wrong team to go activate that. So like, let's go figure out who that person is. And so, we, we believed that, right? We were like, well, if Google says that's true, that's gotta be true.

• 38:59Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 39:00Speaker 01

  And, you know, I have this analogy of, um, I heard it somewhere, it's not mine, but, um, when you start a company, it's like you're hacking through the jungle with machetes. And you're just like, you just need people who are willing to stay up and hack and try to find a path.

• 39:17Guy Raz?

  Yep.

• 39:18Speaker 01

  And eventually you find a path, and that path leads you to a dirt road, and there's a bus on the road.

• 39:24Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 39:26Speaker 01

  At Custom Aid, that bus was funded by Google and funded by First Round Capital. And what we did is we hopped on that bus and we looked at a great deal of the hackers who helped us get on that bus. And we said, you guys don't know how to drive.

• 39:45Speaker 01

  And we left them in the jungle.

• 39:48Guy Raz?

  They were saying, your team isn't good enough. You've got to replace them. Which, I, I mean, setting aside the, the, the kind of interpersonal challenges of doing that with people you know, let's say they were right. Did you, were you able to get good engineers?

• 40:06Speaker 01

  So, we, we started hiring not for culture, but for experience, for resume. And over the course of the next two or three years, we went from overhauling our technology team, our design team, our product team, our, our marketing team. And then, and when there was no one left, it was like,

• 40:30Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 40:30Speaker 01

  it must be a leadership problem. We gotta do something about Mike and Seth.

• 40:39Guy Raz?

  When we come back in just a moment, how Mike emerges from a failed business and pivots to something that seems even harder: a subscription service for grass-fed beef. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This.

• 41:11Guy Raz?

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• 41:53Guy Raz?

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• 42:38Guy Raz?

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• 43:23Guy Raz?

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• 44:07Guy Raz?

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• 44:46Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2014 and Mike is still the CEO of Custom Made, a woodworking marketplace that's slowly running out of steam. And Mike and his co-founder Seth, they're under a lot of scrutiny from the company's board.

• 45:06Speaker 01

  The board said, we think we need to get a real CEO in here. I was like, OK. And Seth called me one night and he said, I feel like it's the fourth quarter and I haven't been the starting quarterback. And I want to be the starting quarterback. And I had just, my daughter Marley was just born. Obviously, things weren't working out with the board. And I wasn't like I had any great ideas. So I was like, yeah, go for it.

• 45:36Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 45:36Speaker 01

  And so Seth took over as the CEO.

• 45:40Guy Raz?

  How did you, how were you managing your own anxiety and stress at the time?

• 45:45Speaker 01

  Poorly.

• 45:47Guy Raz?

  Because you were sitting on top of $29 million that you'd raised. And essentially, this message that you're getting back from your investors saying you're not doing a good enough job.

• 45:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:57Guy Raz?

  But you knew that no matter what you did, the people you were serving, the artisans, it just wasn't the right fit.

• 46:06Speaker 01

  I'm by my nature, a very hopeful person. And so I was definitely able to remain hopeful that the next change we were going to make was going to work.

• 46:17Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 46:18Speaker 01

  The hardest part for me was actually losing the culture. I remember around that time, basically, sitting in my car, not being able to walk into the office.

• 46:29Guy Raz?

  Because you were so...

• 46:31Speaker 01

  The people were so foreign to me. It was like, it just felt so hostile and it felt so... Because I had left all the people who helped me get there in the jungle, there was no one left. It just became a place that I felt very unwelcome. And that feeling is just a horrendous feeling.

• 46:51Speaker 01

  I I gave that thing everything. I mean, I sacrificed my health. I sacrificed my time. I would work there almost every Saturday and it it just didn't work. And it's hard when you're in failure to not take it personally, to not be like, this is my fault. Like, I'm doing something wrong here.

• 47:11Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 47:12Speaker 01

  But so often, it's really the business itself is like, does the business want to be a business or not be a business? And like, so often, it's not up to us. And if I could talk to my scared self back then, you know, just be like, a failed venture is not a failed entrepreneur. Just keep trying to do the best thing possible. And if this doesn't work, you're you're okay.

• 47:40Guy Raz?

  Yeah. While your while custom made was sort of, let's say, imploding, how what was your relationship like with Seth, your co-founder, who was your friend?

• 47:52Speaker 01

  It was good. I'm really proud of the fact that we were able to remain best friends through all the ups and downs. We had a good really, I mean, we would get on the phone and scream at each other and it was obviously very tense. But we both just maintained a huge amount of respect for each other and a huge amount of love for each other.

• 48:11Guy Raz?

  So eventually, you you leave the business and it it sort of starts to wind down. And I I read that you were able to find new jobs for most of your employees, which is correct, which is pretty great.

• 48:23Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 48:24Guy Raz?

  But what about the about custom made with the website and stuff? What what happened to it once, once you you left?

• 48:30Speaker 01

  So the website remained. So what ended up happening is Seth and four other people remained at custom made and essentially bought it out of bankruptcy. And he has done the miraculous job of pivoting it to a jewelry site. So it's custom made.com. It's a custom jewelry and they do everything themselves. So there's no back and forth with the maker. You're going back and forth with a designer who is an employee of custom made. And the the the model actually works amazingly well. You can get, you can get a custom engagement ring for cheaper than you can get it in a store. And you get to actually say exactly what you want, what you want done. So the dream that we always had.

• 49:16Speaker 01

  Is actually starting to come to fruition.

• 49:19Guy Raz?

  But you were, you'd put seven years of your life into this thing.

• 49:22Speaker 01

  Seven hard years, yep.

• 49:24Guy Raz?

  And did you think in your mind, I'm never going to be able to raise money again?

• 49:28Speaker 01

  I thought in my mind, I never want to raise money again.

• 49:31Guy Raz?

  Right. How was your confidence as a leader? I mean, were you thinking, yeah, okay, this didn't work. I'm going to start my next thing. Or were you thinking, God, I, maybe I'm not cut out for this? This entrepreneurial stuff?

• 49:45Speaker 01

  My, I knew I wanted to remain an entrepreneur. I knew I didn't want to go get a job. But I also was deeply insecure about that failure and about how was I going to pick up the pieces and start over?

• 50:03Speaker 01

  But fortunately, I didn't have much time to think about it because what ended up happening was while I was at Custom Made, my wife and I were trying a whole bunch of different diets. She has an autoimmune disease, Hashimoto's, which is a thyroid condition. And a lot of the stuff we were reading online was suggesting, hey, if you eat like an anti-inflammatory diet, that can help with your autoimmune diseases.

• 50:30Guy Raz?

  Tom Brady diet.

• 50:32Speaker 01

  Exactly. So a lot of these elimination diets would say, don't eat conventional meat. Go eat grass-fed beef.

• 50:41Guy Raz?

  And I think, by the way, I think they said this because, and again, I'm not a doctor here, but, but the, the idea is that meat or beef that is raised with antibiotics and steroids and stuff, that, that has an impact on our bodies when we eat it. That's the, that was a lot of what people were writing.

• 50:59Speaker 01

  That's right. So we're following these elimination diets. We're online, you know, going to Daniel Walker's website or Whole30 or Mark's Daily Apple or any of these other ones. And so the first thing that happened was I realized it was remarkably hard to find grass-fed beef. Or it was prohibitively expensive.

• 51:19Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 51:19Speaker 01

  And so the idea behind the company, I had a very modest plan. My, my plan was to start a hobby business while I went and figured out what was next. And the idea behind the company was, I wonder if there's a lot of other people who want grass-fed beef and can't find it, I should try to like bring grass-fed beef like to the masses, try to get people to have a good, reliable source of grass-fed beef.

• 51:45Guy Raz?

  Right. The only, the only challenge is that with grass-fed beef, it's less fatty, right? So, so the argument that people who love beef made and continue to make is that the fat in meat is what gives it flavor. And that's why I like Kobe beef or Wagyu beef is so delicious because they use a lot of, they're giving a lot of corn.

• 52:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. So in this country, if you think about the, the rating system for beef, it's Choice, Prime, Select. Those are like the, the three types of beef that you can get. And all that is, is when you cut open the carcass and you look at the rib eye, it's how much marbling is in the rib eye.

• 52:22Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 52:23Speaker 01

  And so like the entire rating system in this country is based on how much fat could you put into that animal?

• 52:29Guy Raz?

  Yes.

• 52:31Speaker 01

  I don't believe that is the right way to rate the quality. And if you look at other places in the world, that's not how quality is rated.

• 52:42Guy Raz?

  But this idea was in your head as like a kind of a hobby, a side project to figure out your next move?

• 52:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, this was like the Tim Ferriss four hour work week.

• 52:54Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 52:54Speaker 01

  I'm gonna like live in Argentina and look at my laptop, see my numbers.

• 52:59Guy Raz?

  Take Tango classes.

• 53:00Speaker 01

  Take Tango classes, call it a day.

• 53:02Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 53:02Speaker 01

  And so we were doing these elimination diets. Then I started buying meat from farmers. And I meet a farmer in a parking lot and he gives me like a trash bag full of meat.

• 53:12Guy Raz?

  And I guess at this point, 2015, it sounds like we're talking about ancient history, but you could buy, and you can still buy this in some places, like a, a share of the cow, like a quarter or a half. It used to, basically they, you gotta buy a lot of that meat.

• 53:26Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 53:27Guy Raz?

  And, and, and this was so you guys, you and your wife could consume it.

• 53:30Speaker 01

  Right. And it, but we ended up because, you know, these, these farmers are like, oh, I need to sell you half a, half a cow. We ended up needing to like sell it to friends because, or sell, I actually am bringing it to custom made and selling it to people at custom made because it was just like too much meat for our freezer. And I remember distinctly where I custom made and I sold someone some meat and he's like, this would just be so much easier if it was delivered to my house.

• 53:57Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 53:58Speaker 01

  I was like, yeah, that would be easier, wouldn't it? And I just got obsessed with like, okay, how, let's, let's say, how would I do that? And I called the project Meet With A Name, which would have been a really bad name to lead with. And the idea was, hey, why don't we try to ship you your monthly allotment of grass fed beef?

• 54:22Speaker 01

  And I couldn't figure out how to make the business work. I couldn't figure out how to ship a box frozen in the mail, how to buy grass fed beef, where to buy.

• 54:32Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 54:33Speaker 01

  Beef.

• 54:33Guy Raz?

  I mean, you're a real estate and then a woodworking guy. I mean, this is, you're not a food, this is not your area of expertise.

• 54:40Speaker 01

  Not my area of expertise at all. And I ended up hunting down the former head of operations of Omaha Steaks.

• 54:49Guy Raz?

  Omaha Steaks, which, which for, I think a lot of people know that they advertise in magazines and stuff. You can get steaks from cows in, I guess, Omaha, Nebraska. And they ship them to you frozen.

• 55:00Speaker 01

  Right.

• 55:01Guy Raz?

  And they've been doing this for a long time, like 50 years or maybe longer.

• 55:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, Omaha Steaks have been around for a hundred years, a hundred plus years. And they were really the only big direct to consumer steak shipper.

• 55:15Guy Raz?

  Yeah. And it was like, kind of like Harry and David Pears, like getting an Omaha steak was a special thing that somebody would send you for a gift or something.

• 55:23Speaker 01

  That's right. It's a largely gift giving business, largely large in the holiday timeframe. So I, you know, I read an article, he was quoted in it. I hunted him down on LinkedIn. I reached out to him and he was like, well, actually I've been out of Omaha for over two years and I don't have an encope anymore. And I'd be glad to help you.

• 55:45Guy Raz?

  Huh, wow. This is the guy you gotta talk to.

• 55:47Speaker 01

  He's the guy.

• 55:48Guy Raz?

  You're like, where do you get the meat from? Where do you get the, how do you ship it? How do you package it? How do you like, what? And slaughterhouses are so complex in the US. There's USDA and then there's like, it's just really complex. And a lot of these farmers don't slaughter their own meat because they don't own the slaughterhouse.

• 56:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 56:06Guy Raz?

  There's a lot. There's a lot of complexity there.

• 56:08Speaker 01

  Multiple steps. There's a slaughterhouse and then generally that goes to like a cutting facility where then they cut it into steaks and then it has to be packaged and frozen. And then it has to go to fulfillment center and then the fulfillment center ships it and it has to have like a certain amount of dry ice in it and has to be in the right box. And like, yeah, all of those details, I had no idea how to do.

• 56:29Guy Raz?

  And by the way, like at this point, 2015, how much grass fed meat is being raised in the US at all? Probably not that much.

• 56:35Speaker 01

  Not much. To date, there's not a lot of beef raised in the United States that's grass fed. It's about 2% of the overall beef. And also beef at that point, grass fed was like, nobody was really worried about the quality and the taste. And so a lot of the grass fed that came out early was actually dairy cows or was older. And it wasn't like high quality stuff. And so the perception that a lot of people had about grass fed was like, oh, I tried it. It's like really chewy and gross.

• 57:05Guy Raz?

  It's gamey, yeah. And dairy cows, I should mention, because I, they are grass fed by and large, I think.

• 57:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, some are. Not all of them, but some are. And that was what people had brought to market as like the first grass fed.

• 57:19Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 57:20Speaker 01

  Rather than a product where they were really thinking about what the animal's eating and like how that's going to taste. And grass fed has changed dramatically over the past five years.

• 57:29Guy Raz?

  All right. So you, you seek this guy out who worked for Omaha Steaks and you contact him and say, hey, can I ask you some questions? What does he say?

• 57:40Speaker 01

  He was like, sure, fly me to Boston. I'm happy to meet with you and I'm telling you everything I know. So he flew to Boston. We met and I ended up giving him equity in the company rather than paying him. And he, I would not have been able to start this business without, without this guy.

• 58:00Guy Raz?

  What's his name again?

• 58:01Speaker 01

  His name is Ron Ikey.

• 58:02Guy Raz?

  Ron Ikey, okay. And so, but, but you didn't yet have a business, but you said, here, I'm going to give you equity in this business. But you knew that you were going to start something.

• 58:10Speaker 01

  Right. Well, I knew, at that point, I knew I was going to start an LLC and, you know, was going to give him stock in the LLC.

• 58:17Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 58:18Speaker 01

  And, um, once I met with him and he's like, oh, this is totally possible. Like I can do this, this and this and set, set this up. Then it was like, okay, there, let's go. There's a, there's a business here.

• 58:31Guy Raz?

  All right. I'm curious, at this time, how much money did you have in the bank? Did you have like over a million dollars to put to maybe start this?

• 58:39Speaker 01

  No, um, maybe like 500.

• 58:43Guy Raz?

  So basically that was all the money you made over a period of seven years.

• 58:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:47Guy Raz?

  So you did not have a whole lot of money to start this thing, but you had this idea. And, and he comes out and, and this guy presumably Ron is, he's a wellspring of information, right? Cause he has done this before.

• 59:02Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 59:03Guy Raz?

  So you, you sort of, what, what do you lay out to him? You lay out, what's the vision you kind of lay out to him?

• 59:08Speaker 01

  I laid out a, a vision for an Omaha Steaks, but focused on grass-fed beef. And a monthly subscription.

• 59:19Guy Raz?

  All right. Now the question is, how do you do that?

• 59:21Speaker 01

  Right. And the reason for the monthly subscription was when we were at Custom Aid and we had these makers who were at the very beginning, who were this listing service, monthly subscription is amazing if you keep the person, right? And so I just thought, well, people buy meat all the time. I imagine they would just prefer to have a monthly subscription. And so, and I was looking for a hobby business and I felt like it would be much easier to just sell someone once and then, you know, kind of dial in their meat subscription. And so Ron comes in and he says, first of all, he's like, it's too much beef. You need to move into other things as well. He's like, you know, people are going to want chicken and they're going to want pork. And by the way, those two species have the same issues in terms of being able to get a high quality product.

• 1:00:05Speaker 01

  And so it became, rather than just like grass-fed beef, it became a beef, chicken, pork. That was kind of what we were, what we were looking at. And Ron had all these connections. He had a connection with a company in Wisconsin called Nesvigs. And Nesvigs had meat cutting next to a frozen fulfillment distribution center. So it really solved all of our problems all at the same time.

• 1:00:29Guy Raz?

  Wow. So Ron has these connections and he has the know-how of like, how to do this. But where do you, like, where do you start to? Forget about getting customers. That's going to come later because you have this intuition that people want this food. But where are you gonna, where are you gonna source this stuff from? I mean, does Ron have the answers? Where do you find the meat?

• 1:00:53Speaker 01

  Ron did have the answers, yes.

• 1:00:55Guy Raz?

  He was like unlocking this just world of, of knowledge.

• 1:01:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, literally unlock, unlock the business for me. I would not have been able to do this. But he had some contacts of people in Iowa. And he believed that they could provide what we were looking for.

• 1:01:15Guy Raz?

  All right. So just curious, like, how do you? In terms of shipping beef, right? How do you make that? Like, how did you make that economical? Because ice and dry ice, which you have to use is, is heavy, right? Until, I guess, until it evaporates.

• 1:01:33Speaker 01

  It is. It's about five pounds of dry ice per day in transit.

• 1:01:37Guy Raz?

  Five pounds per day, meaning that every day, five pounds evaporates?

• 1:01:40Speaker 01

  That's right. So if you were gonna ship a box from Wisconsin to California, which was a five-day ship, you were putting 25 pounds of dry ice in that thing.

• 1:01:49Guy Raz?

  Wow, okay. So 25 pounds of that has, because by the time it gets to my front door five days later, that's gotta still be pretty much frozen meat.

• 1:01:57Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:01:57Guy Raz?

  But there's gonna be no dry ice left.

• 1:01:59Speaker 01

  Ideally, there is like a little sliver or no dry ice left, yes.

• 1:02:03Guy Raz?

  Yeah. All right. So you had this idea to do a meat box. And you come up with the name Butcher Box, which is a very good name.

• 1:02:13Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:02:13Guy Raz?

  And you knew that from your previous experience that you did not want to seek out outside investors.

• 1:02:19Speaker 01

  Right. At the, at the beginning, it was that I didn't think the opportunity was big enough to have outside investors. I thought this was going to be a very small company.

• 1:02:28Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 1:02:29Speaker 01

  So I had this, I had this goal that I was going to start the company for less than $10,000. That was because I, I didn't think that if it's a hobby, like I wasn't really willing to spend more than $10,000 to get this thing off the ground. And then as I got going, I didn't want outside influence on how to build this company. Cause I, I thought that my first company, some of the outside influence didn't help. And I didn't want to have to deal with that again.

• 1:02:59Guy Raz?

  But even to get it off the ground, right? How are you going to do that? Because I have to assume this packaging company in Wisconsin has a minimum order size. And you know, you've got to buy meat and, and these processors or producers are, they don't want to just sell you $500 of the meat. So you, you know, $10,000 you had of your own money. How are you going to get the cash to launch this thing?

• 1:03:24Speaker 01

  Right. And it's amazing how these like constraints can actually shape the business that you're in. So we, we launched with a Kickstarter campaign. And the idea behind the Kickstarter campaign was that we were going to be able to get a whole bunch of pre-orders. And then we were going to be able to order the meat from Nez Vigs and ship it to customers. And the, the other thing that we did, which was like very unique and had really never been done before. And again, it was because we wanted to like save money was we said, you're just going to choose, do you want beef? Do you want beef and chicken? Or do you want beef, chicken and pork? And then we're just going to send you whatever we want. Like we're going to surprise you.

• 1:04:05Guy Raz?

  Yep.

• 1:04:06Speaker 01

  And the reason why we did that is because I didn't want to carry a lot of inventory.

• 1:04:09Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:09Speaker 01

  And so the idea was, hey, we're going to know, we got 500 orders. We're going to know what that box looks like, box one, and we're going to ship it out to everybody. And like, we're not going to have to worry about inventory. Cause where you get into trouble is if you have a bunch of different SKUs and you're trying to like. You know, carry them all in case the customer wants that versus that.

• 1:04:28Guy Raz?

  Yeah, everybody wants breasts, chicken breasts.

• 1:04:31Speaker 01

  Right, so we just went for kind of center of the plate stuff that we knew people would like. We added recipes to help people learn how to cook and everyone got this box curated by the butcher, by us.

• 1:04:44Guy Raz?

  Got it.

• 1:04:45Speaker 01

  Delivered to their door.

• 1:04:46Guy Raz?

  All right, so you decide to do a Kickstarter campaign and, and did you, I mean, did you make like a cool video and, and tell me how, yeah, tell me what you did and what did the video say?

• 1:04:58Speaker 01

  So the video, the video was all about the nostalgia of how people used to go to a butcher shop and talk to a butcher and really be connected to the meat that they're eating and that we're trying to bring things, what we said, back to nature.

• 1:05:13Guy Raz?

  Are you, is it like you in a field, like a grass field?

• 1:05:16Speaker 01

  Prancing around with, with, with cows, yeah. Yeah, you can still find it Kickstarter, Butcher Box Kickstarter video. And so we did a 30 day campaign. We went out to raise $25,000 and we ended up raising $210,000.

• 1:05:36Guy Raz?

  When we come back in just a moment, how Mike begins to grow the business by using a Trojan horse strategy, reaching out to food influencers and putting their recipes in his boxes. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This.

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• 1:07:42Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2015 and Mike has just done a Kickstarter campaign for Butcher Box, where he's raised a lot more than he expected, over $200,000. And now, he has to fulfill all of those orders.

• 1:08:01Speaker 01

  I was in a rush because I wanted to not only get the boxes for people, but then to get them to sign up as subscribers.

• 1:08:07Guy Raz?

  Ah, yeah.

• 1:08:08Speaker 01

  And so, we were shipping our Kickstarter boxes within two weeks of the campaign being over. And then what we did is we, so we launched our website. But with the Kickstarter people, we shipped them all a box. And we started calling them and saying like, hey, do you like your box? Do you want to sign up as a subscriber? Can we take your credit card? I believe we sent about 1,100 boxes to different customers. And we got like 60% of them to sign up. So right away, we had 600, 700 subscribers.

• 1:08:43Guy Raz?

  So, all right, you launch, you get the boxes out to people. And I have to assume, even though you raised all this money, that's not enough for a big marketing campaign, right? Like, you need to get the word out.

• 1:08:56Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:08:56Guy Raz?

  And so, from what I gather, your strategy was like, let's just go to any paleo influencer and see if we can get them to promote our product.

• 1:09:06Speaker 01

  That's right. The first thing we did is we...

• 1:09:10Speaker 01

  Because we had this curated box of like mystery meat, people didn't know what was gonna, what was gonna show up. We wanted to like include recipes in the box to help people like cook it, but not ship any of the ingredients, just like, you know, just the meat, but then here's a recipe for teriyaki chicken or short ribs or whatever. So what we did is we reached out to these influencers and we're like, hey, we started this company and we started it because like we followed this diet and you know, we used your website and we really love this recipe for squash and ground beef. And we were wondering if we could include it in our box. And we'll put something on there that says like your name and your website and stuff like that. Like,

• 1:09:51Speaker 01

  would that be okay with you? We called it like a Trojan horse. These influencers are like, yeah, that sounds awesome. Like, of course you can use my recipe. Like, make sure you have my website on there. What on, oh, by the way, what do you guys do? And we're like, oh, this is what we do. And by the way, we're launching a referral program. So if you, if you want to become an influencer for us, we'd love to have you.

• 1:10:13Guy Raz?

  And how did the referral program work? I mean, you would give them like a special link? And when people clicked on that link, they would get a, they would get some money?

• 1:10:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. So they would each get a unique link. And then when people click on it, it drops a cookie onto their browser. And so if they were to order over the next 30 days, that influencer would get money. But because we didn't have a lot of money, what we told these people is like, we can't pay you a lot of money because we needed to make sure that we were what we called box one profitable, like that we made money on the first box.

• 1:10:48Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 1:10:49Speaker 01

  And so what we offered them was a residual. It was like, yeah, we can't pay you like $50 upfront. What we can do is we can pay you $10 every month for the life of that subscriber.

• 1:11:00Guy Raz?

  So if, if, if your link gets somebody to subscribe, every month that they pay the subscription fee, and it's anywhere from like 99 to now, almost 300 bucks, right? Depending on the box, that influencer would get 10 bucks a month?

• 1:11:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. At the time, we had one box, it was $129. And so they would get anywhere from 10 to $15 per month. And they loved it. You know, I, I often joke that I think the American dream is to sit on your ass and collect checks. And that was essentially what was happening. I mean, people were able to send an email a quarter to their email list and say, hey, ButcherBox is great, you should sign up. And then just on a monthly basis, just get pretty sizable checks. And so we reached out to anybody in paleo, in CrossFit, in keto. Keto was just kind of starting, but in that world, we reached out to all of them to try to get them to promote ButcherBox.

• 1:11:58Guy Raz?

  Right. Grass-fed meat was a big part of that and is a big part of that culture. And it's kind of a, an important subculture. And we've talked about this, because it's fueled brands like RX Bar, for example, like that really kind of fueled that company. And I know that grass-fed beef is really important, but obviously pigs only grass and neither do chickens, they eat corn and feed. And that's okay, I guess, right?

• 1:12:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, their bodies are better adapted to that type of diet. But with them, one of, one of the big issues, first of all, you've got antibiotic use in both, right? And humane treatment is a really important part as well. So, you know, essentially, we're looking for the grass-fed equivalent, but that doesn't mean that they just eat grass. It's like, what are those claims that then transfer over to other species?

• 1:12:46Guy Raz?

  I wonder also if at the time, like, the hot boxes at the time were like those ready-made things?

• 1:12:54Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:12:54Guy Raz?

  Or like ingredients that were already pre-proportioned, like Blue Apron, which these days isn't, isn't doing as well as it, as once did. It's a public, publicly traded company. But like, that was a thing, too. People were like, oh, man, what am I going to do with these steaks? How am I going to make this food?

• 1:13:11Speaker 01

  I actually, I think we stumbled into this, but right from the beginning, we were attracting a customer who like, didn't want to be told what to do with their meat.

• 1:13:22Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:22Speaker 01

  We were attracting a customer who might be a little more adventurous in the kitchen or might have some knowledge already, who wanted to be able to do what they wanted to do.

• 1:13:31Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:31Speaker 01

  And so that's like categorically different than the Blue Aprons or Hello Freshes of the world, where it's like, here's your spice packet, and here's your potatoes you're going to saute this with. And we kind of took like, the most important element of one of those boxes, the meat, and just made it all about the meat. And people, people really loved that approach.

• 1:13:52Guy Raz?

  Your goal was to get, I think, 1,000 subscribers by the end of 2016, but you got 10,000 subscribers by the end of that first full year in business.

• 1:14:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, pretty remarkable.

• 1:14:05Guy Raz?

  And that was purely because of this influencer marketing strategy?

• 1:14:09Speaker 01

  That was the largest part of it. We also tried to do, you know, email sends and just anything we could do.

• 1:14:16Guy Raz?

  No paid advertising?

• 1:14:18Speaker 01

  No, we didn't really start paying for advertising until 2017, I believe.

• 1:14:23Guy Raz?

  But were you profitable from day one?

• 1:14:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, we had to be. You know, people oftentimes ask like, well, how did you build a company with like no outside capital and no bank debt? And, you know, and one of the things that would really work to our advantage is that company in Wisconsin that cut all of our meat for us and shipped all of our boxes. They were pretty bad at billing us.

• 1:14:47Speaker 01

  So, you know, it turned out that they would like, they'd be like five weeks of float in between like them shipping our boxes and then charging us. And then it was 30 day terms. So like, they kind of helped us finance it at the very beginning. But yeah, no, we, we, we always had to be profitable. And so we were always, we were always looking at the cost of the box and what can we do? And how can we increase the gross margin and all the, all the, you know, the things that I didn't have to worry about in my last company because we were incredibly funded.

• 1:15:21Guy Raz?

  Really? It was a super efficient model that didn't require a lot of manpower, a lot of humans, right? Because it was, you were doing, you were handling sort of the technical logistics or the, the relationship with the customer. But then everything else was handled by these other

• 1:15:38Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:15:38Guy Raz?

  companies.

• 1:15:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. And because I started this business as a hobby, our backbone, like the farms, the processing facilities, pick, pack and ship, customer service, all of that was third party.

• 1:15:53Speaker 01

  And we do that to this day. It's one of the ways that we've been able to be very capital efficient.

• 1:15:58Guy Raz?

  By the end of 2016, you had done $5 million in revenue and you were profitable. And were you significantly profitable?

• 1:16:05Speaker 01

  No. I mean, at that point, we didn't really even know because our accounting systems or books, it was just like really hard to actually know how much money we were making. But no, we were not dramatically profitable by any means, but we were profitable.

• 1:16:21Guy Raz?

  All right, let's talk about beef for a moment because we have to talk about some of the downsides here. Okay. And I say this as a meat eater. I eat everything. I unfortunately eat too much meat. But and we've had Pat Brown on the show, you know, the founder of Impossible Foods. We've had Lauren Poncha, who has Temple Creek, an amazing grass fed farm and ranch in California that produces some of the most awesome grass fed meat. But we also know that livestock production, not just beef, but you know, all animals, it creates devastating carbon emissions, cows especially because of methane. And we know that it's a fact that livestock, whether it's grass fed or feedlot produced,

• 1:17:05Guy Raz?

  is not great for the world.

• 1:17:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. So there's a lot to unpack there. I don't want to build a product that is just causing, going back to my roots of wanting to do well by doing good, I don't want to build a product that's causing like a bigger problem in the world. I believe that meat is here to stay.

• 1:17:27Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:27Speaker 01

  It's a question of how do you make it work and how do we make it sustainable? When people look at the beef industry, I think it's important for people to recognize that what we are talking about is a very small percentage of the beef industry. So grass fed beef in this country is about 2% of the overall beef consumed. So, you know, generally, the large confined feeding operations are the places where some of the research has been done on environmental impacts. And we agree that there needs to be a better way. What we're trying to do as a company is to find a third way to raise animals. I don't think that the solution is let's move to impossible burgers. And on the other

• 1:18:11Speaker 01

  side, you've got kind of the beef enthusiasts who are like, yeah, well, this is American made beef and like, we're just going to do it. We want to honor that like what's happening in the industry right now is not necessarily good for the environment. But we believe, I believe, that there's a way to raise animals that regenerates the soil. There's a lot of really interesting research on-

• 1:18:36Guy Raz?

  Yeah, Alan Savery, and he has done this work, he's giving a TED Talk and wants to see it. Yeah, that you sort of move the animals around naturally as they would on the savannas and they trample the dirt and then they fertilize it and then it grows flowers and yeah.

• 1:18:50Speaker 01

  And that dirt sucks out the carbon. It decarbonizes.

• 1:18:55Guy Raz?

  If you don't churn it up.

• 1:18:57Speaker 01

  If you don't churn it up, right, if you don't tell it.

• 1:18:59Guy Raz?

  So let me ask you this question, and I know this is a crazy question to ask somebody whose business is built on animal products, but is it, could you make the argument that we should eat less of it? We should eat meat as a side dish rather than a main dish, or as much of it as we consume?

• 1:19:13Speaker 01

  Uh, yes. I don't have the courage to, but would love to do a marketing campaign that is eat less meat, but make sure it's raised the proper way. What we'd love to do is to build out a program that is actually carbon negative and that we can prove it from like the ground up. That is, if you talk to me in 10 years, my hope is that I have helped to transform meat by creating a, you know, a carbon negative beef in the United States that honors the farmer, because the farmer is not honored in the system today, honors the animal, treats the animal with humane respect, honors the environment.

• 1:19:57Speaker 01

  And the belief is that all of that is better at the end of the day for the customer.

• 1:20:01Guy Raz?

  Yeah. So is there a world where you could create a system in the US where a small farmer with 100 head of cattle certifiably raises those cattle on grass and then sells them to you and then you guys continue to raise them on grass and then you actually take over the process of slaughtering? And I mean, is that efficient? Could you imagine getting into that business?

• 1:20:27Speaker 01

  Yes, absolutely.

• 1:20:31Speaker 01

  I'm gonna take a detour and answer your question, but I read somewhere that CEOs have a seven-year shelf life. And at the end of seven years, you need to either replace yourself or reinvent yourself. And my seven-year mark was Memorial Day weekend of 2022. And I thought long and hard about whether I wanted to replace myself or reinvent myself. And I don't want to replace myself, but I do want to reinvent myself. And if I look at the last seven years, what did I do? I'd spent a lot of time with my hands in the business and my head down. And now I want to have my head up and to be really to be working on what I call the transformation. You know, we've said as a company that our

• 1:21:14Speaker 01

  mission is to transform meat. That's a big mission.

• 1:21:17Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:17Speaker 01

  And what I want to work on, what I want to spend every waking day and moment working on is how do I transform meat and starting with grass-fed beef? And so we're looking at all options. We're looking at like, do we need our own processing facilities? Do we need to own the last stage? Do we need to be the financing vehicle? Do we need to do the technology layer? You know, there's interesting stuff with carbon credits and there's like all sorts of ways in which we can approach like cracking grass-fed beef in this country. It's a big, big, big challenge, though, because it's like an entrenched massive industry. So it's, you know, in some ways, I look at us now as a business and here we

• 1:21:59Speaker 01

  are, seven years in, we've grown to be a decently large company. We haven't taken any outside funding. I've decided that this is my life's work. And I kind of feel like it's, it's, it's almost our obligation to take a crack at transforming this industry because it's so rife for disruption. It needs it so badly.

• 1:22:20Guy Raz?

  I mean, what's, what's remarkable, we didn't mention this, and it's a good place to mention it, is that in 2021, your revenue surpassed half a billion dollars. That's a lot of subscribers. And I have to imagine that a lot of that came from people stuck at home during the pandemic and, and really kind of maybe discovering it, but also just not wanting to go to the grocery store.

• 1:22:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. I mean, we had grown quickly for the many years before that. Going into the pandemic, I think we did $225 million. And coming out of the pandemic, we did $450 and then $550. So.

• 1:22:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, we've we've grown very quickly, clearly struck a nerve in terms of delivering a product that people are really looking for. And we've done it our way. And I think that's like validating for, I don't know, like my first company, I failed miserably. And this is why, at least, it felt like a miserable failure. And so, yeah, I think we are now seeing that we have a much bigger role to play than just being a hobby business.

• 1:23:28Guy Raz?

  Yeah. Did you, as you, as you sort of like, as the company grew and, you know, 20, 30, 40, 100% growth year over year, whatever, you must have attracted institutional investors who are like, can we get in?

• 1:23:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:23:44Guy Raz?

  Can we invest? Can we scale? Can we help you grow this? And you clearly were like, nope, we don't need it.

• 1:23:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was tempted twice. One time, we almost got documents, but have said no, have continued to say no. But one of the things that happened while we grew this company is Blue Apron went public and immediately started trading well below their last private.

• 1:24:09Guy Raz?

  Well below, I mean, their last, they raised at who knows what, and their last investors lost their shirt.

• 1:24:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, there were like a $2 billion valuation, and now they're trading today at like $100 million.

• 1:24:20Guy Raz?

  $100 million.

• 1:24:21Speaker 01

  And so what happened was all of the venture capital for box subscription companies, it just dried up in an instant.

• 1:24:28Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 1:24:29Speaker 01

  And what you saw was a lot of them sold, so like Plated sold to Albertsons and Green Chef, sold to HelloFresh, and like, they all sold. And, you know, like, I look back at the decision not to raise money. If we had gone and raised money, we would not have a business right now. Because if we had built a model that was like, oh, we're just gonna like buy a bunch of customers and hope for the best, we would have like, you know, it's a game of musical chairs, and when the music runs out.

• 1:24:55Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:56Speaker 01

  There's no more money.

• 1:24:58Guy Raz?

  All right. You have this company now that is, you know, could be a billion dollar company is if the trends continue and a billion revenue, I should say, and you want to transform. You clearly have this idea of like, how do we, how do we have a bigger role in changing how cattle is raised in the US. But at some point, right? I mean, there is usually an end point, right? There is usually a sale or, I mean, could you, you can't rule that possibility out that one day, you know, you know, you sell your company to a, I don't know, Costco or a meat producer, some, somebody.

• 1:25:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. I always caveat my, my feelings on selling the company with the statement that there's no like letter sitting on my desk, right? Like, it's easy to say, I'll never sell. It's a lot harder when there's a letter on your desk saying, we want to buy and here's the price. But when I look at, when you look at iconic food brands in this country, you look at brands that have been around, like that are well known, they all have a similar DNA. They've been around for a hundred plus years. A lot of them are family controlled and they're a multi-generational place. And so if we are trying to build

• 1:26:19Speaker 01

  an iconic brand in meat, it just might take, you know, 25, 50, 100 years. And so, yes, is there a possibility that someone swoops in and says, hey, let's buy Butcher Box and here's a price. And I'm like, okay, you know, like, great, let's do it. That's possible. But the future I'm planning for is one in which I have to plan on like my succession and the, and the company continuing.

• 1:26:47Guy Raz?

  I mean, it's really, it is kind of remarkable. I mean, that this was supposed to be a side project, but you really kind of caught a wave, right? You know, this kind of move towards thinking about, you know, where food comes from. And I mean,

• 1:27:05Guy Raz?

  It's almost kind of like a dumb question, but it is. Aaron, do you ever sit back and think, God, seven years ago, I was a Kickstarter?

• 1:27:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And how freaking lucky I was. You know, as a very novice surfer, I feel like my time at Custom Made was just paddling against waves that were just knocking me over, over and over and over, and never waiting for a break in the waves, just like, keep paddling, keep paddling, keep paddling. And this business, I mean, really, it started snowballing from the first day we launched Kickstarter. But I mean, I can say unequivocally that like, we got really lucky. Like, our timing was really good. I'm not sure if we had started a year before or a year after, if things would have been the same. But the timing was right.

• 1:27:54Speaker 01

  And it's just been a remarkable shift in like, seeing the difference between a boulder being pushed up the hill and a boulder rolling down the hill. And, you know, I worked way harder at my first company. And it didn't work. Like, I always thought that I would run a big company, but I did not think that this was going to be the big company.

• 1:28:22Guy Raz?

  That's Mike Salguero, founder and CEO of ButcherBox. 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 26 million pounds of dry ice each year. The company will soon have two dedicated dry ice making facilities, and it even has a management position that you do not see in most workplaces, Senior Director of Dry Ice.

• 1:28:57Guy Raz?

  Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. If you enjoyed it, please help us spread the word. Tell someone about How I Built This or post about it on social media. And thanks. If you want to contact the team, our email address is [email protected]. If you want to follow us on Twitter, our account is @howibuiltthis and mine is @guyraz. On Instagram, we're @howibuiltthis and I'm @guy.raz. This episode was produced by J.C. Howard with music composed by Ramtin Arablouei. It was edited by Neva Grant with research help from Catherine Seifer. Our production staff also includes Elaine Coats, John Isabella, Liz Metzger, Kerry Thompson,

• 1:29:37Guy Raz?

  Alex Chung, Sam Paulson, Chris Messini, Carla Estevez, and Josh Lash. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.