Threading the future of circular fashion with Peter Majeranowski of Circ

Over one hundred billion garments will be produced this year, but they don’t have to be. Peter Majeranowski says we have all the clothes we need to make all the clothing we’ll ever need, and his company, Circ, has pioneered the technology to prove it. This week on How I Built This Lab, Peter shares how trying to create fuel from tobacco unintentionally led to the creation of a different material — pulp that could go back to the beginning of the supply chain and close the loop on fast fashion. Plus, the future of sustainability in the industry and the impact brands can have on the environment simply by changing their fabric sources. This episode was produced by Carla Esteves and edited by John Isabella, with research help from J. C. Howard. Our music was composed by Ramtin Arablouei. Our audio engineer was James Willetts. You can follow HIBT on Twitter https://twitter.com/HowIBuiltThis & Instagram https://www.instagram.com/howibuiltthis, and email us at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. 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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• 3:45Guy Raz?

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• 4:27Guy Raz?

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• 5:12Guy Raz?

  Hello and welcome to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. So there's enough material in the clothes we throw away to keep making more clothes for decades. The fashion industry alone dumps 92 million tons of textile waste a year. And all of that cotton and polyester is recyclable. It can all be used to make brand-new clothing. This phenomenon struck Peter Majeranowski as a problem looking for a solution. Peter founded a company called Cirque. It's developed patented technology that can recycle poly-cotton, which is what the majority of our clothes are made from. And he's already partnering with some of the biggest names in apparel to try and reduce all of that waste.

• 5:57Guy Raz?

  Peter actually started out his career in the Navy back in 1998, where he served on ships in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

• 6:06Speaker 01

  I was on board a cruiser on its way into the Arabian Gulf. Quite a time to be in the service. We immediately suspected it was Osama bin Laden and we were, instead of continuing on into the Arabian Gulf, we stayed right where we were off the coast of Pakistan and participated in the response. So I had really first row, front row seats to the conflict.

• 6:31Guy Raz?

  Oh, wow. And then, of course, it would go on into Iraq and after Afghanistan, Iraq. And so, what, tell me a little bit about some of the things that you did. Were you, you were also deployed for the Iraq war also on ship or, or on land?

• 6:49Speaker 01

  On land, actually. And the first person I met when I entered Iraq was, at that time, General Petraeus. And he said, what is a sailor doing in the middle of the desert? And as the Iraq war was, was getting underway, they really needed support in terms of analysis on the private sector that existed and how that could be utilized in a post Saddam Iraq to help reconstruct the country. And so I was writing a lot of white papers in the Pentagon and then I was tapped to actually go over to Iraq and support various missions.

• 7:25Guy Raz?

  Hmm. So you, when did you wrap up your, your naval career?

• 7:30Speaker 01

  I wrapped up active duty in 2004.

• 7:32Guy Raz?

  So 2004, and you went, I guess you went on tour for like a, from whatever, a defense industry management firm, but is it, was it like an investment firm or?

• 7:45Speaker 01

  Yes. It was a small group investing in mainly new NATO countries that were soon to join the EU. So these would be countries like Romania or Bulgaria, where it was still very emerging markets with a lot of opportunity. And I was excited to go there. My Pentagon boss was a civilian, had a lot of experience in those markets. And so we went there to invest US dollars into these emerging opportunities. And for me, I already got a bug for business and how enterprise can move economies and move countries, and I was very interested in that. And so for me, Eastern Europe was a

• 8:30Speaker 01

  great place to cut my teeth and really take on a lot of tasks.

• 8:35Guy Raz?

  All right. So you decide in 2009 to go back to school, get an MBA. And was, tell me what your thinking was that you would get an MBA and maybe start a business?

• 8:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. You know, what we were doing already in Eastern Europe was pretty entrepreneurial, but I felt that I could use more sophisticated tools and just be better. And I wanted to expand my network. And so it felt like a logical next step for me.

• 9:03Guy Raz?

  Yeah. So you, so you start that program, you get your MBA. And I guess sometime after that, you, you would meet this guy, Hilary Kaprowski, who was a very famous immunologist. He was involved in the polio vaccine. And he was, I guess he was running a biotech foundation, or he was running a company, a lab. And he talked to you about an idea he had. Can you tell me about, about that meeting and what came out of that?

• 9:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, Hilary actually is an old family friend. My father went to medical school with Hilary in Warsaw until the war broke out, and my father had to escape. And they reconnected after the war.

• 9:50Guy Raz?

  This is World War II you're talking about?

• 9:52Speaker 01

  World War II, yeah. And so I was just visiting him, having dinner at his house. And he was talking to me about his foundation and the research they were doing in plant sciences specifically. His vision was to use plants as a vehicle for vaccines, to develop vaccines, grow vaccines. And he was really frustrated with the uptake from the FDA and other sources. So he started applying that know-how to look at industrial applications. And over dinner, he told me that he just had a patent granted and a lot of press around an engineered, non-smoking tobacco plant that could be used for biofuels.

• 10:30Guy Raz?

  Wow. Okay. So Hilary had this idea to use tobacco plants to make biofuel and even got a patent for that technology. And presumably that idea Really grabbed your attention because of your time you spent working on fuel tankers in the Navy. Is that right?

• 10:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. One of my first jobs in the Navy, I was boarding ships smuggling oil out of Iraq against UN sanctions. And we'd usually have to sit on those ships after we intercepted them for 18 hours at a time. So I had a lot of time to think about the geopolitical nature of energy and oil. And that really ignited a passion inside of me to look at alternative fuels and how amazing it would be if you could democratize energy, take these large poker chips away from bad actors around the world. I mean, we're still seeing this today in Europe with the war in Ukraine. And so when he mentioned that to me, and it happened to be during this global recession where I was not active anymore, I thought this is something I could really dig my teeth into. And so the next thing we know,

• 11:30Speaker 01

  we're starting what's now CERC, but at that time was called Titan Biosciences.

• 11:35Guy Raz?

  And this was to turn tobacco into a fuel source, like biofuels for airplanes?

• 11:43Speaker 01

  Exactly. Or maybe more like cars and trucks. We were specifically targeting ethanol and biodiesel and doing it with a crop that is not a food crop and can grow almost anywhere in the world.

• 11:57Guy Raz?

  And right, because obviously biofuels are generally made from corn, right?

• 12:03Speaker 01

  Right.

• 12:04Guy Raz?

  And so, yeah, tobacco, I mean, it's odd. What is it about tobacco that makes it a good source for this fuel?

• 12:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is not a typical tobacco plant. They grow really large. We treated them differently. We grew more per acre. And what was good about it is that tobacco grows in over 100 countries around the world, and we could get good yields per acre.

• 12:30Guy Raz?

  Yeah. I mean, and let's just talk about the process for a moment. I mean, it was a hydrothermal process. Can you kind of explain how that worked?

• 12:39Guy Raz?

  Like you chop up, you would basically process dried leaves or I don't know, you took the tobacco plant and did you dry it like they do for cigars or?

• 12:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, nothing like that. We would harvest it fresh. We were using combines to do it, chop it up. The juices when you harvest it were, we would press out because those already had high amounts of sugar that we could extract for fermenting into ethanol. And the remaining biomass, we put through this hydrothermal process where we could use water to act like molecular scissors, basically to cut down the cellulose into glucose and extract the oil.

• 13:18Guy Raz?

  So you're basically mechanically doing what, what nature naturally does. Like the, the oil we use today are plants, were plants millions of years ago, right? Animals and plants. And, and so you're essentially doing that, but in a much more expedited way, applying pressure to create a fuel.

• 13:35Speaker 01

  Exactly. Yeah, where it's a time machine for nature.

• 13:40Guy Raz?

  So a cool idea, and you'd been in, in, you know, in the Navy. So you knew that there was a lot of interest in biofuels. But what, what was the challenge you had? I mean, you know, I, I've read that you had a hard time raising money, but, but why? What was the, you know, cause you started this in 2012. But why, why couldn't you attract any, any investors?

• 14:03Speaker 01

  What I can now see in retrospect is there were so many compounding risk factors. You had to find farmers willing to grow it. You had to deal with a plant that didn't have any other application. And also the timing was, was pretty bad. There was a lot of big failures in biofuels in general. And so a lot of the investment community, the venture funds said, look, we, we can't, our hands are tied, even if we wanted to, we're not permitted to invest anymore in biofuels. And so it was a scary time. We, we could see, as I say, the end of the earth, our runway getting smaller and smaller. And we had to quickly. Scramble to find new applications.

• 14:41Guy Raz?

  But you had this process that you that you were working on. I mean, and so, by the way, how are you financing the process with no investment capital?

• 14:50Speaker 01

  We we were creative. Joke, we make one plus one equal five all the time. But we did have some investment from from individuals, high net worth individuals. And we had millions of dollars of grants from the Virginia Tobacco Commission, for example. So that allowed us to develop this technology, which is now the bedrock of CIRC.

• 15:12Guy Raz?

  Right. From what I understand, you were essentially turning the pulp from tobacco stocks to paper.

• 15:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was one of the iterations. Great, great research there. Yeah, we were looking at just continuing with tobacco. And so we looked at how to apply that hydrothermal know how to make non-tree pulp for packaging, paper, you name it. And it turns out the highest or one of the highest qualities of pulp or cellulose goes into clothing, about 300 million trees a year. And that's when a Swedish trading company, they traded primarily in paper and pulp, but they also had a recycling business. And they were the ones that suggested we try running some old T-shirts through our process to see if we could recover anything. And it worked.

• 15:59Guy Raz?

  We're going to take a quick break, but when we come back, Peter changes course, transforming his biofuel company into one that recycles textiles. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This Lab.

• 16:16Guy Raz?

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• 19:54Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz, and my guest today is Peter Majeranowski, who, back in 2016, discovered a way to break down and reuse cotton and polyester. So, OK, so you start experimenting with this, and you see that it's successful. You can actually take a shirt and you can actually shred it up. And what? I mean, didn't you just want like a bag stuffed with shredded cotton? What did you give them? What did you deliver to them?

• 20:24Speaker 01

  We gave them a high-purity cellulose or a high-purity pulp that could go at the very beginning of the supply chain to make fibers like viscose, rayon, or lyocell. So we had two streams coming out of our process. We had the high-purity cellulose or pulp, but we also had the building blocks of polyester, which traditionally come from oil and gas industry.

• 20:48Guy Raz?

  All right, so once this happened, I mean, was it clear at that point that you were going to pivot away from biofuels and tobacco?

• 20:57Speaker 01

  Not quite. We were trying a bunch of things. We were throwing, basically, spaghetti against the wall to see what would stick so we could continue on as a company. And when we figured out the textile recycling, we didn't honestly think it was solving a big problem. We didn't know at the time. And then we started immediately researching, thanks to Google and other resources, and saw that it was a really big problem.

• 21:22Guy Raz?

  This was a huge problem because, obviously, the fashion industry accounts for a significant percentage of carbon emissions and pollution in rivers and oceans, I think.

• 21:36Guy Raz?

  Up to 20% of the world's wastewater comes from, you know, the fashion industry. And then

• 21:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:43Guy Raz?

  Just a small percentage of clothing is recycled. So you were being contacted by manufacturers who were like, how do we get, how do we use more recycled materials in our clothing?

• 21:55Speaker 01

  By manufacturers, but also brands. One of our first cold calls was from Patagonia and they have a take back program where you can come in with a Patagonia garment that's used, it doesn't matter how old, it'll give you some value for it and then they try to resell it. Or they'll even try to repair it to resell it, but if they can't repair it and resell it, they've been warehousing it. So they had this big problem of warehouses full of, of end of use clothing that needed to be recycled. And so that was what drove that phone call.

• 22:28Guy Raz?

  Yeah. So, okay, so you were contacted by Patagonia first and then eventually others and they wanted to know, can you do this at scale? So I have to imagine to do it at scale, you had to raise, really raise serious money to make that happen.

• 22:45Speaker 01

  Serious, serious money. Yeah, a lot of people wanted to know when, when they could start sending truckloads over, when they could start buying recycled material. And, and we're still on that path. Yeah, it is very capital intensive. We're talking about significant chemical engineering processes.

• 23:01Guy Raz?

  So let's talk about how this works. Just a, a small percentage of clothing is recycled.

• 23:09Speaker 01

  Less than 1%.

• 23:10Guy Raz?

  Less than 1% globally. The idea is let's figure out how we can get more stuff to you guys so you can recycle it or help us recycle it. Let's talk about your process first. I think most of the t-shirts come in or the articles of clothing that come in are polycotton, so they're like a combination of cotton and polyester, right?

• 23:31Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 23:31Guy Raz?

  Okay. And then you essentially are doing what with that article of clothing?

• 23:37Speaker 01

  So we shred it, put it through our process. That strips out the dyes and other finishing chemistry. And what we're left is with a very high purity cotton cellulose and those polyester building blocks that can be used for making new clothing.

• 23:52Guy Raz?

  So you can take a T-shirt, a poly cotton shirt, put it through your process as hydrothermal reactions, basically pressure, water, heat. But then how do you separate the cotton from the polyester in that shirt there? It's all intertwined.

• 24:06Speaker 01

  That's right. That's the beauty of it. When you reverse the reaction of making polyester, you're breaking it down to its original building blocks and those building blocks dissolve into water. So essentially, you're dissolving away the polyester and also separating it away from the cotton. So now you have a solid stream with the cotton and a liquid stream with the polyester building blocks.

• 24:28Guy Raz?

  Wow. All right. So you basically can take a poly cotton T-shirt and essentially melt away the plastic, the polyester. You're left with white cotton because you've removed the dyes and it gets shredded up and then that can essentially be turned into thread to make new T-shirts.

• 24:48Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 24:50Guy Raz?

  How many cycles can a piece of clothing go through before you can't recycle it any longer?

• 24:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, so whenever you have a chemical engineering process, you always have a little bit of loss from just material handling and things like that. But the polyester can get repolymerized and unpolymerized, you know, back and forth, essentially infinitely.

• 25:12Guy Raz?

  I remember when my children were babies, we decided to use cotton diapers for them because I just hated the idea of throwing my diapers and just seeing piles of just, you know, diapers in a landfill. So we got out of service. They'd pick up cotton diapers every week and then bring back fresh cotton diapers. It was great. But still, it's water intensive. It requires a lot of bleach, right? And the service was doing that. I have to imagine this process still requires a lot of water.

• 25:43Speaker 01

  It does, but we recycle over 90% of it back into the beginning of the process.

• 25:48Guy Raz?

  Hmm. How do you do that?

• 25:50Speaker 01

  A lot of chemical engineering, a lot of water treatment. We're doing filtration steps to remove the dyes and other finishing chemistry so that we can then use that water again.

• 26:04Guy Raz?

  All right, so essentially, there is, I think I'm right in saying this, there is more than enough clothing in the world to continue to recycle it, to continue to make new clothing. Is that right, that the premise is today, there are enough pieces of clothing that are not recycled, that if they were recycled, we could just use that? We wouldn't have to make, we wouldn't have to get virgin cotton or virgin plastic?

• 26:31Speaker 01

  Absolutely. We believe we have all the clothes we need to make all the clothes we'll ever need. And when you look at the scale of this industry, it's massive. And a lot of it ends up in landfill within a year or two. And so there's a lot of material there that is in a linear system that really should be recirculated so we can continue to use those resources.

• 26:53Guy Raz?

  We're going to take another quick break. But when we come back, how Peter turned polycotton recycling into a growing business, and his thoughts on fashion's looming reckoning with sustainability. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This Lab.

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• 28:55Guy Raz?

  Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. My guest today is Peter Majeranowski, co-founder and CEO of CIRK. Okay, so now you've got the technology down and you've got brands, I believe Zara, for example, is already working with you and has already has a few articles of clothing that have been made from recycled material. Tell me a little bit about how you source all of the clothing, because as you say, only 1% of clothing in the world is recycled. So is it, you know, when you go into a Zara or an H and M, I think a lot of them have like bins where you can, you can just drop things off. But that's still just a fraction of it.

• 29:40Guy Raz?

  Where are you getting, where are you getting this stuff from?

• 29:43Speaker 01

  A combination of sources and unfortunately for the planet, but fortunately for business, there's no lack of input material. We get a lot of material from cut and sew factories. To make a shirt, it takes about another shirt worth of waste along that whole supply chain to produce it. And most of it is that, that final step when you're cutting.

• 30:06Guy Raz?

  And just discarding, just discarding the textiles from what you're not using in a t-shirt.

• 30:11Speaker 01

  Exactly. About 15% hits the factory floor. And so that's a very good source for, for waste as other solutions are scaling in terms of how do we collect from households, sort and get those to, to providers or recyclers like us.

• 30:30Speaker 01

  There's also a whole nother class. There's, there's uniform companies, for example, that process a lot of uniforms. They're essentially big laundries that are constantly washing things.

• 30:39Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 30:40Speaker 01

  And there's a significant amount that can't be put back into use and they're landfilling that right now. Also hospitals use a lot of textiles. Law enforcement uses a lot of textiles. Universities do. So those are all great sources of, of post-consumer waste. That doesn't necessarily have to come from a household.

• 30:59Guy Raz?

  I mean, it seems like that's, but that seems like another business entirely. We had TerraCycle on the show a couple of weeks ago and they obviously have a really robust, you know, network of, of collecting waste. But you guys are processing it. You can't also, at least for now, also collect it. So how do you, how do you get people to send you stuff? How do you get these factories to send you stuff? How do you build partnerships? How are you doing it?

• 31:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, we are attacking that problem from a couple of angles. We are working with people that are just focused on the collection and aggregation of waste. We're working directly with factories that have waste. When we work with brands, you mentioned Zara, for example, we also ask them about their waste and about their factories and to, to direct us to those factories or to direct those factories to give us their waste. So, so that, that's been somewhat effective right now, but I think there's still opportunity here. The circular ecosystem has opportunities all over the place.

• 32:06Guy Raz?

  So, um, tell me a little bit about how you were able to sort of scale it up and presumably, I know you raised some money from, you know, over time from different venture funds, including Bill Gates's venture fund. I think you've raised now. Something like over $40 million, is that about right?

• 32:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, in the last year alone, we've raised about 50 million.

• 32:28Guy Raz?

  Wow, okay. And tell me about the facility that you built.

• 32:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we are at a commercial pilot scale at about five tons per day in Springfield, Ohio, and in Danville, Virginia. And we are doing that with engineering partners that provide equipment and other solutions to various industries. And that's how we've been able to build and scale our solution very quickly. But the bulk of the funds we've recently raised are going towards the engineering and planning for our first really large-scale integrated facility, and that would process about 65,000 tons per year.

• 33:10Guy Raz?

  So how much capacity do you expect to have to be able to, like, I don't know, I don't know if you can quantify it in a way that's easy to understand, instead of like tons or like, I don't know, like a million t-shirts a month, or, I don't know.

• 33:27Guy Raz?

  Yeah, where are you now?

• 33:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we are, you could say, roughly 15,000, 20,000 garments a day at our current scale. So something more about 250,000 garments a day.

• 33:42Guy Raz?

  So, and how long does it take to process one? Just seconds?

• 33:46Speaker 01

  Yes, it happens very, very quickly. From, and it's a continuous process too, so we're now doing it in a continuous way. But from end to end, it's about 15 minutes.

• 33:56Guy Raz?

  Wow. So you guys teamed up with Zara earlier this year, and you've released, have you released this line yet?

• 34:05Speaker 01

  We did. It was a four-piece collection we released back in May during Design Week in Milan. It was the world's first collection made from polycotton waste.

• 34:14Guy Raz?

  Entirely from polycotton waste. And you're, like, a label is sewn in alongside the Zara label.

• 34:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I should also say they're investors. We were their first technology investment, and they've been fantastic partners to work with. And it's not common for a brand to share that key real estate on a garment with another company. And so we were very proud that they agreed to put our name there.

• 34:45Guy Raz?

  Yeah. So give me a sense of where you guys are headed. I mean, right now, you've got a partnership with Zara and they're an investor as well. And do you have other partnerships in the works? And what are you hoping to accomplish through those partnerships?

• 34:59Speaker 01

  We have partnerships with various brands. Some of them, of course, are investors like Patagonia and Zara. Avery Dennison is another one, Zalando in Europe. And we have a calendar set out for several more product releases. And those product releases are really important because they help us educate consumers. As you mentioned, we're buying this stuff and we're feeding this industry. And I think it's for so many reasons. I mean, clothing is such a personal thing. I like to say it's the only artistic thing most people do every day. And when it doesn't match your values, that's a challenge. And so that reckoning is starting to happen now in the industry for clothing.

• 35:42Guy Raz?

  Do you, I mean, as I mentioned earlier, the fashion industry is a huge, and I'm not, you know, I don't mean to sort of single them out because all of us are responsible. We buy the clothing and we wear it. And the fashion industry is serving human consumers who are buying their products.

• 36:01Speaker 01

  Right.

• 36:01Guy Raz?

  Especially fast fashion brands are some of the worst offenders. And again, not them, us as consumers, because we support those practices. But I mean, if in fact, the companies are, you know, are using 100% recycled material to produce, you know, articles of clothing, I have to assume there's still, there's still problems though, right? I mean, because they're still dyeing the clothing, they're still producing wastewater, for example. Like, I mean, they may not be using virgin plastic or cotton, but there are still challenges that they will have to resolve.

• 36:44Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I think. Most people don't know who makes their clothing, how it's made, where it comes from, including fashion executives. And so that's a big, big, big challenge. And so we're starting with with non- virgin materials is just the beginning. You also have to think about labor, water usage, dye, your total life cycle assessment, which is a term of art for how much greenhouse gas emissions you're producing. And so it's a really 360 problem that has to be solved.

• 37:20Guy Raz?

  So give me a sense of where, I mean, where you think this is headed. I mean, you know, obviously you're not, you know, I can't speak for Patagonia or Zara or some of your other investors, but I'm assuming they want a significant percentage, if not all of their clothing, to be recycled. I mean, at the current rate of growth and pace, how much of their inventory do you think could be recycled material in like five or 10 years from now?

• 37:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, in the text, the parent of Zara just put out their targets where they want to have 40% of their clothing made from recycled sources, an additional 25% from next generation materials, which we would fall in both categories. And you also have regulation coming. You know, now you have this, this huge industry that's super optimized, that has to fix itself and has largely been unregulated. And I look at the paper recycling industry as a, as a great example. From 1990 to 2000, that industry added 60 million tons a year of annual capacity. The following decade, another 70 million tons of annual capacity for a total of 130 million tons.

• 38:31Speaker 01

  And that's right on the same order of magnitude as what we're doing today with textiles. And so I think this, this very old and optimized industry can be transformed in 20 years. And there's a lot of capital out there and a lot of traditional ways of doing things that we need to, to disrupt.

• 38:50Guy Raz?

  Pete, thank you so much.

• 38:52Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 38:54Guy Raz?

  That's Peter Majeranowski, co-founder and CEO of Cirque.

• 38:59Guy Raz?

  Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show, and it's totally free. This episode was produced by Carla Esteves and edited by John Isabella with research help from J.C. Howard. Our music was composed by Ramtin Arablouei. Our audio engineer was James Willetts. Our production team includes Alex Chung, Casey Herman, Chris Messina, Elaine Coats, Ramel Wood, Sam Paulson, and Carrie Thompson. Eva Grant is our supervising editor. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.