Pod Insights a16z Podcast Heroes & Myths in Entrepreneurship -- Guy Raz About this episode with @guyraz @smc90
For better or for worse, we tell the stories of entrepreneurs as one of the mythical hero's journey: that's there's a call, a test, a destination... But are we indulging in hero worship or failure porn? Where does and doesn't optimism come in for building? Storytelling IS business -- whether it's a company or a community or a product or a movement -- and is not just about the stories we tell others but the ones we tell ourselves.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:01 Sonal? Hi, everyone. Welcome to the A6andZ Podcast. I'm Sonal and today we have a unique episode. It's someone whose work and latest theme of his work that we, of course, relate to, and it's Guy Raz, the host, co-creator, and editorial director of three NPR programs, including How I Built This. Guy has a new book coming out this week by the same name, How I Built This: The Unexpected Paths to Success from the World's Most Inspiring Entrepreneurs. It's based on his interviews with all kinds of entrepreneurs, big and small, of all kinds of backgrounds and all kinds of businesses. He let each of them tell their unique stories on his show, but pulls a lot of common threads into this book. So, we touch on a few of these threads, and especially one of my favorite
0:45 Sonal? themes throughout, that of storytelling, including movements, buzz, community, and more. And of course, we go meta for a bit in between on podcasting, but we also probe on the notion of failure porn, as well as the question of whether optimism is a good or bad thing. And throughout, we touch on the theme of where the hero's journey does and doesn't come in when we talk about entrepreneurship, and why that matters for everyone, including those who may not even know they're entrepreneurs. Since we mentioned a bunch of different companies in this episode, note to be clear that none of the following should be taken as investment advice. See a6andz.com/disclosures for more important information. So, Guy, welcome. Super excited to have you on the A6andZ Podcast.
1:29 Speaker 01 Thank you for having me, Sonal.
1:31 Sonal? I'm so excited. And it's so funny, because I thought I was kind of clever for figuring this out, and then I actually read your intro. I noticed that you have your book chunked up into the call, the test, and the destination. And as a person who's obsessed with mythology, I immediately was like, oh, my God, that's Joseph Campbell's hero's journey. And I love that. So, tell me a bit about why you organized it that way.
1:51 Speaker 01 You know, I think like a lot of people my age, years ago, I saw this Bill Moyers documentary on PBS about Joseph Campbell.
1:57 Sonal? Yes. It was called The Power of Myth.
1:59 Speaker 01 Yes. And then I took a class in college, a humanities course, where we read The Iliad and The Odyssey, and we also read Joseph Campbell's work. And so, I was always fascinated that- Most stories have, you know, have this kind of narrative arc. And he sort of codified it into this idea of the hero's journey. And that whether it's Gilgamesh, or The Odyssey, or Star Wars, because George Lucas was hugely influenced by him. She has a wacky, insane idea, and everyone in the village thinks she's an oddball. And so she has to leave the village to meet her destiny. And, and, you know, along the way, things happen. She slays a dragon, she's almost killed by a dragon. She finds a mentor, the mentor dies, she falls into an abyss. She emerges.
2:42 Speaker 01 That, and, and when I, when I started How I Built This, I realized that these stories also follow that arc. I mean, there is a lot of crisis, there's a lot of setback, there's a lot of loss and failure. And so when I thought about putting this book together, I really wanted to kind of use Joseph Campbell's framework as a framework for how to lay this book out.
3:06 Sonal? So one other note about The Hero's Met is she has this kind of call.
3:10 Speaker 01 Yeah.
3:10 Sonal? And one of the things that they talk about in the literary world is that it starts in media's rest, like in the middle of the action.
3:15 Speaker 01 Yes.
3:16 Sonal? And one of the things that I loved about your very first podcast with Sarah Blakely, inventor of Spanx, and I think the world's first youngest billionaire.
3:25 Speaker 01 Yeah.
3:25 Sonal? Or something like that, right?
3:26 Speaker 01 Self-made, yeah.
3:27 Sonal? Self-made, exactly, which is actually more powerful. I just got goosebumps. It was so amazing because she had this line in your podcast, I'm in a movie, but it's a wrong movie. The sort of moment where there's a call in the middle of the action.
3:39 Speaker 01 Yeah, at that very moment, she was selling fax machines door to door. And she was going from office park to office park and constantly hearing people say, you know, no interest, no interest, no soliciting, please leave the premises. And one day, you know, she was sitting in her car, and she kind of broke down. And she thought, this is not, this is not my story. I'm supposed to be in a different story. And it was really a catalyst for her to kind of say, well, maybe I need to write my own story. Maybe I need to stop allowing my story to be written for me. And maybe I need to figure out how to write it myself. And that really was the beginning of her journey in, in, in creating Spanx.
4:16 Sonal? It also resonates with the pandemic, because I think a lot of people are feeling like they're in this middle of this time, feeling like, what story am I in? What movie are we in collectively, let alone individually? As a student of therapy, I know the power of the stories we tell ourselves.
4:31 Speaker 01 Yeah.
4:32 Sonal? So, based on all the interviews that you've done, your own journeys, all the people you've talked to, the threads you've seen, what would you say, how do we avoid this sort of failure porn effect when it comes to telling entrepreneurs' stories? Like, how do you sort of think about that in writing your book?
4:48 Speaker 01 I think that you're absolutely right. There is a, there's this fetishization of failure. And if you, if you dig a little bit, you, you realize that most of the failure evangelists are people who have the privilege to fail. They have the safety net, they can do it. And so, they lionize failure, you know, it's a badge of honor. Oh, I, you know, we, we, you know, we here at X, you know, we give a failure award out. Well, for some people, failure can be catastrophic. And some of the themes that I'm trying to kind of highlight in the book are that failure isn't about putting all your chips on the table and it's either gonna, you're either gonna make millions or you're gonna lose it all. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about failure within the context of risk mitigation.
5:31 Speaker 01 Because there are really big failures and there are small failures and there are medium failures. But failure, in whatever form it is, as long as it's, it's mitigated failure, is super important. And what I, what I try to, to show in the book through the stories of people I've interviewed is that, for the most part, most entrepreneurs are not kamikaze risk takers. Most of the time, they actually mitigate those risks.
5:58 Sonal? Yeah.
5:58 Speaker 01 There's a story I tell in the book about the difference between things that are dangerous and things that are scary. And essentially, the idea is that leaving your job to start something new is very scary. Because it's the unknown. You're entering into a completely new headspace. But staying in your job and not taking the risk and not, not, not pursuing the dream you have could be, could actually be dangerous. Because you might one day regret not having tried. And so, there's a very important distinction about the danger and the, the scariness of actually going and pursuing something. And once you can kind of... Understand those two things, it becomes a little bit easier.
6:42 Speaker 01 We know the reason why people are able to withstand challenges like the current challenge in part is because they've experienced failure in other contexts before. We know that it builds resilience. So I'm a big believer in failure, but I'm not a big believer in the fetishization of failure.
7:00 Sonal? Actually, Marc Andreessen, I think six years ago, it was based on a tweet that the goal is not to fail fast, the goal is to succeed over the long run, and the two aren't the same thing.
7:10 Speaker 01 I think that's exactly right.
7:11 Sonal? You launched a new series on your show, How I Built This.
7:14 Speaker 01 Yes.
7:14 Sonal? The resilience edition. Tell me a little bit about that, because what I find very fascinating about that is you've actually brought back people who were on the show before.
7:22 Speaker 01 Yep.
7:23 Sonal? And are telling their stories today.
7:25 Speaker 01 Yep.
7:25 Sonal? In this pandemic. And one example of an episode that I heard that really struck me was the Wayfair.
7:30 Speaker 01 Yeah.
7:30 Sonal? Founders. Do you see any recurring, I mean, it's kind of probably so early so far, and you haven't written a book about it yet, but what do you see as kind of the recurring themes of the resilience in those founders?
7:39 Speaker 01 I think the recurring theme is how creative people have been.
7:43 Sonal? Mm hmm.
7:44 Speaker 01 If their businesses are not doing well, in trying to find other revenue streams to keep their businesses going. We just had the founders of Luke's Lobster on. Luke's Lobster is a chain of lobster shacks all over the United States and Japan and Taiwan, and, you know, only 12 of their 30 locations are open. The co-founders, they also have a seafood business where they distribute seafood to restaurants. Well, 70% of seafood in the United States is consumed in restaurants. So a lot of lobster fishermen are dependent on Luke's Lobster to distribute their lobster. So they've really tried a bunch of different things. They're now in supermarkets, they're selling lobster mac and cheese, they're really pushing direct to consumer sales. I mean, you can buy, you can go to their website now and buy Toro and Bluefin tuna,
8:29 Speaker 01 freshly caught off, you know, the Atlantic coast for a fraction of the cost that you would buy at a sushi restaurant, because sushi restaurants aren't buying it.
8:37 Sonal? Yeah.
8:38 Speaker 01 So they're figuring out creative ways to keep their business afloat, knowing that eventually this will pass. And then, of course, there are businesses like Wayfair that anticipated a massive slowdown, raised cash very quickly when the pandemic struck, only to see that their business exploded in growth, because all of a sudden.
8:55 Sonal? Yes.
8:55 Speaker 01 Everybody was buying home, home office supplies and furniture.
8:58 Sonal? That was fascinating to me on that episode, particularly because. They talk about the guilt they felt that, wait, there's a lot of business going to zero and ours is going up. But what was also very interesting to me about that from a business planning perspective is that they did see that increase sales on your episode, but not in the areas they predicted.
9:15 Speaker 01 That's right.
9:15 Sonal? Which I thought was super interesting to see how people sort of transition in these times. What I think is really fascinating is almost all the stories you've told, both in your book and on your podcast, they're all entrepreneurs who are scratching a personal itch. It wasn't like someone who did, I'm going to be an entrepreneur for entrepreneurship's sake, a startup founder who has a spreadsheet of ideas, and I'm going to analyze them through 20 focus groups and there's my startup. Sarah Blakely is another great example. I mean, she fricking cut off the tops of pantyhose herself.
9:43 Speaker 01 That's right.
9:44 Sonal? So they fit into her pants.
9:45 Speaker 01 Exactly. I mean, think about Lisa Price. Lisa Price is an African American woman. She didn't feel like any of the skincare products available in drugstores spoke to her. She wanted natural skincare creams and lotions that were hypoallergenic, that, you know, that she could feel comfortable using. And so she made them herself. She didn't start this enterprise as a business. She was making something that solved her problem until her friends started to use it. And then their friends started to use it. And then she realized she was solving a problem for a lot of women and women of color, which as she told me on the show, you know, there were very few skincare products that spoke
10:30 Speaker 01 to her as a black woman. And she discovered many of her friends felt the same way. And that was really the genesis of Carol's Daughter, which she went on to sell for, you know, a lot of money to Revlon many years later.
10:43 Sonal? Oh, and Carol's Daughter is still a very strong product.
10:46 Speaker 01 It is.
10:47 Sonal? It's in all the drugstores. It's very well respected. It's not just like a quote, "small, little side business" even. In fact, I think it's really great because she was scratching a personal itch, as you just shared in her story. But the market, the actual, if she were ever to have done a focus group to start it off, it turns out that statistically, African American, black women are very underserved. Like, they actually-
11:07 Speaker 01 Incredibly underserved.
11:08 Sonal? Right. And they over-index on buying beauty products.
11:10 Speaker 01 It's actually one of the biggest beauty markets, I mean, proportionally the biggest beauty market in America is the black American audience market. She was solving a problem she had, and then a problem that other people had. And it's the same story again and again and again.
11:25 Sonal? Okay, so let's switch gears. So far, we've covered the themes of the call, the journey, including what happens when you hit something super unexpected like a pandemic and the destination. Now, before we switch to the meta-theme of podcasting, let's talk about another thread, both throughout your podcast and the book, storytelling. So Ben Horowitz, who you also cite in this section, has said that storytelling is your strategy.
11:52 Speaker 01 Yep.
11:52 Sonal? You quote Ben talking about how you have to answer why.
11:56 Speaker 01 Yep.
11:56 Sonal? Why do you buy the product? Why are you joining the company? Why are you excited to work here? Invest in this company? So tell me about this chapter about storytelling, which I love to talk about because I actually think the storytelling theme is incredibly powerful, not just for entrepreneurs, for people building specific products, not just startups, for people building communities for living online today. It just applies everywhere.
12:18 Speaker 01 The definition of a business is a story. And it's not only what tells your employees why they work there, or your investors, why they want to invest in it, or your customers, why they want to buy your product. But it's what tells you and reminds you why you're doing what you do.
12:37 Sonal? We forget about that sometimes, actually.
12:39 Speaker 01 We forget about it all the time, right? I mean, think about a product like RX Bar. RX Bar was basically another energy bar. When Peter Rehal had this idea, there were thousands of energy bars on the shelf, right? And he could have tried to go the regular route and tried to pitch his energy bar. But really, Peter was serving his own community. He was a CrossFitter, you know? And CrossFitters have a weird diet, you know? They don't eat dairy, they don't eat sugar, they don't eat oils. So how do you make an energy bar for his own community of friends who are CrossFitters? The result was RX Bar. It was powdered egg and dates and some nuts.
13:24 Speaker 01 And he was bringing it around to his friends at these CrossFit gyms. And slowly but surely, you know, that brand... Kind of grew because of the people who knew the story behind it. They knew why it existed. It spoke to them. He understood why he was making it. And they understood why they were consuming it.
13:45 Sonal? What you're basically saying is it means that a community has a shared story that they tell themselves. And in your own podcast, you actually don't even describe, these are stories of businesses, these are stories of products. You say they're stories of movements, which I think is really interesting.
13:59 Speaker 01 I mean, these are not just products or services. I don't want to overhype this. Ultimately, brands and businesses operate in a capitalistic environment, but people are connected to those products. And depending on what that product is, they can become both hugely transformational in someone's life and also become a regular part of someone's life.
14:22 Sonal? Well, I frankly think it's a really good thing you reference a capitalist environment they operate in. Because if anything, it means that that's how you punch above your weight and get heard in a mass crowd of people competing for the same mind share, ear share, whatever you're competing for. And people have a choice in a capitalistic environment. And what's great about this is that you choose the story you tell yourself with the product you choose to buy or adopt or whatever it is.
14:46 Speaker 01 Yeah.
14:47 Sonal? So it actually applies to the customers, to everybody.
14:50 Speaker 01 I agree. And I think a lot of companies, when they think about their story, they don't always focus on the right thing.
14:57 Sonal? What do you mean by that?
14:58 Speaker 01 Well, they tend to focus on the personality of the founder. And I'm not saying that's unimportant, but I think that oftentimes companies don't fully appreciate how much consumers want to know how their products came to be. I'll give you an example. About a year ago, I went to Procter & Gamble, one of the biggest companies in the world, one of the biggest advertisers in the world. And I visited the Procter & Gamble Museum. It's not open to the public. It's really a place for newly onboarded employees to go and learn about the company. You get a tour of the museum, it's an archive. I mean, it's a company that was sort of built before the Civil War in Cincinnati
15:39 Speaker 01 and exploded and grew through the 19th and late 19th and early 20th century and on to today. Well, one of the things they had in display there was a broomstick with a Mr. Clean bottle connected to it and a tube. Running down to the bottom of the broomstick with a maxi pad.
15:56 Sonal? Oh, my God.
15:57 Speaker 01 Mr. Clean is a Procter and Gamble product and Tampax is a Procter and Gamble product. That prototype was built by a Procter and Gamble scientist who was trying to figure out a way to make a better floor cleaner. And through that prototype, they developed the Swiffer.
16:15 Sonal? Oh.
16:16 Speaker 01 You know, there are all these really cool stories there. Oftentimes, companies and brands aren't, they're just, they kind of miss the story that's right in front of them.
16:24 Sonal? Yes. Particularly, this is fascinating, telling you this, given how I built this, is I actually think what's least interesting to me about the podcast is the grand global narrative of the stories the entrepreneur tells, because that follows the classic thing.
16:41 Speaker 01 Right.
16:41 Sonal? It's actually precisely these kinds of details you're sharing.
16:44 Speaker 01 Yeah.
16:45 Sonal? Exactly.
16:45 Speaker 01 I love those. Yep.
16:46 Sonal? And it's not just the origin stories, because we're almost wired to appreciate that type of story. But it's even funny little weird anecdotes. Like, to this day, I still remember the 70-30 split in the patent of Spanx and how the person who had a southern accent said lycra, but she heard it as lacquer.
17:05 Speaker 01 Lacquer.
17:06 Sonal? And so she put in the initial patent application that it was like 30% lacquer and 70% nylon. One of the funniest anecdotes about the Spanx thing in your book that really made me chuckle out loud was the fact that the K sound apparently resonates with comedians. Like, that's, I feel like that cannot be true.
17:24 Speaker 01 Sarah Blakely had a friend who was a comedian and who said, "Look, when I'm on stage as a comedian, that K sound, that K or X sound, that's often sort of in the punchline of a joke." And he pointed to Kodak and think about Kodak and Coca-Cola. And so she was trying to come up with a K name. But in the end, it just sort of, just spark of inspiration came to her, and it was Spanx. Now, of course, it doesn't mean every company or business has to have a X in it, right, to make it innovative?
17:58 Sonal? So let's switch gears and talk about two of my favorite chapters in your book, which were on building buzz and engineering word of mouth. And you made the argument at the very outset of the chapters that you believe that they're often conflated and that they're in fact Distinct phenomena. Tell me why, and then we can break down what they are.
18:18 Speaker 01 Yeah, so building buzz is something that you can do everything in your power to try and generate. You can hire publicists, you can work on a marketing campaign, digital marketing campaign. There are also tricks. One of the examples I gave is a story of Away. And what Jen Rubio did, she had been a social media person at Warby Parker early in her career, when that company was just starting out. And one of the things that she did to build buzz for that brand was every time somebody bought a pair of Warby Parker glasses online, she would message them and say, hey, take a photograph of your city through Warby Parker glasses, and then we'll post it on our social media.
19:03 Speaker 01 And that became a huge phenomenon. And that really sort of helped them to scale their social media following, which created more and more and more buzz. Albers is another good example. When they started out, they didn't have a whole, they didn't raise a whole lot of money to launch their brand. But what they did was they spent it very wisely on a very good publicist. And that was like, an enormous part of their budget.
19:26 Sonal? You're definitely preaching to the choir when it comes to this idea that you should hire PR. We're always having to tell technical founders who actually don't think, they think their products sell themselves. And sometimes we're having to tell them, no, you actually have to sell it, but there's an orchestration to it. And we have podcasts we've done on the art of PR and how to manage it.
19:42 Speaker 01 I mean, building buzz requires real strategic thought. And oftentimes, it doesn't require a lot of money. Sometimes it's about sort of striking at the right place and doing it in the right way. Word of mouth is a different kind of marketing tool. And that's like, probably the most valuable marketing capability you can harness. And I would argue that, you know, look, you can, you can engineer word of mouth, like, for example, a Tupperware party, right? Or you can organize some event, and you have your friends there, and then the hope is that they are going to tell other people about it. The reality is that organic word of mouth is probably the holy grail of marketing. We actually have a
20:25 Speaker 01 An episode that we did on RadWagon, these are electric bikes, e-bikes. And, you know, people learn about that bike through word of mouth. They're bright orange, they're really beautiful. And essentially, when someone's on it, somebody who's interested in it will stop that person to ask them about it. Why? Well, I'm sure a lot of people are familiar with Seth Godin. He talks about products that are extraordinary and products that are ordinary. He's got the purple cow theory. If you're driving in, you know, in the countryside and you pass by a pasture and a cow is just in the pasture, you're not going to stop the car. But if you're driving by a pasture and there's a purple cow in that pasture,
21:10 Speaker 01 you're going to stop your car, take a picture and tell all your friends about it, right? Because it's extraordinary.
21:15 Sonal? Just to kind of tie up this idea of the distinction between the two phenomena. In your book, you basically kind of made this loose distinction between brand awareness and then the actual acquisition and fandom is like the next thing. So it's not just enough to get brand awareness, you have to actually convert.
21:31 Speaker 01 Yeah. This, I mean, this is a famous thought experiment, right? If a tree, you know, falls in the forest and no one's around to hear it, does it make a sound? And I think it's the same concept with a product. You may have a pretty great product or a pretty awesome thing, but if nobody knows about it, that's it. It's sort of dead in the water. And there are examples of really cool products that, you know, for a variety of reasons, just didn't, didn't actually make it because people didn't hear about it. And, I mean, look, we live in a marketplace full of noise. So the challenge is, how do you, how do you get your product or service out into the world in a way where people can hear it above the din that they're exposed to all the time?
22:16 Speaker 01 I mean, Randy Hetrick was a Navy SEAL. He was deployed overseas and he didn't have access to, you know, to workout gear. So he basically invented these straps that we now know of as TRX straps that would enable him to do all the exercise he wanted to do. You know, body weight exercises from wherever, wherever he could find a doorway. And initially, you know, he had to kind of explain this product to people because it was very new and different and people weren't really sure how to use it. So he would go to trade shows, he would go to fitness centers. He would really work very closely, particularly with private trainers and trainers and gyms. And then he would give them a pair of straps in the hope that they would use it. You know, he would show them how it worked.
23:00 Speaker 01 He would provide them with a free strap or two and then kind of send them out to the world. And these trainers, these early trainers ultimately became his biggest evangelists. And, you know, he was very lucky that in that one of the people who happened to kind of find out about this product was Drew Brees, you know, the NFL quarterback and started to use TRX straps and was actually photographed in Sports Illustrated using them. And that was, you know, that was like transformational for Randy and his business.
23:30 Sonal? I think the thing that resonated for me, though, in thinking about that is that A, you're describing, again, this idea that the story is a shared story that the community shares, which I think is absolutely critical. But I also love that when he went to a conference or a show, I think, I forgot it was called Something World.
23:49 Speaker 01 Yep.
23:50 Sonal? In your book, yes, that it's a combination of demonstration and explanation. And I feel like that should be obvious, but it's not obvious, actually, because this is something we say all the time in the storytelling business, is it show versus tell?
24:03 Speaker 01 Yeah.
24:04 Sonal? You know, but you're actually saying in that anecdote, it's both.
24:07 Speaker 01 It's both.
24:08 Sonal? You have to show and tell.
24:09 Speaker 01 You've got to show how it works and you've got to explain it and talk about it.
24:12 Sonal? What do you think in this day and age, given that you worked with words and you've been working in the medium of audio, I too have gone along this line of text to audio. But I feel like we're in a world and a marketplace of storytelling today that's very dominated by images. And that's what struck me about your story that you told in your book about Instagram founders and how they originated, Buzz. This idea of the image at the center. Now we're living in the age of TikTok and memes. Do you have any thoughts on where the image does and doesn't come in?
24:40 Speaker 01 I think images are super hugely important, but the reason why I'm a big believer in audio. Audio is because you can do many things at the same time. You can drive, you can run, you can cook, you can multitask. And audio information is not a new, it's not a new thing. Podcasting is not a new medium. Yes, it is a new technology. You know, since, since Neolithic ages, humans have been sitting around fires telling stories.
25:05 Sonal? Yes, I always say this too. When I talk about podcasting, it is like this original behavior of storytelling around a fire. But now we can scale that sense of intimacy that's one to one,
25:15 Speaker 01 Yes.
25:15 Sonal? one to many at a scale that we never could before.
25:18 Speaker 01 Yep.
25:18 Sonal? And I would even go so far to argue that not only can you do other multitask with audio, but that you have new and different layers of intimacy, that there's actually a weird barrier with images. At least for me, when I watch videos, I'm very aware of a screen interface.
25:33 Speaker 01 I agree.
25:33 Sonal? That kind of, yeah, I mean, I guess we are going to agree with each other. So let's talk about podcasting for a few minutes.
25:38 Speaker 01 Sure.
25:39 Sonal? You know, I actually heard you at Podcast Movement last year. It was interesting because it was right after Tom, Tom Webster of Edison Research gave his report on the state of podcasting. And I've always followed his work from very early days, pre podcasting. And he talked about how the industry was seeing a really unusual inflection point, particularly last year. You've been a longtime podcaster and actually radio storyteller.
26:01 Speaker 01 Yeah.
26:01 Sonal? What would you say the biggest shift in the industry has been when you think of the podcasting landscape from your vantage point?
26:08 Speaker 01 Well, it's changing all the time. And nowadays, it's becoming more and more about consolidation. So I think what we're seeing now in podcasting is a little bit of what we saw in cable television and in television in general over the last, you know, 15 years, which is your favorite shows are going to one platform. And, and we're starting to see the early signs of that with, with the podcasting industry. It's a very different industry from television in that it's so disaggregated and the barrier to entry is, there is no barrier to entry. Anybody can, anybody can do it. There are a million podcasts in the English language and, you know, Probably only 4,000 of those, maybe 3,000 of those podcasts have 1,000 or more listeners a week.
26:53 Speaker 01 A very, very small number, right?
26:54 Sonal? Yeah.
26:55 Speaker 01 The vast majority of podcasts are heard by five or 10 people, which is fine. There's nothing wrong with that. But I think in general, as money has become a bigger part of it, it has really reshaped what people make, how people make it. I mean, you see a lot of a big focus on true crime. There's an increasing focus on sex-themed shows. And all that's fine. I think that it's, but it's, you know, it's happened very quickly. Podcasting really was like in a different place, even five years ago, 10 years ago, for sure. And my hope is that we will see, you know, we will still continue to see, and hopefully it will be incentivized, more content that is really designed to illuminate, you know, and educate people.
27:40 Sonal? Yeah.
27:41 Speaker 01 I think that's important. What I try to do with all of my shows, whether it's How I Built This, or My Kids Show Well in the World, or Wisdom from the Top, is to educate people, to offer real, you know, new ideas that people haven't been exposed to, and hopefully actionable ideas, but also to entertain people and also to inspire them. And I think there's a lot of room for more of that content.
28:04 Sonal? You've built multiple successful shows, and they're different kinds, but you're apparently the first person to have three shows in the top 20 on the Apple Podcast charts. What would you say is one of your best interview tips if you were to tell other people who are also creating their own show, something that we want to see more of?
28:18 Speaker 01 It sounds really simple, but it's something I've worked on for 25 years, which is, listen. Listen actively. When you're interviewing somebody, the most important thing you can do, and the easiest way to honor somebody, is to really listen to them and to ask questions and acknowledge their story.
28:45 Speaker 01 As an active listener, and the closer you listen, the more people will want to share with you. And that doesn't only apply to podcasting, and I think it applies in life.
28:55 Sonal? It's interesting, because Ben Horowitz actually once interviewed Oprah, and she's God. I mean, in like, interview world. And apparently, she said that her number one tip is that the follow-up question is the most important question. And I think that really ties to what you're saying.
29:09 Speaker 01 Yes.
29:09 Sonal? You can't ask the right follow-up question without that active listening, to really know where to probe, and to probe, actually.
29:18 Speaker 01 Yeah.
29:18 Sonal? I'll say that the other thing that I always tell editors is that being a shepherd for the audience is one of the number one things you can do. I think a lot of interviewers forget to do this, where they just kind of treat every conversation as a Q and A, versus that you're actually taking your listener on a journey. And so you need to do a lot of signposting to like, signal to your listener, where are we, where are we going, here's where we're coming back.
29:40 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think that that's right. And, you know, that's what I try to do. I try with with every show I do to create an arc, that you know that there's going to be a journey. And that's the kind of the value proposition that that I try to bring to the shows.
29:56 Sonal? When you do a series or a themed show, honestly, everything begins to feel the same after a while. It just does. Even though you have different stories and color, the subtitle of your book talks about unconventional wisdom. Like, what really, if you take a step back, did you just say, that was unexpected? What really truly surprised you in doing your show, and hearing these entrepreneur stories, and writing your book, and culling these insights?
30:19 Speaker 01 I think the most surprising thing is how ordinary and like, the rest of us, these entrepreneurs are. We lionize entrepreneurs too much in our society. We think that they're superheroes, and I fear that we talk about them in that way. And the reality is that they are just like us. We are just like them. And the reality also is that most entrepreneurs are not starting, you know, Uber or whatever. They're they're running a corner store. They have, they're running a small enterprise. And the mentality of- Of entrepreneurs who make it big and become so-called unicorns are often no different than your mentality or my mentality. One of the things I noticed when I first moved to the Bay Area was that the sort of
31:03 Speaker 01 iconic parts of the city of San Francisco, you've got the Salesforce Tower, and then you go down Market Street, you see Twitter and whatever other companies are on that street. But really, the enduring parts of the city are like Ghirardelli Square, and Levi's Plaza, and the Wells Fargo Building. And you think about all of those companies, and they exist because 30, 40,000 people came to the Bay Area in one summer in 1849 or 1850 to search for gold. They heard of Sutter's Mill. And as we all know, almost nobody made money off that gold rush. No one really found a whole lot of gold.
31:46 Speaker 01 But the people who actually made money and endured were Domingo Ghirardelli, who sold baked goods and chocolates to the gold rush, or Levi Strauss, who sold tents, and then eventually canvas jeans. Wells and Fargo, who started a courier service. They were actually founders of American Express. They moved out to California, and they started a courier service to deliver goods to miners. I mean, these are the enduring brands and names. And it really got me to thinking about how some of the best businesses aren't the businesses that are going for the obvious gold mine. It's companies that are thinking about building products and services adjacent.
32:28 Sonal? One question I have for you, particularly because you are newer to the Bay Area, but also because you've interviewed quite a mix of entrepreneurs. Do you think there's a difference between the tech and non-tech founders when you talk to all of them, just anecdotally?
32:41 Speaker 01 I think the energy and the spirit is the same. Very intentionally, only a minority of the episodes we've done have been about tech companies. Most of what we focused on are products that you can buy in a store. You know, things that you can go to Walmart and pick up, you know, Happy Baby, or hop on Southwest Airlines, or, you know, things like that.
33:03 Sonal? And is that because you want your listener to be able to relate to the product?
33:06 Speaker 01 Exactly, exactly. And while I love tech companies, and I think they're incredibly fascinating and important, we focused on, of course, Slack, and Lyft, and Shopify, and Stripe, and a few others. You know, there is definitely a difference between a tech founder who is technical, and somebody like, you know, Stacy Madison, who makes Stacy's Pita Chips. I mean, both of them are creating something, right?
33:30 Sonal? Yeah.
33:31 Speaker 01 Both of them are creating something they know how to do. I mean, the Colson Brothers, who created Stripe, their version of Stacy's Pita Chips was the line of code that they wrote.
33:40 Sonal? Yes.
33:40 Speaker 01 And that was their skill set. And so I think that, in general, there isn't a whole lot of difference. It's just a difference in terms of what, obviously, what they're building, and what their skill sets are. But I find that, in general, most of the entrepreneurs that I've interviewed, who are successful, are working on things that they either know a little bit about, or have some experience in, in some way.
34:03 Sonal? Yeah, we talk about this idea as founder-market fit, that there's sort of this visceral match between the founder and their market. And this also goes back to what we were saying earlier, that you can't spreadsheet your way into all the stories that you've told, at least on your show, and even in our own observation. It's people who've traveled, quote, "an idea maze" to get to their place.
34:21 Speaker 01 Yes.
34:21 Sonal? And that's so in alignment. So, okay, a meta-theme here, of course. And I love that you have kept the focus on all the stories of the people whose stories you tell. It's like a good host and a good editor, frankly. But let's face it, Guy, you're a part of the story, too. You're the host and co-creator of three NPR programs, and you actually started your own production company in order to pull all this off. So, when you think about your own journey as an entrepreneur, and I'm absolutely sure you've been asked this question on multiple other interviews, but I care about this as a fellow person in the world, what would you say your biggest lesson learned has been in sort of being the story, and not just telling other people's stories?
35:00 Speaker 01 Well, I think what I've learned, and what I've come to understand, is that people see others whom they perceive to be successful. They naturally make assumptions about what that means. "I'd love to be like this person because they are successful." The reality is that... In my case, and I think in the case of most people who have found success in their fields, there are a lot of ups and downs. There are a lot of moments in your career and in your life, and even in your success, that are very challenging and difficult. Sleepless nights, anxiety-riven fears, moments of real despair and failure. And I have come to understand that because I'm perceived to be successful in my field,
35:45 Speaker 01 and look, I have been, I admit, I also have responsibility to remind people that I'm not a superhero. And here are some of the ways I have really failed. And here are some of the mistakes I made. And here are some of the setbacks I had. And it's gonna be okay. You're gonna be okay.
36:03 Sonal? I love that. I love that the dedication of your book is for builders and those dreaming of building. There was a recent New York Times op-ed that this idea of optimism is kind of almost this weird thing. It kind of frames almost this false dichotomy between optimism and pessimism. And it's really interesting, because I actually think optimism is such a striking feature of your work on How I Built This, and in your book, too. Some of these stories have a lot of hardship and criticism in them, but people survive and they're resilient. Do you have any thoughts on this whole kind of debate playing out right now between optimism and pessimism, and how to tell that narrative when it comes to building so that builders feel supported, but not as to be enabling them?
36:43 Speaker 01 Look, I don't think that I am unrealistically optimistic, and I don't think people should be either. I think that blind optimism is as dangerous as being overly pessimistic. In fact, more dangerous, because it blinds you to realities that sometimes you have to foresee and protect yourself against. And here we are, we find ourselves in a situation that probably was unanticipated for many of us. Where I sort of kind of come to is the idea of possibility. I believe in the idea of possibility, because... It's connected to optimism. I mean, I think we don't have any choice but to kind of subscribe to a version of optimism. Otherwise, we wouldn't be able to get out
37:24 Speaker 01 of bed in the morning. We have to, you know, we have to have some kind of version of optimism in our minds. But possibility to me is more important and more intriguing because possibility encompasses all kinds of things. I mean, it encompasses failure, it encompasses collapse, it encompasses setbacks and crises, but it can, it also encompasses the possibility to recover and to be reborn and to regrow. And when I look at the state of things in the United States today and with the pandemic and the economy and the turmoil, I do still believe in possibility. I'm not always optimistic every day that everything is going to get better, but I believe that there's a possibility that, and a good possibility, that we can
38:08 Speaker 01 work through it and that we can, we can make things better. And that, to me, is also more empowering than just, just being optimistic. Being, believing in possibility to me is, it, it makes me feel like I have some agency and that's where I, that's where I stand.
38:27 Sonal? Thank you for joining the A6 and Z podcast. This is our show with Guy Raz. His new book is How I Built This: The Unexpected Paths to Success from the World's Most Inspiring Entrepreneurs, including yourself. Thank you, Guy.
38:42 Speaker 01 Thank you, Sunal. Thank you.
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