Squarespace: Anthony Casalena

Like many classic technology stories, Squarespace started in a college dorm room. In 2003, 21-year-old Anthony Casalena created a website-building tool for himself. But after hearing some positive feedback from friends, he decided to put the tool online and start a business. For years, Anthony ran Squarespace almost entirely on his own but the stress took a toll and he reached the limits of what he could accomplish by himself. The journey to hiring a staff and scaling the company had its own set of growing pains for Anthony, including difficulty letting go of control, and learning how to manage other people. Today, Squarespace has grown to more than 800 employees, and valued at $1.7 billion. PLUS in our postscript "How You Built That," how Kate Westervelt took an overwhelming experience and turned it into a gift box for new moms – filled with essential items women need to recover from childbirth. 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.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Somewhere along the way, I get like a call on my cellphone from a customer. That guy's like, "Hey, is Squarespace OK?" So I call the data center. I'm like, "Hey, can you reboot this server?" And it doesn't come back. And it wasn't coming back. Completely crashed.

• 0:18Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 0:19Speaker 00

  And I was like, "I gotta go to New York right now." And I just drive to New York. And I'm like, having a panic attack the whole way up because I'm like, "It's screwed. I lost all the data. It's all gone." That little experiment's over.

• 0:33Guy Raz?

  From NPR, it's How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

• 0:47Guy Raz?

  I'm Guy Raz, and on today's show, how Anthony Casalena's dorm room coding project grew up and turned into Squarespace, and how Anthony grew up with it.

• 1:05Guy Raz?

  So in business schools, they teach a bunch of ideas about entrepreneurship. But the simplest one, the one that is the clearest path to creating something unique, is this: Find a problem that lots of people have and solve it. So for example, how can I get from this exact point I'm standing on to another specific point two miles away in a relatively fast and cheap way? Well, in most cities in America, Uber and Lyft have solved that problem. Or, how can I get a cheap pair of cool prescription glasses? That's the question the guys behind Warby Parker wanted to answer. Or, what about, how do I build my own website?

• 1:47Guy Raz?

  OK, I think you know where this is going, because today, that is not a problem. But not that long ago, to build a website, you either needed to know how to code, or know someone else who knew how to code and charged you money to make that site. And this, of course, was the problem that Anthony Casalena wanted to solve. Now, before I go on, I'm gonna-- Acknowledge the elephant in the room here because yes, in the past, Squarespace has sponsored this podcast and so have other companies that do similar things. And I promise you, that fact will never influence which companies we profile on the show. We look for great stories and the story of Squarespace, as you will hear, is pretty

• 2:29Guy Raz?

  great. Anthony Casalena literally created his product in a dorm room at the University of Maryland in 2003. He was 21, a self-taught coder, and looking for a way to combine a blog and a website, go figure. And out of that small problem he wanted to solve, came Squarespace. It's a company that's now valued at around $1.7 billion. Anthony grew up outside Baltimore in the early 90s, just as the internet was becoming a mainstream thing. His dad worked in sales for companies like HP and Cisco, so Anthony was exposed to a lot of computer hardware from a young age.

• 3:09Speaker 00

  My dad always had computers around, so I would break those and incur the wrath of my parents. And eventually, I got to a point where they were sick of me breaking their computers and ended up buying me or getting one that I could break myself, which I, you know, learned how to load games onto and learned a little bit of BASIC and stuff like that. And this was like the era of like, you know, 286s, 386s, DOS, Windows 3.1, Windows 95, that kind of era. But I was always really, really into that.

• 3:44Guy Raz?

  So you started to learn how to program, basically, as a kid. Like, how old were you?

• 3:49Speaker 00

  Probably 13, 14. Because when I was 15, I worked for an internet company in Maryland, in Baltimore, actually. They were trying to actually recruit my dad. And, you know, my dad was like, I'm busy, I'm employed, etc. But, you know, my son's a good programmer. You should talk to him.

• 4:06Guy Raz?

  Just to put this in the right timeframe, we're talking about the mid to late 90s.

• 4:11Speaker 00

  I think you're talking about the mid 90s. I mean, the web was really new. I mean, it wasn't like a common thing. And I kind of gravitated towards this thing called Internet Relay Chat. So it's like this like global chat room you can kind of go into. And it was like the Wild West of the Internet. Like you were connected to this this network. And, you know, I remember some of the earliest programming I did was programming scripts to go into the IRC client. That would control it and give it new functionality and things like that. And I also was around people who knew Windows programming. And I was obsessed with the user interfaces. And I learned a lot of Windows programming because I just wanted to know how it all how it all worked.

• 4:52Speaker 00

  I mean, it's really cool. I don't know why I was so fascinated by all that, but I was definitely into it.

• 5:00Guy Raz?

  So you, I guess, you decide when it's time to go to college, you you went to the University of Maryland.

• 5:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 5:05Guy Raz?

  And you are studying computer science. And at that time, like, people are starting to blog and

• 5:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 5:14Guy Raz?

  build websites. And I guess you wanted to do one for yourself.

• 5:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, this was like 2003. And in 2003, I wanted to make a website for myself. And I'll say two things about doing that. One, at the time, you had all these different software programs you would have to put together to make what you would normally think of as a website right now, right? So you had blogging software, but that's separate than page building software, right? Like, that was like at the time, Dreamweaver and FrontPage and all that.

• 5:43Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 5:43Speaker 00

  And then you had separate software that would like tell you who's visiting the website. It'd be like StatCounter or something, like one of these really old things. And then you have to like go and upload that somewhere and host that somewhere. And there was like these old hosting services that that you would use. And I just didn't, I didn't want, I didn't want this mishmash of things. And the other thing that I was really into is, you know, I was just always into the way it looked, the way the interface worked. And I knew that people were going to find this was going to be like my, how they see me online. And so I wanted, I wanted that to be good.

• 6:14Guy Raz?

  So you, so you wanted to create a blog and a website. You could have done that, right? Like, there was LiveJournal and GeoCities. I don't even remember, but there were

• 6:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, that kind of, there was TypePad, movable type.

• 6:26Guy Raz?

  Yeah, it was pretty easy to create a blog, even in 2003, right?

• 6:29Speaker 00

  Well, not really, no. I think that

• 6:34Speaker 00

  There was LiveJournal, but that wasn't a very... I mean, my site was like half professional, right? And so you didn't put your professional site on LiveJournal. And there was Blogger at the time, which again, it was very personal in nature. But I wanted more than just a blog. I wanted, you know, more of a website. And as soon as you start to do that, you know, those blogging services didn't let you do that.

• 6:55Guy Raz?

  And so you thought, all right, well, I know how to make this stuff. Let me try to figure this out.

• 6:59Speaker 00

  Yeah. And so I started making it for myself. And I would show people it, right? I mean, they would be like, check this thing out I made. It's blogging software. And they can make a website with it, too. Isn't that cool? And I remember one of my friends being like, I'll give you 200 bucks for that. And I'm like, okay, maybe other people could use this. And so I started turning it into like a multi-user service where people could go and they could sign up and, you know, it was self-service and they could go and create their own site and things like that. And, you know, it pretty quickly evolved into this could be a business.

• 7:33Guy Raz?

  Was the idea from the beginning to make it easy to build a website, was that, was that what you were thinking when you were creating the software?

• 7:42Speaker 00

  So it was always about publishing. I wasn't going to be able to compete with front-page Microsoft, Dreamweaver, Macromedia, and later Adobe. But when blogging happened, I see it as the kind of beginning of this DIY, do-it-yourself wave, where people who would have otherwise been a little intimidated, you know, it was this kind of like, oh, I can do this, too. But then giving them something more powerful, saying, look, you can publish a blog post, you can publish a page, you can publish a photo gallery, you can do all of these things. The blog was the anchor, but it was always about doing more with it.

• 8:18Guy Raz?

  So like, take me into your, I don't know, was it your dorm room? Like, are you sitting in front of a computer, just fingers at the keys, just like, let's get in there. I've got that, I'm looking at you, you're like 20.

• 8:28Speaker 00

  So let's see. So I'm in my dorm room in the University of Maryland. The dorm was called South Campus Commons. And I was in a, let me see, how many bedrooms was it? One, two, three, four, four bedrooms. You know, it's tiny. It's like a Single bed and there's my little desk in front of it and I have, you know, I'm too into computers, so I have two monitors, which was like a huge deal at the time. I mean, these are like CRT monitors, right? They're these like giant, like heavy, like you remember what televisions used to be like? These like ridiculous things.

• 8:59Guy Raz?

  Yeah, so you were in your dorm room just

• 9:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:02Guy Raz?

  And how long did it take you to actually build this architecture?

• 9:06Speaker 00

  So the original version of it, I started programming it in 2003, April 2003, a little bit before that. And it took me until November, December, I was kind of like done and ready to launch it. So let's say eight months.

• 9:22Guy Raz?

  And, and did you, did you have any cash, any money, any small amount of capital to actually try and launch this into a business?

• 9:33Speaker 00

  So back then, I didn't. And I did everything I could have possibly done with the, with whatever skills I had or whatever I thought I could fake, right? And so, you know, I know how to program a thing. I can write the homepage and do the, write the marketing copy. I can make the interface and all that. Now, there's a couple of things I couldn't do, right? I couldn't invent servers to run it out of nowhere. So I needed to buy some servers.

• 9:59Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 9:59Speaker 00

  And I needed money for the servers. So I, I went to my, I went to my parents who, you know, I don't know how I calculate it, but I needed 30 grand and

• 10:10Guy Raz?

  You needed $30,000 to get this

• 10:12Speaker 00

  $30,000.

• 10:12Guy Raz?

  To get this off the ground.

• 10:14Speaker 00

  And I needed, I needed these servers. I needed two of them, right? Because if one crashes, then I need a redundant one, right? I worked at this, you know, tech company I was in high school and I know that these things crash. And so I, I remember asking my dad for it and it was a fight. I remember parking, I was at the University of Maryland. I was in the, the stupid parking lot outside of the dorm. And I remember being on my phone and, and, you know, it was like, why do you need two? Why can't you have one? Why doesn't, you know, that would be half. Like, I mean, it was, it was a, it was a fight. And, you know, they eventually

• 10:50Speaker 00

  I eventually won that fight and they were the first investor in Squarespace.

• 10:55Guy Raz?

  Did you call it Squarespace already? Like, did you already pick that name?

• 11:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, I can't remember exactly when I picked it, but I needed to get the dot com, the dot net, the dot org domains. They had to be open, right? So I needed to be able to just buy them. I couldn't, you know, negotiate for them because again, I didn't have any money. So I remember Googling it at the time and there were zero Google results for Squarespace. And so I was like, okay, we're starting from zero here. And for some reason, just thought like, okay, square space, like monitors were more square at the time. They weren't as rectangular. Like, it's kind of your space online. I guess that works. And, you know, I can probably draw the logo for this. Probably going to pick like a square or something like that. But yeah, I mean, that's kind of, that's kind of where it started.

• 11:44Guy Raz?

  So if I ran into you junior year of college at University of Maryland, I was like, hey, Anthony, what's going on? And you're like, oh, I'm just working on this, this business. And I would say, well, what, what's the business? What would you say? How would you describe it?

• 11:54Speaker 00

  I call it a publishing system. I said, you know, it's a way to make websites and blogs. And I probably would lean more into blogging back then because it was more topical and people were like, what's that? Interesting. You know, and again, it meant that DIY thing was possible.

• 12:10Speaker 00

  Yeah. And I said, it's a way for people to make websites.

• 12:12Guy Raz?

  And so when you launched it in 2004, like you just, I don't know, hit a button and then, and then it just like, here it is, here's Squarespace.

• 12:20Speaker 00

  So I won the fight with my parents on the 30 grand. And well, I got the servers, right? And so they were on the floor of my dorm room for a while. And, you know, most people have never been in a data center. These are not like normal computers. They're like really flat, really long and really, really loud. And so they were so loud that I'd have to keep them off because otherwise it's just like intolerable. It's like terrible. And so back at the time, I read a lot about software development. One of the blogs I read was this guy, Joel Spolsky. And his blog was hosted in New York by a company called PeerOne. And so I was like, oh, okay. Well, when I do a data center, PeerOne sounds good. They like Joel. And so I,

• 13:06Speaker 00

  I visited New York as a kid and there's just something about it that I just knew, I just knew I wanted to be there eventually. And so I drove them up in my car, plugged everything in and turned them on, checked that I could remotely connect to them and went and had dinner in New York and then drove back to Maryland.

• 13:29Guy Raz?

  So when you, when you launched Squarespace, like from the perspective of a customer, it was just a website that people would, would find?

• 13:40Speaker 00

  Right, so when I turned it on and I was like, well, how am I going to get people to show up? Like, I guess you can do advertising. And so I bought a bunch of Google AdWords, well, not a bunch, I bought like 200 bucks of Google AdWords under like, build a website, make a blog, like all these different things. And a couple people came to Squarespace. It might have been like three. Like, I mean, we're talking like, not a lot of signups, or like 10.

• 14:04Guy Raz?

  By the way, what did it cost to sign up for Squarespace in those first two months? Do you remember?

• 14:08Speaker 00

  So, little known fact is, actually, for the first year, we did have a free plan. You could actually use it for free. We always had a free trial, we still have a free trial. But back then, I actually had a free plan. And the idea, you know, there were plenty of examples of people giving away software for free and those things growing a lot. Like Blogger was free, millions of accounts, or Myspace, whatever. Like, people would be like, you give it away for free and then people are going to upgrade. And so, in the first year, I realized that there were a lot of people who were going to use this thing for free that were never, ever, ever going to upgrade. And again, I'm running this, like, I don't have, like, other money, so I need to, like, keep this thing running.

• 14:50Speaker 00

  So I don't want the people who are free, who are never going to upgrade, using up all the server space. So, and it was really not the point of the thing. It was, I was not out there trying to make the next LiveJournal or Blogger. I wanted the, let me focus on the people that want to pay for this. And I forget what it cost at the time, between five and 15 bucks a month, you know, really inexpensive.

• 15:09Guy Raz?

  So, did you, I mean, in that, in 2004, that first year, I mean, you were still a student and running this thing, and what did that mean? Like, how, what did your life look like at that point?

• 15:23Speaker 00

  You know, it was interesting how it evolved because, you know, it was a year of like, at the end of the year, I mean, we're probably making 50 grand a year. My parents were like, where are you going to get a job after college? That's a nice little side project, but where's, where's your job? And I really started to see at the end of that year, what if I doubled or tripled that? Like, I mean, people are, they stay around, right? Like, they make a website, they're not leaving quickly. I'm going to try and grow this. And so I actually stayed on, instead of graduating in four years, I waited and graduated in five and kind of took some, like, let's just say, pretty light workload classes on that fifth year. I was buying myself time, right? I was buying myself out of like, my parents really getting on my case about getting a job because I gotta pass, I'm in school.

• 16:06Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 16:07Speaker 00

  I mean, I think that they were the inklings of how it would later impact my life, but I don't think it really had hit me.

• 16:12Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 16:13Speaker 00

  I didn't see that stuff coming. Like, I, I, there's a lot of these events along the way. One of the early ones was, I was with my friend and we were taking a road trip to Miami. So driving to Miami, which is like a 17-hour drive, somewhere along the way, I get like a call on my cellphone from a customer. And a guy's like, hey, uh, is Squarespace okay? And I'm like, I don't know. Like, driving to Miami. And I just told my friend, like, I'm like, take me to an internet cafe or something, right? Because this is ridiculous. I mean, this is 2004. This is a different world of internet. And I like, log on and like, remotely login to the servers and like, reboot something and it comes back. And I'm like, and it was like, my first taste of this, like, responsibility.

• 16:55Speaker 00

  And, uh, yeah, a little foreshadowing of, of what would then happen to me later.

• 17:01Guy Raz?

  In your, um, you graduated from college in 2005, right?

• 17:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:07Guy Raz?

  And by the time you graduated college, I've heard that you, you guys had like, about 10,000 accounts and, you know, it started to look pretty good.

• 17:17Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 17:17Guy Raz?

  But you were the only person, right? You were the engineer and designer and support rep and, and CEO.

• 17:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, I was, I was kind of everything. I mean, so in the first year, I think we were like, a run rate of like, 50 grand. And in the second year, I think we were at a run rate of like, 200 grand. You know, it wasn't like a million bucks overnight. But it, um, in year two, I was able to convince my parents that, you know, I'm gonna do this. And I started looking for apartments in New York. I knew I wanted to be in New York. I put the servers there. Um, it was like the scene of- These like really happy moments in my life, but also these like incredibly traumatic moments in my life. Where there was another thing that happened maybe a year in, where I didn't have a lot of space in the data center. So I couldn't actually fit all the servers in the data center.

• 18:05Speaker 00

  And so I had my redundant one, but it was in my dorm room. And so at some point, this happened again. Things blacked out. Somebody's like, hey, it's down. Okay, I try and log into it. Can't log into it. Okay. So I called the data center. I'm like, hey, can you reboot this server?

• 18:19Guy Raz?

  Hmm.

• 18:20Speaker 00

  And it doesn't come back. Completely crashed.

• 18:22Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 18:22Speaker 00

  And it wasn't coming back. And I was in Maryland. I was with, you know, my girlfriend at the time. And I was like, I gotta go to New York right now. And so within 15 minutes, we just got the car, put the server in the backseat, and I just drive to New York. And I'm like having a panic attack the whole way up. Because I'm like, it's screwed. I lost all the data. It's all gone. That little experiment's over. Like, I should have had the other thing there, replicated all the stuff. And I had levels of redundancy, but just not that many. And so I remember going up there and being like, I hope this works. And taking both of the computers and taking all the drives out of one, slotting them into the other and turning the thing back on. And it turned on and everything was fine.

• 19:03Guy Raz?

  So after college, you decide to move to New York. Obviously closer to the servers, to the data center. And it sounds like you just wanted to live there, too.

• 19:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:13Guy Raz?

  So how'd you find a place?

• 19:15Speaker 00

  So I went to Craigslist. Yeah, I didn't know anyone in the city. And so I didn't want to live alone. And there was no reason to incur that expense. And like, I moved in with four other complete strangers off of Craigslist. And it was a five-bedroom apartment on the fourth floor walk-up. And I remember I had this old BMW at the time, this black three series. I packed everything I could into this car. And I remember driving up to New York alone. And the first thing I did is made like an illegal turn over 23rd Street and got a ticket. And then the second thing that happened to me was I parked kind of in front of my place.

• 19:59Speaker 00

  I'm like, OK, I guess I have to be double parked. Like, there's nothing else to do, but I'm going to be running in and out of my car. It'll be fine. And carrying all my stuff up the stairs, literally alone. At the end of the last trip, I was just sitting there on my floor. And it was getting a little bit dark. And I was like, take a minute, because this is just exhausting. And I go down, my car's towed. So it's like, I'm just piled with tickets and no car. And I remember going back up to my room and realizing like, I don't even have a light in this room. Like, just no lamp. This is like, you know, New York crap. So I go to like the tow yard or whatever on the west side, get my car and call up one of my best friends who lived in Philadelphia.

• 20:44Speaker 00

  And so I went back to Philadelphia, returned to New York the next day, bought myself a lamp, bought myself a bed, and went on from there.

• 20:54Guy Raz?

  Now, this is 2006, and I think Squarespace was still just you, right?

• 21:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I had at some point along the way, a part-time, this was the end of this, somebody who was doing part-time customer support. And then I had contracted out somebody to do some of the helping me with the template designs. But there were no full-time employees, no.

• 21:17Guy Raz?

  And was your office your room in your apartment?

• 21:21Speaker 00

  It was.

• 21:21Guy Raz?

  And were your roommates at the time? Like, were they just thinking, oh, that's Anthony. He's like doing this internet thing?

• 21:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, they had no clue what to do. Like, I mean, because it's like, it's New York, right? And it's New York 10 years ago. This is not like Silicon Valley. They're like, what do you do? You make websites? Whatever. Anyway, they couldn't tell us. They're like startup? They're like, oh, you're unemployed. Interesting. That's cool.

• 21:45Guy Raz?

  So let's say in 2006, you're doing about $250 in revenue a year.

• 21:50Speaker 00

  Something like that.

• 21:51Guy Raz?

  Which, which sounds like a lot of money for a guy in his early or mid-20s. Were you making a lot of money? Was there a lot of profit? Or was it just, were your expenses?

• 22:02Speaker 00

  I would put it 100% back in as much as I could. If I made 20 bucks on AdWords, I'd put 20 bucks back in AdWords. If I made 1,000 bucks on AdWords, I'd spend 1,000 more bucks on AdWords. If I spent, you know, I keep a little bit of a balance in case I needed it for something, but I would just put almost all of it back in. And Yeah, I mean, I didn't have a problem paying my rent.

• 22:22Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 22:22Speaker 00

  I was going out with other people my age, so it wasn't like.

• 22:25Guy Raz?

  Yeah, you weren't going to Michelin three-star restaurants.

• 22:27Speaker 00

  No, no, I couldn't even find someone to go with me if I wanted to. And at some point, I forget exactly when, but I ended up being like, OK, I should, I should have an office. Just to split up work day and not work day. And so I remember being like, OK, well, let's see. And so, of course, go back to Craigslist, where apparently everything is. And I rented a desk from this architect down in West Broadway and Beach. So it's like Tribeca.

• 22:57Guy Raz?

  But you were still doing most everything, like you were the, you were the CTO, the CEO. You were designing stuff.

• 23:04Speaker 00

  Yep, for a while.

• 23:05Guy Raz?

  And, and how did you cope with that? Was that, was it exciting? Was it amazing or were you stressed out or what?

• 23:12Speaker 00

  I think it took me years to fully appreciate what the stress was really doing to me. You know, at some point in this, two things happened. One, I stopped making progress. I would set these minor goals for myself, like the simple things, like, OK, I want this feature out in a month. And then, you know, at the end of the month, it's like, nah, I just, I ran AdWords, I paid my taxes and like, you know, I answer customers. And I think, wow, I didn't actually get anywhere. And so I started to be like, OK, this isn't going to work. And two, started to sort of like have, yeah, it was like panic attacks. You know, and I didn't know what that was or where that's from, or I had never experienced that in my life before.

• 23:52Guy Raz?

  Like, like heart palpitations and just, just.

• 23:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, hearts racing, your throat's closing up, you can't breathe. It basically feels like you're having a heart attack or what you think in your mind to be a heart attack.

• 24:02Guy Raz?

  Do you remember what would trigger those?

• 24:04Speaker 00

  You know, here, here's the funny thing, and it's why I said that I didn't really appreciate what it was doing to me. It was almost nothing would trigger it. You'd just be kind of there and you'd start to get in your head and start to focus on it and start to get stressed. And, you know, yes, it was stressful in the moments where the server would crash or something and my heart would be racing. But, but that's not a panic attack. Panic attacks, like you're just sitting there at like 2:00 PM in your room, hanging out, and your heart's racing. You don't know why.

• 24:31Guy Raz?

  But, but what was stressing you out? Would you remember what the things that would stress you out?

• 24:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, I, I, I think that. Trying to do it alone for a while, the infrastructure side of it, I can't really like explain to you how stressful this was because eventually, after this thing crashed a bunch, you set up monitoring. And the monitoring checks it. And if it crashes, or there's a performance problem or whatever, it would send a message to my phone. And so it would happen in the middle of the night. It would happen if I'm out to dinner. And you never know what's wrong with it. So it's always like this psychological, here you go. Figure it out. Figure out why it's broke. Like, and there's no one else who can save you because no one else knows. Because you wrote the whole thing, so go for it. It was like, in a way, I was really free because I was in New York and I had control over my schedule and all those.

• 25:20Speaker 00

  And I didn't have any employees. And yeah, it was a self-service thing. On the other hand, I'm completely and totally trapped.

• 25:30Guy Raz?

  When we come back in just a moment, how Anthony started to bring other people on board to help out and then realized that letting go of control was a lot harder than he thought. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This from NPR.

• 25:56Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This from NPR. So it's around 2006, and things are going pretty well for Anthony Casalena, at least on the business side. But personally, it's not so great. He's running Squarespace almost entirely by himself, and he's really stressed out. Squarespace is totally consuming his life. He even refuses to travel by plane because he's afraid the servers might crash while he's in the air. And so one day, someone suggests that Anthony seek out some business advice.

• 26:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, I conversed with a lot of customers over chat and people writing the support and stuff like that. And there was a point where I was having a lot of chats with this one customer and he's like, hey, I'll introduce you to somebody who is a business guy and will help you. You should talk to him for advice. And so I ended up talking to this guy for a while. His name is Dane.

• 26:52Guy Raz?

  His name is Dane Atkinson, I think, right?

• 26:54Speaker 00

  That's right. And it was like, hey, you know, you're really good, Anthony, at engineering design, all these things that you have done up to this point, you know, and are somewhat successful at, right? I mean, this is not, Squarespace is a good story up to this point, not, you know, not a bad one.

• 27:10Guy Raz?

  Sure.

• 27:10Speaker 00

  But you haven't been great at hiring, you know, you haven't hired anybody or any of that.

• 27:14Guy Raz?

  You're not good at business, he was saying.

• 27:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, I mean, some parts of business, I would say, because, I mean, this is, you know, it's funny, I look back at Squarespace at the time and it's like, this was a really successful project. This was not a really successful company, even though it really looked like a company, right? And he said, okay, you know, let's join up and I'll be the CEO and you be the founder, everything else, it'll be great. And, you know, I'm going to bring over one of my friends who's an engineer and let's start hiring people and start doing this.

• 27:42Guy Raz?

  Well, just, who was Dane? Like, what was his background? How did he convince you to do this?

• 27:48Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, he was somebody who had, he had started a couple of companies in New York. I'm kind of, I'm blanking on some of them, but he was a guy who-

• 27:58Guy Raz?

  Older than you, too?

• 27:59Speaker 00

  Yeah. Maybe like 12, 15 years older than me, something like that.

• 28:03Guy Raz?

  Right. So more experienced in the, in sort of the running businesses?

• 28:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 28:07Guy Raz?

  Yeah. How, how were you going to pay him? Was there enough revenue coming in where you were like, okay, I could, I could pay you a salary?

• 28:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, totally. You know, Squarespace always had enough money to, yeah, we always had enough money to pay people salaries. That kind of wasn't an issue.

• 28:22Guy Raz?

  So he came aboard as your CEO and presumably the goal is to grow Squarespace?

• 28:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, and, you know, for me at the time, I didn't know what it meant to have a certain title or not have a certain title. I was just like, look, this is fluid, easy. Okay, cool. I'm still running the show here. Like, I, you know, I'll just take this risk. And over the next couple of years, we moved into an office on Center Street in Soho and, you know, we started adding people to the company. And frankly, some, a lot actually joined very organically. We had- Some people joined in creative roles who were customers, actually. Some moved to New York. You know, we had a guy join and help, you know, two people help with the infrastructure.

• 29:06Guy Raz?

  And did that instantly free you up? Did that take some of the pressure off?

• 29:12Speaker 00

  Honestly, there's more people there. So I am at least not like alone and in my head. And that relieved some stress. But I think it probably created more stress for me than I realized because I didn't fully appreciate what I was doing. What I, you gotta imagine, I'm 20, what, four, five, six? I've never hired a single person in my entire life. And I'd say that, you know, through this process, I, I learned a lot about myself and I learned a lot about, a lot about dealing with people in a company. And I learned a lot of lessons, really, the hard way.

• 29:47Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 29:47Speaker 00

  By literally making, I think, pretty much every possible mistake one can make.

• 29:53Guy Raz?

  Here's what I'm curious about. You start this thing in your dorm room. It's you. You're the engineer, you're the CEO, you're the marketing guy, you're, you're, you're everything.

• 30:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:04Guy Raz?

  All of a sudden, you team up with somebody who has some business experience, who has a plan and says, look, we need to start hiring people, we need to expand, which is exciting.

• 30:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:14Guy Raz?

  But you would have to give up some control over the day-to-day running of this thing, which I can imagine was probably not easy.

• 30:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, and it didn't work for me.

• 30:25Guy Raz?

  Was there friction between you and Dane?

• 30:28Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, of course.

• 30:29Guy Raz?

  Which is very normal. I mean, this happens all the time in startups, right? This is a story we've heard on the show before.

• 30:36Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 30:38Guy Raz?

  He was there for five years and then he, he left and to start his own company.

• 30:41Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 30:42Guy Raz?

  But during that five-year period, was it really difficult for you to align what your visions were? Did you just kind of plow through that five-year period? Or was it actually OK?

• 30:56Speaker 00

  It wasn't really okay. I think, you know, look, I was young, right? And I think that people had a good intent back then. And I didn't know what I was getting into. I didn't even know what a good manager looked like. I didn't know how much stress I was supposed to have or not have. I didn't know what kind of dialogues were good or bad, like what dysfunction looked like. What, you know, I didn't know that stuff. And so I was in this mode of like, keep it all together. Just keep it together. Don't let it fall apart. Don't go back to zero people. Like, don't, just keep it together and try and find a way through this. And that was a lot of what I was, what I was thinking about.

• 31:32Guy Raz?

  So, okay, let's just get back to the actual website publishing side of things for a sec. Because, I mean, Dane's there, Squarespace is growing. This is like the late 2000s.

• 31:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 31:44Guy Raz?

  So, like, so what's happening on the, on the product side?

• 31:47Speaker 00

  So, the product at Squarespace has always been one of the primary growth drivers. And a lot of good things happened at the time. I mean, we expanded our advertising channels. Adding more people meant that I wasn't in this mode anymore where I was sort of just constantly like not hitting any goals. And so, you know, around, I'm recalling this now. Here's how this happened. So, we launched Squarespace 5, which was a huge, huge update to the platform. I mean, the year is like, I'd say 07, 08, something like that. Animations and things on a website and web apps.

• 32:26Guy Raz?

  Yes.

• 32:27Speaker 00

  Like, we're entering into a different era. And launching Squarespace 5 was, you know, one of the things that helped propel us forward. And I would say this, it was a total disaster. We flipped it on for everyone at once. It had these really hard to track down bugs. We're literally working 24/7 overnight. Every single person was doing customer support because it was just crashing and crashing. And we couldn't roll it back. And, you know, I think that we finally got through it and we kept growing up. And at the time, you know, we had a couple of people in marketing. We had more people in product. We had more people in engineering. We had eighty five thousand customers or so, ten million dollar run rate. And at some point, we were approached to sell the company.

• 33:12Speaker 00

  And yeah, so we got approached by Getty Images. And Getty sells, you know.

• 33:18Guy Raz?

  Photos, images, yeah.

• 33:19Speaker 00

  Stock photos, stock photos, stock videos, stock audio, et cetera. And one of their ideas was, well, a lot of these images end up going onto websites. Why don't we sell stock websites too? You know, there's this little company in New York that seems to be doing a pretty job. So they ended up coming and talking with me. And, you know, I don't come from like massive amount of money or anything like that. And like, you know, and I had never started Squarespace to sell it. Like, that wasn't the point. I was having a good time growing it. We were making an impact on the web. And somebody shows up with a not insignificant offer to buy the company.

• 33:56Guy Raz?

  Sure.

• 33:56Speaker 00

  And that would have been a really big thing for me. And I really, I struggled with it.

• 34:04Guy Raz?

  So, so what'd you do?

• 34:06Speaker 00

  Around the same time, I was also approached, I don't even know how they like caught wind of this, but like with some investors saying, hey, you don't have to do that. You don't have to sell it all if you want some liquidity. Why don't you accept an investment from us? We'll put some money into the company. You can sell some of your shares to us. You can keep running it. We'll put a board in place. We'll help you recruit executives and all that. And I, I liked that. And if the acquisition did anything, it caused me to go down that track and realize, I want to keep doing this. I want to keep running it. I want to sell some of my shares in the company. I want a real board in place. I want different kinds of accountability and I want a different kind of team.

• 34:48Speaker 00

  So we closed an investment from Index and Excel in July of 2010.

• 34:56Guy Raz?

  This is, these are two investment firms, Index Ventures and Excel Partners. And they invested, I think I read, what, like thirty eight million dollars?

• 35:04Speaker 00

  Yep, thirty eight point five.

• 35:06Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 35:07Speaker 00

  And I think that that was the, one of the catalysts for me kind of kicking off that era of Squarespace.

• 35:13Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 35:13Speaker 00

  After this investment, we started looking at the product. And I remember this moment with being there with one of my main product people. And we were looking at the sites that are being created on the platform. And all the business metrics were kind of fine, but not growing as well as, you know, we had. And we were starting to tap out on a couple of different ad channels where you reached kind of exhaustion, right? You can't just keep spending and not hit a point of diminishing returns. But, I mean, the web was changing. There were, the iPhone had come out. And so people were more used to saying, okay, the web experience on my phone, while different, needs to be very high fidelity. And this thing, this thing that we had, Squarespace 5, you know, it wasn't gonna, it wasn't gonna do it.

• 35:56Speaker 00

  I mean, it's, these look like blogs, they've got sidebars, this doesn't even work on phones. What is this? And so me and a couple of people started to rewrite all of Squarespace, like, the whole thing.

• 36:07Guy Raz?

  Wow. This is in, this is in 2011?

• 36:10Speaker 00

  2010. And so we start to work on Squarespace 6. And Squarespace 6, you know, look, if anyone knows what it sounds like when I'm like, oh, we'll just rewrite the thing, like, that's probably the worst thing you can do. You never want to be in a situation where you're rewriting the core of your platform. It always takes three times longer than you would expect. You know, the people who originally wrote it are sometimes no longer there. And it's usually a disaster. But, you know, I wanted to take another shot at this. That was the point of the investment. The point of the investment was, we're not done. We know we can make something better. And so over two years, a small group of people made Squarespace 6, which, really, the vision was, you know, we want to be able to create any kind of website.

• 36:52Guy Raz?

  I'm trying to imagine this, like, you resumed the role of CEO after Dane left, I think in around 2011, is that right?

• 37:00Speaker 00

  End of 2010.

• 37:01Guy Raz?

  2010.

• 37:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 37:02Guy Raz?

  And you are leading the re-

• 37:05Speaker 00

  Architecting.

• 37:05Guy Raz?

  Like, complete, re-architecture of this thing.

• 37:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm coding.

• 37:09Guy Raz?

  How were you coding and also trying to, like, be a CEO? Were you, because you're a good coder, obviously, were you able to also be a good CEO?

• 37:18Speaker 00

  I think I was in a mode where I knew I didn't have the right kind of support around me. And I think during this time, I started realizing what a horrible manager I was. You know, after this investment, it was maybe a, maybe a year after, and I ended up meeting our, our first VP of Engineering, a guy named John Colton, who's great. And I was trying to code and run the engineering team and I had all these like, you know, weird relationships and like, he just like immediately took such a massive amount of stress away from me with respect to how to be a manager, how to do one on one, how to remove roadblocks from people. Yeah, like he just, like, I just learned

• 38:01Speaker 00

  so much. I mean, because again, I've never worked anywhere else, really.

• 38:04Guy Raz?

  It sounds, Anthony, like you, I mean, because you were growing up with this company. I mean, you were a kid, you know, we matured like you, you know, we're all different versions of ourselves as we get older. Like, me at 30 and me at 20 are very different from who I am today. And it sounds like you, you started to kind of realize this. Were you okay with criticism and feedback or did you, would you get defensive?

• 38:32Speaker 00

  Um, one of the things that happened a long time ago in Squarespace, when doing a lot of customer support and doing it all alone, is like, whether you'd like the feedback or not, you're about to get a lot of it. Right? I mean, people cursing me out, saying I'm an idiot, asking to put my manager on the line, even though I'm the only person in the company. You know, like, and, and literally leaving and being like, I'm done with you, this product sucks. And so, over, over the years, I think I, I developed some amount of realization that I need to create an environment where I hear feedback and I don't always have to agree with it. But to create an environment where you don't hear it is really the scariest thing for me. Because I think that if you remain closed

• 39:13Speaker 00

  off to it, you become vulnerable to these big, like, seismic shifts where you just, you just ignored something to the point where something's really going to break. So I'm more about trying to listen to what's there and figure out what I can figure out from it. Because, look, at the end of the day, I've made so many mistakes. It would be so silly for me to sit there and, and think that I'm not making any now, like, have to be. Hopefully, I'm just more attuned to it and I'm faster at resolving things.

• 39:40Guy Raz?

  What, what, I mean, it sounds like the turning point was when this new team started to come, you started to rewrite the software. But the visibility of Squarespace also changed. Like, you guys, you guys had a pretty interesting Strategy, which was to advertise on podcasts. You've advertised on ours, full disclosure. And people weren't really doing that in 2010.

• 40:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, so we did it even before 2010. I mean, podcasts was, yeah, I remember, you know, we were gonna, we were gonna maybe try a podcast ad. The first podcast we did was This Week in Tech. And it cost like, something like 30 grand. I'm like, that's our whole AdWords budget for like, the whole month? In how many podcast reads? And what's the audience? And are you sure? Like, I don't know. But you know what? At the end of the day, let's try it. And it immediately worked for us.

• 40:31Guy Raz?

  You saw traction right away?

• 40:33Speaker 00

  Right away, right away.

• 40:34Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 40:34Speaker 00

  You could do, there's this really authentic thing around, like, you are supporting a show host. That show host has a connection with their audience. You are supporting the creation of that content. And you would never hide the fact that it's sponsored. But, you know, people genuinely were like, okay, I'm in board with this. I love podcasts. I love this show. Thank you, Squarespace, for doing this. And I think that it was a, it was a really great thing for us.

• 40:57Guy Raz?

  There was a point where it seemed like every podcast was sponsored by Squarespace.

• 41:01Speaker 00

  We tried. We really tried. Later on, there was, it was a joke when we first did our, our Super Bowl ad. Somebody was tweeting, they were like, I didn't know the Super Bowl was a podcast. So yeah, I mean, we, we went in this space and it, you know, it was great because, I mean, it's something like related to what we do, right? Squarespace supports lots and lots and lots of independent creators. And I think a lot of podcasters were independent creators. And they had, you know, voices and, and show concepts that otherwise wouldn't have, you know, existed if it wasn't for that medium. So it's really amazing to be able to support it the way we did.

• 41:35Guy Raz?

  As you sort of began to turn a corner, did the growth just come from, you know, a combination of more outside capital and the ability to market your brand more? Is that, was that the game changer for you?

• 41:49Speaker 00

  The outside capital is not it. The main driver for it was Squarespace 6 launching, and that changed everything for us. So this is in like 2012, July.

• 42:01Guy Raz?

  This is version 6 of Squarespace.

• 42:03Speaker 00

  Version 6 of Squarespace. This is the one that, you know, small team, a couple of years after this investment, came together, did the rewrite.

• 42:10Guy Raz?

  This is the one that you can use today, right?

• 42:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, this is the one that's online today. It's technically 7, but it's not a big, the version difference is not as big. And it changed all of our metrics. You know, you had all these crazy, beautiful sites you could do, the portfolio sites with full-screen images. You could use those for businesses. The sites were, it was some of the first sites that worked perfectly on mobile phones without any adjustments, right? And so that was a big deal. Without that product, Squarespace wouldn't be here.

• 42:39Guy Raz?

  I'm curious, how did you? I mean, you started this in 2003, right? In your dorm room. And there was really nothing like it out there. Today, there's a lot of competition, right? I mean, this is a much more complex world than it was when you first had Squarespace out in the world.

• 42:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. Well, in a way, what's funny is it's almost less fragmented. And, you know, I don't know if you could grow a business on AdWords the same way I did 15 years ago. Because I think people look, they look for the brand now. It's definitely a different landscape. And also, when you've got companies like us that have had such an investment over such a long period of time in this space, it's really, as we've grown, the ambition of the company has scaled. You know, it started with, can Anthony make a website for himself? To, you know, can we make blogs? And then these other kinds of websites? To, you know, the kinds of sites you can create on Squarespace 6? And then, you know, we launched a commerce platform later. So can you sell on Squarespace? And there's a lot of people selling on Squarespace. And, you know, we're just really centered around entrepreneurial success right now. Can you put the site online you want?

• 43:38Speaker 00

  Can we help you be successful in marketing yourself and starting a business? And that's really the core of what Squarespace is about.

• 43:48Guy Raz?

  You now have this huge platform, right?

• 43:51Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 43:51Guy Raz?

  And it means that with that comes responsibilities that you probably never even imagined, power that you probably never even imagined or wanted.

• 43:59Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 44:00Guy Raz?

  There was some controversy, I think, last year, where some white supremacists were using Squarespace. And you're going to face these things all the time.

• 44:10Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 44:10Guy Raz?

  Do you weigh each situation? Like, how do you, what do you do?

• 44:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, you try and have rules around it. And so, one thing that's great about Squarespace, frankly, versus other situations other providers are in, is that it's a paid service. So, we actually avoid the worst of this, right? Very rarely is somebody like, "I'm going to post a bunch of bad stuff online. So, here's my credit card, and here's my address, and I'm going to post it all." You know what I mean? We're very lucky in that regard. So, our stance, like everyone else's stance, has to evolve on this as time goes on. Because we are a business. We're not the government. And we're not trying to protect every possible viewpoint on the planet. And so, we need to make sure that we're doing business

• 44:59Speaker 00

  with the right, the kinds of people we need to do business with.

• 45:03Guy Raz?

  I think at the end of 2017, Squarespace raised $200 million in funding. Valuing the company at $1.7 billion might be valued higher now. That's a lot of money. I mean, you are a tech success, and you do these conferences, and you're on these shows. And you're worth a lot of money. But you are also, does it also make it challenging to make new friends and to meet new people? Because you never know if people just want to be around you for that reason.

• 45:36Speaker 00

  I'm really lucky in life that I've always been the kind of person that I've made good friends that have kind of gone through a lot with me. And I know kind of what that... What that looks like when it's, you know, non-superficial. And yeah, I still have a lot of friends from like, from that, that original apartment in New York. I think that's been a really positive part of my life. Actually, we stay in touch and, um, you know, look, you get older and context changes. So it is harder, it becomes harder to meet new people. Sure. I mean, when you're, when you're 23, 24 and you got your roommates and you have a bunch of time and you have your school friends or whatever, like, yeah, people are more open now, more people are in kind of family modes and everything else.

• 46:19Guy Raz?

  Do you ever think that you wanna, you wanna do that? I mean, have family?

• 46:23Speaker 00

  It's a great question. I, um, I've really put off thinking about that. Yeah, I mean, just so much has changed in my life so rapidly. I've just really been focused on all of that. I mean, I'm not ruling it out. I just, uh, it's not front and center right now. But, you know, the things that were front and center on my mind at 25 and 35 and 15 are different.

• 46:44Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 46:45Speaker 00

  So.

• 46:45Guy Raz?

  And I hope I don't sound like your mom, like, when are you gonna have grandchildren?

• 46:50Speaker 00

  They do that. They do that. Don't, don't, don't worry. That voice is there.

• 46:55Guy Raz?

  Anthony, obviously you're, you know, you were like, super talented coder programmer from a young age and have a lot of talent. But how much, how much of your success do you think is because of that talent and your skill and your intelligence? And how much of it do you think is because you just got lucky too?

• 47:13Speaker 00

  Oh, man, I have been lucky so many times in my life. I'm lucky my, my parents had a computer around me when I was a kid, right? You know, I'm lucky the data didn't get deleted, you know, all these scenarios. I mean, you know, we're even scratching the surface of the crazy things that have happened. I mean, um, I'd say that there are qualities I probably have that have helped me stay here around, you know, perseverance and pain tolerance and, um, and I guess some level of adaptability.

• 47:45Speaker 00

  My best moments, some kind of self-awareness. But no, I think that anyone who possibly claims that they didn't get lucky is crazy.

• 47:56Guy Raz?

  That's Anthony Casalena, founder of Squarespace. Last year, there was speculation Anthony would take the company public, but for now, Squarespace has decided to stay private. Meanwhile, Anthony still keeps a vast collection of Magic the Gathering cards that he bought when he was a kid. He says he's got hundreds of them sitting in binders in a storage space, including the rare Black Lotus card, said to be worth more than $20,000. Hey, thanks so much for sticking around because it's time now for How You Built That. And today's story starts in 2016, right outside of Boston, with Kate Westervelt.

• 48:41Speaker 02

  Waddling around Target.

• 48:43Guy Raz?

  Waddling around Target because she'd just been released from the hospital where she'd given birth to a nine-and-a-half-pound baby boy. So Kate was sore, and she had stitches, and she wasn't really up for a Target run. Now, the thing you should know about Kate is that she's kind of a planner, so she'd already fully stocked her nursery with everything she thought the baby would need: diapers, and wipes, and clothing. But she didn't really give much thought to the things that she might need after her baby was born.

• 49:15Speaker 02

  The nurses walked in with things like mesh underwear and these ginormous pads.

• 49:20Guy Raz?

  Plus ice packs and a squeeze bottle to help keep her stitches clean, all stuff she needed for her recovery. But stuff Kate didn't have at home. So on the way home from the hospital, while her husband and new baby waited in the car, she went shopping, and she felt kind of clueless.

• 49:39Speaker 02

  I got a bunch of different breastfeeding aids, you know, organic pads, synthetic pads, whatever I could get my hands on, because I was just desperate and in dire need of any help and all help, and I knew I wouldn't be able to get to the store again in the next couple of days.

• 49:55Guy Raz?

  Kate left the store totally overwhelmed, but she also left with an idea.

• 50:01Speaker 02

  We live in a convenience economy. We get razors delivered, groceries delivered, everything is delivered. How are we not providing this convenience for new moms who need it the most?

• 50:11Guy Raz?

  And as soon as she got back in the car, Kate thought-

• 50:15Speaker 02

  I'm gonna go build this thing.

• 50:16Guy Raz?

  And by this thing, she meant a box filled with products a new mom would need. A box delivered right to her door. She kept thinking about this idea during her leave. So after she went back to her nine to five job, Kate decided to start working on it at night after her baby went to sleep.

• 50:36Speaker 02

  I would order various products, then I would test them all.

• 50:40Guy Raz?

  Maternity pads, creams, protein bars, herbal supplements. Kate tried more than 400 products over the course of a year. And eventually, she settled on a set of 10 items to go into her first boxes. She sent them to friends and family, and she asked them for feedback. And the one product her test moms really liked, an ice pack.

• 51:01Speaker 02

  At the hospital, they give you just bags of ice, and they sort of stick them in your underwear and say, "Good luck."

• 51:06Guy Raz?

  So Kate found the perfect ice pack, sized and shaped, so new moms could walk around. But there were some women who told her, "You know, this ice pack is great, but..."

• 51:16Speaker 02

  I ended up with a C-section, and what I really needed was a heating pad to place on my belly, or some sort of oil for my scar and my incision line.

• 51:27Guy Raz?

  So Kate decided, "Hey, maybe I should curate a C-section recovery box." She went on to put up a website and build a social media following on Facebook and Instagram.

• 51:36Speaker 02

  We know moms are really viral. 60% of moms mom source across the internet. And so moms started to talk about this box.

• 51:46Guy Raz?

  And in January of 2018, nearly two years after her frustrating Target run, Kate sold her first box. It was designed to look just like a present.

• 51:56Speaker 02

  It's pink and glossy, and we sort of thought, you know, let's put a handle on this box because it makes it feel like a special arrival, like a special trunk filled with self-care items.

• 52:09Guy Raz?

  Kate decided to jump fully into this venture, so she quit her job, launched a company. And in her first year, she sold almost 500 boxes, all assembled and packed in a room above her garage. Kate Westervelt's business is called Mom Box. And if you want to find out more about it or hear previous episodes, head to our podcast page, howibuiltthis.npr.org. And of course, if you want to tell us your story, please visit build.npr.org. And thanks so much for listening to the show this week. You can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And while you're there, please do give us a review. You can also write to us at [email protected]. And if you want to send a tweet, it's at howibuiltthis.

• 52:53Guy Raz?

  Our show was produced this week by Casey Herman, with music composed by Ramtin Arablouei. Thanks also to Julia Carney, J. C. Howard, Noor Kutsi, Neva Grant, Melissa Gray, Sanaz Meshkhanpour, and Jeff Rogers. Our intern is Candace Lim. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This from NPR.