Alienware: Frank Azor and Nelson Gonzalez

With no formal training in business or computer design, Nelson Gonzalez and his cofounders decided to do what almost no other company was doing in the mid-1990’s: make personal computers specifically for gaming. They started as a tiny custom shop in Miami, and eventually began building PC’s for avid gamers, who were willing to pay top dollar for higher speed, better graphics, and a brightly-colored chassis that looked like the head of an Alien. Despite ongoing challenges with sourcing parts and getting loans, Alienware became one of the fastest-growing private companies in the U. S. In 2006, it was purchased by Dell for an undisclosed amount, and remains one of the most popular gaming PC’s in the country. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

• 0:00Guy Raz?

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• 0:46Guy Raz?

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• 1:32Guy Raz?

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• 3:40Guy Raz?

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• 4:23Guy Raz?

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• 5:07Guy Raz?

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• 5:12Speaker 01

  One of the things that made life really interesting for us was we were a small company in Miami, taking orders basically over the internet using credit cards. But the banks that we dealt with were all freaking out. What is this company doing? They're in Miami.

• 5:32Guy Raz?

  They thought you were in something unsavory.

• 5:35Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 5:36Speaker 02

  And we're trying to run a business. We have to, you know, you have to buy parts. You have to pay rent. You have to pay services. And yeah, they would hold the money for however long they wanted to hold it for because they thought the business wasn't legitimate.

• 5:58Guy Raz?

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

• 6:09Guy Raz?

  I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how two guys from Miami with no formal education reimagine what a gaming computer can do. They make it fast, they make it sleek, and they call it Alienware.

• 6:26Guy Raz?

  Up until the early 1990s, personal computer makers were focused on three general categories of users: office workers, students, and designers. Not necessarily gamers. If you were a gamer, you could find thousands of games for computers, but they were fairly unimpressive. The best graphics were on consoles like Nintendos, or SEGS, or at the arcade. And then, in 1993, Intel came out with a new processor, the Pentium processor, that would eventually unleash a massive new market for PC makers: the gaming PC. That processor made video games look and sound much better on PCs than ever before.

• 7:09Guy Raz?

  But even then, if you were a video gamer, computers weren't being built for you. And it was around that time, the early to mid 1990s, that video gamers started to get computers custom-built. They'd order them with faster processors and better graphics and sound cards, features that weren't standard in the PCs sold by IBM, or HP, or Compaq. This is a time when mom-and-pop PC makers started to spring up all over the US and around the world. These were small business owners that could build you a PC, often for cheaper than the ones sold by the big players. And one of these personalized PC makers was a guy named Nelson Gonzalez.

• 7:53Guy Raz?

  Nelson lived in Miami and hung out with a group of friends who loved playing games: video games, board games, Dungeons & Dragons, you name it. And by 1996, he decided to form a little business that would custom-make gaming PC's for hardcore gamers. Now, you might not think of Miami in the mid-'90s as a tech hotspot, and it wasn't. But what Miami was, and still is, is the gateway to the Latin American marketplace. And it meant that the city had warehouses filled with all kinds of computer components designated for export to South America. So at the beginning, Nelson had quick access to things like motherboards, and computer cases, and peripherals, the stuff you need to build a PC.

• 8:39Guy Raz?

  He called his little business Alienware, in part because, well, he's fascinated by aliens. At the beginning, not a single bank would loan money to Nelson to get the business going, so most orders required you to pay upfront. That small cash flow fueled a business that eventually became one of the leading gaming PC companies in the US. And the story of how Nelson did it, with a small group of friends, mostly Cuban Americans, most of them broke, none of them with college degrees. How they managed to turn Alienware into a force in the world of gaming has a lot to do with both timing and an understanding of a customer base that none of the big players were serving.

• 9:23Guy Raz?

  10 years after Nelson founded Alienware in his Miami garage, the company was acquired by Dell, and it's still part of Dell today. On today's show, we're going to hear about three of Alienware's founders, and we'll talk to two of them, Frank Azor and Nelson Gonzalez. Frank will come into the story a little later on. As for Nelson, he grew up in and around Miami in the 70s and 80s, the son of Cuban immigrants. His mom was a homemaker and his dad painted billboards. When he was a teenager, his parents split up, and he went to live with his mom. And to help pay the bills, he worked at a grocery store and as a janitor.

• 10:01Speaker 01

  I was very frustrated because even though we were lower-middle class, and now it was, I would say, lower class because it was my mom and myself, and, you know, she needed help even with welfare.

• 10:16Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 10:17Speaker 01

  And I, myself, you know, was just, you know, working in these stupid, you know, jobs that really didn't go anywhere. And I was like, wow, is this life? Is this is, this is going to be, you know, all that I can look forward to? So, you know, I kept my head up and I always aspired. I always had the confidence, and I think that my parents, especially my mom, gave me that confidence that I could do whatever I want. And it wasn't- Was never something that, oh, you can't do this if you don't want to do it.

• 10:56Speaker 01

  So I, I always had that mentality and I, I think it's very generic amongst Cuban Americans in, in Miami. It's, I, I don't know what it is, our, our parents' generation, how.

• 11:10Guy Raz?

  Just a hustle mentality.

• 11:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, they would, you know, I want to be in, oh, sure, I want to be president of the United, sure, oh, come on, that's easy, type of thing. So it's like a natural confidence that they would give you. So I always had that, that mentality of, you know what, I am going to get out of this.

• 11:27Guy Raz?

  Hmm, and I know when you were growing up, you spent a lot of time playing games and, and even video games, like going to the arcade.

• 11:36Speaker 01

  Right.

• 11:37Guy Raz?

  But when did you start getting into, into computer games and how, like, did your, like, did your friends all have computers at, at that point?

• 11:45Speaker 01

  There was one of our friends, Joe Pontillo, and he was the one, the first one that had a, a 386, I believe. And this was probably, gosh, 1990. And that's when we were exposed to the PC for gaming, because we saw a couple of video games loaded up for the first time. At that point, I made friends with a gentleman, an Iranian gentleman that had one of those small mom and pop operations where they built PCs. And I started hanging out there and I started learning more and more. So I had him build a PC and as, as, I told him, well, listen, you're going to build this

• 12:28Speaker 01

  PC, but I want, I want to see how you build it, if you don't mind. He goes, no, absolutely.

• 12:32Guy Raz?

  You ordered one from him?

• 12:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 12:35Guy Raz?

  And, and this was so you could play video games?

• 12:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, so I could play game and just, you know, just all around, just get on the internet for the first time, you know, it's, at this point, I was longing for that kind of stuff.

• 12:47Guy Raz?

  You know, I wonder, at this time, right, 1990, you could buy, obviously, a Compaq or, you know, or a variety, many, any number of dozens of these clones.

• 13:02Speaker 01

  Right.

• 13:03Guy Raz?

  No name brand, off the shelf PCs. Why did you want it made for you at that time?

• 13:08Speaker 01

  You know, because I think that it was more expensive to buy an HP or a Compaq back then.

• 13:15Guy Raz?

  It was cheaper to go to one of these mom and pop places and have them custom build it for you.

• 13:19Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, absolutely.

• 13:21Guy Raz?

  And you're watching him take all the components, obviously, the case for the PC and the motherboard and the graphics. I mean, today, you can go on YouTube and find out how to do this very easy. I've done it twice with my kid. But back then, 1990.

• 13:38Speaker 01

  I'll tell you what, it was, it was not easy. And the other part of it is, you know, configuring the machine so it could work with games back then was, you know, an art form unto itself.

• 13:51Guy Raz?

  That's, that's just wild. Like, so you had this PC built for you, and then you'd go out and you'd get, you'd buy the game on floppy disk, presumably.

• 14:00Speaker 01

  Yes, absolutely. The game that really got me going, the first time I saw it, was Doom.

• 14:05Guy Raz?

  Doom, yeah.

• 14:06Speaker 01

  You know, you're a space marine in a Mars base, you're going through corridors, and all of a sudden, all of a sudden, you've got these hellacious monsters coming out from, from the seventh level of hell or whatever, and you're shooting them up with a traditional gun and whatnot. So it was silly, but it wasn't silly.

• 14:26Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 14:27Speaker 01

  So for us, this was, this world was perfectly acceptable, you know?

• 14:31Guy Raz?

  All right, so you've got this, this kind of new obsession, which is, which is playing these PC games. And I guess one of the people who, who shared your love of gaming was a childhood friend named Alex Aguilera. And Alex is going to figure prominently in this story because he would become a founding member of Alienware, but... But at this point, I guess you guys are just hanging out, right?

• 14:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 14:56Guy Raz?

  And what, he gets an idea to develop his own game or something like, but it wasn't a computer game? It was a board game. What's the story?

• 15:04Speaker 01

  Yes. Alex had this idea for coming out with a board game.

• 15:09Guy Raz?

  Okay.

• 15:11Speaker 01

  And the subject matter was pro wrestling. You develop your character and you roll a dice and basically you have certain moves and you put the move on the other guy. It's a tactical game.

• 15:24Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 15:25Speaker 01

  And, you know, I kind of was like an artist, you know, I used to draw a lot. So he had me do the characters that, you know, we thought were really cool.

• 15:35Guy Raz?

  These are wrestlers?

• 15:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, wrestlers like, like the Ultimate Warrior, you know, type of, you know.

• 15:40Guy Raz?

  But you were making up, because I think the Venn diagram of people who were into pro wrestling, video games and role playing games was probably right. They all were in that center circle, right?

• 15:52Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 15:52Guy Raz?

  That was a comp, because they're character based.

• 15:55Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. And it was a, it's a beer and pretzels game. It was a, in fact, we could play it today and have, I guarantee you, you got a group of people together.

• 16:04Guy Raz?

  I'm in.

• 16:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:05Guy Raz?

  I'll bring the pretzels.

• 16:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 16:07Guy Raz?

  I'll bring the beer, actually.

• 16:08Speaker 01

  Actually, yeah. That was, I would say that was a-

• 16:11Guy Raz?

  And how much, how much you guys charged, by the way?

• 16:13Speaker 01

  Oh, jeez. Man, maybe it was like fourteen ninety-nine or something. Maybe it got to twenty bucks.

• 16:19Guy Raz?

  And, and do you remember like how much, how many you sold?

• 16:23Speaker 01

  Man, Alex-

• 16:24Guy Raz?

  A hundred, hundreds?

• 16:25Speaker 01

  I would say hundreds. I would say, I would say like three or four hundred at least.

• 16:30Guy Raz?

  That's pretty good.

• 16:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 16:32Guy Raz?

  All right. So, so you've got this successful, relatively successful game, but what happened to it? Why didn't you guys decide to go big, you know, to sort of like, you know, see if you could get into, to, you know?

• 16:44Speaker 01

  Because real, I think Real World dawned on us and slapped us across the face. And, you know-

• 16:51Guy Raz?

  And what was that?

• 16:52Speaker 01

  You know, three hundred copies of this is not gonna, you know, buy a house in Miami and, and support a family. And that's the reality of it. Alex was at that time, probably doing, if I'm, if I'm not mistaken, I think he was doing neurological diagnostic testing of some sort, and he was a technician. You know, he was doing that. I was I was already doing something else.

• 17:17Guy Raz?

  What were you doing at the time?

• 17:18Speaker 01

  Well, at that time, I felt I needed more computing experience. So I interviewed for this job and my friends go, you're crazy. You know, again, here comes the confidence part. I interviewed for this job to be an IT support guy or to manage a network, a small network for a post-production house. So I got the job. I I don't know how I got the job because really I, you know, I was a novice at computing. Okay, I had no formal education. I really I'm not qualified for this. But I always felt that if given the opportunity, listen, I'll learn it and I'll, nobody's gonna outwork me. There's no way. So I could do this.

• 18:00Speaker 01

  Sure enough, I got the job. I I call Alex and say, hey, Al, you know, I got I got this job managing this network. What do you think? He goes, Nelson, you have no idea what you're doing. How the hell did you get this job? I go, I don't know, but you know what? I'm gonna do it. So he goes, you're nuts. I go, yeah, but something drove me to this. I didn't, I don't know what it was, but something was driving me. You know, I didn't lie. I really didn't lie in the interview, but I wasn't very truthful either because I didn't have the experience I, you know, they thought I had. Uh, so anyway, I got the job. I learned a lot. It it taught me a lot about the com- the components. Uh, inside the PC, if you're gonna have a PC network.

• 18:43Speaker 01

  And so I got a lot of exposure to the developers and a lot of smart, technical guys that really knew their stuff.

• 18:52Guy Raz?

  At this post-production house. All right. So you're working there and it would be around this time when you would found a company, I believe, pronounced Saikai?

• 19:02Speaker 01

  Saikai of Miami.

• 19:05Guy Raz?

  Saikai, okay. And I'm just gonna, from what I understand, this was a company which was like that Iranian friend. You would do something similar. You would build, custom, do custom build PCs. Tell me about about about deciding to leave that job at the post-production house and starting your own your own business.

• 19:25Speaker 01

  You know, we started doing it slowly. Uh, I so on the side, uh, so I I ask Alex, Alex, I need, I need a name for the company. So Alex is a big collector of War One, War Two, Korean War, uh, ACES.

• 19:42Speaker 01

  So there was this famous Japanese ace back in World War II. His name was Saburo Sakai and he was shot. It spoke to perseverance. The guy was a heroic fighter pilot. So we decided to name the company Sakai.

• 19:58Guy Raz?

  But it was just you?

• 19:59Speaker 01

  It was me.

• 19:59Guy Raz?

  It was me. Just you?

• 20:01Speaker 01

  It was myself and another gentleman that started with me. Actually, he would be the first one to start Avingworth, which was his name is Fabian Santiesteva. And he works with Alex and Hector and all my friends. So Fabian is part of our group already.

• 20:19Guy Raz?

  Yep.

• 20:19Speaker 01

  So Fabian goes around town and when we get orders from different, I don't know, little, you know, again, these were small businesses that were in need of a PC with a printer and blah, blah, blah, you know. So we build a custom machine for them and I'd set up the whole thing. I did the whole network for them. And Fabian would go around and source the components that we needed to put the PCs together.

• 20:44Guy Raz?

  And just to be clear, this was, you were kind of doing this out of your home? Like in your garage?

• 20:49Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 20:50Guy Raz?

  And how would you find people who would order them from you? How would you identify any customers?

• 20:55Speaker 01

  Friends and family, really. It was, there was no dollars dedicated to advertising or anything like that.

• 21:02Guy Raz?

  It was like, oh, Nelson knows how to do this computer stuff.

• 21:05Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 21:05Guy Raz?

  Nelson, you know about computers, right? Can you, can you build one for my friend Joe over here?

• 21:10Speaker 01

  Exactly. So I became that guy in the group. You know, the guy in the group?

• 21:13Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 21:14Speaker 01

  That's the guy.

• 21:14Guy Raz?

  He's a computer guy.

• 21:15Speaker 01

  He's the computer. He's the guy. He's the guy. So then what was interesting was, A, can you build me a PC for gaming? Can we optimize it for? Yeah, why not? So I built a couple of machines. One was for Alex's. Father-in-law.

• 21:37Guy Raz?

  Okay.

• 21:38Speaker 01

  We built it for him and we built one for Hector.

• 21:40Guy Raz?

  And what did, they said, hey, I want a computer that can do, like, what was the difference between, just for people to know, like a gaming PC in 1995 or 96, what's the difference between that and just a regular PC build?

• 21:54Speaker 01

  Well, we tried, you know, we had a couple of friends that did have HPs and whatnot and they, it just didn't work right. It was very cumbersome. I mean, you had, the video card was very important. It's always been very important, right?

• 22:07Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 22:07Speaker 01

  The video card and the motherboard and whatnot. I, I, I felt that there was more quality with the motherboards and the memory and all the components that I was picking. And even though people would say, oh, it's supposed to work together and, you know, whatever, it didn't exactly work that way. So.

• 22:27Guy Raz?

  Like certain components just didn't work with other components?

• 22:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I felt, I felt that there needed to be compatibility amongst peripherals and I kind of identified what those were for gaming, so that they worked well in a gaming environment. Because, believe it or not, I mean, again, it's supposed to work together. It's, it's Windows-based. Everybody, all the drivers are supposed to work together. That was not the case.

• 22:52Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 22:53Speaker 01

  Uh, so I, I tried to make a system where they, it was dependable and it was fast.

• 23:01Guy Raz?

  All right. So you've got this business. And, and by the way, I mean, there's a lot of labor that goes into that, you know, building a PC. I mean, today, you know, you can build one in an hour, but then, I'm assuming this was many, many hours of work per, you know, maybe days per computer.

• 23:18Speaker 01

  Right. But back then, especially the computer chassis were, man, they were, they were not built with quality. Okay? And they were like, you know, they were cheap. And, and what happened was I would cut myself, I mean, it was like.

• 23:34Guy Raz?

  Cut your fingers.

• 23:35Speaker 01

  I was fighting a demon every time I went into a computer and, and, and, you know, tried building. It was literally a fight for my life. There was blood, there was, you know, it was, there was rituals. It was, it was complicated.

• 23:50Guy Raz?

  I mean, were you guys making any money, you and Fabian?

• 23:53Speaker 01

  Absolutely nothing.

• 23:55Guy Raz?

  Nothing, okay.

• 23:56Speaker 01

  I tell you, zero.

• 23:57Guy Raz?

  I think you were gonna say absolutely boatload.

• 24:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, no, zero dollars. If anything, we probably lost money on the ordeal. Uh, the support, it's, I mean, I would, uh, routinely, I would have to go to people's offices. Because what's the other problem here? The other problem is, you know, guess what? The internet was very new. The programs, they weren't, they didn't know how to use them correctly.

• 24:25Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 24:25Speaker 01

  They, they didn't know how to configure a network. So therefore they had no idea what a network is and how it works. So there was a lot of troubleshooting. And I found myself going to a lot of these places and saying, man, this is not worth it. This is not, this is not.

• 24:39Guy Raz?

  You were the, cause you were selling the PCs, but then you were the tech support too, which you probably didn't realize.

• 24:44Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 24:45Guy Raz?

  That was gonna happen. They were calling you like, Nelson, my computer's down. What's going on? You're like, oh, you're like building this other PC. Now you gotta stop and like help troubleshoot that thing for that person.

• 24:56Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 24:57Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 24:57Speaker 01

  It, it was tough. It was tough. I, I gotta tell you, it was real tough.

• 25:01Guy Raz?

  Yeah. But if the business wasn't making money, how were you gonna make it sustainable? I mean, that's what I'm trying to figure out. Cause you knew that you were probably losing money.

• 25:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:12Guy Raz?

  You know, you had to be competitive with your prices.

• 25:15Speaker 01

  You know, I think, I, I think I gotta admit something. I, I'm not that bright.

• 25:20Guy Raz?

  You are very bright.

• 25:21Speaker 01

  No, no.

• 25:22Guy Raz?

  But anyway, keep going.

• 25:22Speaker 01

  Seriously, I, I, you know, I, I kind of ignored the whole thing. And then I, you know, I kind of ignored it. And then I, I have, you know, I'm looking at Fabian, I'm punching myself and I'm saying, man, this, there's gotta be a better way. So I said, I, I, and I gotta tell you, there was already a company around that was doing this already back, back in the day.

• 25:43Guy Raz?

  What were they called?

• 25:44Speaker 01

  Falcon Northwest.

• 25:46Guy Raz?

  Okay, Falcon Northwest.

• 25:47Speaker 01

  Yes. Uh, we, we became very familiar with them. They became one of our competitors. Uh, but I also saw them advertising.

• 25:56Speaker 01

  On uh one of the magazines, I think it was Computer Gaming World or PC Gamer back then.

• 26:01Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 26:02Speaker 01

  So I uh at this point, I'm saying, man, you know, we did the we did the creative gaming designs, which was Pro Wrestler, and we did it through mail order. Well, wait a second, why don't we just, you know, put a little ad somewhere in a magazine like these guys do? And sell our services of putting PCs together.

• 26:21Guy Raz?

  And what did the ad say? Something like?

• 26:24Speaker 01

  Well, well, the ad was, it was strange, I gotta tell you, it was strange because I said, I said, I've got appeal to the nerds like me and Alex and, you know, and all our friends. So the first ad we did was that of a weird looking alien, okay? Hovering over a PC with all the the configuration of, you know, what parts we were gonna use and and and and the sum total. But I wanna go a little bit, if you don't mind, I'll I'll tell you a little the funny story about how Alienware came to be.

• 27:01Guy Raz?

  Okay.

• 27:02Speaker 01

  I'm a big UFO guy, I'm a big UFO enthusiast, I've always been.

• 27:06Guy Raz?

  Yeah, are they real, do they exist?

• 27:08Speaker 01

  Uh, in my mind, you're, you know, you're absolutely a hundred percent.

• 27:12Guy Raz?

  This is a different episode that we'll do.

• 27:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

• 27:15Guy Raz?

  The UFO episode of this.

• 27:17Speaker 01

  So uh and so is Alex, Alex is a big UFO enthusiast even to this day, so.

• 27:22Guy Raz?

  All right.

• 27:23Speaker 01

  I also knew, I kinda knew that I wanted my, like, the company name to start with an A. Because that way we would be first in the Yellow Pages or.

• 27:33Guy Raz?

  That was right. By the way, this was a common thing, my brother-in-law called this, used the word American in his company because he'd be first in the the binding business.

• 27:43Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 27:44Guy Raz?

  Well, I know, yeah, I wanna know this story because I know that this is around ninety-seven.

• 27:49Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 27:49Guy Raz?

  And you recruited, you basically went to your friend Alex Aguilera and you said, okay, I need you to join me.

• 27:56Speaker 01

  Well.

• 27:56Guy Raz?

  And kind of.

• 27:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, so.

• 27:59Speaker 01

  It's already like nineteen ninety, yeah, late ninety seven, early ninety eight, I guess. And then, so I, I, I call Alex and I say, Al, and he picks up the phone and he's like, hey, what's up? Uh, listen, I got this name for a company and we're gonna do the same thing, but we're gonna use the model that we have for creative gaming designs and let's just sell mail order computers. I saw this company called Falcon Do It and they're in computer gaming world or PC gaming. Why can't we do it? So, uh, he goes, yeah, what are you gonna call it? I go, how about Alienware? He goes, wow, that's a pretty cool name. You know, and, and Alex and myself are pretty realistic.

• 28:41Speaker 01

  If he would've said nah, I would've kind of like listened to that, you know? I would've taken it seriously.

• 28:47Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 28:47Speaker 01

  But he, when Alex and myself say yes at the same time, it's dangerous because it really does mean it's gonna be, it's gonna be okay. I go, but here's the thing, Alex, you're gonna need to drop your job. You're gonna need to leave your job and you're gonna have to bring like, I don't know, five thousand, I, I don't know if it was five thousand dollars or six thousand dollars because I would put the other six thousand dollars in.

• 29:10Guy Raz?

  You needed him to invest five thousand dollars in your company and join you?

• 29:14Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 29:15Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 29:15Speaker 01

  Listen, it was credit card debt. We didn't have any cash. When I say, hey, Al, you need to bring five thousand dollars? He didn't like, yeah, you don't have any cash.

• 29:25Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 29:26Speaker 01

  So I tell, I call Alex, I tell him, this is the, the proposition and he goes, dude, I'm there tomorrow.

• 29:32Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 29:33Speaker 01

  Oh, okay, let's do it.

• 29:37Guy Raz?

  When we come back in just a moment, how Nelson and his team break into the PC gaming market and why their credit card companies start to suspect they're running a shady business. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This.

• 30:03Guy Raz?

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• 30:47Guy Raz?

  and people bring taste, judgment, and control. Learn how you can get more out of your site from a Framer specialist or get started building for free today at framer.com/built for 30% off a Framer Pro annual plan. That's framer.com/built. Rules and restrictions may apply. AI isn't just opening new business opportunities, it's changing the way businesses get work done. The questions they ask, the decisions they make, the routine tasks they can hand off. That's the idea behind NetSuite Next, the next generation of NetSuite with AI woven into the tools your business already relies on.

• 31:30Guy Raz?

  NetSuite Next surfaces insights exactly when you need them, puts agents to work on routine tasks and problems, and lets you ask complex questions in plain language, like talking to a knowledgeable colleague. But technology is only part of the story. AI is also reshaping how people and teams work together, and that shift is already underway. That's why NetSuite wants to put a new, expert-created business guide in your hands today. It's called Aligning for the Agentic Era: How AI is Changing Everyday Work. And right now, it's yours, absolutely free. Inside, you'll discover How AI could reshape work across your entire organization and how to position your business to prosper from it.

• 32:15Guy Raz?

  If your revenues are at least in the seven figures, get NetSuite's free business guide, Aligning for the Agentic Era: How AI is Changing Everyday Work, at netsuite.com/built. The guide is free to you at netsuite.com/built. Netsuite.com/built. Stripe is built for whatever comes next because the pace of change has never been faster than it is right now. New business models, new currencies, and new expectations for speed, reliability, and scale. Stripe builds financial infrastructure that helps businesses start, grow, and operate globally. From payments and billing to fraud protection and cross-border payouts, Stripe is built

• 33:00Guy Raz?

  to support the new pace of commerce. They're trusted by the companies building at the frontier, from 86% of the Forbes AI 50 to global leaders like Salesforce and OpenAI. In fact, more than 1.6% of global GDP flows through Stripe, with Stripe's users processing a combined $1.9 trillion last year. So if you're already thinking about what's next for your business, see what's possible at stripe.com.

• 33:39Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 1998, and Nelson's childhood friend Alex has agreed to quit his job and join Alienware. And at this point, Nelson is looking to get the word out about his new gaming computer. And he manages to get it reviewed by a small publication, which is a pretty big accomplishment.

• 34:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, listen, I was stunned. I called Boot Magazine. I don't know who I spoke to. And I said, well, I got this company, and I've got this machine, and I want you guys to check it out. It's a game-- oh, it's a gaming computer. And I think that's what got them interested.

• 34:17Guy Raz?

  Because there were not that many gaming computers being made at the time?

• 34:21Speaker 01

  No, there was only Falcon.

• 34:23Guy Raz?

  There was only, this is crazy. No, none of these big PC companies, IBM and Dell and HP and Compaq were making gaming. They were only making PCs for

• 34:35Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 34:35Guy Raz?

  basically

• 34:37Speaker 01

  Business.

• 34:37Guy Raz?

  office workers and students and yeah.

• 34:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. And the consumer, the consumer PC back then was probably Gateway, Micron, Compaq. But they were, you know, they, they weren't optimized for, they were doing big volumes and you know whatnot, so.

• 34:52Guy Raz?

  So, so this was a completely under the radar thing. And yet there was this culture, subculture of magazines and gamers who were basically getting them built, built by their friends at these mom and pop shops.

• 35:05Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, they were there. We were there, you know? And then there was the software developers that were introducing the world to 3D gaming. And I just felt that, wow, man, this is so, you know, honestly, I didn't even care about making money.

• 35:24Speaker 01

  The overriding factor for me was more so, wow, I, you know, this is so cool. This is absolutely so cool. There's gonna be, you know, maybe I'll have a customer or two out there. You know, maybe in Oregon or in Washington State or New York or somewhere. You know, playing on one of my computers, a video game that that person's gonna love. You know, what greater joy is that, you know?

• 35:49Guy Raz?

  Yeah. So I think, I think you get a pretty good review in, in this one magazine and Boot Magazine, but, but I guess it's, it's kind of a small publication, right? So, so from what I gather, you decide to send another computer to another magazine, to PC Gamer, which is bigger. And I guess this time you also take an ad out, right? Like, like in the same magazine?

• 36:13Speaker 01

  Right. So, we send the machine. The machine was like the most glorious piece of machinery. And hey, yeah, we're gonna, we're gonna do an advertisement. The advertisement back then for a full page was $5,000.

• 36:27Guy Raz?

  And how'd you pay for that?

• 36:28Speaker 01

  That's a lot of money. They also gave us net terms, I think. I go, oh, wow, okay, go, cool, net terms. Let me put a credit card on this and, or whatever, you know, I don't know. It was

• 36:38Guy Raz?

  That's a lot of money, $5,000.

• 36:40Speaker 01

  A lot of money. But I told, we were, you know, I'm not a gambler, but I definitely gambled on that one. We gambled on that one because between the machine, the rent, the advertisement, I mean, we were clearly way beyond our means already.

• 36:58Guy Raz?

  And by the way, you mentioned this beautiful PC. I mean, obviously, the chassis was off the shelf, but how did you make it beautiful? Like, what did you do to it?

• 37:08Speaker 01

  It was such a complicated machine. It had one 2D card, two 3D cards, 3D FX Voodoo cards and Sly.

• 37:19Guy Raz?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 37:20Speaker 01

  It had two sound cards.

• 37:25Guy Raz?

  Okay.

• 37:26Speaker 01

  It had two hard drives and SCUSI, well, it had a RAID controller for the hard drives and TAN to make them faster. Memory up the kazoom. By the way, that machine cost us money. That was a big investment.

• 37:43Guy Raz?

  Yeah, how much would that machine have cost in 1997?

• 37:47Speaker 01

  That machine would have cost, I mean, back then it cost like $6,000, $7,000.

• 37:50Guy Raz?

  Wow. And you could not buy a PC like this off the shelf in 1990?

• 37:55Speaker 01

  No, there was no way. There was no way.

• 37:57Guy Raz?

  There's no way. You had to be, it's amazing.

• 37:59Speaker 01

  It's lunacy.

• 38:00Guy Raz?

  It's just so amazing because there were big companies out there who just, this was happening under their nose.

• 38:07Speaker 01

  I know.

• 38:08Guy Raz?

  All right. So you build this thing. Basically, you're just picking the best components.

• 38:12Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 38:13Guy Raz?

  Just kind of cherry picking the best thing and making like a Maserati PC, basically.

• 38:19Speaker 01

  A custom hot rod. Yeah.

• 38:21Guy Raz?

  Custom hot rod. It's a custom hot rod. That's what you were doing.

• 38:24Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. That's what it was.

• 38:26Guy Raz?

  And these chop shops exist, right?

• 38:28Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 38:28Guy Raz?

  You can get a custom hot rod today.

• 38:29Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 38:31Guy Raz?

  And Ford and Chrysler and Tesla, they're not making custom hot rods because...

• 38:35Speaker 01

  Exactly. Exactly.

• 38:37Guy Raz?

  I mean, I was looking, I just was, before this interview, I was just looking at prices for like an iMac at that time. Uh, cause you're, you're talking about five, six, seven thousand dollars for what you were building.

• 38:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:49Guy Raz?

  An iMac was one thousand two hundred ninety-nine dollars ninety-eight.

• 38:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:53Guy Raz?

  PCs, desktop PCs at that time were like five hundred bucks.

• 38:57Speaker 01

  I know.

• 38:57Guy Raz?

  So this was a premium product for a very specific kind of customer. This is not a mass product.

• 39:03Speaker 01

  Yep. Yeah. It was a tough, you know, it was a tough proposition, but only those that could appreciate it, appreciated it.

• 39:12Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 39:13Speaker 01

  Uh, because they knew the power of this PC once they loaded up their favorite game. I, I mean, we would give them a range of things like, okay, you can only pick from these three motherboards. You can only pick, you know, and let's say, and from these two manufacturers in terms of memory. But they had the ability to create themselves their own machine.

• 39:36Guy Raz?

  I mean, it is, it is, it is kind of remarkable. Here, here's this like group of like Cuban-American kids, right?

• 39:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:45Guy Raz?

  In Miami.

• 39:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:46Guy Raz?

  Not a tech center by any means, certainly at that time.

• 39:49Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 39:49Guy Raz?

  Uh, like building these gaming PC's and, and like, yeah.

• 39:54Speaker 01

  Crazy. I go back in time. I go, what, what were we thinking of? What, what's going on here?

• 39:59Guy Raz?

  Yeah. And, and by the way, when, when that review came out in PC Gamer, how, how was it? Was it favorable?

• 40:06Speaker 01

  Uh, we got a great review.

• 40:09Guy Raz?

  What'd they say?

• 40:10Speaker 01

  He loved the machine. He called it an eight hundred pound gorilla. And he want, he says, I, I'm not going to give it back to them. There's no way. I love this machine because the guy's a gamer himself.

• 40:20Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 40:20Speaker 01

  And, uh, we had the ad and then we got, we got a couple of orders and then we noticed I already started using, I started getting a little proficient with the web stuff. We noticed that there was some traffic, but back then all we did was you could configure the machine online, but you couldn't order it.

• 40:37Guy Raz?

  Wait, you could, you could go to the website and you could design what you wanted, but you couldn't order it?

• 40:42Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 40:42Guy Raz?

  You had to call in and say, this is what I want to do?

• 40:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. And Alex would be the sales guy. So, uh, Alex would answer the phone and take the order and, and all that good stuff. And we did okay. We did like, I don't know, fifteen machines that month, whatever.

• 40:58Guy Raz?

  Wow. And that's like at five, three to five thousand dollars a pop. That's pretty good.

• 41:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. No, actually back then, uh, it was, the, the machines were averaging closer to six or seven thousand dollars.

• 41:12Guy Raz?

  Okay, so Nelson, up to this point, it was pretty much you and Alex and Fabian who are running Alienware, but we're gonna pause for a second because this is when another key person enters the business, that is Frank Azor, and Frank is actually here with us. He's been sitting here, listening to our conversation quietly and patiently. And by the way, Frank, have you learned anything you didn't know, listening to Nelson?

• 41:37Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. I've learned a ton. This has been awesome, actually.

• 41:41Guy Raz?

  Awesome. Okay, so Frank, I think you were like, what, like 17, like a kid? I shouldn't say kid, I guess. You were a teenager, and this is the late 90s, and I believe, what, you joined this budding group of three guys called Alienware? Is that right?

• 41:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was 1998. I was 16 years old.

• 42:02Guy Raz?

  16, okay.

• 42:03Speaker 02

  A junior in high school.

• 42:04Guy Raz?

  And you grew up in Miami, too?

• 42:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, born and raised in Miami. Very similar upbringing to Nelson, Alex, and the whole gang.

• 42:13Guy Raz?

  Cuban parents, immigrants, or grandparents?

• 42:16Speaker 02

  Cuban parents. They came over a little later than Nelson's. They came in 1959.

• 42:21Guy Raz?

  And by the way, were you a good student? I mean, I think probably you were.

• 42:26Speaker 02

  I was not. But my father ran an experiment, my parents ran an experiment on me in high school, and they said, if you get straight A's, we'll buy you a car. And suddenly, I realized that I could be a phenomenal student, and I can get straight A's. And that's when I realized how coin-operated I am.

• 42:44Guy Raz?

  And how did you connect with these guys? How did you even know what they were doing?

• 42:50Speaker 02

  So, a mutual friend that we didn't know was a mutual friend, was a friend of my sister and her husband, my brother-in-law.

• 42:59Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 43:00Speaker 02

  And one day, I'm at their house. Again, I'm in high school, I'm a junior in high school, and he was there. I tell him I'm building computers now. Almost exactly the same story as Nelson and Alex.

• 43:11Guy Raz?

  Nelson.

• 43:12Speaker 02

  I was building it for friends and family, and he told me that he was working with a few guys that started a computer company. And I go, oh, man, that sounds incredible. I'd love to get to meet them. And he's like, actually, they're hiring. So, he handed me like a Post-it note with the name of the company, Alienware PC, and Alex Agla's phone number on it. I still have that sticky note till today. And then I called and we set up an interview for, I don't know, someday during the week. And they asked me to be there like at 12 or 1. I'm like, actually, can I show up at 3?

• 43:45Guy Raz?

  Yeah, and, and, and, right, because you were at high school. And what were they looking for? Did you know?

• 43:50Speaker 02

  Somebody who was older, mature, had a lot of experience. Everything I wasn't.

• 43:57Speaker 02

  So I, I, I walk in and there's some guy with a long ponytail sitting to the right on a couch when I walk into this office. And then I see these two other guys. Um, uh, one of them is Nelson, one of them is Alex.

• 44:10Guy Raz?

  Who is the guy with the ponytail?

• 44:12Speaker 02

  That was Fabian.

• 44:13Guy Raz?

  Fabian, okay.

• 44:14Speaker 02

  Yeah. And they look at me like I'm a, a criminal or something that just walked through the door. And Alex would admit to me later that that was the moment he realized they needed to start locking the front door. So weird strangers wouldn't walk in. And, uh, and I'd said, hey, uh, you know, I'm, I'm Frank. And, uh, you know, I think Max talked to you about me. And they're like, oh, no, no, you're very, you're, you're too young for this. We want somebody with a lot more experience. And I said, well, actually I'm here already and I'm willing to work for free. So why don't you at least talk to me?

• 44:47Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 44:47Speaker 02

  Yeah. And it's funny because Nelson talks about confidence, right? And I don't know where all that confidence came, but like the confidence to walk through that door and to sit down, even though they were kind of pushing me out the door. It was just something that I had at the time. And, uh, I think I got him when I offered to work for free. That was the killer line. But, uh, it worked out and they called me the next day and asked me to join.

• 45:13Guy Raz?

  And, all right. And so this became your after school job.

• 45:16Speaker 02

  Yep. I would leave school at 2:20 PM and I'd rush over to Alienware, get there before 3. And then we would end every day at 7.

• 45:26Guy Raz?

  And basically just building PC's.

• 45:29Speaker 02

  So Fabian would build them. And then, uh, when I joined, Nelson built a checklist of everything he wanted me to check on the computer to make sure that it was built correctly. And then, uh, I would load all the drivers on the computer. And we would do it really cool. We would actually tell customers, they could send us their games. They could send us their joystick, their game pads, whatever hardware they wanted pre-configured on the computer. They can mail it to us. We would install and configure everything for them. So that when they received the computer, they just turned it on and all the work was done. It was a fully turnkey system.

• 46:06Guy Raz?

  So, all right, Nelson, it's just the four of you guys still at this point. And, and I guess it's a sustainable, I mean, it's kind of, you can handle the workload, right? Because it's like 98 and what, you're building two, three PCs, four PCs a week? Five, 10, maybe?

• 46:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, maybe eight, eight to 10 PCs a week.

• 46:24Speaker 02

  But I, I want to just visualize the environment for once.

• 46:27Guy Raz?

  Please, yeah.

• 46:28Speaker 02

  So, it was a two-story building, tiny little office. How many square feet was it, Nelson?

• 46:33Speaker 01

  It's tiny, 800 square.

• 46:34Speaker 02

  800 square feet. These decisions predated me, but somebody decided, it must have been Nelson, that we were going to build the computers on the second floor. And then we were gonna walk them down the stairs. Keep in mind, these computers weighed 50, 60 pounds, yeah.

• 46:50Guy Raz?

  Heavy.

• 46:51Speaker 02

  So this 16-year-old kid would walk down the stairs carrying this 50, 60-pound computer, and then we would package it on the first floor. So we would put it in a box and then put, you know, foam and all that, and then package it again. Well, Alex would be on the phone trying to sell computers, and Nelson would be on the other phone next to him trying to do tech support for customers, right? And then Fabian and I would be trying to package the computer, but the tape gun would make so much noise as you were putting the tape on the boxes. Now, we had to wait until the two of them were off the phone, so we could tape the boxes.

• 47:26Speaker 02

  And so we'd just be sitting on the couch, waiting for the phone calls to end, then we'd tape them, and then we'd, yeah, we'd ship them out every day.

• 47:33Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 47:34Speaker 01

  But one of the things that made life really interesting for us was, we were a small company in Miami, taking orders that we would, you know, we'd at least book 50% of, of, of the order on the credit card, and the remaining balance, when it shipped out. So of course the banks were all freaking out. What is this company doing there in Miami? Oh God, the world's coming to an end.

• 48:05Guy Raz?

  They thought you were in something unsavory.

• 48:08Speaker 01

  Yes, so they would, oh no, we have to keep the monies in reserve. Because there's fraud, what fraud, there's no fraud. I mean, we were, fraud was insignificant at our level because everybody was, I mean, they were seriously ordering the machines and we would do our due diligence with the sale.

• 48:28Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 48:29Speaker 01

  But we also had the difficulties of dealing in Miami. Because, you know, nobody knew what was, you know, they didn't understand the business model.

• 48:39Speaker 02

  So imagine that one day you're not getting deposits in your checking account for your business. And you call the credit card companies and you ask them, why aren't you sending us the money? And they'd be like, oh, we have to hold it for 60 days to make sure this is legitimate.

• 48:52Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 48:53Speaker 02

  And we're trying to run a business. We have to, you know, you have to buy parts, you have to pay yourselves, you have to pay rent, you have to pay services. And yeah, they would hold the money for however long they wanted to hold it for because they thought the business wasn't legitimate.

• 49:07Guy Raz?

  But I mean, the model, if it did work, if you did get the money right away, was great because you got the money to buy, you didn't have to hold inventory, right? You would just get an order in and then you'd go get the parts needed and then make the machine.

• 49:23Speaker 01

  For the most part, as our volumes began to grow, it was getting more and more challenging to source the parts.

• 49:30Speaker 02

  We used to do some pretty insane things to get parts. I remember a new graphics card had just launched and we couldn't get any of them. And we sent every employee with their credit card to every electronics boutique in Miami and in North Broward. And we asked them to go buy the maximum amount of graphics cards that the retailer would sell them. And then we'd reimburse them on their credit card after they, you know, they brought the graphics cards back. Um, but you know, we were small. We were really small. We were arguably insignificant. And uh, uh, these parts were in high demand in many cases. And sometimes you'd be competing against the big companies like a Dell or an HP for something like memory or for a motherboard or for a processor.

• 50:15Speaker 02

  We have an incredible story about when AMD launched the first one gigahertz processor. We couldn't get our hands on it. So Nelson or Alex came up with the idea, just buy a bunch of gateways that have the processor in it.

• 50:27Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 50:28Speaker 02

  We'll take out the one gigahertz processor. We'll put a cheaper two or $300 processor that we can get. And then we'll put that one gigahertz processor inside our systems. I mean, we did crazy things like that.

• 50:38Guy Raz?

  And what would you do with the gateway computers?

• 50:40Speaker 02

  We'd use them around the office for desktops, for corporate, like for your workstation. You'd use it as your office PC.

• 50:47Guy Raz?

  Yeah. You know, it's interesting. I'm just, what you were able to do despite being tiny, a drop in the bucket, right? Early on, which was the big PC companies, they could make cheap PCs. You guys couldn't. You were not able to make cheap PCs. You didn't have the connections. You didn't have the supply chains. You didn't have the, you know, you didn't have the capital to scale that, but you could make expensive PCs. Because that was possible to do and to charge a lot of money for expensive PCs, which the big PC makers, they were looking to reduce their prices.

• 51:23Speaker 01

  Exactly. What we were doing was selling four PCs in one. And they were fascinated by the fact that we were, you know, we were commanding that much money from those PCs.

• 51:33Speaker 02

  But keep in mind, what we were doing was providing the customer with a service that the big companies really couldn't do. They were so configured for no customization or low personalization, let's call it that, and high rate of manufacturing.

• 51:51Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 51:52Speaker 02

  That what we were, we were configured completely opposite of that from day one. And that ultimately was, I think, the, one of the biggest competitive advantages that we had. And there was a lot of secret sauce in that, like, you know, because we were smaller, we were, we had access to certain components and ultra high-tech and emerging technologies that weren't ready for mass scale and mass adoption.

• 52:15Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 52:15Speaker 02

  So that we used our size to our advantage.

• 52:18Guy Raz?

  Were you guys able in the late 90s to get a line of credit from a bank? Or any loans to just to shore up, you know, your supplies? Or to, or did you even try?

• 52:30Speaker 01

  Yes, we did. Um, there was one banker that we spoke to that got it. She got it. She was an older lady. We explained the circumstances. She came to the office. She saw what we were doing. She saw we were busy and we couldn't, I mean, we were pulling our hairs. And she goes, you know what? Tomorrow you get the loan. She came. She drew up a check for $50,000. We signed the documents and, you know, we needed that money for the operational part of the business. So she was a godsend. She was the only one, really. Yeah.

• 53:02Guy Raz?

  Wow. And, and what, at what point, right? Cause Frank, you joined in 98 and it's still the four of you. But, but obviously that was not going to last because you had to, you would get in more orders would come in and you would need more than two people building PC's at a certain point. What, what was the, what was the tipping point? What, what happened? Like, was it a slow burn? Or did it all of a sudden just start, orders to start to pour in that made it impossible for just the two of you to build the computers?

• 53:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think, uh, the, the inflection point was, uh, when we evolved the website so that customers could actually order it on the website instead of just configuring it.

• 53:46Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 53:47Speaker 02

  Um, you know, and that is when things started going from like 20, 30 computers a month to 50, then 70, then 100. But the challenge is, is the numbers still sound small, but you have to understand it's exponential growth. You're like doubling like one month to the next and.

• 54:07Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 54:07Speaker 02

  You know, as the business grew and, you know, Nelson Alex started hiring more employees, um, we would outgrow every single space. And then what ended up happening is by the time they were able to find the next parcel of real estate to keep up with our growth and we would build it out and move in. We were never able to move out of the last building that we were in because the business just kept growing so fast. So it was always an idea of we're going to move from this old building to the new building. But by the time the new building was ready to move into, we were so big, we could never leave the old buildings. And that basically happened forever.

• 54:43Speaker 01

  Well, the last one to the last one.

• 54:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:45Speaker 01

  That we finally got it right.

• 54:46Guy Raz?

  And all right, so but but really, you were still, even in the early 2000s, under the radar, right? There was no, the big guys, the big players were not part. In fact, I think at this point, in the early 2000s, the big computer companies were in crisis because there was so much competition, the price of PCs was so low. They, I mean, I mean, this is when IBM was thinking about, and then eventually did, sold off its computer division, stopped making computers, sold to Lenovo.

• 55:17Speaker 01

  There was quite a bit of pressure back then for them, but they didn't understand our market. They had no idea that this market would grow so fast and that there were so many people that were closet gamers, if you will. There were moms and dads and kids of all ages and college grads. And we were appealing to a lot of people.

• 55:45Speaker 02

  It was a bit of a golden age because as we were coming up as a hardware provider to gamers, some of the greatest games ever created were also coming up. You had, obviously, you know, John Carmack at ID developing the Doom series and the Quake series. You had Tim Sweeney and Mark Raine at Epic creating Unreal. And then, at the same time, you had Microsoft taking notice of all of this and saying, they're going to get into the gaming space with the Xbox.

• 56:14Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 56:14Speaker 02

  And, you know, for a while, as much as that was a threat to PC gaming and the death of PC gaming was pronounced, it also was a huge opportunity because they spent billions on marketing and advertising. And they brought the Halo franchise, which was a first-person shooter game that was exclusively on the PC. All first-person shooter genre was pretty much always on computer gaming. They brought that over to console gaming for the first time. And suddenly, this platform of consoles, which had tens of millions of gamers out there, you know, from Atari and even before Atari, were playing PC-level games. And that was a big inflection point as well. But everything was happening all at the same time.

• 56:58Speaker 01

  You know, and there's another component to this. Aside from the gaming and the customization and all the good stuff, we poured a lot of personality into the PC. The only guys that were really doing something interesting with the PC that gave it a design, gave it a life, was Apple.

• 57:16Guy Raz?

  Yeah, beautiful, right? When those colors came out in the late 90s or the early 2000s, yeah. It was game changer, those giant monitors that were blue and translucent, yeah.

• 57:28Speaker 01

  Exactly. So, there was no PC maker out there that was really doing that.

• 57:32Guy Raz?

  They were just boring beige colored boxes.

• 57:35Speaker 01

  It was awful, awful.

• 57:36Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 57:37Speaker 01

  So, we made a decision, you know, we're gonna, we're gonna do some cutting-edge stuff, not only inside the box but outside the box. We're gonna give this machine a personality like a car, like a Ferrari, like a Porsche. So, we started doing that with the PC and...

• 57:54Guy Raz?

  Doing what?

• 57:55Speaker 01

  Well, we started, we, first, we had different color scapes of like plasma purple, Martian red, lunar white.

• 58:03Guy Raz?

  And it was the, and it was the color of the actual metallic chassis, or it was like colors that were like lights?

• 58:09Speaker 02

  We had contracted a body shop that basically painted cars. Going back to the hot rod analogy we were making earlier.

• 58:18Guy Raz?

  Okay.

• 58:19Speaker 02

  They were painting these cases and we did keyboards, monitors, speakers.

• 58:24Guy Raz?

  Wow, so you would buy the cases that were off the shelf, but you would paint them?

• 58:28Speaker 02

  We would send them to a body shop in Miami, or actually, initially, we sent them to one in Minnesota.

• 58:34Speaker 01

  In Minnesota.

• 58:35Speaker 02

  And then they would paint them, and then we'd ship them down. Eventually, Alex was like, this is too expensive, shipping things back and forth, because he was running supply chain and operations. So, we moved them down here, and they set up a body shop down here in Miami.

• 58:48Speaker 01

  Next to us, next to us.

• 58:49Speaker 02

  Right behind the warehouse.

• 58:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:51Speaker 02

  Alienware was, is still, um, one of the few brands that has a personality behind it, where you can cover up the logo and know immediately that that is an Alienware product. And, you know, people don't buy it purely because of its function, they buy it because, okay, it performs a function, but it has a style, it represents me, it says something about me as the purchaser of that product. And that was very similar to Apple back then, Apple was, you know, very similar.

• 59:21Guy Raz?

  Creative, creative people.

• 59:22Speaker 02

  Right, the creative people, the rebellious people, the whole campaign they had around that. Um, Alienware was the closest thing you had to something like that in the PC world, in the PC spectrum.

• 59:34Guy Raz?

  I mean, obviously, you were getting attention for what you were doing. Certainly, when you were one of the very few businesses doing this. But by the time this became clear, it was clear to Dell, for example, and other big computer makers, that there was money to be made there. They got into this game. And you guys, I think, when Dell really got in 2003, you were probably doing $50, $60 million a year in revenue, maybe a little bit more. So you were doing a significant amount, but not like Dell.

• 1:00:06Speaker 01

  No, no, no, no. Yeah, we ordered nothing.

• 1:00:08Guy Raz?

  I mean, you had a brand, but now the big companies are coming in and building these really good gaming PC's that you could buy, and they had a better distribution. Some of them were available at Best Buy and all these other places. That must have been a little concerning, even though you had a good brand. How were you going to? I mean, were you guys nervous at all?

• 1:00:30Speaker 01

  No, not at all.

• 1:00:32Guy Raz?

  You weren't nervous.

• 1:00:33Speaker 01

  Okay. When Dell got in, we were.

• 1:00:35Guy Raz?

  Okay. Of course, you're nervous.

• 1:00:37Speaker 01

  The only reason I said Dell was because Dell, we mimicked Dell's business model. We didn't reinvent the wheel.

• 1:00:44Guy Raz?

  Right. Dell's model was you ordered a custom-made PC, and they would send it to you.

• 1:00:50Speaker 01

  Yes. But hey, we also, you know, we were also growing. So I always felt that, hey, you know, if given the right funding and we could get some good hires and develop a supply chain, which is the hard part with the East, then, hey, we really do have a chance.

• 1:01:14Guy Raz?

  When we come back in just a moment, Nelson and Frank keep an eye on their biggest competitor, which, as it turns out, is watching them, too. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This.

• 1:01:40Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's around 2004 and Alienware has become one of the fastest growing private companies in the US. It's doing over $100 million in revenue and has like 500 employees. But that kind of growth can be really hard.

• 1:02:00Speaker 01

  It was pretty tough. I gotta tell you, I mean, we, you know, we talk about growth as being, oh, it's great. And, you know, you see that ticker, you remember that UPS commercial where you saw that ticker where the orders started coming in?

• 1:02:13Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:14Speaker 01

  Well, that's a problem too, right? I mean, if you don't, if you don't have the infrastructure, then you could blow that brand away. I mean, it's gonna, you're gonna have bad service, all sorts of bad things happen. One of the things that we did was the little that we managed to keep for ourselves, we always reinvested in the business. We never, we were never top-heavy. We didn't, we took, you know, average salaries. We didn't give ourselves big bonuses. We sold the notion to the employees also that, hey, there'll be time for that. That will happen, but I need you guys to do it with us.

• 1:02:52Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:53Speaker 01

  So, you know, but we were, we were pretty successful managing the expectation and the growth.

• 1:03:00Guy Raz?

  Well, tell me about the relationship between the four sort of original people involved. I mean, obviously you're still friends with Alex and the two of you are friends and you haven't worked together for a long time. We're gonna get to that in a moment, what happened to Alienware. But did you, did you all kind of, everybody kind of have their lane and focus on that? And was there ever any tension or, or, you know, different views about where to go and which directions to take?

• 1:03:32Speaker 01

  What I learned was that I did not have, I was not your typical CEO because I just didn't have the, the training or the business acumen or whatever.

• 1:03:43Speaker 01

  But if there was a disagreement, if there was debate, then fine, I actually, I welcomed it a lot. I I wanted to hear all the bad stuff first and, you know, all the negative news first, and then let's focus on how we get better.

• 1:03:56Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:57Speaker 01

  You know, so we, we, and everybody for the most, they knew it was a lot of work. There was a lot of work involved, especially us, that we just didn't have the, the, the, the typical tools that a, a, perhaps a, an MBA coming out of school would have. But we figured it out. And then we, we were smart enough to hire people that were smarter than us.

• 1:04:21Speaker 02

  But you mentioned contention. I think one of the greatest assets that we had at Alienware is how different Nelson and Alex are and were, and how much they debated every issue. They rarely ever saw eye to eye. And the beauty of that was that we would see almost every angle of a challenge or a decision that we had to make, because they saw it always differently. And finally, they would debate it out. And, you know, I remember that my first day on the job, I could hear them screaming downstairs, and I'm a brand new employee, and I looked over to Fabian, and I go, what, what's going on? And he goes, don't worry about it. It'll, it'll all be over in a few minutes. But it was that contention

• 1:05:02Speaker 02

  and that debate and those, those different perspectives that helped us arrive at really good decisions. And ultimately, I think, had we not had that, we probably wouldn't have been as successful as we were.

• 1:05:15Guy Raz?

  All right. You guys are, obviously, you know, you built this thing in a garage, you know, or, you know, in your house, and, and, and less than 10 years in, you consider going public, but ultimately, you get an acquisition offer from

• 1:05:32Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:05:33Guy Raz?

  You, from Dell, from your biggest competitor, from the evil empire, obviously, and he's, Michael Dell's been on the show. But, but, but you must have been like, they were your competitor. You probably saw them as an evil competitor.

• 1:05:46Speaker 01

  No, I didn't.

• 1:05:46Guy Raz?

  No, you didn't.

• 1:05:48Speaker 01

  I saw them as, as my long lost brother, you know, the Romulans and the Vulcans. If any, anybody can understand that out there. You know, they, they were, we were very similar. We had the same model. So the first time XPS comes out.

• 1:06:07Guy Raz?

  Their, their XPS?

• 1:06:08Speaker 01

  Their XPS.

• 1:06:09Guy Raz?

  Yep, in 2001 or two or maybe four.

• 1:06:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, 2000, well, maybe this was closer to 2003, Frank.

• 1:06:16Guy Raz?

  Yeah, okay.

• 1:06:18Speaker 01

  Well, I, I sent a note to Michael.

• 1:06:20Guy Raz?

  This is to Michael Dell, the founder of the company.

• 1:06:22Speaker 01

  Right, thinking I'm never gonna get a response. I said, okay, Michael at Dell.com, sure enough, whatever. Uh, maybe I shouldn't have said that on the air.

• 1:06:31Guy Raz?

  That's right. It's not hard to figure these out.

• 1:06:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, so, um, I sent him an email. And I did this one on my own, I just said, you know, man, I am a little bit concerned. I'm a little bit concerned because this is a big guy and he's in our space. And I should be, I should be concerned, but I said, I'm gonna be very cordial about this whole thing.

• 1:06:51Guy Raz?

  Yep.

• 1:06:51Speaker 01

  Hey, Michael, this is Nelson, just wanna welcome you on board, you're giving a lot of visibility to the gaming market, I appreciate it, blah, blah, blah.

• 1:06:58Guy Raz?

  Oh, so you're welcoming into him into your space?

• 1:07:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:01Guy Raz?

  You weren't like, you jerk, you're coming, you were like, hey, welcome, you know, um.

• 1:07:06Speaker 01

  Keep your friends close, but keep your enemies closer, I mean.

• 1:07:08Guy Raz?

  Right, yeah.

• 1:07:09Speaker 01

  So I said, okay, so, and so we exchanged email, by the way, he responded within minutes.

• 1:07:16Guy Raz?

  And you don't keep in touch with him, that was it?

• 1:07:18Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:07:18Guy Raz?

  It was a cordial exchange.

• 1:07:19Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly.

• 1:07:20Guy Raz?

  Okay.

• 1:07:21Speaker 01

  We exchanged maybe a couple of emails about a couple of things, but we don't, nothing, nothing major. So 2006 comes around, I think what happened was, and I, I don't wanna speak for Michael, but we probably got wind of, you know, us growing.

• 1:07:36Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:36Speaker 01

  And us going public. And at that point, he, he sends me an email and he says, hey, do you wanna meet? You know, in Orlando, and I go, sure, and he goes, bring Alex, let's, let's sit down and talk. So we met in Orlando and he goes, guys, I wanna buy you out. And I'm like, okay, I'm thinking, why do you wanna buy us out? You know, what's going on, but he goes, well, I, I think that you guys are doing great, I've always admired your company and you're doing the right thing. He recognized the value in the brand.

• 1:08:07Guy Raz?

  And this came out of the blue, you had no idea this is gonna come?

• 1:08:10Speaker 01

  No idea.

• 1:08:10Guy Raz?

  No, you did not know, you were not soliciting this.

• 1:08:13Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:08:14Guy Raz?

  He just is like, I think I, I wanna buy you guys.

• 1:08:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:18Guy Raz?

  Did he put a number on the table at that time?

• 1:08:20Speaker 01

  He put a number on the table, that didn't work, I mean, the number didn't, well, the, the funny thing is that we come to terms. He, he sends his guys over.

• 1:08:32Speaker 01

  They start doing the due diligence. Then a month or two into it, all of a sudden, Michael sends, you know, calls me and says, hey, we're gonna have to pull out.

• 1:08:42Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 1:08:43Speaker 01

  What? You're gonna pull out now? After knowing everything we're doing? And how we run our business?

• 1:08:49Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:49Speaker 01

  Our books? Are you crazy? I didn't say anything. I kept my mouth shut. I kept cool. I said, okay. You gotta do what you gotta do, and I gotta do what I gotta do.

• 1:08:58Guy Raz?

  Yeah, why did they pull out?

• 1:09:00Speaker 01

  Well, I guess he wanted to, you know, he presented it to the board. You know, I'm sure the board said, gaming, what is gaming? Are you guys crazy? Your enterprise, your, you know, you don't need this, blah, blah, blah. You know, that typical board stuff.

• 1:09:14Guy Raz?

  Yep.

• 1:09:15Speaker 01

  And, uh, and he was, he really did love us. He really, you know, I almost felt like he was one of our customers.

• 1:09:25Speaker 01

  But I'm saying, well, whatever was meant to be is meant to be. We're gonna go now. We're gonna present, and we're gonna go public. That's it. I get a phone call, unknown caller. I'm driving to dinner with my wife.

• 1:09:38Guy Raz?

  This is 2006.

• 1:09:39Speaker 01

  This is 2006. I get this call from unknown. I know unknown means Michael. So I get the phone call, and then we start talking, talks about a number. I say another number. He says, okay. I says, hey, this time, we have a deal, right? Then he goes, yes, absolutely. And we made the deal happen.

• 1:09:59Speaker 01

  Then he asked me, he asked me, what do you wanna do, Nelson? Do you wanna stay? You wanna be incorporated to the Dell machine? Or do you wanna, you know, be your own, you know, entity? And pick from us what you need when you need it? The challenge was, I wanted to make anywhere a little bit bigger, so no, I wanna incorporate. I wanna incorporate into your supply chain mechanism. I want to, you know, get in there so that we can grow the eating word business. So it presented with challenges and stuff. It's hard. I mean, it's, but honestly, they did a phenomenal job of preserving the brand.

• 1:10:40Guy Raz?

  When he, when that came to you, obviously, we're gonna make a lot of money. The founders are gonna make a ton of money. This is gonna be it's an undisclosed acquisition, but I, I can imagine what it was, given what your revenue is. You do some calculations and figure out roughly how much you got. Was, in your view, at that time, because I think I probably would have done that, was it part, part of it was, was it like, okay, I'm just, I'm tired. I've been doing this for so long. I just need a break. Was that part of it too?

• 1:11:14Speaker 01

  No, no, no. I was ready, I was ready for the next, I was, I was gearing up for the next level.

• 1:11:20Guy Raz?

  So, so to you, it was Dell was going to be with their supply chains, with their, you know, marketing chops, with their massive scale. You were thinking, we're going to use their resources to grow even bigger. And now we're going to be part of Dell, but, but we can only do this if we have access to massive resources, like, like the resources they have.

• 1:11:39Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. But what I soon found out, that I'm not a corporate guy.

• 1:11:45Guy Raz?

  Yeah. Because you were hired to be a Dell employee. Now, now you're the CEO of a Dell portfolio company.

• 1:11:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I, you know, Alex and myself, and especially Alex, myself, couldn't, we weren't going to fit in.

• 1:11:59Guy Raz?

  You, you weren't, you weren't, you weren't, you didn't want to go to the meetings? You didn't want to?

• 1:12:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, there was a lot of corporate, you know, like, requests and a lot of decisions that would take a long time because there was a lot of analysis that had to be done. Understandably slow, slow. It was a public company. And I understand that, but, man, I kind of wanted to move at the speed of light and they just, they're, they're an aircraft carrier and we're like a little PT boat.

• 1:12:23Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:24Speaker 01

  So, you know, one of the things that Alex, Alex was tired, Alex was, you know, was, didn't do a lot of work. He was very tired. I, I was tired as well, but I was ready for the challenge. But Alex said, listen, man, I, I don't think I could do this. And once Alex says that, I'm like, mm, I'm not going to do this without Alex. It's going to be very, very difficult and I just don't want to do it. So, that's where it ended.

• 1:12:49Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:51Guy Raz?

  So Nelson, you left. You and Alex left Alienware, I think at roughly the same time. And Frank, you stayed on. In fact, you stayed on in a leadership role at Dell, I think until just a few years ago. But I mean, Nelson, back then, I think it was 2007 when you left Alienware. And I wonder, did you go through a period of just sadness, or I don't know, depression, or, you know, like, what do I do now?

• 1:13:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was depressed for like, two years. It was tough. I was going 100 miles an hour, and every day. And then all of a sudden, you know, because, you know, Alex, Alex could adapt very well, because he's got so many hobbies, and he, Alex is like a machine. He just, he's got a million things going on. But I am very singularly focused.

• 1:13:47Guy Raz?

  Your hobby was your job?

• 1:13:48Speaker 01

  My hobby was my job.

• 1:13:50Guy Raz?

  Yeah. And that's amazing. See, people don't, people just think, wow, you get all this money. People are probably thinking that about you. You're loaded, you've got everything set, you're set for life, and here you are, you're actually depressed.

• 1:14:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, I was brought up from pretty humble beginnings. Money, obviously, is important for everything, but it's never been the most important thing in my life.

• 1:14:19Speaker 01

  I felt that I was contributing something to people, and that's what I, that's what drove me.

• 1:14:27Speaker 02

  Nelson is a creator. He used to create the Alienware ads. Most of the product, if not all the product innovations that you saw at Alienware, the industrial design, was all really being fed from Nelson's mind. And, you know, that creative outlet was now gone. It wasn't there anymore. But, I mean, everything you still see to today, I mean, the industrial design characteristics of Alienware, as they're still carried through, there's components and elements of all of that that came from. He was the visionary behind all of these things. But it's, in a lot of ways, you know, Alienware is Nelson.

• 1:15:08Speaker 01

  Gee, thanks, Frank. I should hire you to speak for me.

• 1:15:14Guy Raz?

  So Frank, you stayed on for a long time. You only left Dell in 2019.

• 1:15:21Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:15:21Guy Raz?

  And then when you left, you were the vice president, the GM for premium consumer brands.

• 1:15:27Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:15:27Guy Raz?

  You had a big, big, massive job at Dell. So you really, I mean, and you kind of oversaw the growth, the explosive growth of Alienware. I mean, to the point where now it's not just PCs and laptops. It's like, they make gaming chairs and headsets. The gaming chairs thing still boggles my mind that that's a whole thing. But, I mean, really, like, you oversaw this, this massive growth of this brand for the next, what, how long were you there? Almost 15 years, 14 years.

• 1:16:02Speaker 02

  Yep, long time. It goes by fast.

• 1:16:05Guy Raz?

  And, and tell me what, I mean, is it, I mean, is that what happened that with Dell's resources and, and, you know, its kind of platform, you were able to take Alienware to the next level?

• 1:16:20Speaker 02

  It wasn't that easy. Initially, when Dell acquired Alienware, we were still competing against XPS Gaming, because XPS was their gaming brand.

• 1:16:31Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:32Speaker 02

  So, mission number one was to survive that.

• 1:16:35Guy Raz?

  With the hope that they wouldn't shut you down and just take your technology or take your people?

• 1:16:39Speaker 02

  Correct, correct. You know, the PC industry is extremely challenging. It's very competitive. You have hyper-competitive people. And you had two, you know, sets of people now trying to win against the same customer, trying to win the same customer.

• 1:16:57Guy Raz?

  Wow. So you're internally competing with your colleagues now?

• 1:17:01Speaker 02

  Yes, and we are dependent upon them because, to Nelson's point, right, we immediately recognized the benefit of leveraging their supply chain and their operations. And the competitor piece was definitely awkward, but...

• 1:17:17Speaker 02

  The cultural differences were so stark. Alienware was all about just, we gotta do whatever we gotta do to get the job done. And going to a large company, that was 50,000 employees by the time I had joined, was a completely different world with tons of analysts and all this research and all these well-educated professionals and enormous experience and just this carefulness and this thoughtfulness to every decision that's made. And that was very different, a completely different environment. And it was extremely intimidating, very, very scary, very uncomfortable.

• 1:18:01Speaker 02

  Suddenly, I felt like I was back in kindergarten almost, like starting at ground zero, where I had to learn a big company. And I had no experience with that. And it was a different language. It was everything, everything was different about it. Then it became, okay, once it was pretty clear that we were going to survive, then how did we shift from surviving to thriving? And that took a little bit of time to go off and figure out. And we figured it out. But the whole time, what I'd say is, we built this thing. Nelson Alex, more than anybody, had built this baby, if you will. And you don't want to let it die.

• 1:18:42Speaker 02

  You don't want to let it not prosper and see it recognize its full potential.

• 1:18:47Guy Raz?

  Yeah. When you guys think about this journey, right? This thing has started in 96, 97. A garage sold for, who knows how many millions of dollars to Dell, but a lot. And you built a brand that is really enduring. Certainly, one of the most prominent gaming brands in the world. How much of that do you attribute to how hard you worked and your skill and intelligence? And how much do you think has to do with luck? First to you, Frank.

• 1:19:22Speaker 02

  I think it has to do...

• 1:19:26Speaker 02

  Almost entirely with the people that were involved in all of it. That was the secret sauce of Alienware was the differences in opinions and the respect that everybody had for one another and all of that. Was there luck? There was an enormous amount of luck. So many other things could have gone wrong and a lot of things went wrong. This was not a perfect journey by any means. I mean, there was an enormous amount of obstacles that were presented along the way. And hard work had to overcome those obstacles. But I think it's the people and it was the luck of those people coming together that were really the driving forces from my perspective.

• 1:20:07Guy Raz?

  Nelson?

• 1:20:08Speaker 01

  You know, interesting you say about, you know, you talk about work. I think if I had to give one piece of advice to an entrepreneur is if you're not smarter than they are, then outwork them. If you have a tendency of saying, hey, I'm, these people are smarter than me, my competitors, my whatever, but you know, I'm, I'm pretty smart too and I can outwork them. So I'm going to work hard. I think that's one of the biggest things that we all had in common. We worked really, really, really hard because we just did not have the formal training

• 1:20:52Speaker 01

  that we needed. But beyond the all things, I think that without passion, we're nothing. And I think if you take that approach as an entrepreneur and, and, and look at business that way and, you know, not do it just solely for the money, but for whatever else drives you, you know, I, I think you'll be okay.

• 1:21:17Guy Raz?

  That's Nelson Gonzalez and Frank Azor, two of the co-founders of Alienware. Frank is now an executive at AMD, a company that makes processors and a whole range of gaming devices. And a while back, both he and Nelson were appointed to the board of yet another gaming company, GameCraft. So for the first time in like 15 years, they're working together again.

• 1:21:46Guy Raz?

  Before I let you go, Nelson, you said you believe in aliens, right?

• 1:21:50Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:21:51Guy Raz?

  So here's my question. If they come, if they arrive to planet Earth, are you gonna run out of your house with your arms open to the sky, saying, "Yes, take me, welcome"? Or are you gonna like run to the hills and, you know, with your ammo and shotgun and hide?

• 1:22:08Speaker 01

  I am not one of those believers that aliens are just entities from another galaxy or another world.

• 1:22:14Guy Raz?

  You're ruining my story. You're ruining my scenario. Okay, keep going.

• 1:22:19Speaker 01

  Okay, so if I had to leave with them, if they gave me an option, I would definitely, "Give me five minutes, let me talk to my family, but I'm gone."

• 1:22:29Guy Raz?

  You're on that ride.

• 1:22:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:22:31Guy Raz?

  Even if they poke needles in you and dissect you, you just...

• 1:22:34Speaker 01

  It depends where they poke the needles at.

• 1:22:36Guy Raz?

  Yeah. But you had to check out that ride. You're like, you know what?

• 1:22:40Speaker 01

  I have to check out the ride.

• 1:22:42Guy Raz?

  Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. If you want to contact the team, our email address is [email protected]. And if you want to follow us on Twitter, our account is @howibuiltthis and mine is @guyroz. And on Instagram, we're @howibuiltthis and I'm @guy dot roz. This episode was produced by Kerry Thompson with music composed by Ramtin Arablouei. It was edited by Neva Grant with research help from Sam Paulson. Our production staff also includes J.C. Howard, Casey Herman, Liz Metzger, Alex Chung, Elaine Coats, John Isabella, Chris Messini, and Carla Estevez. Our intern is Susanna Brown. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.