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A show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the movements they built. Created and hosted by @guy.raz ✨
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Recent posts
The genius of YETI wasn’t inventing the cooler.
It was convincing people that a cooler could be worth caring about.
Ryan and Roy Seiders saw something most companies missed: serious hunters and anglers weren’t looking for the cheapest ice chest. They wanted equipment that could survive the way they actually used it.
So instead of competing on price, the brothers went radically upmarket.
That created another challenge: how do you convince someone to spend hundreds of dollars on something they’ve always treated like a commodity?
YETI built credibility from the inside out. Fishing guides, hunters, and other respected outdoorsmen became early advocates, giving the brand authenticity with exactly the customers it needed to reach.
Eventually, YETI didn’t just sell a premium cooler. It helped turn the humble ice chest into an aspirational piece of outdoor gear.
It’s a great example of how disruption doesn’t always require inventing something new.
Sometimes you take something everyone has stopped thinking about—and give them a reason to think about it differently.
Hear the full story on How I Built This with @guy.raz.
24 Aug 2026
An exciting new chapter for @howibuiltthis. We are expanding and bringing more of what our listeners and our community has come to expect and love! And an exciting new partnership with Vox Media. Stay tuned for changes coming in January 2027! 📷 @peterprato (an old photo but still the best Peter!)
29 Sep 2026
From near bankruptcy to Magnolia: the empire Chip and Joanna Gaines built.
They didn’t just renovate homes—they rebuilt an entire culture around them.
Before they were household names, Chip and Joanna Gaines were nearly broke—renovating houses in Waco during the 2008 crash. Most people would’ve quit. They didn’t. They doubled down—on their partnership, their faith, and their hometown.
Then came Fixer Upper: 5 million viewers a week, a cultural movement around shiplap and small-town charm. But when they walked away from the show at its peak, everyone thought they were crazy.
They weren’t quitting TV. They were building Magnolia—a billion-dollar brand rooted in storytelling, family, and the belief that “home” can change everything.
💡 The lesson? You don’t need the spotlight to build something lasting. You need conviction, patience, and a story people want to belong to.
🎧 Hear how Chip and Joanna Gaines built Magnolia—now on How I Built This with @guy.raz.
20 Oct 2025
🚨 NEW EPISODE ALERT 🚨
@drsquatch
The $15,000 commercial didn’t just make @drsquatch famous. It solved the company’s real bottleneck: finding customers affordably.
For years, founder Jack Haldrup had built the soap company methodically. Inventory lived in his closet, his mother helped fulfill orders, and the product developed a loyal following.
But a good product and gradual growth weren’t enough to create a national brand. Dr. Squatch still lacked a repeatable way to reach large numbers of men without spending more to acquire them than each order was worth.
Jack saw a possible answer in the irreverent commercials popularized by brands like Dollar Shave Club. When one agency proposed a roughly $500,000 campaign, he found a smaller team and produced his own version for $15,000.
The humor attracted millions of viewers. More importantly, the ad converted attention into sales at a fraction of the company’s previous customer-acquisition cost. It gave Dr. Squatch a marketing engine it could scale.
The turning point wasn’t simply “going viral.” It was discovering a distinctive way to tell the product’s story that also worked economically.
A memorable ad can create attention. A great one changes the mathematics of the business.
Hear the full story of Dr. Squatch on How I Built This with @guy.raz.
09 Nov 2026
🚨 🚨 NEW EPISODE ALERT 🚨 🚨
Airbnb’s business model was strong enough to hide Brian Chesky’s self described weaknesses as a CEO—until the pandemic.
As a young designer leading a rapidly growing company, Brian surrounded himself with experienced executives and followed conventional advice: hire great people, delegate and focus on the big picture.
But delegation gradually became distance. Intimidated by leaders with decades more experience, Brian (@bchesky) often deferred to their judgment. Airbnb expanded into too many projects, accumulated layers of management and became increasingly difficult to steer.
Then COVID erased 80 percent of its business in eight weeks. With the company’s survival at stake, Brian could no longer lead from a distance.
He studied how Steve Jobs had rebuilt Apple, cut projects, simplified the organization and returned to the details. Brian began speaking with employees several levels below him, scrutinizing decisions and setting a single direction for the company—even when that approach frustrated executives.
The crisis didn’t suddenly give him every skill a CEO needs. It forced him to stop treating experience as a substitute for his own judgment.
Hiring people who know more than you is essential. Surrendering responsibility for understanding what they’re doing is not.
Hear the full story of Airbnb (@airbnb) on How I Built This with @guy.raz.
05 Nov 2026
Protecting yourself from the wrong people can also prevent the right people from entering your life.
As Airbnb grew, Brian Chesky (@bchesky) became increasingly unsure whom he could trust. The pandemic intensified that isolation: he spent two years largely inside his home, working roughly 100 hours a week and feeling disconnected from nearly every part of life outside the company.
Some successful people respond by closing their circles entirely—trusting only those who knew them before the money, attention or influence arrived.
Brian chose a different risk. He began giving new people the benefit of the doubt and allowing their behavior to reveal who they were.
That didn’t mean abandoning boundaries or trusting everyone with everything immediately. It meant opening the door gradually, assuming good intent and being willing to walk away if someone violated that trust.
A few people disappointed him. But those experiences were survivable. A life organized entirely around avoiding betrayal, he decided, carried the greater cost.
Trust always creates exposure. It also creates the possibility of friendship, learning and a life that continues to expand.
Hear the full story of Airbnb (@airbnb) on How I Built This with @guy.raz.
04 Nov 2026
When Airbnb (@airbnb) CEO Brian Chesky’s (@bchesky) mother was undergoing cancer treatment, she noticed other patients struggling to afford a place to stay. Her experience helped inspire Airbnb.org’s mission to provide free housing to people in need.
03 Nov 2026
🚨 NEW EPISODE ALERT 🚨
A milestone can transform a company overnight without changing how its founder feels the next morning.
When Airbnb went public during the pandemic, the company was valued at roughly $100 billion. There was no crowded trading floor or celebration with everyone who had built it—just faces arranged in boxes on Zoom.
The next morning, Brian Chesky (@bchesky) woke up alone, put on sweatpants and joined another ordinary meeting. The achievement he had spent much of his life moving toward had arrived, but his life felt surprisingly unchanged.
That realization forced him to examine what had been driving his ambition. Success had become entangled with a desire for validation—to feel special, admired and, perhaps, loved.
But adulation couldn’t provide that. It produced a rush, then faded, creating the need for another achievement to replace it.
Ambition can build something extraordinary. It becomes more complicated when we expect the thing we build to resolve something inside us.
Reaching the summit answers whether you could climb the mountain. It may also force you to ask why you needed to climb it in the first place.
Hear the full story of Airbnb (@airbnb) on How I Built This with @guy.raz.
02 Nov 2026
A product can serve a specific need without presenting itself as a niche product.
After developing an allergen-free version of Sweet Loren’s cookie dough, Loren Brill Castle faced a choice: maintain separate product lines or reformulate the entire brand.
The new recipe tasted as good as—or better than—the original. And in a crowded refrigerated aisle, two nearly identical lines would compete for limited shelf space while making the brand harder to understand.
So Sweet Loren’s went all in. Every product would be free from the top allergens, but the packaging would lead with something more universal: a delicious cookie made with simple, trustworthy ingredients.
The dietary information remained visible for shoppers who needed it. It simply stopped defining the product for everyone else.
That distinction helped Sweet Loren’s offer something meaningful to people with food allergies without asking the broader market to think of it as a compromise.
Sometimes the strongest positioning doesn’t make a product’s most specialized feature louder. It makes the product good enough that the feature can quietly expand who gets to enjoy it.
Hear the full story of Sweet Loren’s (@sweetlorens) on How I Built This with @guy.raz.
30 Oct 2026
AI is making software cheaper to build. It isn’t making good problems easier to find.
When Tope Awotona started Calendly, he funded the early product with personal savings, emptied his 401(k) and worked with a small development team overseas. Today, he believes many software founders can reach that same first milestone with far less capital.
AI tools can help turn an idea into a working prototype before a founder hires a full team or raises millions of dollars. That first version may not support millions of users—but it doesn’t need to.
Its job is to answer the more important questions: Does this solve a real problem? Will anyone use it? Will anyone pay for it?
Once those answers are clear, raising money and recruiting talent become easier because the founder is no longer selling only a vision. There is evidence that something valuable exists.
The cost of building is falling. The value of understanding the customer is not.
Hear the full conversation on How I Built This with @guy.raz.
29 Oct 2026
At 22, Loren Brill Castle was preparing to move to Los Angeles when she was diagnosed with stage two Hodgkin’s lymphoma and told she needed to begin chemotherapy immediately.
The first months were physically and emotionally difficult. Treatment became her full-time job, and questions about whether she would ever feel healthy—or normal—again crowded out the future she had imagined.
A therapist helped Loren recognize a distinction that would stay with her: she couldn’t choose the diagnosis or make treatment easier, but she could decide how the experience would shape the life that followed.
That reframing wasn’t a substitute for medical care, nor did it erase her fear. It gave her a way to move through it without allowing illness to become the only story she could tell about herself.
During treatment, Loren began studying nutrition and taking cooking classes on the days she felt well enough. After she was cured, baking became a source of comfort—and eventually an experiment in making the kind of cookies she wanted to eat with less-processed ingredients.
Those experiments became Sweet Loren’s.
We don’t control every experience that changes us. But sometimes we can decide what we build from it.
Hear the full story of Sweet Loren’s (@sweetlorens) on How I Built This with @guy.raz.
29 Oct 2026
Sometimes the meeting arrives before the business does.
In 2011, Sweet Loren’s was still an idea. Loren Brill’s website said “coming soon,” she had no factory, and she hadn’t even decided what form the product should take.
Then a classmate who worked the overnight shift at Whole Foods unexpectedly secured her a meeting with the grocery buyer at its Columbus Circle store. Loren’s first reaction wasn’t excitement. It was panic.
She emptied a gift box of chocolates, filled its compartments with her experimental cookies, and printed a one-page explanation of the brand. The presentation was improvised, but the product and the story behind it were real.
The buyer called the next day. His team loved the cookies and wanted to know how quickly Loren could turn them into refrigerated cookie dough.
That question helped define the business. It still took roughly seven months to develop, package and deliver the product—and the initial order was for just one store.
Being ready doesn’t always mean having the entire company figured out. Sometimes it means having enough conviction to show your unfinished work to someone who can help reveal what it should become.
Hear the full story of Sweet Loren’s (@sweetlorens) on How I Built This with @guy.raz.
28 Oct 2026
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