Business

How Guy Raz Built ‘How I Built This’

Guy Raz is wrapping up an episode of “How I Built This,” his podcast about the origin stories of late capitalism, when his guest, Israeli investor Haim Saban, gets to the good part. The throw-your-arms-aloft, finish-line moment of his personal business journey. In the story Saban is telling, he is about to make a lot of money, and then quadruple it into even more money.

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How Guy Raz Built ‘How I Built This’
By
Nellie Bowles
, New York Times
Guy Raz is wrapping up an episode of “How I Built This,” his podcast about the origin stories of late capitalism, when his guest, Israeli investor Haim Saban, gets to the good part. The throw-your-arms-aloft, finish-line moment of his personal business journey. In the story Saban is telling, he is about to make a lot of money, and then quadruple it into even more money.

Raz cuts in, astonished. “But half a billion dollars — that’s a lot of money,” he says. “I mean, wow.”

“Two billion is more,” Saban says.

“Was money — becoming really rich — did that motivate you?” Raz asks a moment later.

“You know, it wasn’t only money, but it was also money,” Saban says. “Money is a marker to success.”

There’s a moment like this in every episode of “How I Built This.” The guest has let his or her guard down and revealed something intimate, or financial, or financially intimate, and Raz keeps the disclosures rolling by reacting with total marvelment.

Betterment chief executive Jon Stein, whom Raz stokes with 12 individual wows, details an agonizing split with his partners. Cisco co-founder Sandy Lerner, amid 15 of Raz’s wows, tells about being ousted from her own company. Eighteen further wows get Bobby Trussell, who created the Tempur-Pedic mattress empire, to describe a breakthrough moment with the Brookstone chain of stores: “Talk about high-fiving!”

By creating a safe space for entrepreneurs to share their stories of ascent, Raz has become one of the most popular podcasters in history. That history is short, but in this new land of aural opportunity, Raz, 44, has a claim to be king. According to NPR, where he works on contract, he is the only person to ever have three shows simultaneously in Apple’s top 20 podcasts. In addition to “How I Built This,” Raz hosts the “TED Radio Hour” and the children’s series “Wow in the World.” Another show, “The Rewind With Guy Raz,” just started on Spotify, and spring 2019 will bring “Wisdom From the Top,” a podcast about leadership.

The jewel in Raz’s earbud empire remains “How I Built This.” Produced by NPR, the series began in September 2016 with Raz interviewing Spanx founder Sara Blakely, setting the tone that it would be about business without being stodgy.

“Yes, the baseline is that somebody eventually is going to make a lot of money,” Raz says. But the show succeeds because it taps into something deeper: “Who are you when you’re on the bathroom floor in the fetal position, crying because you are not going to make it to the next day?”

In each installment, Raz takes listeners on a journey through the free market toward some of capitalism’s most glorious finales: Howard Schultz builds Starbucks, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger build Instagram, Eileen Fisher builds Eileen Fisher.

“Business is filled with crisis and failure and sadness and tension and discomfort and then triumph,” Raz says. He calls “How I Built This” a show about vulnerability. And it is — in that it is a show about how much we will do to our lives and ourselves for money, and how vulnerable we are in the face of the enormous desire for capital and power. Raz gets founders to open up and tell wrenching stories about sacrifices, late nights, self-doubt and the mistakes that led to success.

How Raz built “How I Built This” is inseparable from his interview voice of constant wonder.

Raz sounds like no matter what he is saying, he is also saying “Wow.”

When he says “billions,” he pops the “b.”

If a voice could be wearing pool-blue acrylic glasses, his would be. When I meet Raz, he is.

— Come to This Interview and Be Willing to Surrender

The biggest name in business podcasts arrives at a Berkeley coffee shop on a cargo bike. The back has seats for his sons to ride, and in front Raz has installed a grocery rack. He shows me a layer of padding that is present specifically to keep farmers-market tomatoes from bruising on the ride home.

“Oh my god, it’s Nellie Bowles!” is how he says hello to me, and to almost anyone whose name he knows. To be on the receiving end of this welcome is delightful, like we are all CEOs to this buoyant man.

Raz seems as surprised as anyone that he has emerged as one of capitalism’s biggest boosters. His background is not in business, but in globe-trotting radio journalism: He was NPR’s Berlin bureau chief by 25, then London bureau chief; he covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and spent two years with CNN in Jerusalem; then he returned to NPR, where he was the defense correspondent and finally the weekend host of “All Things Considered.”

In 2012, feeling ground down at 37, Raz left the news cycle. He started the “TED Radio Hour,” which is co-produced with NPR and explores one big human experience per episode, like “Why do we have the capacity to imagine?” “This is going to sound really hokey, but we’re a species, right?” Raz says. “We’re this species called Homo sapiens, and there’s cats and there’s dolphins and there’s many things we all do. We grieve, we love, we hate, we’re cruel, we’re kind, we’re joyful, we’re jealous. And so I wanted to do a show that went to that 35,000-foot view on all of that.”

And to Raz, no stories captured the human experience as much as clawing out a living.

“The question from everyone was ‘What makes this different from Bloomberg and CNBC?'” Raz said. “And the case I was making was: I’m not looking for news, I’m not interested in your fourth-quarter strategy, I’m looking to get into your heart and mind.”

He decided from the start that “How I Built This” would feature only entrepreneurs he liked. He spends months researching them before an interview to make sure they align with what he and his team want to put into the world.

“We had this responsibility to find people who kind of reflected a certain way of doing business,” Raz says. “People we think are generally kind. Are generally moral and ethical. Did you run your business honestly? Did you treat people well?”

He also demands that those who sit for an interview are completely open. “I ask them, ‘Are you willing to come to this interview and surrender?'” he says.

Some people say no. But most yield. They do so because they know that at the moment their belly is upturned, their worst decisions laid bare, Raz will guide them gently back to where they both know this is going: success. He does not consider himself a reporter anymore, he says.

Raz insists that he is not trying to glorify money, even if his show occasionally does just that. “There are definitely people who believe in a world, a just world, or a more equal world that would find ‘How I Built This’ offensive,” he says. He worries about this, and he wants to make it clear that the free market just happens to be where he found a narrative groove.

“There aren’t an infinite number of narrative arcs,” he says, citing Joseph Campbell’s theory of storytelling archetypes. “It’s like how every romantic comedy is the same movie with slight differences.”

The arcs Raz describes are finding an audience. His podcasts have a combined monthly audience of 19.2 million downloads. In the coffee shop, Raz tries to argue that this does not necessarily mean he has become a celebrity himself.

“I know the numbers but, you know, look,” he says. “At the end of the day, nobody knows who I am.” A few minutes later, the man sitting next to us interrupts, apologizes and says he just has to tell Raz that his wife is a big fan.

— The Wizardry of Raz

In October, in San Francisco, Raz hosted the “How I Built This” Summit — the largest event of its kind that NPR has ever put on. The session was held in the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the same space where Apple used to introduce its gadgets, and its 850 spots, costing $699 to $899 a person, quickly sold out. Featuring Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia, Stitch Fix co-founder Katrina Lake, Lyft co-founder John Zimmer and Carol’s Daughter founder Lisa Price, the event established Raz as one of radio’s most marketable personalities, up there with the likes of Ira Glass and Terry Gross.

I meet Raz for a second time backstage. He’s alone in the dark and seems sedated. I get a softer “Oh my god, it’s Nellie Bowles.”

Onstage, though, Raz switches on his persona: bounding, effusive and handsome in a clean-cut way. His hair maintains an immaculate side part. He looks like a game-show host or the dad in a TV show from the 1950s.

He announces the results of a contest called “How You Built That,” in which small-scale entrepreneurs have submitted their projects for a chance to appear on the show. The goods include flexible toy connectors for kids, lip balm invented by musicians, a bag of “superfood clusters.” The victor is Winnie Lou, a food truck “experience” for dogs.

Everyone is celebrated. It’s like a kinder, less carnivorous “Shark Tank.” Gebbia comes onstage for a chat. Raz asks, “What was your trough of sorrow?” He jokes that this is exposure therapy, and he’s the therapist.

“You guys are a huge company, valued at 40, 50 billion,” Raz says. “I mean, it’s, it’s astonishing. What is that like for you?”

At the entrance to the theater, American Express has sponsored a selfie-friendly wall display of blue hats with block letters on the front: “Money Manager,” “Hype Person,” “CEOOOOO,” “Master Motivator.” Jenelle Isaacson, who owns a real estate brokerage in Portland, Oregon, and her 11-year-old daughter are in line to take pictures.

“This is the podcast she’s always requesting in the car,” Isaacson says. “And then we found out she’s listening to it while she’s doing her homework.”

The conference is a haven for aspiration at all ages. Paul Tecker, 51, who founded H2OPS Hop Water, a sparkling water infused with hops, says he came because he wants to be part of a winning community. “If you’re going to be a winner,” he says, “you have to look for those communities, and you need to realize it’s not just you that’s struggling.”

The energy is jarringly friendly for a tech conference, possibly because the “How I Built This” audience skews slightly female, with an average age of 28. In a summit bathroom, one woman turns to another and says, “This is weird, but I just wanted to tell you, your hair looks great.” The second woman responds that she was just about to say the same thing.

Several of Raz’s fans tell me they consider the show basically an MBA course. His founder interviews function as case studies. Listeners get inspired. Many say the show makes them feel less lonely. Others say they cue up an episode when their business is a mess and they need a kick of enthusiasm. “Whenever I’m having one of those days, when I think I’m going to quit, I listen to one,” says Jenny Brien, 35, founder of Snohomish Pie Co. in Seattle. Sometimes she listens to the same episode over and over again.

Backstage, Jenn Hyman, co-founder of Rent the Runway, is in the greenroom. I am not prepared for her intensity.

“I won’t hire someone at Rent the Runway unless they’ve listened to my ‘How I Built This’ interview,” Hyman says. “You can’t listen to that podcast without understanding who I am as a person and a leader. It gets to the core of me. There’s nothing more authentic to me as a person than that interview.”

— ‘I’m Not Some Rah-Rah, “Go, Capitalism!” Person’ Across the street from Raz’s event, his wife, a consultant named Hannah Raz, is catching up with their friends Stewart Butterfield, the founder of Slack, and Jen Rubio, who co-founded the smart-luggage startup Away.

Hannah Raz is not quite sure how to describe Guy Raz’s hobbies without making him sound “like such an NPR dad.” Truly, it is difficult. “He loves to cook,” she says. “He made his own almond milk, but moved on because of water issues, so now he makes cashew milk.”

Guy Raz, she says, is obsessed with kale and tries to eat paleo. He is awake and ready to go each day at 5:30 a.m. “I’m trying to think of things that don’t make him sound so precious,” Hannah Raz says.

Butterfield jumps in. “Oh, I can help,” he says. “It’s all about the cast-iron pans.”

“He does love to oil his cast-iron pans,” Hannah Raz says, resigned to the emerging narrative.

“And coconut aminos, carbon-neutral beef,” Rubio chimes in. “And the salmon.”

“Oh god,” Hannah Raz says.

They had gone as a family to Alaska, where Guy Raz saw fishermen pulling in salmon. “He was like, ‘Where are these fishermen going?'” Hannah Raz says. “And we followed the fishermen into this warehouse, and now we get salmon directly from them. It’s not that weird.”

Guy Raz’s unchecked enthusiasm across subject areas, from Alaskan seafood to risk-adjusted returns on capital, helps to explain how he came to create a founder-friendly podcast at a cultural moment that is trending anti-startup, if not anti-capitalist. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are constantly in the news for allowing hate and disinformation to spread, and across the political spectrum, CEOs are hardly seen as moral leaders.

“I’m not some rah-rah, ‘Go, capitalism!’ person,” Raz says. “I’m interested in human experiences, and building a business is rich with natural drama.”

He adds, “What I hope is that even somebody who has antipathy toward capitalism or market economics would find value in the stories.” He goes on: "What I want to do is leave people with a sense of possibility.”

Raz’s own possibilities keep expanding. He just got a “How I Built This” book deal from educational publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, for publication in autumn 2020.

Raz’s next podcast, “Wisdom From the Top,” will debut in early 2019, and highlight people who run big companies, organizations, nonprofits or entire cities. The animating idea, he says, is “Are you born a leader, or do you become a leader?”

About that title, I say. Might it trigger those already worried he is glorifying the rich?

“Yeah, that’s a good point,” Raz says. “We can change the name.”

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