Growing up in 1960's Chicago, Dave Anderson didn't eat much deep dish. Instead, his dad took the family to the South Side for barbecue, and those memories—and aromas—stayed with him. For years, Dave tinkered with his own recipes for sauces and sides while working as a salesman and business advisor to Native American tribes. Finally in 1994, he opened his first barbecue shack in the last place you might expect to find one: the little town of Hayward, Wisconsin. The chain grew quickly—too quickly—...
Dec 05, 2022•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 470
Growing up, Andrew Rea dreamed of becoming a Hollywood filmmaker. But the special effects production job he landed after college left him feeling…uninspired. After a series of creative defeats and mounting relationship troubles, his therapist suggested he find a new creative outlet. Andrew decided to make a short cooking video inspired by an episode of Parks and Recreation and uploaded it to YouTube... This week on How I Built This Lab, Guy asks Andrew about his journey from TV and movie buff to...
Dec 01, 2022•47 min•Ep. 469
In the mid-1990’s most Americans had probably never even heard of yerba mate, but when David Karr and Chris Mann were first introduced to the South American drink, they were hooked. Together with three other friends, they decided to launch a company that would bring mate to the American market. Based in San Luis Obispo, California, the co-founders of Guayakí Yerba Mate spent years living in a van and driving all over the country, brewing up free samples for consumers, and convincing natural food...
Nov 28, 2022•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 468
Millions of Americans don’t have enough to eat — a startling fact considering 40% of the food produced in the U.S. gets thrown away. And a lot of that food… from restaurants, supermarkets, office buildings and more… is perfectly safe to eat. What’s worse is that this discarded food waste produces harmful methane emissions that contribute to global climate change. Jasmine Crowe-Houston is an entrepreneur who became obsessed with these problems. In 2017, she founded Goodr, which works with busines...
Nov 24, 2022•45 min•Ep. 467
Anthony Wood helped transform the media landscape…twice. First, in the early 2000’s, when he invented a device that let you record, pause, and re-watch live TV. The DVR was a game-changer, but the company Anthony built around it—ReplayTV—was eventually out-maneuvered by TiVo. Unfazed, Anthony developed another piece of hardware; one that would tap into the growing power of the internet by letting TV’s stream digital content. In 2008, he launched the Roku box, a $99 device that connected your TV ...
Nov 21, 2022•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 466
‘This is not our customer...’ That was the common justification banks used to deny loans to the entrepreneurs Shivani Siroya supported through her work with the United Nations. While it’s not unusual for a tech startup to raise millions before ever launching a product, small business owners across the globe are all-too-often deemed unworthy of even just a few hundred dollars by traditional financial institutions. In 2011, Shivani set out to change this at scale. Her company, Tala, has since disb...
Nov 17, 2022•34 min•Ep. 465
As a newly arrived immigrant from Turkey, Hamdi Ulukaya learned to be resourceful, determined, and even stubborn when he needed to be. All those traits would serve him well as he began to navigate the hairpin turns of building a yogurt business from the ground up. In 2005, Hamdi was running a small feta cheese business in upstate New York when he happened upon a piece of junk mail that would change his life: an ad for an abandoned yogurt factory...$700K, as is. He knew if he could get his hands ...
Nov 14, 2022•1 hr 30 min•Ep. 464
Our planet is warming, and many parts of the world are not equipped to accurately predict the heat waves, hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires and floods that are becoming more frequent and intense due to the changing climate. Former Israeli Air Force pilot Shimon Elkabetz knows the importance of good weather forecasts — they can literally mean the difference between life and death. In 2016, he co-founded Tomorrow.io to improve the weather data available across the world. This week on How I Built Th...
Nov 10, 2022•41 min•Ep. 463
When you think of pizza, the first place that comes to mind probably isn’t Finland…or Scotland. But that’s where the two founders of the outdoor pizza oven brand Ooni grew up. In 2012, Kristian Tapaninaho was experimenting with making his own pizza, but he couldn’t get his home oven hot enough to produce an authentic, Neapolitan-style crust. With no background in product design, Kristian decided to design a portable, wood-fired outdoor oven. He used some basic 3D modeling software, enlisted a ne...
Nov 07, 2022•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 462
“Right now I have approximately 70-ish subscribers,” declared a teenage Marques Brownlee at the beginning of his 100th YouTube video back in 2009. Marques recorded his first of many product reviews earlier that year, after buying his first laptop. Quite simply, he wanted others to have more information about this computer than he did when he bought it. Since then, Marques has grown his channel, MKBHD, into a full-fledged business with more than 16 million subscribers and over 3 billion total vie...
Nov 03, 2022•50 min•Ep. 461
Steve Kaufer got the idea for Tripadvisor in 1998 after spending way too many hours online, trying to figure out if a resort in Mexico was really as good as its brochure. When he launched a travel guidance site a few years later, his business plan failed spectacularly because he was trying to partner with other websites, rather than engaging directly with travelers. But Steve eventually arrived at a winning formula: make Tripadvisor available to everyone, aggregate tons of information about hote...
Oct 31, 2022•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 460
Most of us are familiar with rideshare apps at this point. We tap a few buttons on a phone and...voila! A vehicle arrives to take you virtually anywhere you want to go. But what if these vehicles could operate entirely without a human driver? Will we one day live in a world where most cars drive themselves? Kyle Vogt believes that autonomous vehicles will fundamentally change how we get from place to place, and soon! After being part of the team that launched the video game streaming platform Tw...
Oct 27, 2022•51 min•Ep. 459
The story of Bluemercury is packed with business lessons—for starters, it’s always good to have a backup plan. That’s what Marla and Barry Beck discovered in 1999, when they realized their startup online cosmetics business was going nowhere fast. They begged the bank for a second loan so they could invest in a brick-and-mortar store in Washington, D.C., and Bluemercury was born. More lessons followed: as they grew, they distinguished themselves by offering high-end brands and personalized servic...
Oct 24, 2022•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 458
Commercial air travel has connected humans across the globe in extraordinary ways. This connection, however, comes with a cost: about a billion tons of carbon emissions annually. There’s been major progress in other transportation sectors with cars, trains, trucks, buses, and even ships that run entirely on renewable energy. But for planes, the path to flying carbon-free hasn’t been so clear. Paul Eremenko is on a mission to change that. His company, Universal Hydrogen, works with stakeholders a...
Oct 20, 2022•38 min•Ep. 457
Craig Culver says that when he opened the first Culver’s restaurant in a small Wisconsin town, there were three cars in the parking lot on a good day – and two of them were his family’s. Those early years of selling frozen custard and ButterBurgers were hard, but the business was in Craig’s blood. He grew up working in restaurants run by his parents, and Culver’s was a family affair too—one that was more challenging to run than a typical burger joint because of its large menu, with pot roast, so...
Oct 17, 2022•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 456
Cassey Ho is the face of Blogilates, best known for its free online workout videos which have more than a billion views on YouTube alone. As impressive as that is, digital content is just one part of Cassey’s multi-million dollar entrepreneurial portfolio, which has grown to include her POPFLEX apparel brand, additional product lines at Target, a Pilates certification program, and more. This week on How I Built This Lab, hear about the risks Cassey took to defy cultural expectations in pursuit o...
Oct 13, 2022•34 min•Ep. 455
When Brian Lam walked away from a high-profile job at Gizmodo to launch a product review blog, he had no plan for how it would make money. He just knew what he wanted: a user-friendly site with reviews that could be read in a few minutes, with the best products clearly listed, all backed up by meticulous research. But when he launched The Wirecutter in 2011, Brian’s business partners worried that the site’s posts were too brief and too infrequent to build an audience on the web, where clickbait ...
Oct 10, 2022•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 454
Growing up, Danielle Walker’s family often convened for big meals prepared by her Italian grandmother, Grandma Marge. Back then, Danielle enjoyed a wide variety of food without restriction; but she began experiencing severe abdominal pain in her 20s that ultimately led her to totally transform her diet—cutting grains, lactose, sugar and more. As Danielle found relief in this approach—and realized that others with similar ailments could as well—she began compiling her recipes in an online blog ca...
Oct 06, 2022•47 min•Ep. 453
Back in 2015, when Mike Salguero set out to buy some grass-fed beef for himself and his wife, he had to meet a farmer in a parking lot, who handed him the beef in a trash bag. Naturally, Mike figured there had to be a better way. At the time, he was running a company that was slowly cratering, and he didn’t know the first thing about sourcing or packaging meat. But he had a hunch that if he could figure it out, he could build a successful home subscription business, shipping humanely-raised meat...
Oct 03, 2022•1 hr 20 min•Ep. 452
Artificial Intelligence was once the realm of science fiction. But over the last several years, advances in machine learning and deep neural networks have moved us closer to a reality where computers can learn and solve problems independently, the way a human does. From art and music to medicine and politics, the potential applications of AI are nearly endless, and the technology just keeps getting better. This week on How I Built This Lab, Guy talks with one of the leaders in the field of AI de...
Sep 29, 2022•57 min•Ep. 451
Obsessed with TV and passionate about writing, Issa Rae sent an unsolicited script to CBS’s Cosby when she was still in middle school. By her 20's, she realized there was a certain type of character that was absent from the media landscape—a character she would eventually inhabit in her breakout YouTube series, "Mis-Adventures of Awkward Black Girl." From there, Issa created the five-season HBO hit Insecure , but first went through a bruising gauntlet of rejections and reversals as she learned t...
Sep 26, 2022•1 hr 20 min•Ep. 450
Picture this: you just wrapped a long day of work and you are starving! You open a delivery app and place an order from your favorite restaurant. About an hour later, you get a notification that your meal has arrived. You’re practically salivating as you tear open the bag, and then...a rude awakening — your dinner became cold and soggy in transit. This frustrating and all-too-common experience is exactly what Marc Lore is trying to solve with his latest venture, Wonder. This week on How I Built ...
Sep 22, 2022•40 min•Ep. 449
David Heath and Randy Goldberg saw an opportunity to disrupt a long dormant—and arguably boring sector...socks. They met at a startup in their 20s, each already had their own side hustles before they hatched a plan to launch a business together. Randy and David didn’t initially intend to get into the sock business, but in 2011, David read that socks are the most requested clothing item at homeless shelters. That led them to start a company they called Bombas based on a promise: for each pair of ...
Sep 19, 2022•1 hr 22 min•Ep. 448
Water is all around us–quite literally, there is enough water in the air we breathe to meet all of humanity’s needs and then some. Engineering professor Cody Friesen invented a solar-powered device that captures this vapor and transforms it into drinking water. Cody began manufacturing these ‘hydropanels’ with his Arizona-based company SOURCE in 2014, and today they’re used in more than 50 countries worldwide. This week on How I Built This Lab, Cody talks with Guy about the prevalence of water s...
Sep 15, 2022•39 min•Ep. 447
When you consider the risk of doing business, it doesn’t get much bigger than starting a car company: competition is formidable, startup costs are in the billions, and very few people believe you can pull it off. That’s the massive challenge RJ Scaringe walked into in 2009, when he launched his truck and SUV company, Rivian. To add to the risk, RJ wanted to build fully electric vehicles while attracting drivers who’d never bought them, so he knew his trucks had to be fun and sporty: appealing in...
Sep 12, 2022•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 446
On October 9, 2012, Shiza Shahid’s life changed forever. It was on that day that 15-year-old Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai was shot in the head by a Taliban gunman, capturing the world’s attention. Before long, 22-year-old Shiza found herself leaving her corporate job to join a recovering Malala and her father in launching the Malala Fund, a nonprofit that advocates for girls’ education across the globe. Little did Shiza know, this venture was actually just the beginning of her entrepreneu...
Sep 08, 2022•46 min•Ep. 445
In 2009, Sarah Kauss had a well-paying job in real estate development, but she was itching to do something more. On a hike in Tucson with her mom, she got an idea for a business while swigging warm water from a metal thermos: Why not design a water bottle that kept cold things cold and hot things hot, but was also beautiful to look at? Just six years after launch, S'well reportedly made $100 million, and today, Sarah is especially focused on how the brand can help eliminate plastic waste around ...
Sep 05, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 444
You might not expect a deep friendship to bloom from an argument about favorite authors...in a Miami bar...during spring break. Yet that’s exactly how Greg Solano and Wylie Aronow’s long journey to becoming business partners began... Fast forward more than a decade, and Greg and Wylie are now co-founders of Yuga Labs—the company behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collection. Since the collection was unveiled in spring 2021, the value of each digital ape has skyrocketed, with celebrities like Pa...
Sep 01, 2022•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 443
In 1970, George Zimmer was a college graduate with no real job prospects and little direction. That's when his father, an executive at a boy's clothing company, asked him to go on an important business trip to Asia. It was that trip that propelled him into the world of men's apparel. In 1973, the first Men's Wearhouse opened in Houston with little fanfare, but by the mid-80s, George Zimmer managed to carve out a distinct niche in the market—a place where men could buy a good quality suit, at "ev...
Aug 29, 2022•1 hr•Ep. 442
Pierre Thiam was robbed within days of arriving in New York City. It was 1989, and he had just traveled to the U.S. from Senegal to study chemistry and physics. This chance incident, however, set Pierre’s life on an entirely different course. Today, he’s a renowned chef, restaurant owner, cookbook author, and co-founder of Yolélé – a company working to introduce the world to an ancient West African grain called fonio. This week on How I Built This Lab, Pierre talks with Guy about his company’s w...
Aug 25, 2022•41 min•Ep. 441
