Chelsea Fagan got her first credit card when she was a senior in high school. She quickly maxed it out, racking up debt that would burden her through her early twenties. Then, in 2014, Chelsea started a blog as a way to keep track of her spending habits and get her financial life back on track. She called it “The Financial Diet.” This week on How I Built This Lab , Guy talks with Chelsea about how she turned that blog into the multimedia personal finance business it is today. Plus, Chelsea share...
Jan 05, 2023•40 min•Ep. 479
When he was 8 years old, Joel Clark loaded bags of his mom's whole grain pancake mix into a red wagon to sell door-to-door. By the mid-90s, he and his older brother had upgraded to selling the mix out of a Mazda sedan and calling it Kodiak Cakes. As he tried to scale the business, Joel made some risky business decisions and almost went bankrupt, but eventually got the brand into Target—a major turning point. Today, Kodiak Cakes is one of the best-selling pancake mixes in America. See Privacy Pol...
Jan 02, 2023•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 478
YouTubers Kelsey MacDermaid and Becky Wright – better known as The Sorry Girls – have always had an affinity for production. When they met as film students back in 2010, little did they know that the DIY videos they were creating for fun would eventually lead to full-fledged careers co-founding and leading their own media company. But building to where they are now, with over 2 million subscribers and counting, didn’t exactly come with a blueprint… This week on How I Built This Lab, Kelsey and B...
Dec 29, 2022•44 min•Ep. 477
As a music industry mogul and founder of I.R.S. Records, Miles Copeland prided himself on making deals that were easy to say “yes” to. With a mixture of shrewd business skills, swagger, good taste and great timing, Miles signed or managed some of the most popular bands of the 1980's, including R.E.M., The Go-Go's, and The Police. After getting his start booking little-known British bands in the early 1970's and nearly going bankrupt after a failed tour, Miles eased back into the business by prom...
Dec 26, 2022•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 476
According to the CDC, 6 in 10 adults in the U.S. have a chronic disease like cancer or diabetes. Meanwhile, the process for discovering new drug treatments is critically expensive and inefficient. About 90% of drug candidates fail to gain FDA approval; the average cost to develop a new drug is over $1 billion; and testing can take over 10 years. Noam Solomon is on a mission to change this. His company, Immunai, is using artificial intelligence to create an atlas of the human immune system. This ...
Dec 22, 2022•34 min•Ep. 475
Working as a Hollywood makeup artist in the early 2000s, Rea Ann Silva designed a sponge that reshaped the face of beauty. She'd been looking for a technique to simplify makeup touch-ups without worrying about the smudges or streaks that were easily detected on HDTV. Her solution? A teardrop-shaped sponge—hand-cut from a foam wedge—that could apply makeup from any angle, and absorb just enough water to be extra-efficient. Actors and fellow makeup artists raved about the sponge, so Rea Ann cold-c...
Dec 19, 2022•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 474
It was a love for Ricky Martin that started it all... Beatriz Acevedo thought that if she could only become a DJ, she could get his attention and marry him. While marriage to Ricky was not in the cards, an illustrious career in radio, TV, and eventually digital media was. Beatriz is now a serial entrepreneur: her first venture, mitú, is published content for a growing young Latino market. Soon after selling mitú in 2020, she launched Suma Wealth to help young Latinos build wealth and navigate th...
Dec 15, 2022•37 min•Ep. 473
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 ...
Dec 12, 2022•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 472
Growing up in Ethiopia in the 1980s and ‘90s, Sara Menker saw the devastating effects of drought and famine firsthand. Later as a commodities trader on Wall Street, Sara realized that a major driver of food insecurity around the world was a lack of good data to predict weather events, crop yields, and food prices. That realization led Sara to found her company, Gro Intelligence, in 2014. This week on How I Built This Lab, Sara shares how Gro Intelligence uses a combination of artificial intellig...
Dec 08, 2022•39 min•Ep. 471
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
