With a passion for design and a skill for sewing, Mike Pfotenhauer grew a bespoke backpack business into one of the world’s most popular outdoor brands. He got his start in the 1970’s, when it was hard to find a pack that wasn’t clunky and uncomfortable. Operating out of a little shop in Santa Cruz, California, Mike started making better-fitting packs for hikers, and—with no advertising except for a sign out front—began to get noticed. As demand for the packs grew, Mike was forced to shift produ...
Feb 20, 2023•1 hr•Ep. 492
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 d...
Feb 16, 2023•59 min•Ep. 491
Wherever Bill Simmons is, he’s obsessed with helping his team win. During 14 tumultuous years as a creative force at ESPN, that meant launching a slew of influential projects that blended sports and pop culture—including the documentary series 30 for 30 , the podcast The B.S. Report , and the multimedia blog Grantland . Today, it means growing his own company, The Ringer, into a major player in the media landscape, with over 50 sports and pop culture podcasts. From his earliest days as one of th...
Feb 13, 2023•1 hr 21 min•Ep. 490
Biobot Analytics founders Mariana Matus and Newsha Ghaeli first met in a poop lab. Yep, you read that correctly... Their company has been working with government and corporate clients since 2017 to analyze disease levels and other biomarkers in our wastewater. Their insights have been used to predict spikes in Covid and other infections, help local officials address drug use in their communities, and much more. This week on How I Built This Lab, Mariana and Newsha talk with Guy about the innovat...
Feb 09, 2023•37 min•Ep. 489
Working as a manager for nine years at JCPenney, Tom Campion learned a critical lesson about how to succeed in retail: you have to keep close track of inventory. Tom’s experience navigating the ebb and flow of style, color, and size—all without the benefit of computers—gave him the confidence to launch his own retail business, aimed at teenagers. In 1978, he and his partner Gary Haakenson opened their first store, Above the Belt, in Seattle, and soon tapped into the hot new “action sports” categ...
Feb 06, 2023•56 min•Ep. 488
Chef Sean Sherman is on a mission to revitalize and reimagine Native American cuisine. Growing up on a reservation in South Dakota, Sean ate a lot of highly processed foods provided by the U.S. government. It wasn’t until he started working in restaurants as a teenager that he began to learn about fresh ingredients and how to prepare them. But as Sean climbed the kitchen ranks, learning the techniques and recipes of European-style fine dining, he began to wonder what happened to the culinary tra...
Feb 02, 2023•36 min•Ep. 487
When steaks don’t sell you shift to sticks; that’s how Chomps was born. After several failed ventures—one of which left him bankrupt—Pete Maldonado decided to take another chance on launching a business. He partnered with Rashid Ali to start a mail-order service similar to Omaha Steaks, but with grass-fed meat that was more suited to the Paleo diet. When the partners couldn’t get that off the ground, they shifted to individually-wrapped meat sticks; one of the first in a long line of ‘healthier ...
Jan 30, 2023•1 hr 25 min•Ep. 486
Do you know who holds the record for making the world’s largest chicken nugget? How about the world’s largest sushi roll? If you know Nick DiGiovanni, then you know the answer to those questions. Each week, more than 15 million followers across YouTube and TikTok gawk and drool over Nick’s masterful and over-the-top culinary creations. Nick is at the helm of some analog business ventures too, including a DTC salt and seasoning company and his debut cookbook, Knife Drop , which publishes later th...
Jan 26, 2023•43 min•Ep. 485
Let’s say you had a passion but thought of it only as a hobby; certainly never the seed of a billion-dollar company. Plus, you are studying for a career in something unrelated to business. That’s Maureen Kelly’s story, CEO of Tarte Cosmetics. She was pursuing a Ph.D. in clinical psychology and already had TWO Master’s degrees when she realized she didn't want that to be her career. What she wanted was to launch a makeup company—despite having no significant start-up money, no experience, and no ...
Jan 23, 2023•1 hr 21 min•Ep. 484
When you think about self-driving cars, you might imagine relaxing in the back seat while a vehicle carries you to your destination. But according to Dave Ferguson, nearly half of all car tips that Americans take don’t actually need any passengers at all. That’s because we spend a lot of our time driving around just to pick things up, like groceries and takeout. This week on How I Built This Lab, Dave talks with Guy about his vision of a future where many of these everyday errands could be done ...
Jan 19, 2023•39 min•Ep. 483
In 2007, brothers Hank and John Green lived thousands of miles apart, so they started posting video blogs to each other on a strange new platform called YouTube. People began tuning in, and the daily Vlogbrothers posts became an early viral hit. Over time, the brothers grew that single channel into a sprawling collection of businesses, including a production studio—Complexly—that makes some of the most entertaining educational content on the internet. They’re also both hugely successful authors;...
Jan 16, 2023•1 hr 24 min•Ep. 482
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...
Jan 12, 2023•46 min•Ep. 481
In 2012, Daina Trout, her husband Justin, and her best friend Vanessa Dew were sitting around a kitchen table spit-balling possible business ideas. Their biggest contender seemed to be a natural product to treat hair loss. Turns out, it's harder than they thought to make one, so they landed on something completely different: a brand of homemade kombucha they called Health-Ade. After nine months of brewing kombucha in their kitchen and selling it at local farmer's markets, the three co-founders q...
Jan 09, 2023•58 min•Ep. 480
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
