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HOW I BUILT THIS - GUY RAZ

What I love most about starting your own business is the journey of coming up with a big idea and turning it into something tangible, though it would take me until my late thirties to start to feel even a tinge of confidence about some of my ideas or my ability to execute them. For most of my career before then, I struggled with the kinds of worries I thought charismatic entrepreneurs never confronted: anxiety, fear, imposter syndrome, even depression. But over the course of my time doing deep-dive interview with hundreds of busienss founders and CEO's for my shows, I've come to understand that, for the most part, they are just like you and me. Which is to say, they're human. They all have sleepless nights and midnight terrors. Most of them, at some point, feel like omposters. They are not natural superheroes, they are all Clark Kents. The only difference between them and you, at this moment, is that when opportunity presented itself, they went into the phone booth and put on the cape. They took the leap. That's basically it.

PART I: THE CALL

1) BE OPEN TO IDEAS People start businesses for all kinds of reasons. They do it to satisfy a dream or so solve a problem or to fill a void in the market. Some people want to improve on something that seems obsolete, and others want to reinvent an entire industry. There are literally dozens of on ramps to the entrepreneurial journey. But no matter which one you take, at some point you are to need an idea. Something specific. Something concrete and unique and new. An idea that makes life better or more intersting and delivers on the reason you wanted to start a business in the first place.

Sounds simple enough right? After all, ideas are a dime a dozen. Or atleast that's what many of us are led to believe. That ideas are easy and abundant. That what matters is execution. And all of that is true to some extent. It's just not the whole truth, because coming up with a good idea is hard. Good ideas are hard to find and hard to get right. But once you find one, they are also very hard to turn away from. That what makes good ideas so initimidating. Not that you won't ever find one, but that one day you will, and when you do, it's very possible that your life will never be the same again.

So where do you find one of these good ideas? Where do you look? Can you look? Or do you have to wait for the angels to sing in your ear and the light bulb to go on over your head? Some people are lucky, and this epiphany happens for them early. An idea hits them out of the blue and sends them on their way. For most of us, though, it isn't so simple. We have to look for a good idea, or at least be open to receiving it.

It's one of the eternal entrepreneurial questions: Can you actually find a good idea, or does it have to find you? The answer it the same for both option: yes. The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of start up ideas, it's to look for problems, preferably problems you have yourself, It sounds obvious to say you should only work on problems that exist. And yet by far the most common mistake startups make is to solve problems no one has. - Paul Graham There is a name for a person who creates something purely out of passion: hobbyist. There is a name for a person who creates something out of passion that solves a problem only they have: tinkerer. There is a name for a person who creates something out of passion that also solves a problem they share with lots of other people: entrepreneur.

2) IS IS DANGEROUS OR JUST SCARY?

Michael Dell the creator of Dell at the age of 19, was told by his parents not to start a business and to focus on school. For Michael's parents coming from a family of well-educated people at a time when personal computing was mostly a curiosity that was often dismissed as a fag, leaving school to tinker with computers and resell them must have felt like their son was in danger of throwing his life away. What is more dangerous to a parent than a child taking their first steps out onto the high wire act of adulthood and doing so without a net?

But for Michael, there was nothing at all dangerous about his idea. He loved working on computers. He knew them well enough as a teenager that professional adults with even more to lose than he did trusted his insight and his work. He was solving their problems. Moreover, having found early success and having seen what was on the other side of this big leap, it was impossible to go back and see the world in the same way again, to ever again see it as his parents had. He knew the rules of this new world, and becaues of that, any last vestiges of danger melted away. And, hey if it didn't work out for whatever reason, he could always just go back to school and slot right back into the premed program. He was nineteen years old, he had his entire life ahead of him. The reality was the scariest part of starting Dell Computer Corportaion was the same thing that is scary about starting any business: it's the unknown. What did a teenage Michael Dell know about running a business? About hiring? About leading people? About find and leasing office space? About corportate taxes?

What do any of us know about that stuff before we confront it? Nothing. That is truly terrifying to the first-time entrepreneur. But it is also eminently knowable, if you choose to learn it. Even though it comes from an old French word "entrepreneurship" is a fairly new term in the vocabulary of business. Founders today self-identify as entrepreneurs in a way that the generations who came before them struggle to understand, mostly because they didn't have the language back then to describe what they were doing as they built their businesses. Fundamentally though they were doing the same thing. They were taking the detour, taking the leap away from the type of professional life they didn't want, and toward something new and exciting and their own.

As a group they have made entrepreneurship both less scary and less dangerous. By developing a lexicon for the process of starting a business, by giving it a name, many of the modern founders whom you will meet in this book have helped to demystify the prospect of taking the leap. By breaking new ground, the older generation of foudners of which Jim and Mike are a part have made taking the leap seem almost normal.

They are why you can trust the rope threaded through your harness by experts and counterweighted by mentors, and have fait that the anchors hammered into the cliff face by those who came before you will hold, as you take that first big step backward off the cliff and into the unknown. Because they know what it means to take you fate into your own hands and to feel that you've got a real grip on this idea that has it's own grip on your soul.

3)LEAVE YOUR SAFETY ZONE... BUT DO IT SAFELY

There is something romantic about the struggle to do something new, isn't there? About taking the leap. At one point or another, all of us who are enamored of the pursuit of big ideas have ourselves enthralled by the origin story of a successful enterprise: the marathon coding sessions, the all-nighters that stretch across an entire week, the four friends stacked on top of one another inside a one bedroom apartment, meeting every evening at the kitchen table in the "boardroom". In commencement addresses and keynote speeches, famous founders talk wistfully about these memorable and crucial moments. Being down to their last dollar, maxing out their credit cards, eating nothing but ramen noodles and drinking nothing but Mountain Dew for months on end.

Those were the good old days.

There are some people who find those stories exhilarating, others, terrifying. For the longest time, I would have counted myself as one of the latter. And to an extent, I still do. I mean, what kind of maniac would just throw caution to the wind as Reid described? Who in their right mind would ever take such a huge risk? If building a company or creating something big and new is like jumping off a cliff and hoping to put enough pieces together before it, and you, die a horrible death, the question I always want to ask founders and creators is, Why do it?

What are you thinking? Why whould you ever jump? Most of the successful entrepreneurs I've met left the comfort of their previous lives as safely and smartly as possible. And they did this in one of two ways: either they stayed in their "real jobs" until their startups demanded more time than they could spare, or they went for it with a fallback plan in their hip pocket, which made the risks inherent in entrepreneurship manageable enought for them to be able to sleep at night.

Having a fallback plan does not mean you are building an escape hatch from your dream. It's not an excuse not to try hard, nor is it a ready made reason to quit. It just means you've give yourself a cushion at the bottom of your entrepreneurial leap of faith that if you do crash, you can bounce back to fight another day.

4) DO YOUR RESEARCH

5) FIND YOUR CO-FOUNDER Many of the same founders I talked about at the beginning of this chapter, whom we have now elevated to godlike status in our culture, have talked openly about the importance of the partners they had in their early fight to bring their ideas to fruition, many of them while the fight was still happening.

"My best business decisions really have to do with picking people" Bill Gates said in a 1998 conversation with Warren Buffett on the campus of the University Of Washington. "Deciding to go into partnership with Paul Allen is probably at the top of the list, having somedboy who you totally trust, who's totally committed, who shares your vision and yet has a little big different set of skills, and also acts as a check on you, and just the benefit of sparking off of somebody who's got that kind of brilliance, it'snot only made it fun, but it's really led to a lot of success"

In a 1985 Playboy interview, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs talked about the importance of both his partner Steve Wozniak's differing interests and their shared lack of a vision. "Neither of us had any idead that this would go anywhere, Woz was motivated by figuring things out. He concentrated more on the engineering and proceeded to do one of his most brillian pieces of work, which was the disk drive that made the Apple II a possibility. I was trying to build the company, I don't think it would have happened without Woz and I don't think it would have happened without me" Jobs said.

The power of partnership is not just a modern tech phenomenon. Partnerships are a hallmark in the history of innovation, regardless of the industry. Many of them are cultural icons we know by the name on the door: Ben and Jerry. Hewlett and Packard. Harley and Davidson. Wells and Fargo. Procter and Gamblr. Aso for Warren Buffett and his part in that conversation with Bill Gates in 1998, he was in complete agreement about the importance of picking people: "I've had a partner like that, Charlie Munger, for a lot of years, and it does for me exactly what Bill is talking about."

6) FUND THE BUSINESS, PART 1: BOOTSTRAPPING

7) GET YOUR STORY STRAIGHT Telling your story is a more cost-effective way to take your advertiseing beyond usefulness and effiacacy and efficiency as topics of conversation. It's like a growth hack that enables consumers to connect to your brand in a deeper, more personal way, which is a big part of how you differentiate and de-commodify your product, create brand loyalty, and set yourself up for long term success. While many legacy companies struggle to see the innovation and origin stories right under their noses, it is nevertheless as true for them as it is for young upstart brands that their busienss is a story, that every business is astory. The store, more than anything else, is what connects you and me and everyone out there to the thing you're building. And every defining element of that thing you're building, of that business, helps to tell its story. This goes from the name and the logo, to the function of the product or the style of the service to the partners that founded it, all the way to the customers who partronize it. The purpose of that story changes with time and with whom it is being told to, but fundamentally its goal is to answer a hundred different variations on the simple question: Why?

Why should i buy your product? Why should I join this company? Why should I be excited to work here? Why should I invest in this company?

These are just a few of the variations identified by Ben Horowitz the brilliant tech entrepreneur, best selling author, and co-founder of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He describe in 2010 how his company evaluates CEO's, whose main job, he contends it to be "the keeper of the vision and the story" A few years later, in talking to Forbes, Horowitz put the role of the company's story even more succinctly: "The story must explain at a fundamental level why you exist." It is a story you have to tell to you customers, to investors, to employees, and ultimately to yourself. Kind of in that order, in fact, from the bottom up, like the old food pyramid or Maslow's legendary hierarchy of needs.

One of the reasons for this approach seem prettty obvious: in most markets there are already plenty of options to choose from, so you need to give us a really compelling reason why we should choose yours. And in the cases where you're making something no on has ever seen before, when you're creating an entirely new market, it's not always immediately clear what we have been missing. As such, you need to tell us why we need to choose anything new at all. The other, slightly more complicated reason you need a terrific story is that there are so many other questions one could ask in an effort to understand why you exist, and your current answers don't reveal very much: what you do, where you dot it, how you do it, whom you do it for. Those are just discoverable facts. I can search for them on Google. I can buy market research reports. I can hire someone to reverse engineer your product or go through your process. I can read books and articles about all of it.

But the key here is: Why do you do what you do? Or, Why should we care? I can't know the answers to those questions until you, as the founder want me to know them, because they exist first in your mind. And like most concepts that are unquantifiable, the answers to these basic questions are suually best understood and best shared with the world through a story.

Whitney Wolfe has a story. She knows it well. To hear her tell it is to get to know her and the history of her dating app, Bumble. It is to know what she is trying to do with her app, why we should all care about it, and how it has managed to succeed despite the fact that by the end of 2014, when Bumble was launched, if there was one thing the world didn't need any more of, it was dating apps. There was already Match.com, Plenty Of Fish, IkCupid, eHarmony, and Hinge, along with all the niches sites, such as Jdate, BlackPlanet, Christian Mingle, and way on the other end of the spectrum. SeekingArrangment and Ashley Madinson.

And then there was Tinder, the behemoth, which Whitney founded in 2012 and had recently left under some of the worst possible circumstances not just for a co-founder but for a woman and a human being. There was both a professinoal and a romantic split with one of her co-founders, there was a very public sexual harassment lawsuit, and there was an avalanche of despicably hurtful online vitriol aimed directly at her. By the time she left Tinder in early 2014, Whitney wasn't just done with the dating business, she was done, period.

The stories of Bumble & AirBnB are unique to themselves, but what is true across industries and across time is that all businesses are stories, and all stories are a process. They are a mechanism for thinking deeply about yourself, your product or service, your employees, your customers, your market and the world. They explain each to all the others in a way that facts and figures never can.

Ben Horowitz is right knowing your story and being able to clearly articulate to the world why you exist is one of your most important challenges as an entrepreneur. Not because it helps you sell more product, or build a cooler brand, or make your money through all those things are true.

Rather the basic story that answers the big "why" questions is the one that creates loyal customers, find the best investors, builds an employee culture that keeps them committed to the venture and keeps you committed and grinding away when things get really hard and you want to give (and you will). There are a millions reasons for any one of these groups to quit or to say no. Your job is to give them one of the few reasons to them the story, that gets them to keep listening and to say yes.

8) FUND THE BUSINESS, PART 2: OTHER PEOPLE'S MONEY(OPM)

Some people have distinct, tangible advantages that make it easier for them to pull together enough OPM to get their businesses on solid footing and pointed in the right direction. Recognition of this fact, especially for the entrepreneurs who enjoyed some of those advntages going in, is why I always ask my podcast guests how much they attribute their success to both luck and hark work.

Acknowledging privilege and recognizing advantage are essential to understanding the nature of success, both yours and others. That does not mean privilege should define or predertermine success, any more than lack of privilege should preclude it. While not everyone has the same privilege of circumstance, everyone has intangible advantages of one kind or another that they can leverage in pursuit of success. Personality is an advantage. Will is an advantage. Likability, unflappability, resilience, having a good memory, those are all advantages that anyone who possesses them can use much the way anyone who possesses privilege uses theirs.

But where does that really leave those of us who may not be lucky enough to have a parent who can write a $10,000 check compared with those whose parents casually carry around $10,000 in cash? It doesn't leave us in the same place, but it does put us in the same race on the same track. Although out access to money differs, the process for securing it is the same, no matter who we are, where we live, how we grew up, or what we're trying to build. In every case, a conversation takes place in which a founder has to describe what they're trying to do and then ask another person for some amount of money, in the form of investment, loan, gift, whatever, to help them get there.

Here's where those early fundraising stories from the priviledged and the less-than-privileged start to sound surprisingly alike. To a person, all of these entrepreneurs will tell you that fundraising is brutally hard at every level. It taxes your time, your energy, your ego, and sometimes your relationships. You will have hundreds of conversations. You will have to tell your story hundreds of times and answer ten times as many questions, a lot of them the same, some of them invredibly frustrating, especially form people who think are supposed to support you or whom you have always called a friend. You are going to need a thick skin, like the heat shield on a space shuttle trinyg to punch through the incredible resistance of the surrounding atmosphere and not break apart. This is true whether you are blue blooded or blue-collar, just as it is true that this process starts the same way for everyone, with a conversation, with the people you know.

First a parent, then an uncle, then a family friend, then a mentor, then maybe a kid you went to high school with who also started their own business, and on and on from there, until you've exhausted your total personal network and have, by then hopefully, raised all the money you need. I think about it like a series of concentric circles. You start with the circle of people who are closest to you, the people who names you don't have to dig to the bottom of your contacts to find, because they're right there in your text messages and the call log on your phone. Maybe you start with a best friend and as to borrow a few hundred dollars. Does your friend know someone, a relative, possibly whom you can call for a little more, maybe $500? Does that relative know of someone interested in helping out a startup like yours?

The lesson here is that despite the sometimes daunting advantages that privilege can cofer, this process for raising early money really is available to anyone. Everyone exists at the centre of their own set of concentric circles. The built-in advantages or privilege do not change their shape, they only reduce the number of outer circles one might need to explore to reach one's fundraising goals. And that, comes to OPM and entrepreneurship, whic which I mean, once someone has raised money, even if it was easy for them and there is more where that came from, they still have to do something with it. I can't point to a single example of an entrepreneur I've profiled who raised a bunch of friends and family money early on and then merely sat back, resting on their privilege, to watch their business grow organically with no effort.

9) ITERATE, ITERATE, ITERATE

Take a look around you right now. At the seat you're sitting on. The shirt you're wearing. The light bulbs illuminating the space you're in. The phone in your pocket. Maybe the earbuds in your ears. Even the cover of this book you're reading or listening to.

If these items have anything in common, it is that none of them looked like they do now when they were first conceived by the people who invented or designed them. And that' because a lot happens between conception and first production for nearly every idea that gets turned into a business. Shape changes. Materials change. Offerings change. Names change. Process changes. Construction methods change. Look and feel and tast change.

Typically there are two phases to the iterative process prior to launch. The first involves tinkering with your idea until it works and you, as its creator, are satisfied with what you have. The second entails exposing the working idea to the public and tweaking the product based o ntheir feedback until it catches on, either with a buyer, a major investor, a retail partner, or a critical mass of your customers.

As the creator of AllBirds, Time made clear was that it's important to spend enough time in this first phase to really get comfortable with your product and your story and really get to know the business you're trying to build. Tim, arguably, spent five productive years there. Whitney Wolfe, in contrast, took less than a year to get the version of Bumble out into the world and onto people's phones, in part because she already knew the busienss from her time at Tinder and she'd lived every moment of the Bumble story from the day she left Tinder for good. The exact amount of time you spend in the first phase of development isn't as important as making sure you don't get stuck there for too long. Every idea, no matter how great, has a shelf life. If you don't get it off that shelf and out into the world in time, no amount of feedback you get during the second phase of the iterative process can overcome a lack of insterest or mitigate first mover advantage if someone beats you to the punch.

Moving to phase two can be tough for people who don't handle criticism well, or who are dogged by that familiar yet unattainable form of perfectionsism that has trapped the next great American novel on the desks or hard drives of countless aspiring writers since forever. Like asking friends and family for money, exposing your idea and all your hard work to feedback can be very uncomfortable, which can make the first phase of internal development feel like a safe space out of which you would rather not poke your head until you're absolutely sure. Except "absolutely sure" doesn't exist.

I would love to tell you a story about an entrepreneur who suceeded in spite of the paralysis of their perfectionism, but I don't have one, because such people generally don't create companies. The creators and innovators who I meet, if they do struggle with criticism and perfectionism, also understand the importance of allowing their product to be judged by the marketplace, and the opportunity that users' feedback presents to make the product better as a result. They know that they need an abundance of feedback to dial in their product. They actively seek it out, in fact. Because while they know what they want to do, and they know why and how they want to do it, they also know that they have no idea if anyone will actually like what they're making. And that's always essential to keep in mind.

PART II THE TESTS

Most of the entrepreneurs I've interviewed have a healthy fear of failure. They konw it's possible at any moment. Even likely. When it happens, and believe me it will happen they certainly don't like it. It's not comfortable, and it's definetely not fun. But that never stops them.

Good entrepreneurs, succesful ones, have a way of not letting their fear of failure slow them down. They are defined instead by a seemingly inextinguishable belief in their idea, the idea that has pulled them out of their comfort zone and driven them across the unknown to explore new possiblities.

They are convinced that, if they can just get there (where "there" is), if they can just get their idea off the ground, it will succeed. If. That's really what entrepreneurs fear at this stage. The uncertainty of whether they wil be able to cross that vast space between inspiration and execution, full of tests and traps, twists and turns. A gauntlet that every entrepreneur must pass through, with challenges that are generally the same for everyone, but that take different forms and present in a different order with each trip across the unknown territory of starting a business.

Indeed, every entrepreneurial journey is a new and different story. No two paths are the same. Everyone will proceed through many of the same pivotal points, but your path will inevitably be unique to you, to your idea, and to the time and place through which it passes.

Fortunately, it's never been easier to make this journey than it is right now. So many entrepreneurs have done what you are about to do. You have the chance to prepare for what's coming your way, if you are willing to learn from these unwitting helpers. They've made every mistake. They've falled into every trap. They've taken every wrong turn. And the good ones, the successful one, only made those mistakes, fell into those traps, took those wrong turns, once.

Because they borrowed from the entrepreneurs who came before them as well. They heard the stories and learned the lessons. Now it's your turn.

10) GO IN THROUGH THE SIDE DOOR

Most new businesses aren't doing something completely novel or aren't doing it in a totally new way or new place, you should be thinking long and hard about how else you might enter your market besides knocking on the front door and asking for permission to come in. This is something that female and minority entrepreneurs have long had to contend with, whether it means breaking through glass ceilings or breaking down walls built by prejudice. All of which is to say, figuring out how to sneak in through the side door is not new ground you will have to break. A legion of resourceful geniuses have come before you. And what many of them have discovered is that the side door isn't just less heavily guarded, it's often bigger. Or as Peter Thiel put it in a 2014 lecture at the Standford Center for Professional Development titles "Competition is for losers" "Don't always go through the tiny little door that everyone's trying to rush through. Go around the corner and go through the vast gate that no one's taking"

For Manoj Bhargava, the founder of 5-hour Energy, his side door into the energy drink market did not take the shape of a small niche, but rather of a small product. In early 2003, a few years removed from his retirement from a plastics business he'd turned around and profitable, Manoj was attending a natural products trade show outside Los Angeles looking for inventions he might acquire or license in an efford to create a business that would generate an ongoing residual income stream for him in his post plastic years.

Walking the floor of the show, he stumbled upon a new sixteen ounce energy drink that produced long-lasting effects he'd never experienced with other energy drinks "Well this is amazing", he said to himself, exhausted from a long morning of meetings and now energized enough to continue walking the trade show floor. "I could sell this" He thought. The drink's creators disagreed. They were "science guys with PhDs" while he was "just a lowly business guy". They refused to sell their invention to him or even offer him a license on their formula. When they effectively told him to hit the road, Manoj decided to hit the lab instead and to create his own version of the energy drink that had fueled him up and blown him away.

"I looked at their label and said, I can do better than this. How hard can it be? I'll figure it out." Manoj said. With the help of scientists from a company he'd founded for the express purpose of finding inventions just like this one, he had a comparable energy drink formula in a matter of months. It would turn out to be the easiest part of the process.

The hard part would be getting his invention into stores "If I made another drink" Manoj said of his thinking at the time, "I've got to fight for space in the cooler against Red Bull and Monster Energy. I've also got to fight Coke, Pepsi, and Budweiser for space. So you're pretty much dead if you want to try that. He was dead because he would be fighting for a finite amount of space in brick and mortar stores, against the compeition not just in his own niche but in the entire beverage industry, which is dominated by some of the biggest companies in the world. If you own a 7-Eleven or you're the gneral manager of a grocery chain like Kroger or Tesco, are you really going to turn over a Diet Coke, Mountain Dew, or Snapple rack to a new energy drink that on one has every heard of? Especially when, in 2003, in energy drink sales had yet to really spike and there were already two major players, Red Bull and Monster energy, in the nascent market. Even if you were inclined to give a little guy like Manoj Bhargava a shot, once the regional sales reps and distributors from Coca-Cola and PepsiCo got wind of your decision, they would likely wield their Microsoftesque price discretion against you like a baseball bat, or just pull their products from your store altogether.

Those were the barriers to entry that Manoj was looking at. If he was going to get into this market, he'd have to find some other way. That's when it dawned on him. "If I'm tired why am I thirsty also?" By which he meant, why should we have to chug ten to sixteen ounces of a cloyingly sweet liquid in order to get an energy boost? "It would be like Tylenol selling sixteen-ounce bottles", Manoj explained by way of analogy. "I just want to do it quick. I don't want to drink this whole thing", he thought. This is how Manoj arrived at the idea of shrinking his product down from the standard sixteen-ounce drink to a two-ounce shot.

Quickly, everything changed. In less than six months, he'd hired a designer to make his distinctive label, and he'd found a bottler who could produce two ounce versions of his energy formula. "And at two ounces, it's really not a drink, it's a delivery system"

This was 5-hour Energy's side door. It wasn't a drink, so it wasn't an immediate threat to Red Bull or Monster Energy. At two ounces, it also didn't need to be refigerated or given a large, dedicated shelf, so retailers didn't have to worry about space. They understood that the perfect spot for it would be at the cash register, right next to the Slim Jims and pickled eggs!

"It just belonged there" Manoj said "You could tell it just looked that way that it should be there" Moreover because the ingredients that way, that it should be there." Moreover, because the ingredients that went into 5-hour Energy were actually less about energy and more about focus, "vitamins for the brain". He could position his product beyond the beverage verticals and outside the grocery or convenience store channels. In fact, the very first place he went with 5-hour Energy in 2004 was the largest vitamin store, GNC, which decided to put the product in a thousand of its stores.

GNC turned out to be a genius side door into the energy "drink" market for a couple reasons. The first is obvious, there was much less competition compared with grocery and convenience stores, but the second is more interesting. "It turns out GNC is always looking for new products, because once a product gets mass distribution, GNC is sort of out of it, if it's in Walmart, nobody's going to buy it at GNC" Essentially, GNC was an easier route to retail distribution than a place like 7-Eleven or Safeway, and thankfully the tolerance for a slow start was higher as well, because in the first week they sold only 200 bottles. "Which was horrible" Manoj admitted. But they waited it out, manufacturer and retailer together, "and at the end of six months it was selling 10,000 bottles a week"

From there Manoj went to drugstores like Walgreens and Rite Aid, which snapped it up, now a 5-hour Energy is near the cash register in most stores basically everywhere.

This is the great irony of circumventing the barriers to entry that your competitions's apparent monopoly power constructs and then fighting you way in through the side door. If you're successful, you stand a very good chance of achieving market domination of your own. Of digging and widening your own moat and building the toll that bridge that crosses it. Of massive, unbelievable success. For many entrepreneurs, that is the goal.

11) IT'S ALL ABOUT LOCATION

12) GET ATTENTION, PART 1: BUILDING BUZZ If a tree falls in the forest and there's no one to hear it, does it make a sound? I think there is a business analog to that: If a company opens it's doors and no one hears about it, does it ever really exist? Or is it just one of the 170,000 new businesses that year that didn't make it to its first birthday and whose existence you can only infer from a table of numbers in a Bureaur of Labor Statistics Report?

The answer, I believe, is of course it existed! If you took that leap off the cliff while attempting to build your own airplane on the way down, you deserve to be known. But as the builder of that plane, it's also your job to be the creator of the buzz from that plane's engines.

It's your job to make sure that the sound of your doors opening reaches past your front steps and far enough out into the world for potential customers to hear it. It's your job to get attention for the product or the service you are bringing to the market.

It's usually not easy, and you are going to need help from all forms of media to make it happen, because like Jen Rubio said, nobody wants to hear you talk about yourself. But it's doable, particularly when you are able to build buzz among many possible customers while at the same time engineering work of mouth among your ideal customers.

Take one look around you at all the things you observed at the start of this chapter. The people who made these products were sending a version of their idea out into the world that they could stand behind and that could itself stand up to the criticism they were inviting. That is the real recipe for success in the iterative process, and one every creator needs to get right if they want to turn their idea not just into a product, but into a business that is poised for real, sustained growth.

13) GET ATTENTION PART 2: ENGINEERING WORD OF MOUTH

14) SURVIVE THE CRUCIBLE

15) FUND THE BUSINESS, PART 3: PROFESSIONAL MONEY

The first thing to understand is that raising venture capital is about making a promise. A promise that you have a product or a service that people will pay money for, that you have a plan to reach as many of those people as possible, and that in exchange for lots of moeny, you will bust your butt to reach them. The next thing to understand is that good investors know the promise you are making to them is just that, a promise. They know you can't make any guarantees. You can do everything right, but if the world shifts under your feet, there's nothing you can do about it. Venture capital is by its nature a gamble, it's right there in the name, and every gamble comes with the risk of heavy losses. Professional investors know and accept this fact, which is why the also do everything they can to mitigate the risk before writing very large checks.

One of the principal ways they do this, especially if they are unfamiliar with your industry, is to ask lots of questions:

How do you expect to scale this? Where is the growth going to come from? Who is the customer for this? Doesn't something like this already exist? How will you get costs down? Where will you manufacture? Where will you be based? What's your marketing strategy? Why does anyone need this? Why would anyone do this?

16) PROTECT WHAT YOU'VE BUILT

17) WHEN CATASTROPHE STRIKES

18) THE ART OF THE PIVOT

PART III THE DESTINATION In many ways, the scariest part of entrepreneurship is success. It's reaching your destination, your objective. Because that's when the work really starts. Why you've got to decide: What now? What next? Do you keep moving and do it again? Do you stick around? Do you build? What do you build? How big? With what? And why? Getting here was difficult enough. The anxiety that comes with the responsibility of continue success isn't making things any easier. Why continue to put yourself through all this?

These questions are difficult to answer. And the answers are often hard to get exactly right. Because in the beginning, all you're worried about is trying to survive. You're not aiming for perfection, you're just hoping to avoid pitfalls. You're not thinking about legacy, you're just focused on lasting one more day in your quest across the unknown.

Eventually, though, these questions will become paramount if you want to ubild a business that stands the test of time. Something more than just a vessel for the idea that drove you in the beginning. Something that reflects you mission and your values, that honors all the work you put in, and that treats the people who helped you get here well.

Figuring out your answers to these questions is also what will make you feel successful, no matter what your next move is: whether you stay and build and lead, whether you go, whether you move on and try to repeat your success in another area. If you're not doing it for reasons that are authentically yours, if you've lost sight of what inspired you from those very first days, then the long, arduous entrepreneurial journey you just endured might very well fill you with regret. Like promise unfulfilled.

Forget feeling successful. You can feel like a downright failure when you get to the right place for the wrong reasons, no matter how much money you have. That's because the path to true entrepreneurial success is not strictly about profit, it's also about finding and fulfilling a deeper purpose. That has been the destination all along. Knowing that, and recognizing when you've reached it, is when the rewards truly begin to accrue.

19) IT CAN'T BE ALL ABOUT THE MONEY

The Beatles told us that money can't buy you love. Rousseau taught us that money doesn't buy you happiness. The Bible warns us that the love of money is the root of all evil. And these casualities of the subprime mortgage crisis showed us that money can't be the primary motivating force behind our businesses. A company that is successful and resilient and that acts as a force for good in the world long after you're gone has a larger purpose, a mission at it's center. One that you as founder are responsible for indentifying and articulating from the very beginning, then guarding during times of plenty and leaning on during times of difficulty.

Founders who approach their business with a “mission first” focus tend to be better equipped to handle the lure of unrestrained and manic growth that has damaged or even sunk so many companies with early potential. But having a defined mission is even more valubale when money is scarce or growh is anemic, especially for younger companies, because it gives them a reason to keep on fighting. In contrast, if they are operating with a “money first” mind-set, money's absence makes it so much easier to abandon what they're doing and to pivot before they should, to give up on their original idea at the first sign of trouble, or just plain old quit.

More than just stoking the flames of a fighting spirit when things aren't going your way, the mission is what gives your business, and you, direction. It helps you identify opportunities. It helps you categorize and prioritize the field of choices in any situation, from those that advance the intersts of the business to those that subvert it or hold it back. This is perhaps the most important thing that a mission does for a young company, because with everything swirling around you, whether it's product development, funding, hiring, or marketing, it's very easy to lose your sense of direction both individually as a founder and collectively as the business. Once you lose your sense of direction, the chances of keeping hold of any sense of mission become slim. After all, if you don't know where you're going, it's hard to know why you're going there.

Andy Puddicombe, a former Buddhist monk from the southwest of England, had a mission to demystify meditation and make it accessible to as many people as possible. The first step on the journey once he was back in the United Kingdom was to figure out the how and the why of this whole experience and then to find a plae where he could teach clients one on one. The goal he said was to give people just enough to be inspired or to get excited to try mediation, because a lot of people had heard and read about it, but it's only really in the experience of it that you can get them to make that leap in terms of actually getting the benefit. So he started to use a lot more storytelling in his practice. He took a lot of metaphors and analogies from the Tibetan tradition, but he changed them just enough to make them “more approachable and accessible.”

At his first teaching space, a clinic room in a London integrative health center fun by a doctor who had heard a lot of good things about “mindfulness”. Before too long, Andy was seeing six to ten people every day, all with very mainstream problems. They were struggling with depression, anxiety, insomnia, stress, mirgraines, many of the things that we all suffer with now in a life of just sheer overload. He'd see each person for an hour a week for ten weeks, gradually developing in the process a ten week long modular course from which everyone can benefit. Any by everyone I mean everyone, because everything you hear in the Headspace app is now is build built on the content and the language that was developed during that time. It was a really important trainign ground in terms of understanding what worked and what didn', what language connected and what didn't.

Before he got to the Headspace app, which by mid 2018, had more thatn 30 million users and a million paying subscribers, Andy first had to figure out how to move beyond the one on one clinic experience. Not to make more money, though he certainly could have used it, but to reach more people more quickly. ”I wanted to get meditation out. I wanted to get more people meditating. I just didn't know how to do it outside of the clinic” he said.

20) BUILD A CULTURE, NOT A CULT

At Reed Hastings first company Pure Software, the "culture first" approach he used at Netflix didn't come naturally. He did things another way which was "me first". Not that he was selfish, just the opposite was true. He did everything or at least he tried to do everything, himself. "I thought if I could just do more sales calls, more travel, write more code, do more interviews, that somehow it would work out better," he said. In his mind, if there was a problem to be solved or a bug in the code to be fixed, as the founder and CEO of the company, which was his brainchild, he was the obvious and best choice for doing what needed to get done. Eventually, wearing all those hats got to be too much. "I was coding all night, trying to be CEO in the day, and once in a while, I'd squeeze in a shower" he said. It wasn't working Hastings had to figure out a better way. This is when he made the mistake from which the culture deck would eventually be born. Now whenever they had a problem at Pure Software, instead of tring to fix it himself, he tried to implement a process that would prevent the problem from ever happening again. The real problem was that he was trying to dummy-proof the system, and then eventually only dummies wanted to work there. Then, of course the market shifted and the company was unable to adapt.

Pure Software was eventually acquired by its largest competitor, and Reed Hastings used the financial windfall from that sale to co-founder Netflix, where he made sure not to repeat his process-obsessed, founder-centric mistakes. He was fortunate. Many founders have not been so lucky. Any successful founder will tell you that the impulse to do everything yourself, to believe that only you know best and then to build processes that reflect that belief, is endemic to entrepreneurship and has the potential to be incredibly destructive. When the processes don't work and your conclusions continually prove wrong, your assumption is that if you just take on a little more and work a little harder, everything will be fine. But that approach can wear you down physically and mentally. Plus, as Reid Hoffman put it in his episode with Hastings, "more work is never the real answer. To succeed as you scale, you have to leverage every person in the organization. And to do that, you have to be very intentional about how you craft the culture." This may sound like common sense, because it is! But I've been surprised at how often entrepreneurs I've encountered make the mistake of trying to do everything themselves as the company begins to grow. What happens in the end is that everything about the business starts to be about the founder rather than the business.

This is one of the hardest traps for even the most well-intentioned entrepreneur to avoid, let alone spot. For the longest time in the beginning, it can feel like it's just you and your idea. The seed gets planted in your mind, you water it with inspiration until it germinates into an idea, you feed it with research until it pokes up through the soil and sees the light of day as a product, which is when it first finds the warmth of attention from an audience, and then if you're lucky, it starts to blossom into a full fledged business.

Getting to that point is an all-consuming process. It takes all your time, energy and focus. It's all you think about, and after a while the line between you and your idea can start to blur. It becomes difficult to know where you end and the company begins. It becomes impossible, especially in the leaner, trying times, to fathom that anyone could understand the business or its problems in the way that you can. So when someone on your team levels the charge that you're making everything about yourself, it almost doesn't compute. Everything you do, you do for the business. You've given everything have to it. If you could give more, you would. But when you and the business are indistinguishable, when you've allowed your identity to merge with the company's how does it not appear to be the case, from outside at least, that your singular focus on the business is also a singular focus on yourself?

It turns out there is a name for founders who fall into this trap. They're called "monarch CEO's" according to Professor Jeffery Sonnenfeld, who stuides CEOs at the Yale School of Management. "Their business is defined around them and their life is defined around the business", he told the Washington Post. The most notorious of these figures in recent years was Dov Charney, the controversial founder of the now-defunct clothing retailer American Apparel.

American Apparel was a juggernaut in the clothing business and in the culture during the first decade of the twenty-first century. Their advertisements were edgy and sexually provocative. Their retail stores were on the best streets in all the right cities. They manufactured their clothes out of a large, old factory building in downtown Los Angeles. Their clothes were everywhere and on everyone the entire decade. I still own a couple American Apparel T-shirts and hoodies that I wear in regular rotation.

American' Apparel's rise from a domestic clothing manufacturer and wholesaler into an international retail brand was as fast as its fall. They moved into their famous downtown LA factory in 2000. By 2005, they were one of the fastest growing companies in America. By 2011, the company had more than 250 stores with revenue well north of $500 million. And then, by 2014 amidst a tangle of sexual harassment lawsuits and bad financial deals, Dov was kicked off the board of the company he founded. By 2015, American Apparel was in Chapter 11 bankruptcy. By 2017, the company as Dov Charney knew it was gone, all ties to the founder severed, it's intellectual property sold at auction to a competitor, Gildan Activewear for less than $100 million, it's retail stores shuttered. It's a sad cautionary tale. Dov Charney was American Apparel. American Apparel was Dov Charney. And that was the whole problem. Everyone saw it. The New York Times said, "Charney himself had no other interests ouside his company. He viewed himself as indeispensable" The Financial Times said "It is almost as if Mr.Charney believes that the scandalous behaviour he has so often been accused if is inextricably tied up with the image of his often lauded but deeply unconventional fashion label" It's a sentiment Charney would not reject. He told the Financial Times reporter "I am a deep part of the brand".

The depth of their synchronicity is where the trouble for American Apparel started. At various points well into the history of the company. Charney was the CEO, the designer, the main photographer, the male fit model, a centerpiece of their advertising and their biggest liability. Not just legally either. As often happens when a founder loses themselves inside their business, he became a control freak. He had store managers calling him directly. He famously moved into a warehouse that was having some problems and had a shower installed so he could live there twenty four hours a day monitoring the work. Once when there was a traffic jam in the parking lot of American Apparel's LA headquarters, Charney went downstairs and personally directed traffic until it cleared.

These might be humble, romantic gestures of a leader willing to do whatever it takes if they weren't actually a reflection of a founder who had turned into a relentless micromanager as the company grew. "A lot of founders have difficulty making this transition" said Professor Sydney Finkelstein of the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth in the wake of Charney's ouster from the board. "When you're a smaller company, micromanagment is not necessarily a terrible thing. It's when you cross the line and have to grow, you've got to have management talent around you.

"If the cultural roots are strong, then new leadership is developed in that model, and will often continue the culture" - Reed Hastings If the roots are unstable however and the leadership is constantly changing, the culture will be, too. By consistently firing or driving away talented leaders, Charney managed to yank out by the roots whatever culture there was to speak of at American Apparell, and in filling the vacuum with himself, the culture of American Apparel became the Cult of Dov. As Dov imploded, so did American Apparell.

Tristan the owner of a skincare brand. If he hadn't been careful, Tristan could have very easily found himself on a self absorbed Dov Charney style trajectory. Instead, he found a problem to solve "for people who lookied like me", as he put it. He developed a set of solutions that could become a business that employed a lot of people, if he just cultivated the seed of the idea and tended to the soil with enough care to make sure the idea blossomed and flourished. Almost immediately, Tristan's goals changed. Instead of being singular and self-focuesed, they were multiple and communal. He recongnized that for a business to last 100 years, which was one of his new goals, it can't be about you, because "you don't scale". Only your idea, and your story, and your values do. As long as you know them and share them.

"Knowing your values gets you on the same page with your employees. They get you on the same page in this noisy world with your consumers, but more importantly they give you your purpose," Tristan said "Without knowing your values, you're going to make decisions that are inconsistent and you have to have consistency to inspire your sanity."

I would argue that you also need consistency to inspire your people. And there is nothing more consistent than a set of clear values written down on the page for everyone to see. Just ask Reed Hastings or better yet, ask his 7000 employees.

21) THINK SMALL TO GET BIG

22) MANAGE PARTNERSHIP TENSIONS

23) KNOW THYSELF

When I started podcasts my friends thought I'd lost my mind. they were right to be skeptical. We were still a few years away from the podcast boom that began to swallow traditional radio.

Podcasting let me be the most genuine version of my personal and professional self, and it unexpectedly put my career into ascendancy as a result. Embracing my storytelling sensibilities helped put my production ecompany on the same track. It guided me to, and through, every decision in every phase of our growth, whom to hire, who to profile on the show, what to say no to, and it also kep us from falling off the righ track.

When growth begins to accelerate, it's even more critical to know who you are as a founder and who you are as a company. That understanding helps point you in the right direction when you have opportunities to pursure lots of different things. It's a constant reminder of what business you're actually in, which is something that is surprisingly easy to forget or lose sight of once your business starts to expand, evolve, and change shape. Believe me, I've been there, and so have most of the founder I've interviewed.

Andy, one of the co-founders of Bonobos was dealing with problems in the workplace. "I was a confused person, I got depressed, and I kind of had to fake it at work that I was doing okay. It was super tough to navigate." He also struggled with direct conflict and confrontation. "I valued harmoney over the difficult conversations until the situation became really difficult", he said, "and then I'd take it on" Compbined with the normal stress and insecurity that come with running a succesful startup, one that wasn't even his idea to begin with, these personal issues started to steer Andy toward poor decisions, including fighting with his co-founder in front of the team, which exacerbated the company's identity crisis.

24) WHEN TO SELL AND WHEN TO STAY

Now entrepreneurs don't have to raise professional money if they don't want to. They don't have to accept it in the amounts or at the valuation that may be available to them. They don't have to realize the potential idling within their ideas as quickly as others may want either. They can take it slow. They can defer compensation. They can wait to make a lot of money and let the company grow at a more natural pace. It wouldn't be an unfamiliar place from which to operate for most entrepreneurs, since founders typically pay themselves about as much as they could make if they were employees, and much less on average than a CEO would make coming into the company. Fundamentally it comes down to what a founder thinks is best for the company and best for themselves. Neither choice is by definition better than the other. It all depends on what a founder's goals were when they started their company, and where theose goals have evolved in light of their success.

Except I don't think money and control are your only choices when you are wrangling with a growing and successful busines. I don't believe they are the only two major forces that motivate an entrepreneur's decision making either. I think there is a third. A consider that tends to play a lesser role during the fundraising part of growth, but is especially active once a founder has grown their business beyond what they ever imagined possible and the opportunity to sell presents itself. I'm talking about happiness. Contentment. Making a decision that feels right.

25) BE KIND

26) WHAT YOU DO WITH YOUR LUCK

Every successful entrepreneur I've met has a story about working eighteen hour days for months on end or eating ramen and cereal and rice to get by, but none of them has ever worked harder in their capacity as a founder than a dishwasher or a gardener or a construction worker or a waitress works every single day. Every founders stories has a strong strain of luck running through it. But I'm not talking about luck in this context as any sort of admonition against these founders being proud of all the hard work they put in. I mention it in order to, I hope, help aspring entrepreneurs understadn that the luck these founders experienced was not some desembodied magical force. It didn't happen in a vacuum. It didn't happen to them. Luck when it comes right down to it, is really just an opportunity waiting to be taken advatage of, and they took advantage of it.

Maybe you were lucky enough to have a good network, or a stable home, or a good education, or maybe you were lucky enough to be born with the kind of personality that makes you more resilient, more willing to accept rejection, more willing to do whatever it takes, without the massive ego that prevents so many from sticking with it during hard times. A personality like Daymond John's with the drive to work hard and the resilience to push forward through all the nos until he got to a yes.

Whatever the case, the question you will need to answer for you self as an aspring entrepreneur isn't whether you will have any luck, you will, you probably already do. It's what you are going to do with the luck that you have. Are you doing to take advantage of it? Are you going to do the work? Are you going to take the leap? Are you going to write that twenty-fifth investor email? What about the twenty-sixth? Are you going to pay all the friends in your network to buy your product so the stores think its super popular right away, like Sara Blakely did with the first five stores she got Spanx into? Are you going to physically move your product in those stores to a more optimal location like she did, too? Those are choices you will have when you realize how lucky you are and you spot the opportunities that come with that luck.

You and I, we are both lucky. I had the opportunity to write this book, you had the money to buy it (or the patience to wait for it at the library) and the time and inclination to read it. I've had the privilege of meeting and interviewing some of the world's most succesful innovators, entrepreneurs, and idealists in order to help them tell their stories, you somehow found you way here, where you can learn from the lessons their stories hold.

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