Extended Moment: Guy Raz: Why 99% of Businesses Fail & This Secret Made Apple, Pixar, & Elon Musk Billions!
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What inspired Guy Raz to interview over 20,000 people and launch “How I Built This”?
Guy, how
many people have you interviewed in your life? I would say over 20,000. And you started a smash hit iconic show called How I Built This. Why? What's the mission behind that show? I wanted to give
people access to the greatest entrepreneurs I could find in ways that they might not have access to them. And I wanted that wisdom and those stories to be available to anyone at any time for
free forever. Give me an idea of the kinds and caliber of people that you've interviewed over those 20,000 interviews. Everybody from rural
sheepers in Afghanistan to soccer players in Europe to celebrities in the United States were leaders. entrepreneurs and founders of businesses to ordinary man on the street conversations.
I'm really curious. You know, when we talk about building something, the seemingly impossible, most difficult part of building anything seems to be going from zero to one. And you've sat with people who have gone from having an idea to putting that idea in motion. And it's not a huge journey to travel, but it seems like the hardest journey to travel because it requires so much of a shift in mindset. It requires the confrontation of fear and apparent danger. And there's something about these people that makes them decide that it's better than not starting. Taking the action is better than not taking the action. Have you been able to figure out what that is in people? and how we can cultivate it.
There's several sort of the Venn diagram of founders coalesces around a few common traits that, by the way, many of us have intuitively, naturally, or can develop, right? So curiosity is an obvious one. Just this desire to grow and to learn and to look around you and to try and absorb the lessons around you. But the other ones are a little bit more hard edged, like a fear of regret of not trying something. So many years ago, I interviewed a guy named Jim Cook. I've actually interviewed him recently again. He really kind of revolutionized the beer industry in the United States. Like the reason why Europeans drink American beer today is because of Jim Cook. Like in the 80s, it was a joke, right? There was there's actually a famous Monty Python
sketch where it's something about rather drink piss than American beer, something like that. Well, in the 80s, he revived the beer industry in the US with a beer named Samuel Adams. And he really supercharged what became this craft brewing industry in the US, IPAs and all these really interesting beers that to this day are some of the greatest in the world. He started his business, Sam Adams, in his 30s. He was a consultant for uh boston consulting group he was making a good salary he had a family but he there was something about his life that felt unfulfilled and part of that was he wanted to build something on his own he wanted it to be his he didn't want to work for somebody else. And he felt that if he didn't try, if he just continued on at BCS, he would make a lot of money.
He would make millions of dollars and he could have a very stable, good life. But he felt like he would be unfulfilled if it wasn't his own thing, that he had to try. So he took a risk. He left. But he felt that if he didn't take the risk, it would be dangerous and he actually uses this paradigm dangerous versus scary it was really scary to leave his job at bcs but it would be dangerous if he stayed because the danger would be that one day he'd get out of bed and he'd be 60 and he would regret not having tried and i think that's a big factor for a lot of founders this idea that They don't want to feel intense regret, and so they're willing to take the risk, even though it might be catastrophic. The idea of building something, of owning something, of creating something yourself that is yours.
is a hugely powerful pull. And it's like that's that magnetic field that they're all attracted to. They're all kind of moving in that direction. I think many of us who are entrepreneurs or aspire to be entrepreneurs feel
that magnetic pull. What role does self-belief play and what is that?
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What inspired Guy Raz to interview over 20,000 people and launch “How I Built This”?
0:00–10:31
2
How do curiosity and the fear of regret shape a founder’s mindset?
10:31–13:09
3
What can we learn from Jim Cook’s decision to leave a stable career and revolutionize the beer industry?
13:09–21:50
4
Why do Mormon missionaries view “no” as a training ground for entrepreneurship?
21:50–45:55
5
How did Isaac Larian turn a rejected pitch at Nintendo into a $3 billion toy empire?
45:55–1:12:51
Speakers
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