I love the podcast, How I Built This, and so when I heard that they were releasing a book, I knew I wanted to read it. How I Built This, by Guy Raz, is about the various through-lines that connect the different entrepreneurs he’s interviewed on his podcast over the years. How I Built This doesn’t give directives – it’s not a “how to start a business” or “how to be successful in business” or anything like that, it’s more about finding the commonalities between all of these wildly different business stories.
The book is cleanly divided into chapters, and they sort of follow this chronological order of starting a business. First, “Be Open to Ideas” which centers on Lisa Price, who founded Carol’s Daughter. She had been making fragrances and lotions for herself as a hobby for years, when her mother convinced her to sell them at a church flea market. That turned into a business selling lotions to friends of friends, which Price continued to grow until she sold it to L’Oreal.
The next chapter, “Is it Dangerous or Just Scary?” is about the risks that entrepreneurs take, and focusing on Jim Koch, who started Boston Brewing Company, and Michael Dell, of Dell Computers. The central point there is that neither of them did anything that was terribly dangerous in taking the leap to start their business. Koch left a consulting job that he could return to if his business didn’t work out, and Dell dropped out of college, and could go back to college if his business didn’t work out.
The next chapter, “Leave Your Safety Zone…but Do It Safely” covers entrepreneurs who managed the risk of entrepreneurship by staying in their jobs while building a business. This chapter focuses on Daymond John, who founded FUBU, and kept his job at Red Lobster for the first four years of starting his business.
The book goes on like this, in a pretty high level of detail. A few chapters I found to be really interesting were “Think Small to Get Big” which focused on the businesses that flourish alongside a big booming industry – think Levi Strauss in the California Gold Rush, and Chet Pipkin, who founded Belkin International and created a business of selling the cables to connect desktop computers to printers in the beginning of the personal computing boom. “Build a Culture, Not a Cult” focused on companies like 1-800-GOT-JUNK? that had major culture struggles early on and had to make drastic changes to turn around the organizational culture, and the major culture problems that Dov Charney had at American Apparel, which were ultimately the downfall of the company.
I really liked this book, in part because of the podcast – it was fun to see the entrepreneurs from the podcast show up in different ways in the book. I also enjoyed the story aspect of it – Raz is really good at telling a compelling story, and that made this an engaging read.
I’m tracking all of my books this year on Goodreads, so if Goodreads is your thing, let’s connect, be buddies, read a lot of books, etc.