On Purpose with Jay Shetty - Guy Raz ON: Safely Quitting Your Job & Building the Business of Your Dreams
Episode Date: June 28, 2021You can order my new book 8 RULES OF LOVE at 8rulesoflove.com or at a retail store near you. You can also get the chance to see me live on my first ever world tour. This is a 90 minute interactive sho...w where I will take you on a journey of finding, keeping and even letting go of love. Head to jayshettytour.com and find out if I'll be in a city near you. Thank you so much for all your support - I hope to see you soon.Guy Raz talks with Jay Shetty about the risks of being an entrepreneur, the motivation behind every successful entrepreneurship, and finding the right co-founder who shares your ideals and beliefs.Guy Raz is an acclaimed radio and podcast personality, described by The New York Times as “one of the most popular podcasters in history.” Perhaps his best-known show, How I Built This, features in-depth interviews with the world’s greatest innovators, entrepreneurs, and idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.Sign up for Jay Shetty’s free “Pursuit of Purpose” Live Masterclass at www.jayshettypurpose.comWhat We Discuss with Guy:00:00 Intro02:15 First thing Guy ever built as a kid05:11 “Journalism gave me a psychological pass to talk to anybody” - Guy10:13 The way we come across an idea is when we have a problem to solve17:25 Motivation comes from solving a problem or fixing something23:03 Chapter 3: Leave your safety zone, but do it safely27:56 Risks taken and experiences gained while building a career33:09 Master the skill to understand what you’re good at37:04 Having a business partner is crucial when you almost want to give up41:44 Give yourself time and opportunity to decide if the partnership is right for you44:26 The common myths surrounding fundraising50:20 Be an active listener to learn more information about the real story53:50 The most outlandish story or pain out of 400 interviews done59:55 What you’re missing out on when you think you’re not cut to be an entrepreneur01:03:42 Guy on Fast FiveLike this show? Please leave us a review here - even one sentence helps! Post a screenshot of you listening on Instagram & tag us so we can thank you personally!Episode Resources:Guy Raz | WebsiteGuy Raz | PodcastsGuy Raz | TwitterGuy Raz | FacebookGuy Raz | InstagramGuy Raz | LinkedInGuy Raz | YouTubeAchieve success in every area of your life with Jay Shetty’s Genius Community. Join over 10,000 members taking their holistic well-being to the next level today, at https://shetty.cc/OnPurposeGeniusSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Conquer your New Year's resolution to be more productive with the Before Breakfast Podcast.
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There will come a time where you will want to give up, where you will run into a roadblock
and you will say, is this worth fighting for? And you will say to yourself, it's not.
It's better for me to just move on, give up. But the person who you co-founded the company
with will say,
we got this, we can get through this.
And there will be other times where those rules are reversed,
where you are the person with the optimism.
I have experienced that hundreds of times. [♪ Music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing, music Hey everyone, welcome back to On Purpose, the number one health podcast in the world.
Thanks to each and every single one of you that come back every week to listen, learn,
and grow.
And I am so excited to be talking to you today.
I can't believe it.
My new book, Eight Rules of Love, is out.
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For you to listen to this book, I read the audiobook.
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It's dedicated to anyone who's trying to find,
keep, or let go of love.
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And I'd love to invite you to come and see me for my global tour. that are dating, broken up, or struggling with love, make sure you grab this book.
And I'd love to invite you to come and see me for my global tour.
Love rules.
Go to jsheddytour.com to learn more information about tickets, VIP experiences, and more.
I can't wait to see you this year.
Now today we have an extremely special guest because his ability to understand, simulate, and synthesize
knowledge insights and information about building successful businesses, about finding our
calling and following that calling are just second to none.
Now, I'm talking about none other than Guy Razz, the author of the new book, How I Built
This, and the host of the NPR podcast of the same name. He's a connoisseur of entrepreneurs having interviewed hundreds of successful self-starters
and researched what makes them successful.
For years, Guy was a foreign correspondent for NPR
and was the youngest bureau chief ever at the age of just 25.
I can't wait to speak to Guy today and share this conversation with all of you. Guy,
welcome to the podcast. It's so great to be here, Jay. Thanks so much for having me.
No, thank you. I remember just, I think it was a few months ago when we were just DMing on
Instagram and you kindly invited me to do your live event for how I built this, which was
unbelievable and I'm so grateful for that opportunity. But I've been more excited about today because I want to hear from you.
I was so excited to have you on. It was so fun.
We got incredible feedback.
And I mean, I love your book.
So I love what you do.
And so it was great when you reached out.
I'm so glad that now we know each other.
We're going to be friends.
Absolutely. I love it. I want to actually start off with a different question than you
get asked often. What was the first thing you ever built as a child? How did your family,
friends, parents respond to your first ever thing that you built?
I grew up in a fairly traditional, I'm not religious these days. I have a lot of
respect and immense respect for people who are observant and practice religion, but I grew up
in a kind of an observant Jewish home as a kid. My parents were immigrants and it was really important
for especially my mom to keep traditions. And so Friday nights were very important in my home as a kid
That's the the Friday to sundown. It's the Jewish Sabbath and
Saturday you kind of take a day of rest
foreshadowing I do that today, but for different reasons and
As a kid, it was really important that our house was clean and and and bright and ready for the Sabbath. It was just part of our tradition growing up.
And so I was expected to clean my room and tidy it up.
And every Friday afternoon after school, I would spend hours building these elaborate villages
out of Lincoln logs.
Lincoln logs, are you familiar with Lincoln logs?
It was a, they're still around,
but it was a classic American toy, Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln.
You know, the myth was that he was born in a log cabin,
which is kind of true.
And so they were these logs that had little grooves
and niches in them and you could build these elaborate homes
and structures out of them.
And I would build these villages in my bedroom
as a kid
for my dad when he would come home from work.
Who was not my dad was not particularly observant.
It was my mom really.
But this was part of our tradition at home when I was a kid.
And so I would spend hours building these elaborate villages
out of Lincoln logs and then eventually Legos.
And I loved it.
It was like a wonderful creative outlet. out of Lincoln logs and then eventually Legos. And I loved it.
It was like a wonderful creative outlet.
Of course, you don't think about that
when you're eight or nine years old,
but it was a way for me to kind of express myself
and also show my parents something I was proud of
and then feel pride when they were excited about it.
Yeah, that sounds awesome.
I remember doing similar. I used just played a lot with Lego and Play
Mobile and some of this similar style of toys and I remember creating lots of villages and
castles and boats and I actually miss it now that I'm talking to you about it. I know.
Yeah. I'm like, I want to go build a train track.
That's right. Yeah. I need to go and get back into it. It was so, it was so interesting building it out.
And I feel when I go to places like,
I don't know if you have that in the US.
We have in the UK, we have Legoland,
which is like, there are a few in the US.
Yeah, there's one San Diego, yeah.
Yeah, and whenever I go to those,
I'm like, oh, this is so cool.
Like there's just such a fascination towards building a city
or a town out of something very small.
So I love that.
Thank you for sharing that story.
And I noticed recently also on Instagram, you posted an old press pass from your high school
newspaper.
And so you've been a journalist and a reporter and a interviewer for a very long time.
Do you remember the first story you ever covered?
Yeah.
It was my Hebrew school newspaper.
Again, I grew up having to go to Hebrew school.
It's like going to Catholic school, you know,
you start off something that you do
and then some people kind of,
but it was really an important thing when I was a kid
and I was the reporter for the Hebrew school newsletter.
So it was about some,
it was like some one of the classes,
did a performance and sang songs,
and I wrote about that.
I was a journalist,
kind of a journalist.
I was interested in journalism from a very young age and I don't
say that to sound like, you know, some kind of, you know, precocious kid, it's not that I was
precocious. What it was, Jay, was that I am, have always been, as a kid I was, I still am,
even though I do these very public jobs now, I am, and I think you have a lot of this
too, I'm super introverted and actually quite shy.
I'm not the kind of person that can easily go into a room and just start shaking hands.
You know, it's a very, it's a very American characteristic, by the way, the charisma,
which is something that I can find and have found over time as I've had to
do public things, but it doesn't come naturally to me.
What journalism gave me was a pass.
Was this kind of psychological pass in my mind to talk to anybody.
You know, naturally, I'm not the kind of person that would just go up and say, hey, I'm
Guy Ross.
Can I?
How are you? When I used to meet you and make small talk?
It doesn't come easily to me.
But when I had a notepad in my hand, and this was going back in all over high school, I
could.
I felt like as a high school kid, I could go up to other kids in high school and ask them
questions because it was for the newspaper.
I was a reporter.
And so I was doing a job on behalf of something bigger than me. And that was what attracted
me to it. It was this idea that it was like open to world to me that I couldn't access without
that note pad, that safety net. I love that answer. That is such a brilliant way of thinking about it.
And I couldn't agree with you more.
We definitely have that in common.
I feel like when I told you about how my parents
forced me to go to public speaking classes,
it wasn't that after I finished the classes,
I was just happy being a public speaker.
It was not until I actually discovered the buggered
Gita and the Vedas and the spiritual texts that I studied
that I felt like I was speaking about something more than me
and beyond me and far more fascinating and interesting than I was.
And so then I had the confidence to share it because I felt I'd come across this treasure
mind of wisdom.
And I had to share that wisdom with the world.
And so I can identify very closely with that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's this thing that it's like there's no explanation to it because why did I
feel empowered with a notepad and then eventually a microphone in my hand. I mean, it's just something
in my brain clicked and it enabled me to feel safe and comfortable approaching people and having
conversations and not being worried about being judged because I was gathering information. And that, that, that was a strong gravitational pull for me.
It's what attracted me initially to this profession. Later on, it would evolve and I would do it for
other reasons. But that was really the beginning. So yeah, I mean, I've got, I've got my high school press pass still to this day. I just happen to have it, you know, but it really is what I eventually would do with my life.
Yeah, you've encouraged me to go dig up some old things from my life. I think it's always
fun looking back. For anyone who's listening and watching right now, I'm talking to Guy Rars,
how I built this, the unexpected paths to success from the world's most inspiring entrepreneurs.
Here is the book.
We've got the link in the description so you can go and grab a copy anytime while we're
listening, while you're listening.
Guy, what I'm fascinated by, and I was saying this to you earlier, I think you've done a phenomenal
job of breaking down the entrepreneur journey.
I mean, you've done so many interviews with so many incredible people
and I can't imagine how you'd even start to write this book.
But I do want to honestly say that I thought everything
from the titles to the chapters to the structure
was just wonderful to see.
And I'm honestly, and I'm not joking at all,
I'm thinking about pursuing a new business venture.
And I'm gonna follow your book while I do that.
And I can't wait to tell you how it goes.
So that's a side note.
But one of the first things I wanted to talk to you about is question, I get asked a lot.
And it's about this idea of like, how do I know if this is the thing I should be doing?
And I think we hear this a lot.
And I'm sure you hear a million times.
And people are like, well, what do I start with?
Like, how do I know if this is what I love? How do I know if this is my passion?
How do I know if this is the idea? And you start off the book by telling people to be open
to ideas. Tell us about how someone finds the answer to that question.
Probably the question that people ask the most, I'm sure you get this question the most
of almost any question, which is, how do I know? How do I find an idea?
The answer is, you don't always know right away, right?
And the reality is that most of the time,
the way we come across an idea is because we have a problem,
ourselves, a problem we need to solve for ourselves.
And as we begin to interrogate how to solve that problem for ourselves, a problem we need to solve for ourselves. And as we begin to interrogate how to solve that problem for ourselves, it starts to crystallize
in our mind that maybe that problem is a problem other people have and could solve other people's
problems.
So, a great example of this is my friend Tristan Walker who was on how I built this. Tristan is an entrepreneur,
a brilliant entrepreneur, and he is a black man, and he knew and knows that razors were not designed
for most black men because most black men have curly hair. And when they shave, oftentimes the hair and their beard grows back into their skin.
And most razors in the United States and sold around the world
by Gillette and other companies have four or five blades
that are designed to cut the hair under the skin.
The problem is, is when it grows out, it grows back into the skin, especially for men with very curly hair, and it affects
mainly men of color.
And he knew that this was a problem for him, and he knew it was a problem for his friends,
but nobody was addressing this problem.
And in his mind, he thought, why isn't there a beautiful product as good as a Gillette
razor, as beautifully packaged packaged available in the same aisle
Where Gillette razors are available. Why doesn't that exist?
And that was the genesis of the Bevel razor, which is now part of the Procter and Gamble Company
One of the biggest multinationals in the world. They bought they bought the company interesting as a CEO
But it's a great example of a problem that he needed to solve and that solved a problem
for millions of men whose day-to-day routine was, you know, in many cases pain, it was not
just painful, but it was also psychologically painful because of the scarring that occurred
and just the physical pain of dealing with that.
And that is how you begin to come up with ideas.
You begin by interrogating your own problems, the things that bother you or that need to be
improved.
And we see these all the time, Jay, how many times have you been somewhere?
And I know anyone listening to this is experiencing this.
You're waiting in line somewhere for a coffee or you're at a restaurant or you're in a shop
and you think to yourself,
God, they could do X so much better
if they did it like this way.
Or, man, if they'd just tweaked that,
then the outcome would be so much better
for the customer.
That's when you start to kind of connect the dots
and say, wait a minute, maybe I can do that.
Howard Schultz loved coffee, kind of connect the dots and say, wait a minute, maybe I can do that.
Howard Schultz loved coffee and he loved this one little coffee place called Starbucks
in Seattle.
But guess what?
They didn't sell coffee.
They only sold coffee beans.
They sold great coffee beans, but you had to go brew it at home.
But he wanted to have the coffee there.
And so when he bought this little shop,
he decided to turn it into something much, much bigger,
which today is I think the second biggest food company in the world.
And it was all because he saw a problem that needed to be solved.
I think that's such a great place to start for anyone who's listening
or watching right now, because it's something you experience.
It's not something you have to think about.
You don't have to do a brainstorm.
You don't have to get a pen and paper out.
You don't have to be reading lots of books.
It's something that we do almost intuitively.
I think my biggest problem that I would love to solve right now
is me and my wife never know what to watch
on any of the streaming platforms.
And I spend every night like flicking through
like, do we want to watch this show?
Oh, what's this trailer?
What do you think?
Oh, no.
All right, do we want to watch this?
And it's, we spend the whole night
and I'm not coming up with a solution for this.
But it is interesting that that would be a great starting place.
Exactly.
If I wanted to, because it's something that calls me
a lot of pain on a daily basis, I'm
sure it causes a lot of people a lot of pain on a daily basis, at least friends that I
know.
And therefore, it would be a good thing to start on.
This is a huge challenge, discoverability, not just with video content, but with audio
content too.
And so many people are trying to figure out how to solve this problem because I think
from most of us, we go by recommendations from friends. You know, in my case watching things is really challenging
Jay because I'm, I am, I am sort of a weirdo when it comes to watch like I don't like anything violent.
I don't love things. I mean, I'm personally very open and to the world and to ideas.
But I've got two little kids, so it's hard to watch things with a lot of sexual content
or violence or not only because they're around, but I don't really wanna see that. It's hard for me to see it.
I can't, I appreciate Quentin Tarantino's a genius,
but it's hard for me to watch his movies
because they're so violent,
even though they're sort of cartoonish violence,
breaking bad, I stopped watching it
after three or four episodes.
It was too violent, even though it's amazing.
So I agree with you, I hear you.
I have a really hard time figuring out what to watch. I end up watching
like a Wes Anderson movie or something that's fairly innocuous. Yeah. Yeah. No, absolutely.
The closest I've got to a solution is I really trust votes on IMDB. So I believe that if anything is
above eight on IMDB, it's going to be epic and it always I believe that if anything is above eight on IMDB,
it's gonna be epic and it always fits.
And if anything's above seven on IMDB,
it's usually a good watch.
If it's a six, I'm setting myself up
for a bit of disappointment at the end of the night.
And if it's anything lower than a six,
it is gonna be the biggest waste of my time.
But I love your answer of starting with a problem.
And that takes us inward straight away.
It stops you from worrying about, like, will this be successful?
How much money will this make?
Will I be able to exit this company?
You know, all the things that,
with the people you spoke to,
and obviously they all went from a problem point of view
with a couple of examples
that you've so beautifully shared with us
and so many more in the book.
How many people were really thinking
or vocalizing or verbalizing their focus on the result?
How many people started with anything to do with the result?
Almost done.
I mean, the reality is that in virtually every case,
for virtually every entrepreneur I've interviewed,
they had a vision and an idea and that vision and idea
became something
slightly or
extremely different from from how it started out. I mean,
you know, one of my favorite stories is a story of slack, right? And by the way, Jay, I will add to that.
I have never interviewed anybody
who is purely motivated by money because if you're purely motivated by money, you're probably better off going into finance
or getting a job as a lawyer because you will eventually make good money.
Being an entrepreneur is super risky in terms of going for the gold.
I mean, yes, you can make a lot of money.
But virtually everybody I've interviewed
is motivated by a problem and solving a problem
and trying to fix something and or build something
and the best evidence for that is,
the vast majority of people who sell their businesses,
after 10 or 15 years go and start something
else or continue to work for the company that bought them out because it's not the goal
they're chasing, it's the challenge and it's the team, it's the collaborative part of
it, it's going into the office every day. I've interviewed people who have sold their businesses
and then were kind of pushed out of the companies
and they became very, very miserable
because they lost that connection
to the people around them, right?
Yes.
So in terms of like thinking of an idea
and it becoming something entirely different,
I mean, one of the best examples of this is Slack.
I mean, this is a product
now that is used by so many people, especially in the pandemic era, right? My team uses it to
communicate. Slack began as a multiplayer, multiplayer, massive, massive multiplayer online game.
It was called glitch. Stuart Butterfield wanted to create a game, a video game. He is a gamer. He's a friend of mine,
he's a wonderful person,
and he loves games.
And he brought a team together.
He had already had a successful business called Flicker
that he sold to Yahoo.
So we had a track record.
He got investors.
He brought this amazing team.
They built this amazing game.
And it wasn't successful.
Nobody wanted to play it.
Even though it was a beautiful game,
it was way ahead of its time. And this is 2012.
So they had to shutter the company. But what they realized, very late in the game,
was that they actually built something entirely different, which was an internal
communicating communications network that allowed the software developers and the sales reps,
communications network that allowed the software developers and the sales reps and the development people and the backend people and the business people to
communicate just a internal but a friend of Stuart's from outside of the company
saw and he was like this is amazing can we use it for my companies like how sure
here it is here you go that became the product they they did not realize that
the the revolution or anything they were making was was that didn't even have a That became the product. They did not realize that the revolutionary thing
they were making was that.
Didn't even have a name.
They were trying to build this game.
But once they realized that they built something
completely different that was really useful,
that was the revolutionary product.
So sometimes the idea sneaks up on you,
and you have to kind of go through the other stages
to get there.
We just did a story about,
and I can talk on and on about these stories.
We did this story about the largest Mexican-American
paleo food company in America called Siete Foods.
It was started several years, great company.
It started several years ago by a brother and sister
from Laredo, Texas.
Miguel and Veronica Garza, now it's the whole family's involved.
They had no money.
They really started this out
because they built a crossfit gym in Laredo, Texas.
The family ran it and the crossfit gym
basically ran it a money in the end.
They couldn't keep it going.
But Miguel's sister Veronica used to make tortillas for the customers of the CrossFit gym,
out of cassava flour and almond flour, because if you do CrossFit, there's a good chance
you're eating a paleo diet, you're not eating grains.
But you're in Laredo, Texas, which is like one of the capitals of Tex-Mex food and if you love Mexican food
You're gonna eat wheat and corn and beans. Well
She was going to these crossfitters at their cross-fetchive and saying hey
Do you want to have a paleo tortilla? You want to buy some and that's how their business began?
So it began as a cross-fetchive, which eventually morphed into a food business.
I am Yonla, and on my podcast, The R-Spot,
we're having inspirational, educational, and sometimes
difficult and challenging conversations about relationships.
They may not have the capacity to give you what you need.
And insisting means that you are abusing yourself now.
You human!
That means that you're crazy as hell, just like the rest of us.
When a relationship breaks down, I take copious notes and I want to share them with you.
Anybody with two eyes and a brain knows that too much Alfredo sauce is just no good for
you.
But if you're going to eat it, they're not going to stop you.
So he's going to continue to give you the Alfredo sauce and put it even on your grits
if you don't stop him.
Listen to the R-Spot on the iHeart Radio app Apple Podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Our 20s are seen as this golden decade. Our time to be carefree,
full in love, make mistakes and decide what we want from our life. But what can psychology really
teach us about this decade? I'm Gemma Spake, the host of the
psychology of your 20s. Each week we take a deep dive into a unique aspect of
our 20s, from career anxiety, mental health, heartbreak, money, friendships, and
much more to explore the science and the psychology behind our experiences,
incredible guests, fascinating topics, important science,
and a bit of my own personal experience.
Audrey, I honestly have no idea what's going on with my life.
Hahaha!
Join me as we explore what our 20s are really all about
from the good, the bad, and the ugly,
and listen along as we uncover how everything is psychology,
including our 20s.
The psychology of your 20s hosted by me, Gemis Begg, now streaming on the iHot Radio app, Apple
podcasts or whatever you get your podcasts.
Not too long ago, in the heart of the Amazon Rainforest, this explorer stumbled upon something that
would change his life. I saw it and I saw, oh wow, this is a very unusual situation.
It was cacao.
The tree that gives us chocolate.
But this cacao was unlike anything experts had seen.
Poor tasted.
I've never wanted us to have a gun fight.
I mean, you saw this tax of cash in our office.
Chocolate sort of forms this vortex.
It sucks you in.
It's like I can be the queen of wild chocolate.
We're all lost, it was madness.
It was a game changer.
People quit their jobs.
They left their lives behind,
so they could search for more of this stuff.
I wanted to tell their stories,
so I followed them deep into the jungle,
and it wasn't always pretty.
Basically, this like disgruntled guy and his family
surrounded the building arm with machetes.
And we've heard all sorts of things that, you know,
somebody got shot over this.
Sometimes I think all these for a damn bar of chocolate.
Listen to obsessions, wild chocolate,
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcast.
I had no idea about that, and I loved that brand.
Me and my wife love their sources and their dips
and their chips and like, they're incredible.
Yeah, they're really tasty and we love them too
when we don't wanna eat grains or exactly what you're saying.
Like paleo diets, like it's a great brand.
I had no idea that was their story
and I love how you've shared that point about the pivot
and the discovery of a product is not how you expect it.
One of my favorite chapter titles that you have in here, which in and of itself
answers the question, but I really want to dive deep into it.
It's chapter three and it's called, leave your safety zone, but do it safely.
I just thought that that was just told perfectly because whether it's in being in my own
journey or when I'm speaking to people and again, another one question is, well, when do I know
to quit my job? Like, should I quit my job and go all in? Is it because I'm not all in that it's
not working? Or when do you know that, you know, now it's time to bootstrap and get stuck in? And
when you wrote that chapter, leave your safety zone, but do it safely,
I wanted to understand how does someone practice that?
How does someone bring that into reality?
Because I think, I want for another, everyone gets to,
okay, I know what my problem I'm trying to solve is,
I've started the process, we've started to create something,
but now it needs momentum,
it needs money, it needs investment, whatever else it needs.
How do you leave your safety zone, but do it safely?
You know, there's a myth about entrepreneurs that they're all these kind of kamikazis that
they jump out of an airplane with no parachute.
And the reality is that's just not true. The vast majority
of entrepreneurs, as you know, Jay, mitigate their their risks. I mean, look at your own
story. You didn't just one day wake up and start making videos based on the teachings
and learnings that you had assimilated as a younger man. You didn't just go off and start
doing that. You were working for a bigger company and you were making content for the company and
through that experience that content was recognized by somebody else, then you got a job
at the Huffington Post, you built an audience and then you had the confidence to go out
on your own because you knew by that point you had amassed, this experience, and you had built a platform on which to stand.
Yes.
This idea of leaving your safety zone, but doing it safely comes from Jim Cook, who is
the founder of Boston Beer Company, the company that makes Samuel Adams Beer.
And Jim Cook was a, he had a very safe job.
He had a career at Boston Consulting Group,
but he wasn't happy.
He wanted to do something else with his life.
And he thought about creating a great American craft beer.
This was in the early 80s, when American beer,
I mean, Monty Python was making jokes
about American beer at the time, right?
It was a joke.
I mean, today it's crazy to think about because American
craft beer is the envy of the world and and and loved and loved in Europe, but at the time in the
early 80s, it wasn't. So he started to experiment and research this idea on the side, but he kept
his job and he kept his job for a long time. And he kept working on this side project for a long time
as well until he started to dip
First one toe and then two toes and then five toes and then the whole foot and then a leg and then
Eventually he became comfortable and confident enough and it saved some money from his job that he gave himself the permission to
To leap and to take the leap and to try it always knowing by the way
But he could go back to his old job if it didn't work. Now, that doesn't mean that, you know, it's an excuse not to try hard. It just means that
there are ways to take risks and to take the leap, but to do it in a way that if it all falls apart,
it's not going to be catastrophic. You know, we, there's a fetish around failure, especially in Silicon Valley.
There's a fetish, fetishization of failure.
People say fail big, fail fast, fail.
The reality is that when people talk about failure, especially at a place like Google or
Facebook, they can talk about it because those companies are already successful.
The people working inside them have already had some successes.
Failure is really important for all of us to experience, but failure can happen in small
ways and medium ways, and even in big ways, but it doesn't have to be catastrophic.
Failure should always be something that you can bounce back from, even if it's painful,
it's super important to experience failure, failure. But it's almost never a good idea to put absolutely all your chips on the table without some kind of
mitigation plan. Not to say it's not important to take risks. You have to take big risks,
but you also want to take those risks in a safe way.
Guy, tell us about some of the risks you took
in a safe way because you like you were sharing about me,
you're sort of, you've been a reporter, a journalist,
you've been an interviewer and so, you know,
today you're obviously known for being the incredible brand
and the incredible host and of how I built this
and the name of the book and just,
you have all these amazing relationships where people
open up to you and interviews and share
their stories very vulnerably. Tell us about some of the risks you took to get to that stage as well
because I think often it gets forgotten that you've had to live all of this in your journey too
even though you're telling the stories of others. Yeah, I mean, look, most of my career, I was,
I mean, look, most of my career, I worked for one or two organizations, NPR and CNN, and I was a reporter, and it was a wonderful life and a wonderful career. But through those experiences, I was able to gain
more and more experience. I was a foreign correspondent for seven years. I covered four wars. I was based
in three different countries. I reported from 50, 60 different countries.
I was able to go to places I could never have imagined and meet people who were in desperate
circumstances, but we're also so incredibly generous.
I know you've seen that in places like India.
You find that in the most deprived places in the world, people are actually most the most
generous. Those are the most generous places in the world, people are actually most the most generous.
Those are the most generous people and the kindest people.
And, you know, at a certain point in my career,
I had to decide whether I was gonna pursue
this life as a news person
and pursue the life of maybe becoming a news presenter.
And there's a lot of prestige that goes with that.
But about 10 years ago, it began to occur to me
that if I was going to do something
that was more meaningful to me, it had to be different.
It couldn't just be about reporting the news.
It had to be something that people connected
to on a visceral level.
And that was really the beginning of a journey that I started where I wanted to tell stories
about human experiences and not stories about things that happened just at the moment.
But stories that were evergreen, that were long lasting.
And it was very scary for me to leap outside of the safe comfortable job that I had
and to start production companies and and try this on my own, but by that point I
already had developed
the experience and a
Platform and I I did this later in life. I didn't do this when I was in my 20s
I did this in my you know my my't do this one. I was in my 20s. I did this in my,
you know, my late 30s, early 40s. And by the way, most first time entrepreneurs are like 42 years old.
There's another myth that it's all people in their 20s. It's not true. And there's a lot of
reasons why it can often make sense to gain some experience before you leap out on your own. But that was a scary thing to do,
not just to leave the news,
but to kind of go off on my own
and eventually to start programs
and then make a career to a kids company
that I now have with two amazing friends.
We run a kids media company, we make children's shows and we do live shows and we're making
all kinds of content and we've got books and so on.
And it's scary because you're on your own, you're sort of out there in the world without
the safety net.
But there comes a time and I can't quite articulate it in words, but I think it's like you know it,
you just kind of know it.
There comes a time in your life
and I know you had this experience
where you say to yourself,
I can do this, I got this.
And I am not a risk taker, I am not a kamikaze.
I am somebody who really needs that assurance.
I didn't grow up with a lot of, I didn't grow up with family money.
I financial safety was always important to me, having health insurance, those kinds of
things.
But there came a point in my life where I felt like I could do it.
And I can't explain why, but I think it's because I had spent so much time in the trenches
learning the craft and getting, trying to get better at it.
And I continued to get to try and get better at it every single day.
And so it was very intuitive.
It was like there's this little angel that landed on my shoulder and says, you got, now
it's a time. you can do this.
And I think that's, it's not a very scientific answer,
but it's something inside of us that just says,
gives ourselves permission to make the leap.
Yeah.
Well, I think you did answer, actually, really well.
And it's something I think a lot about.
And I think it's something that's not talked enough about.
And that's partly because of humility and modesty of some of the people we sit down with,
even yourself today.
I mean, you're, what you just said of like mastering the craft, I think that it's such an untold
story of repetition and actually building a skill.
Like you developed skills, you developed a craft. And when you do that, your self-worth and confidence is natural.
And it's effortless in one sense.
And it becomes something that you can share with others.
And it becomes contagious.
I find that one of the biggest things missing in the journey of entrepreneurship today,
at least in how it's being shared, is the point that at one point,
you have to actually have a skill.
You actually have to master whatever it is.
And your skill may be knowing how to iterate the best.
Your skill may be, the skill doesn't need to be you know coding inside out.
Like, that's not the point.
The skill could be you know how to bring together a coder and a creative to make magic. And I think that
that's just being so undervalued today. You were a phenomenal reporter with lots of experience
that therefore meant when you went out, you had confidence. And I think that's where
that intuitive feeling calling comes from.
I agree. I mean, by the way, I'm not a businessman, you know, that's not my core competency.
I, and, and you're exactly right.
Like your skill might be you are a great people person or you develop the ability to identify
really smart people who can make things happen or you get really good at getting people
to do things for you because they believe in you.
I recently interviewed Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple,
and his descriptions of Steve Jobs really brought that home
because Steve Jobs's talent was, of course,
he had an incredible eye and an incredible sensibility
of what would work, what was it beautiful
and he had a sense of beauty and also functionality you know he didn't invent the Apple too, he didn't invent the Mac, he didn't
invent the iPod or the iPad, but he they wouldn't have happened without him.
You know, Steve Wise in the act created the the Apple 2 computer and all the software,
but Steve Jobs looked at that thing and said, let's make a beautiful case for it.
Let's make this really easy to plug in.
Let's make this really simple to use.
And he couldn't code it,
but he understood what people wanted.
And he could direct people to make that happen.
And that was his genius.
He was not going in there with a soldering iron
or tapping the keys with his fingers. His genius was he was conducting an orchestra.
Yeah, exactly, exactly. And there's that, there's that beautiful part, I believe it's in Walter
Isaacson's book or maybe in one of the other stories of Steve Wozniak looking at Steve Jobs.
And he's saying, what do you even do? You're not a coder, you're not a marketer, you're not an engineer,
what do you even do? And Steve Jobs supposedly replied, musicians play their instruments,
I play the orchestra. And you know, that idea of he wasn't a musician, he didn't know how to play
the instrument, but he knew how to bring it together. Speaking of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, you have a whole chapter on here in the book called Finding Your Co-Founder.
And it's so interesting because that's actually a stage at which I'm at right now in something
I'm wanting to pursue. And I like you, as you said, I don't consider myself a business person.
That's not my core competency or skill set. It's not the part
I find interesting or fascinating. It's something I've had to learn, but it's people that I've
surrounded myself by to support me in that space. When you think about finding a co-founder,
tell me about some of the biggest mistakes people may have shared, and tell me about the solutions
to finding a good co-founder. Because I think we're also living at a time
where, and I'll be open, when I was launching my businesses, a lot of people said to me,
they said, Jay, why would you have a co-founder?
You could have 100% of 100% and you have a brand, so you should protect that.
And I was always like, hey, I'd much rather have more people involved and get excited
and have more energy and more enthusiasm and build more things because we have more people involved and get excited and have like, you know, more energy and more
enthusiasm and build more things because we have other people.
And so I've always had that mindset, but I think we live in a mindset today where it's
like, no, only 100% of 100% and don't trust anyone.
What are some of the mistakes we make and what are the solutions?
I mean, there's a famous investor in Paul Graham and his rule for investing in a startup.
I mean, this guy is the founder of Y Combinator.
He's an investor in Airbnb and, you know, all the companies that came out of Y
Combinator. His rule of thumb is he only invests when there are co-founders.
Now, not every business has more than one founder and some work just fine with one
founder. What I have found in interviewing hundreds of entrepreneurs
who have co-founders who started with who have businesses
that they created with another founder or more than one is,
it is going to be extremely hard.
Starting a business, it doesn't matter what business it is.
It will be very hard.
It doesn't matter who you are.
It doesn't matter if you're a celebrity.
You know, LeBron James,
by the way, has Madfracarter. They have a partnership and they created a business around LeBron James,
which is a billion dollar business. Having a business partner or partners is crucial for the one
simple reason, which is there will come a time on any journey where you will want to give up where you will run into a roadblock
and you will say, is this worth fighting for? Is this worth trying to get around?
And you will say to yourself, it's not. It's better for me to just move on, give up.
But the person who you co-founded the company with will say, we got this.
We can get through this.
And there will be other times where those roles are reversed, where you are the person with
the optimism.
I have experienced that hundreds of times with my children's media company, I have two
partners, Meredith Halpern, Ranzer and Mindy Thomas.
We make kids content and we make, we have live shows and we do all kinds
and we're about to enter into a phenomenal partnership.
There have been so many times on that journey over the last four years where one of us is
just feeling so dejected or low or we had a setback or we tried to raise money and
it didn't, we got a term sheet and then it was pulled.
It's all these things have happened.
And at every step of the way, there was one out of the three of us who was like, we got
this guys.
We've had really low points and really incredible high points.
That is absolutely crucial.
You need somebody in your life who can
reassure you because you will have moments where you want to give it all up.
How you find that person
is Part partly luck and but partly it's about finding of course somebody who has
complimentary skills somebody who can do things that you cannot do, who has competencies
that you don't have. But most importantly, you have to find somebody you like, you trust,
respect, and can get along with. Because ultimately, the thing that breaks partnerships up in
every case, professional partnerships is the same thing that breaks up romantic relationships up.
It's differences of outlook.
It's an inability to communicate.
It's an inability to work through tension.
There will always be tension with partners.
But when you have a partner with whom you have agreed that you will be transparent, open, and communicative with.
You will be able to work through that.
We did an episode about seventh generation, the non-toxic cleaning products company.
That was started by two partners, Alan Newman and Jeffrey Hollander, and within three years
they had a falling out, a very bitter falling out,
but they began as intense friends, fast friends,
but they didn't do the hard work
before they came to realize that they should be partners,
which was to really interrogate what each person was
wanted out of this and why.
And I think that was the mistake,
but on balance, I believe having a partner
gives you more, creates a higher probability that you will succeed.
Yeah. I love that you compared a business partnership to a romantic relationship or a marriage.
I think that's such a great way of looking at it because in the same way as we have a honeymoon
period in our relationship, so we get carried away with chemistry and not really forming a
real connection or compatibility, we do the same in business.
Like you said, when you become fast friends and you fall for each other and things seem
to be going perfectly and then all of a sudden, you're met with that moment where you realize
that you don't have the same values
and you haven't communicated effectively.
And I think what you said,
doing that mature work of setting your values
in the beginning, setting your systems and standards,
I think we all want to trust people more.
Like we all want to love and trust
and have this open relationship,
but actually doing
that hard work up front seems to be the long-term sustainable option.
And by the way, you know, it's really important to give yourself that time and to give yourself
the opportunity to decide that maybe the partnership isn't right.
I mean, I've been in the process of developing a partnership
with a friend, well, somebody who's now really a friend,
become a friend, but somebody I knew over the last year
and it's regular calls, it's weekly conversations
and also developing the idea.
And that has been absolutely crucial
because you will be tested.
There will be so many moments on that journey where you will be tested.
And you're going to need to know that the person with you is a person of integrity,
and a person who is in this with you, in the trenches with you.
And it's, as I say, there's an element of luck there too, but you can also control
that control for that by really taking the time to interrogate that relationship and
to understand that this is the right person.
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. This is so helpful, guy. I'm enjoying this conversation so
much, so far. We've got so many more questions I want to ask you, but I did want to take a quick pause because I,
I just want to let you know that your ability to share
these stories of people you've interviewed
with your ability to share your own experiences is just,
it's magical it, honestly is.
And I know that you've had a lot on this week
and last week with your summits and the live event.
And, but you're just so present right now
right here with these stories.
And I want to thank you for that.
And I applaud you for being able to share these stories in such a practical way that everyone
who's listening and watching right now.
I hope you're all taking notes, by the way, because I'm taking mental notes.
And I honestly believe that you've given us the pathway to building a business in a book,
which is actually really, really difficult to do.
So one of the things that I think you shed a lot of light on, and I'm sure a lot of your
guests have also spoken about, is that there seems to be a lot of mysticism around fundraising.
Right, there's a lot of mysticism about how much money you need to actually get started,
and then when you need a certain amount of money, I remember being one of those people
who would sit and dream with my friends in London
and would be like,
oh, you need like a million dollars to do that.
Or you need like five million dollars to do that.
And then you always postpone it in your head.
And it's always like, everyone's always like,
when you see a app idea launch,
you look, oh, I had that idea like seven years ago.
Like, oh, they're just, you know,
there's a big difference between the idea of a company,
actually fundraising, how much you need.
Can you, what are some of the myths around fundraising
that you think we have in society today?
And what did you actually learn
from speaking to the people that actually did it?
Effectively.
I mean, I think the biggest myth is that you need it, right?
And by the way, sometimes you do.
But I think there's an assumption that you have to go out and find money now because
that has been the path for several of these billion-dollar unicorns.
The reality is building a business is not about building a billion dollar unicorn. Building a business is about building something
that is sustainable and gives you fulfillment
and might actually provide employment for other people.
I mean, look at your own life.
You didn't have any money to make videos
but you had a friend who shot weddings
and he said, I'll help you out. And he happened to be really good.
And at two in the morning, four to five in the morning,
six in the morning, he went around London
and he got these great shots because nobody was out there
and he didn't get permits to do it
because he were just in and out quickly filming.
And you built that up slowly.
And then you got to a point with such a huge audience,
you have mass, such a huge audience, you'll mass such a huge audience,
that you could then muster the resources in the capital
to deploy for better, larger scale productions.
And so you built it up like a pyramid.
And that actually is a very simple way
of thinking about any business, right?
It starts here, and then you kind of progressively move up.
Now there are some businesses that are pretty much impossible to do that way.
I don't think you could build Tesla without going to investors.
But the reality is that Elon Musk, when he started out building x.com, which was his payment
company, he didn out building x.com, which was his payment company.
He didn't have funding.
He had to start on his own for several months, and then eventually had to find people who
were willing to give them a thousand bucks here, a thousand bucks there.
Now, here's a thing.
Most people don't have access to Sand Hill Road venture capitalists.
They can't just walk into Sequoia Capital and say,
hey, here's my idea and I want a million dollars.
The vast majority of people don't have those networks.
By the way, the vast majority of people
don't just have a rich uncle or a rich parent
who can write them a $10,000 check.
So the idea that capital is accessible to everyone
is just not true.
But I do believe that virtually all of us,
if we need to amass some capital,
do have access to some of it and ways to get it.
So one of the things I talk about in the book
is the concentric circles that we all inhabit.
We are at the center of our own circle, right?
We're sort of ego maniac maniacal, selfish creatures.
That's not really fair to say. But we all have our own, we're all living our own movie.
That's our consciousness. It's our own movie. And we're at the center of our own world.
But around us, there are these circles of close and loose ties. So imagine you want to start a business and you start to talk to your
friends and you start to tell them the idea. And one friend might say, you know, my boss actually
might be interested in hearing this. Or another friend says, somebody I go to, you know, I'm in a
bowling league with or whatever it might be. The way to kind of build those circles is by really testing your idea out on people,
talking with people, and trying to get feedback from people and asking people, do you know
anybody?
Is there anybody you think I should meet with?
One of the best ways that founders that I've interviewed have raised money is by going
to a meeting with somebody and not going with the intention of getting money from them,
even though, in many cases, they would love that outcome.
But saying to them, who should I talk to?
Who should I go see?
Can you give me three or four names?
And you very quickly build this network of people that you have a connection to and a tie to. And that is really how
many founders who don't have access to venture capital or big money is how they start to build
the funding to create their businesses. And so it's a very, it's very possible. It's just requires a commitment and work and time
and a willingness to put yourself out there.
I'm Eva Longoria.
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I love that question though because it puts yourself out there without having to put yourself
out there. So when you ask some of the question of saying, Hey, do you know anyone that I should
speak to about raising funds for this or introducing
for this kind of manufacturer or product designer?
You give that personally opportunity to say, oh, I want to be involved.
Let me know.
And if they don't, that's fine.
They introduce you to their friends or their network.
And so I feel like it's such a healthy way of being able to ask for help and put yourself
out there without actually feeling that kind of awkwardness or weakness or feeling
like you don't have it figured out.
You have a great knack of asking good questions.
You've developed the art of asking fantastic questions.
What has been your favorite question to ask people that has given you the answer that
was most fascinating?
The reason I asked this is a few years ago, I used to say to people, I was like,
if you see someone you admire,
go up to them and don't ask them for a picture,
ask them for a question, ask them a question.
Because that picture will last a moment,
but the question will give you a story to tell, forever.
And what question do you think people should ask people
that they admire and people that they admire
and people that they respect? I think it's more about a tone rather than a question. I'll
give you two answers to this because I will give you a question. I love it. I think it's
more about listening to somebody. I actually get much more information by just being an active listener to what somebody is saying.
And there's a wonderful book actually.
It came out about 30 years ago.
It's called, how to talk to your kids so they'll listen to you, something like that.
I can't remember the name of the book.
And it's basically designed, it's a parenting guide.
And it basically says, when your kid comes to you and says, I'm so mad, you know, at school today, Johnny was so mean to me, you shouldn't say, well, you know, don't worry about Johnny. Go find another friend.
Like that's the instinct that a parent has. This book said, no, he parents, you got it all wrong. When your kid comes to you and says, Johnny made me so mad today, I'm so angry. Just listen and say, oh, I'm sorry to hear that.
Don't give advice, just listen. And what you find is that your kid will give you more and more information.
That principle applies to adults too.
If you are talking to me and you are telling me your story, Jay,
and I'm with you on that journey.
And I am not just with you, but I'm expressing empathy.
I'm like, I feel you.
I'm really like, God, that must have been so hard.
That's sometimes my response to somebody.
I don't say, and then what happened?
I'll say, and it's not a strategic thing.
I'm not doing this in a calculated way.
It's just, I'm just saying, that must have been so hard.
I can't imagine how hard that was.
And the person says, and then they go on
and I continue to tell you their story.
So a big part of it is active listening,
but if you have one shot, you find somebody you admire
and you just, you've
got one question for them. I think you can always ask a person, what is something if you could
go back in time to the younger version of you? What would you tell yourself now? What would you
say? You will almost always get an interesting answer from somebody. Yeah, that's beautiful. I love that.
And I'm so glad you raised the point about tone and listening because it's,
it's so refreshing to hear that as well, because you also get a different,
you can ask the same question with a different tone and get a completely different answer. And you can almost feel it when it's a technique versus when it's a true seeking of individuals
like heart and mind and like, you can tell when they're obsessed with that question versus
when they think it's a good question to ask.
And I think that applies to the listener, the receiver who's going to answer the question
as well.
Tell me about when you are putting this book together and you're obviously trying to compile,
I mean, I didn't know how many interviews you've done.
How many is it? Do you have a number? Do you know?
We've done for how I built this total about 400 in-depth interviews with founders.
Incrombinors. Incredible. Okay, so 400 interviews, you're trying to compile it. total about 400 in-depth interviews with founders. And entrepreneurs.
Incredible.
Okay, so 400 interviews, you're trying to compile it.
What do you think has been the craziest, most outlandish story or pain that you came across
in these 400 interviews that has stayed with you so strongly that you just think, this is almost like a movie.
Like, I can't believe this was someone's actual life.
I try and think of every episode in a cinematic way.
I really do, because I'm trying to unfold that story
and create a visual experience for people.
I want people to go to just completely get lost in the story.
I think of what I do is,
and by the way, you're right.
I mean, tone and listening is such an important part of it
because how you talk to somebody,
how you ask questions.
It's not what you ask.
It's how you ask it, right? That's not how you elicit information. It's not the actual words, it's how you ask it, right?
That's not how you elicit information.
It's not the actual words you used to ask a question
because if it was so simple,
you could just give people a list of questions.
Sometimes questions are very effective,
but it's how you ask them.
I think that for me, I'm always looking to help somebody
tell their story in a way that you could imagine as a movie.
You could imagine in a, because our human stories
are movies.
We, every single one of us as a movie.
Many people think, I'm not that interesting,
or my life isn't that dramatic.
And what they don't realize is that it is.
My job is to show you that, is to know so much about you ahead of time that I can pull
that out of you, because I know that.
I can see that.
That's the advantage we have as outsiders.
We can see other people in ways they can't see themselves.
And it gives all of us a superpower.
I think, you know, a story that sticks into my mind is a recent one we did about a company
called the McBride Sisters Collection. It's the largest black owned wine business in the United
States and one of the largest in the world. And it was started by two sisters, Robin and Andre
McBride. They both share the same father. He was African-American and they both had different mothers.
They both share the same father. He was African-American and they both had different mothers.
Neither of these women knew the other existed until they were in their 20s.
Their father died and they were informed by relatives that the other one, each sister
was informed that they had a sister.
Andrea was raised in New Zealand.
Her mother was Kiwi. She had met Andre's father in Los Angeles
and then emigrated to New Zealand.
Robyn's mother was from Monterey, California
and raised also a white woman
raised her daughter in Monterey, California.
And these two women did not know the existence
of the other until they were in their 20s.
And the story of the reunion is so emotional, it's so powerful.
We were all crying when we were recording the interview because it's almost impossible
to believe that it's true that it happened, that they threw just a random miracle.
Not only did they come together, not only did they love each other
from the moment they saw each other, but they both grew up in wine-growing parts of the
world, Monterey, California, and New Zealand. And they both had this incredible passion
for wine. And they both decided that they were never going to be a part again. And Andrea
moved to the United States to be with her sister.
And they went on to create this business.
They started it 15, 16 years ago.
Very small, with no money, with no connections.
In a world dominated by mainly by white men,
and they created this incredible business.
You can find McBride sister's wine
in virtually every grocery store, every
Walmart, you know, around the United States today. And how they got there is, it's an epic. It's a
hero's journey. It's as good as any movie you've ever seen. And it's all true.
That's incredible. I need to go back and listen to that. I've not, I've not, not heard that one. So definitely excited to dive back into it.
And I hope everyone who's listening will go off
and listen to that episode as well.
It sounds absolutely phenomenal on how I built this.
Guy, I want to, coming towards the end of our conversation
here, I want to talk a bit about how this book and your work
massively helps people who don't want to be entrepreneurs.
Because I think that all the lessons you've shared today, all the lessons in the book,
are applicable to each and every person, whether they're an entrepreneur inside their organization
or whether they work at their parents' business or whether they are just working a regular
job and going out there and doing it.
I think what you're sharing and the things that me and you
care about are things that are applicable and useful to
anyone and everyone in a skill set.
And often the entrepreneurship journey has today been made
very sexy and like attractive and it's almost like everyone
feels the pressure that they have to be an entrepreneur.
I remember with one of my mentors who I absolutely love,
and he was a mentor for me when I was at Accenture,
and he would always tell me,
he'd be like, Jay, you're an entrepreneur.
And I'd be like, no, I'm not.
I was like, I'm not an entrepreneur.
I'm like, you're like working for people.
I just want to make videos.
I just want to make content.
Like, I'm more of a reporter journalist, kind of person.
I don't want to, and he's like, no, no, no, you're an entrepreneur.
And he keeps saying it, and I go home and be like,
this guy just doesn't understand me.
And now I'm like, oh, you were right, you were right.
But if someone's sitting here listening
and they're like, oh, Guy and Jay,
I don't really wanna be an entrepreneur.
I don't think I have it in me.
It sounds too scary.
Yeah.
What can they take away from these conversations
you're podcasting this book?
Because I think there's so much for them to take away.
And I don't want people to miss out just because they don't want to be an entrepreneur.
Yeah.
So probably only about 15 or 20% of our audience are actually traditional entrepreneurs.
People of a brick and mortar store or an online store who have a hungish, single outside
and are running a business.
The vast majority of people who listen to how I built this may not think of
themselves as traditional entrepreneurs, but they are. The reality is that entrepreneurial
thinking happens all of the time. It happens every single day of our lives. If you are
a parent with kids trying to think of creative ways to manage your household. If you are a parent with kids trying to think of creative ways to manage your household,
if you are a single person thinking entrepreneurially about how to fill your time, one of the
most innovative products in modern human history is the iPhone that was invented by Johnny
Ive inside of Apple.
Would you not say that was entrepreneurial? That whole product was
developed by people within Apple who wanted to connect people through a handheld device.
There was no dictator mandate from above that said, let's do this now. It was part of
a process that developed and created these amazing products.
Entrepreneurial is a mindset.
It's not about hanging a shingle outside of your door.
It's about thinking creatively.
It's about thinking collaboratively.
It's about trying to do different and new things and improve ways of working within your
own team. It might be coming up with a whole new system for how you hold each other accountable.
It might be a small nudge or twist or change in how you approach your own role or how
your team is organized. It's the same thing as leadership. Leadership can be
a title, but having a title alone doesn't make you a leader. What makes you a leader is
when you share your experience with others. We do this on our teams, especially on how
I built this. It's a small team of producers, but from the very beginning,
and we really work to promote people from within,
from our interns eventually become producers.
And we have a system where we encourage
the sort of the lowest level person
from a title perspective,
we encourage that person to take a leadership role.
So we have an intern. The intern gets guidance from the previous intern who's now a producer and other producers
who may have been interns two or three years earlier, but who are now leaders. We now have a
former intern who is mentoring a current intern. That's a leadership position. That is a leader.
Once you start to behave as a mentor to other people and you don't have to be much older than them, you might be a year or two ahead of them. You are
a leader, you are an innovator and you are an entrepreneur. That is what it's about. It's
a way of thinking and operating. It's not about selling a product and venting a product
and hanging a shingle. It's a mindset And everybody has the potential to adopt that mindset.
I love that guy.
Thank you so much for sharing that.
So clearly, both through this interview and in the book and in all of your podcast episodes,
we end every episode of on purpose with a final five, a fast five.
So these answers have to be in one word or one sentence maximum. I break my own rules all
the time, so be ready for me deviating, but guy, if you're ready, we'll get going. Okay. All right,
so question one is, what is the best piece of advice you've ever received? It's hard to give one
answer, but it's a variation of dance like no one's watching,
which means be open to all kinds of experiences. Don't limit yourself.
I love that great piece of advice. What's the worst piece of advice you've ever heard?
Stay in your lane. Interesting. Interesting. Okay. Question number three,
Interesting. Interesting.
Okay.
Question number three, what is your metric for success, your personal metric?
It's very simple to create kind, responsible, warm, and loving humans.
I'm a parent.
I have one job to do.
It's to pass on my values as best I can to my children and hope that they become
good, kind, loving people who contribute to the world. It's that simple for me. I really,
it really is. It's that's it. I love that. That's my purpose.
Yeah, it's beautiful. Question number four, if you could have invested in a company or person
Aligned with your values at the beginning that you've now got to know or that you've interviewed now who would it been?
It would have been
Sal Khan even though he runs a nonprofit. I just he's he inspires me in
runs a nonprofit. I just, he inspires me in infinite ways. I mean, what he has created with Khan Academy is life changing. It educates 30 million people a month for free. And I,
and anybody listening or watching, if you do use it, please contribute to Khan Academy
because it is a gift to the world. That's beautiful. And the fifth and final question guy is,
if you could create one law that everyone in the world
had to follow, what would it be?
You must visit another country.
I love that.
It's a great answer.
And we've never had it before.
So it's also unique in a return answer.
I love it.
Everyone, Guy Rars, the author of How I Built This,
the unexpected paths to success
from the world's most inspiring entrepreneurs.
Go and grab your copy, we've put the link
in the description below as well.
I hope that all of you read this, use it.
Don't just read it, use this book.
Use it if you're someone who's stuck,
if you're trying to find a pivot,
if you're struggling to figure out which is the right idea,
if you're trying to find a pivot, if you're struggling to figure out which is the right idea, if you're trying to find your co-founder,
having issues with your co-founder,
literally this book covers the whole gamut
of the journey of an entrepreneur or an entrepreneur.
And I couldn't recommend it more.
Guy, it's been so much fun spending so much time
with you over the last couple of weeks.
I honestly want us to turn this into a real friendship.
I can't wait to hang out and spend time together
and get to know each other's families as well.
Is there anything that I haven't asked you to share
that you'd love to share right now?
I would love to hear it from you.
No, but I just, I can't even begin to thank you
for your generosity.
And also, I'm a little bit uncomfortable
with how kind you, in generous you've been about
what I do and the show.
I really, I have one really simple rule,
which is I never wanna do anything.
I never wanna appear anywhere.
I never wanna make content or a show
if I feel like it weighs someone's time.
I always want, if somebody is giving me their time,
if someone's listening to this somebody is giving me their time, if someone's listening
to this interview right now on your show, and they're giving me something extremely valuable
which is their time, and I never want to waste that time. I always want to be able to
give somebody something that is valuable or useful. And so that's why I do what I do. That's what I aim to do. And you know, you're just so generous and and and the things that you said about the show and what I do.
It means a lot. I mean, that's, that's why I do it.
Absolutely, Guy. Thank you so much for coming on on purpose and I meant everywhere I said.
Thank you so much for coming on on purpose and I meant everywhere I said. Everyone go and follow Guy on Instagram as well.
If you don't already to find out more about how I built this and all the incredible work
he's doing, he's also giving away thousands of dollars to help people start their businesses
and companies too.
So please, please, please go and check out for more details.
Guy, thank you again for doing this.
I'm so grateful for your time and And I hope we can connect soon.
Me too, thank you.
Thank you, man.
Thanks, Guy.
[♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪
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