How to start, launch, and build a successful venture

Based on the highly acclaimed NPR podcast, How I Built This offers priceless insights and inspiration from the world’s top entrepreneurs.

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Great ideas often come from a simple spark: A soccer player on the New Zealand national team notices all the unused wool his country produces and figures out a way to turn them into shoes (Allbirds). A former Buddhist monk decides the very best way to spread his mindfulness teachings is by launching an app (Headspace). A sandwich cart vendor finds a way to reuse leftover pita bread and turns it into a multimillion-dollar business (Stacy’s Pita Chips).

Award-winning journalist and NPR host Guy Raz has interviewed more than 200 highly successful entrepreneurs to uncover amazing true stories like these. In How I Built This, he shares tips for every entrepreneur’s journey: from the early days of formulating your idea, to raising money and recruiting employees, to fending off competitors, to finally paying yourself a real salary. This is a must-read for anyone who has ever dreamed of starting their own business or wondered how trailblazing entrepreneurs made their own dreams a reality.

Hear What People Are Saying

This book is all about inspiration – told with blood, sweat, and tears. You’ll come away refreshed. And ready to hit the ground running.

- Mark Cuban, entrepreneur, 'shark' on Shark Tank, and proprietor of the Dallas Mavericks

Featuring his probing yet welcoming narrative voice, Raz presents stories that serve as solid lessons in entrepreneurship. While the syntheses of the lessons are useful, it is the learning curve—the story-by-story building of business acumen—that imparts the most wisdom...Years of business wisdom distilled into an entertaining and useful narrative.

- Kirkus Reviews

Drawing on interviews with successful businesspeople conducted for his podcast (from which this book gets its name), Raz distills lessons for aspiring founders, including tips on how to nurture an idea and win funding, and dispels some myths.

- Publishers Weekly

After spending countless hours inside the heads of the world’s best founders, [Guy's] written the mother of all entrepreneurship memoirs. It’s a must-read for anyone who wants to start a business, grow a business, or be inspired by those who do.

- Adam Grant, New York Times bestselling author  of Originals and Give and Take and host of the TED podcast WorkLife

If you have dreams and ambition, and worries and woes—and you wonder how to take all of that and build something great, this book is for you. Guy Raz is supremely himself in this guide for aspiring entrepreneurs: brilliantly perceptive, incessantly curious, infectiously energetic and above all, a master storyteller.

- Angela Duckworth, author of Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance and founder and CEO of Character Lab

Truly remarkable stories…about truly remarkable people. Imagine compiling thousands of hours of Guy's greatest hits from How I Built This into one how-to manual for starting a business. Well this is IT. Guy Raz captures their stories on the page to incredible effect.

- Jennifer Hyman, CEO and founder of Rent the Runway

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