How I Built This with Guy Raz - AOL: Steve Case

Episode Date: April 3, 2017

When Steve Case started out in the tech business in the mid-80s, the idea of the internet — as we think of it today — didn't exist. But with AOL, Case saw an opportunity to connect millions of people, through chat rooms, news updates, and the iconic greeting, "You've Got Mail." See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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That was a scary time. Did you think the company was going to collapse? It was certainly a possibility of that. From NPR, it's how I built this, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built. I'm Guy Raz, and on today's show, how Steve Case made email and the Internet

a normal part of American life and went on to forge the biggest corporate merger in U.S. history. If you happen to be over the age of, say, 35, there is a good chance the first time you ever used email was on a computer with an AOL account. Because in the 1990s, AOL made sure of that by mailing free CD-ROMs to almost every household in the U.S. You'd pop it into your computer and within minutes you could magically type a message to someone else who had something called an email account. And I promise you, if you do not know what I'm talking about, it was magical. It was a miracle. And this revolution in human communication was pushed by companies that are mostly forgotten now.

CompuServe, Prodigy, Earthlink, Delphi, and of course, AOL. And out of all of them, AOL prevailed, in part because the company was smart. And in part, as you will hear, it was lucky. Steve Case was as relentless as he was. ambitious. And the way he did it, well, like many entrepreneurs, Steve went the corporate route out of college. And in the early 1980s, he landed a job doing product development for Pizza Hut, but at night, he would tinker with his computer. You know, went through the process of trying to plug it into a modem. And, you know, back then, it seems silly now, but not many people had PCs

and the vast majority of people had PCs didn't have the ability to connect their PCs. So you'd have to go to the peripheral section of the computer store to buy something called the modem, and then figure out to plug that in. You put the phone receiver on it, right? Initially, phone receiver, and then you could plug the line in, but it was viewed as sort of a peripheral, non-essential part of computing. And that was most interesting to me. So when I did buy a computer, I immediately wanted to get it connected, found that very

frustrating process. It was kind of expensive to get online, about $10 an hour. There wasn't much to, you know, do. There still wasn't much content online. There obviously weren't many people online. And it was really early days, but still there's something about that that I found magical. What was it? It was the fact that you could be anywhere.

I happened to be at the time in Wichita, Kansas, and connect to people and ideas all over the world. And that if you could just take the leap of faith that someday everybody would be connected and would just be part of everyday life, then I really believe that would be transformative. indeed have the potential to be as transformative as things like the, you know, the telephone or television. I mean, you thought that when you were connecting on this rudimentary modem, you thought this is going to be transformative? I'd totally did. I just knew it. I didn't know whether I'd be part of it. I didn't know how to get into it. But I always knew the idea of the Internet was going to change the world. So at what point, are you able to leave Pizza Hut and then, like, go in a completely different career path?

Well, when I was at P&G and then at pizza, I was still paying a lot of attention to what was happening, try to learn more about what's happening, started a consulting business on the side, consulting with technology companies trying to learn from it. And my brother was an investment banker in San Francisco. And one day he sent me a business plan of a company that they were thinking of investing in their venture capital. He was just like, what do you think kind of thing? Yeah, what do you think? And he knew I was interested in this space. And so they did decide to invest. I ended up starting to consult with that company.

and then moved to D.C. to join them the summer of 1983. What was that company called? The company is called Control Video Corporation. They had a product called GameLine, which at the time was almost like Netflix for video games. Back then, most people didn't have PCs, but a lot of people had Atari game machines. Right.

And so GameLine allowed you to turn your game machine into an interactive terminal to download games. And over time, I thought, to do email and other things through that terminal. I mean, it must have been a tiny, tiny market. It was a tiny market, and it actually turned out to be an idea that, well, I thought made tremendous sense. The market didn't agree with. And when they launched the product in the fall of 1983, basically failed. And so suddenly this company was in free fall.

So this was my first experience. A few months after I was there, it was kind of teetering on bankruptcy. He had to lay off 70, 80 percent of the employees. And so it suddenly became a struggle. So what happened to your job? Well, they kept me in part because I think there was seven or eight people in the marketing department. and I think I was the only one who survived, and part of it was because I was paid the least, I think. And so I worked with them in trying to figure out some way to reposition it, did some partnerships.

But eventually we decided to start over again. And two of the people that were there at the time, Jim Kempsey and Mark Serraith and I ended up in 1985, starting essentially what became America online. At the time in the mid-80s, if you wanted to get online, what were your options? Basically, you had to buy a PC. You had to then figure out a way to buy and integrate this thing called the modem. You then had to subscribe to one of the national online services. And who were the big players at the time?

Big players. We started were CompuServe and the source, but they neither were particularly big at the time. There were some other ventures that were coming into fruition. There was one in particular called Prodigy that IBM and Sears and for a while, CBS, committed about a billion dollars to launch Prodigy. So people were piloting things, trying things, but about 3% of America was online. an average of one hour a week. Wow. The market still was pretty small.

So how did you even get the money for this new venture? Because, I mean, here you are, right? You and your partners failed, basically. Your last business failed. So how did you even find new investors? Well, it was a struggle. And some of the investors from the previous company were willing to invest in the new company, and some weren't.

And we also were able to track some new investors. But I think we raised $1 million in that first round. And did you get a decent share? that? No, it was kind of unusual because it was this restart and some of the investors had lost their money on the previous company. Essentially, management started with zero of the company and the investors were 100%. But you had no choice. No choice. We wanted to continue going. We had this idea we wanted to pursue. Back then in 1985, it was hard to raise venture capital. So at the time, the only path to essentially have a new start, a fresh start, was to agree to a deal where the investors own the

company and the entrepreneur team over time kind of earn their way into part of the company. So, I mean, at that time in 1985, did you just think to yourself, well, you know, this internet thing is going to be so huge, we're going to all make money off of it, doesn't really matter how we structure this deal? It's a mix. I actually did believe that, obviously, and the idea of the internet did believe that, you know, huge companies were going to be built on the back of the internet. But I was driven as I think a lot of entrepreneurs are, not just by the economic

reward side of it, but really the idea that you could change the world. And so I wanted to figure out some way to take this idea that I was so fascinated with it and make it more mainstream. So it frankly matter less, you know, what I was pay, which wasn't much or how much stock I got, which was not that much in the grand scheme of things. I wanted to pursue this idea, this, this passion, this dream. And what were you going to do? What was your product? What were you selling? Well, we realized then, this was still the early days of personal computers, but there were different manufacturers offering different kinds of computers. And we said, well, instead of trying to do it on our own, why don't we create essentially custom private label online services with each

of those companies? So our deals with all these companies would be Commodore or Apple or IBM was we'll create the service and you market it. You'll bundle our software with your modems or with your computers or whatever you choose to do. And then we'll essentially share the revenue. And so we created something called QLink for Commodore. We created something called PCLink for Radio Shack. We created something called Promenade for IBM. We'd create something called Apple Link for Apple. So if I bought like a RadioShack computer in 1984, it would come with its own RadioShack online service, but your company was the one that was designing that service? Correct.

So, I mean, what could you do with it? Do a lot of things. I mean, we basically, the core was allow you to download software because of the time that was interesting. But he also could do things like email and participate in message boards. And, you know, we created chat. We always believed that the killer app of the internet was people. Some thought it would be content, particularly the media companies. Some thought it would be commerce, particularly the retail companies. We thought content and commerce would be important, but that community was really going to be the most important.

So we always focused on people interacting with each other, even to this day with social media, Facebook and Twitter and Snapchat. Essentially, that idea of community continues to carry forward. So you mentioned that one of your customers, was Apple, which by that point was already a big company. It was well established. So, I mean, how did you even get them to partner with you? Was it, was that easy? No, it was hard.

It was, they were skeptical, and then they weren't quite sure what part of the company even should deal with us. I ended up moving to the San Francisco area. You left D.C. and moved to the apartment. Just for the Apple. Just for the Apple deal. You wanted that deal. You moved to San Francisco. Yep.

And every day for six months showed up at their office. We just knocked on the door every day. Whatever would talk to me, I was talking to the marketing people, I talked to the software people, I talked to the customer service people. Were there days where they said, can you please, like, stop bugging us? Yeah, you have to keep going. I wanted to get that deal. I figured somebody, somewhere in Apple was going to say yes. I just needed to find him.

Steve Jobs was not there at the time, right? Steve Jobs was not. He'd been kicked out just before that. And so we worked with a variety of different people within the company, but he was not there doing that period. Because if he was there, I can't imagine he would have done a deal with you. you're probably right because he was so careful about controlling his brand. I'm not sure. It was, I think, the first time Apple licensed their brand to another company. And indeed, not long after, within the first year of launching the Apple-Ling service, Apple basically decided

they didn't like the idea of, you know, they wished they hadn't licensed the brand. And so we had a little bit of a standoff. And so we eventually had to rename the service. They paid us a few million dollars to kind of go away quietly. And that's when we, you know, to rename it, so we called America Online. So when that deal unraveled, I'm assuming that was the biggest contract that the company had. Yeah, we were banking on that. We just raised a bunch of money, about $5 million, which for us was a lot of money on the idea of expanding this Apple deal. So when Apple basically said they wanted to pull the plug, pull the rug out from under us, that was a scary time. Did you think the company was going to collapse? It was certainly a possibility of that. I think

There were a lot of our investors who believed that it was going to be hard to recover from this loss and the idea of essentially moving away from partnering to instead launch our own brand, America Online, with our own marketing. It was scary. Yeah. I mean, it sounds like it was probably also a pretty lonely time, right? Because you were just like really waiting for this thing to take off. Yeah, it was lonely. And they'd even go to industry conference. I remember one in the late 80s called PC Forum.

There'd be three or four hundred people there. under v one or two, you know, that we're focused on the internet. Most were focused on semiconductors or software or something else. And so we were viewed as sort of this fringy little hobbyist thing that, you know, most people didn't ever believe would amount too much. But I still believe. I kept at it. Steve Case, in just a minute, how Steve and America Online created one of the most iconic sounds of the 1990s.

You've got mail. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This? from NPR. It's How I Built This from NPR. I'm Guy Raz. So when Steve Case launched America Online in the mid-1980s, the internet, as we know it, did not yet exist. AOL was basically a service that let subscribers log on, use chat rooms, and email,

but you couldn't visit websites that were outside of the AOL service. Actually, until 1991, it was illegal for most people to connect to the internet. At the time, it was a note. of computers used by research universities and the Department of Defense. So explain how AOL then really started to take off. It becomes AOL. You say Congress passes legislation that allowed the Internet to become commercialized, which obviously was a huge turning point for you guys.

And was that it? That was it as well as by then we had convinced PC manufacturers to build modems in. So suddenly it was a standard part of a computer and not a peripheral. World Wide Web was also created in that 93-ish time frame. And so all these things really kind of came together. But when we went public, took AWOL public in 1992 as the first Internet company to go public. And we had less than 200,000 customers. Been out of for seven years.

The first decade was slow and hard and two steps four or one step back. It's the second decade that things really kicked in. And thankfully, we did stick with it. But in those early days, when you were still a pretty young guy, were you running the company? Over time, when we started, I was, I think, 25, 26, something like that. I was kind of a young kid with sort of the crazy marketing partnership ideas. But over time, I got more responsibility, took on more roles.

And I think it was in 1991. I was named CEO of the company. Sadly, at least for me, when we decided 1922 to go public, the board decided I was too young to be They didn't want you to be the face of the company. Well, they just, again, lots changed in the past three decades. But back then, the idea of the Internet was sort of foreign, and there were not 30-ish-year-old CEOs, you know, taking companies public. How did you feel about being demoted?

I was quite upset. I didn't think it was fair. But at the same time, I cared about the company and decided to weather that storm. And I did understand at one level. I didn't fully agree with it, but did understand this logic that institutional investors who didn't understand what they did. the internet was and didn't understand why whatever amount to much, you know, it was even harder if it was some, you know, kid who was untested and didn't have significant business experience.

When you did eventually, you know, formally lead the company, what, like, what kind of leader were you? What did you think, you know, your role was? I think it evolved, certainly as the Internet became much more of a force in the mid to late 90s. I became not just the spokesman for AOL, but also for the Internet. So even when I was CEO, people used to joke. I wasn't just the CEO of the company. I was also sort of the mayor of the community. Yeah.

I write monthly letters to our members talking about what's happening and what our strategy is. I wanted them all to feel like they were part of this effort. So it really was sort of a cheerleader kind of, you know, rallyer role even 20 years ago. Give us a sense of what kind of environment you were operating in because this is like the early 90s. How do you sell this idea to customers? How do you even describe what the Internet is at that time? Well, it was challenging, but it went back to trying to figure out ways to partner. So even it wasn't PC manufacturers, we partnered with New York Times and Time Magazine. To what to offer their publications.

Off their publication also essentially have the credibility of their names associated with what we were doing. So when you would go to AOL, you could get Times headlines and. You know, whether in encyclopedia, we partnered with lots of companies that provided some of the services, some of the content that would make it more interesting, but also made it more credible. I think anybody who's over the age of like 35 probably remembers having an AOL account, right? Like you would log on and you would hear, welcome, you've got mail. How did that come about? The voices? Well, we were in that early 90s.

We're trying to figure out a way to make the Internet more accessible, more something that people could relate to. So we're trying to humanize the Internet, put a friendly face on it. One way to make it seem more friendly, more human was to actually have a person welcoming you to the service. And so I was talking about that one day with our customer service department. A woman there basically said, well, my husband does voiceover kind of thing. So he'd be happy to tape some messages. And so I got my little pen down and a little post-it note and wrote a bunch of different things like you've got mail. And that guy, Edward Edwards, recorded him that night and brought it in the next day, a little cassette tape.

And they said, well, that sounds pretty good. Let's stick it on the software. And then became one of the most recognizable voices of that generation. Do you remember the moment when you realized that this was going to be a huge, like, consumer product, not just for 3% of Americans, but for most people, like when it was going to be huge? Well, to be honest, the moment I thought that was 1980 when I first started focusing on it. In my heart of hearts, believe, the day where it became clear that that was actually happening, it wasn't just sort of a crazy pipe dream. I think the year was 1996, and we had moved to unlimited pricing, and we had some of it. system problem or a system X was down for 23 hours. Nobody could log in. And it was a national

news story. It led the network TV news, was the lead article in most newspapers, and suddenly the fact we were down for 23 hours was a national crisis. That's when I knew that this idea of the Internet had arrived. It was frustrating because obviously we were down and a lot of people had been counting on us and we let them down. But it also was just a sign that this really was becoming real and the idea the internet was becoming part of everyday life and had gone from something when we got started in 1995 that nobody knew about or cared about to suddenly something that people needed and couldn't live without. I guess once you really started to take off in the mid-90s, all of a sudden Microsoft says, we want to get into this business. We want to have our

own portal to the internet. Bill Gates summons you to Seattle to meet with him and what makes an offer to buy you guys out? They basically said they've decided this internet world, this online world, was now a strategic priority for them. They're going to take it very seriously. They're planning to create their own service. They're planning to bundle it with every copy of Windows, but they respected what we were doing. And if we had a willingness to sell our company to them, then instead of building their own thing, they would be happy to indeed prefer kind of going with us. And so it was a little scary because, you know, we knew the threat of Microsoft was pretty serious. And some of our investors, some of our board members did feel like we should quit while we're ahead. Maybe we can't

compete in this new era with Microsoft. So it came down to a close vote. But eventually, the board decided not to sell the Microsoft. Microsoft did, in fact, launch their own service. And were you worried that they were going to crush you? Oh, sure. You were quite worried they're going to crush us because they had, you know, a lot more money than particularly the power of distribution, the fact that essentially every computer shipped with their Windows software, and they were saying they're going to include in every copy of that access to their service or every computer when you first turn it on would automatically, you know, basically be going to Microsoft. So we're quite afraid. How did you combat that? How did you fight against that? What did you do? First of all, we tried to rally the team to really focus on what made us unique, what made us different.

And we actually, the fact that we knew Microsoft was coming ended up rally. the company and the partners of the company to be much more ambitious in terms of what we were trying to do. And we used to say that, you know, to do what we can today to build a larger audience, create more content. And so that actually ended up pushing us to do better than we likely would have done without the threat of Microsoft looming over us. I know that today your relationship is much different. But back then, did you think Bill Gates was just being super aggressive? I mean, did you? Oh, yeah, of course.

Yeah. Yeah, he was being super aggressive. Yeah. And was it personal for you? I'm not sure it was personal. I understood why they were doing what they're doing, and I think they understood why we were doing what we were doing. So it was something that we wanted to prevail. We wanted to, you know, win.

And I remember even one cover story of Fortune magazine in the mid to late 90s basically had Bill Gates signed the cover of the magazine saying who is going to win the battle for the Internet. Of course, the answer was none of the above. Towards the end of the 90s, a huge change for AOL when you basically buy Time Warner. Why did you want to do that? A mix of things. First of all, from a financial standpoint, we had a pretty good run. It was the best performing stock of the decade. I think that peak was $150 billion, so it really had been rocketing.

And what percentage of the, I recently like 30% of all internet traffic went through AOL? Oh, at the time was more like 50%. We were the leader of the pack, but we were the leader of the pack. what was called the narrow band world with dial-up modems. We didn't have a clear path to broadband, which was controlled by the cable companies. We tried to figure out ways to get into that, but it was looking like a struggle.

You were looking ahead and you knew you were going to run into problems if you did nothing. Correct. We knew it would be more difficult to maintain a lead in the broadband world, so we needed to figure out some way to do that. One of the things that was attractive to us about a merger with Time Warner in particular was they had the largest cable network. And so the fact that they had that broadband footprint was really a key driver for as well.

So it was partly financial. We went from our company when we did the merger, I think it was $5 billion of revenue, about $1 billion of profit. The combined company had $40 billion of revenue, $10 billion of profit. So from a financial diversification standpoint, it made sense as well. As you know, it's like a classic case study at business schools today, right, of a disastrous partnership. You were blamed for a lot of it. You know this. You've read all the articles from the time.

Did that get to you? Sure. Sure. I always believe, still believe. The idea of the merger made sense. I think it really was the execution, particularly around people and culture where things got rocky. And I was very frustrated that the company wasn't able to achieve the kind of vision that I certainly thought was possible.

Was it you couldn't convince people of what you wanted to do or that you just saw the world in different ways? It's a mix of things. Some of it was, you know, the market itself, right after we did the merger, the stock market generally went into decline. The internet sector went into kind of a free fall. So that was unhelpful timing. Also, as part of the merger to get the merger done, I stepped aside as CEO, so I didn't have direct control of any of the businesses, including AOL. I was just overseeing the board itself. Some of it was the fights within the company. Time Warner historically had been organized as a lot of independent companies. So part of the idea of the merger was to run it in a more integrated way. But that really was the never, never happened. So it was a mix of different factors. But at the end of day, it really was about execution. And, you know, one of the key lessons is that it really does come down to people. Yeah. How do you take these ideas and make them real? And it's about people and it's about teams. Were you just miserable doing that job? Did you just hate doing that job? Miserables may be a little strong. But yeah, I was frustrated. It was harder to, after basically a decade of being CEO and leading the charge and being on the field, it was hard to be kind of in

skybox, you know, we're not really having that day-to-day interaction. And obviously, you know, there's some strategic differences that I had with others on the team, others on the board, and that was frustrating as well. When you left Tim Warner AOL, what did you think, I mean, you were looking for something new to do? Did you know what you wanted to do? Not specifically, but I knew I wanted to do something that was more entrepreneurial. I loved the whole 20-year journey I had with AOL, but I realized that, you know, the first 10 years, even though it was harder and more frustrating and scarier and lonelier, that part of it I really enjoyed. And so that I wanted to go back to the garage and kind of roll with my sleeves and focus on new things. At the same

time, I decided, rather than start another company, I wanted to figure out a way to partner with and mentor and invest in entrepreneurs in a variety of different sectors. And that's really what I've been doing for the past, you know, 15 years or so. What do you think is the most important quality or characteristic that you've, that you either have or you've developed over time that's allowed you to be successful as an entrepreneur? I think it's a mix of skills. Some of it is, you know, goes back to the idea, the vision side of it, and being pretty good at seeing around corners, pretty good at pattern recognition, getting a sense of what

might be happening. I think perseverance, I think being willing to take a long-term view, as we discussed, the ABLE journey was a decade in the making overnight sensation. And so recognizing that revolutions sometimes happen in evolutionary ways, and you've got to have to take a long-term view and be steady there. And the other is a respect for the role of government and the role of policy that I have appreciation that I've developed over the years of that role, probably because the Internet wouldn't exist without the government.

You know, it was the government 50 years ago that funded DARPA that created the Internet. It was the government through the judicial system that broke up the phone company, you know, Ma Bell, which unleashed competition and lowered prices and telecommunications or the government that then commercialize the internet with the telecom. So I just understand the role of policy. I think when you are trying to figure out ways to innovate, these are going to be tough challenges to take on. You know, earlier, Steve, you talked about like being a cheerleader, right? Like, how important do you think it is for the CEO or the entrepreneur behind the company to be the head cheerleader? Do you think that's crucial or is it a little overrated?

No, I think it is crucial. You know, people have to believe in the mission. They have to believe it's sort of a battle worth fighting, a mountain worth climbing. You know, the most entrepreneurial journeys are circuitous and, you know, two steps forward, one step back and can be sometimes scary. And so just reminding people why this, you know, why it's important to not just focus on the vision, but also the execution and priorities and things like that. I think that is part of the journey if you're really trying to change the world. You're really trying to disrupt important aspects of our lives.

Steve Case, founder of America Online. In 2005, he moved on to found a venture capital company in Washington, D.C. It's called Revolution. By the way, during the Obama administration, Steve was a member of the president's council on jobs and competitiveness, and that wasn't the first time he'd met Barack Obama. In fact, Steve and President Obama actually went to the same high school together in Hawaii. He was there at the same time, but no, I was a senior when he was a freshman. I did joke that before he made his run for the presidency, I was, you know, the best known.

He overshadowed you a little bit. Totally overshadow, man. That one's a goner. He won that one for generations. And stick around. In just a moment, we're going to hear from you about what you're building. Hey, thanks for sticking around because it's time now for how you built that. We know from reading all your stories and emails that an idea for a business can come from just about anywhere.

And for Christina Kazakia, her idea was about as basic as it gets. Well, when I was walking around Providence, I just kept seeing sticks everywhere. Sticks, like, you know, the kind of you just see lying around in the grass. I was like, okay, sticks are on the floor, kids are playing with sticks. I loved building a fort as a kid, and all my other friends loved building forts, too. By the way, this was all going through Christina's mind about four years ago when she was at design school in Providence. And for her final project, she was thinking, maybe I'll make a new toy. And that's when I realized I need to find a way to get kids outside, today's kids, away from the screen.

away from battery toys to get outside and engage. Because, you know, what kid doesn't want to be pried away from her iPad or PlayStation to build a teepee made of sticks in the backyard? A challenge, admittedly, but Christina started tinkering with an idea to help kids connect sticks into shapes. You know, I started working with existing connectors and, like, rubber bands and zip ties to understand, okay, how do you tie a knot? How do you secure something? And eventually, she designed these stretchy connectors made of silicone. She called them sticklets. They're almost like cookie cutout shapes.

And they have two to four holes in the shapes. And all the holes are various sizes. And you can use them with little twigs that you find or huge branches that you find. And you might be thinking, why do I need silicone connectors to build a fort? I mean, I could just use rope to tie sticks together, right? But Christina says sticklets are a. a lot easier to use. Especially the younger kids.

They love that they're stretchy and so pliable. They'll bring people over and say, look what I built. Like, look, this is the raccoon's chimney and he's climbing up and he goes down. We've got to add a stick. Anyway, after Christina made a demo of her sticklets for that project at design school, people would ask her, where can I get them? So she started to sell them for real and eventually to sell them in toy stores and then online.

But some of her toughest customers were the parents. Occasionally parents will contact me and be like, well, wait, don't you have like step-by-step instructions? Like, how do we do this? I don't get it. Christina says the whole point of sticklets is that kids don't want instructions. They just want to figure out how to connect things on their own. But because parents are demanding it, she is now writing a manual on all of the stuff you can make with sticks. The challenge is, well, how do we show parents the violence? value of what they're paying for. How do we convince them that it's worth the money because it's a

higher quality, higher-end toy? A pack of six sticklets, by the way, goes for about $17. Silicon is expensive, but you can use them over and over and over again. To find out more about Christina Kazakia and her company sticklets, go to our Facebook page. And of course, if you have a story about something you are building, please tell us about it. Go to build.npr.org. And thanks so much for listening to the show this week. If you want to find out more about who was on it, go to how I Built This.NPR.org. You can also follow us on Twitter.

That's at How I Built This, and you can write to us at hibt at npr.org. Our show was produced this week by Casey Herman with music composed by Rumtin Arablui. Thanks also to Neva Grant, Sanaz Meshkampur, and Jeff Rogers. our intern is Claire Breen. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This from NPR. Hey, one more thing. There are tens of thousands of podcasts out there, and it's pretty hard to know what's good, but WAMU and NPR's The Big Listen has come to the rescue.

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