How I Built This with Guy Raz - Dang Foods: Vincent and Andrew Kitirattragarn

Episode Date: January 24, 2022

Vincent Kitirattragarn grew up in a Thai-Chinese-American household, which meant eating congee and lemongrass chicken, while also ordering chicken McNuggets with his younger brothers. He dreamed of opening his own Thai restaurant, but an exhausting stint working at one convinced him that his entrepreneurial path would never be in the restaurant industry. Instead Vincent's Asian-inspired snack food brand, Dang Foods, was born in 2011 when a delicious home-cooking experiment led him to start importing coconut chips from Thailand. Vincent's brother Andrew joined a few years later to help grow the brand through a series of snack product successes—and some tasty but colossal flops. Today, the company sells their brightly-packaged coconut chips, rice crackers, and energy bars in over 10,000 stores across the country. 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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walking distance from so much of the city, made it feel less like a visit and more like we were actually living there. Plus, taking a trip is the perfect time to host your space on Airbnb. Your place with all of its personal touches and its amazing location could make someone else's vacation even better. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca.com slash host. We heard about this other trade show and got two feet of table space in a shared booth. So we stood in the aisles, just we made a wall. And it was me, my dad, my brother, and my girlfriend at the time now, my wife.

and nobody got through the wall without tasting some coconut chips. People would just toss them in their mouth and say... They say, dang. Dang, these are great. They say, dang, these are really good. 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 the show today, how Vincent Kittirajigar took a simple Thai ingredient, a toasted coconut chip, and joined up with his brother to build Dang Foods, an Asian-American snack brand now sold in thousands of stores across the country. I spend an inexcusable amount of time in grocery stores. I stroll up and down the aisles looking for interesting things to try. Last week, I bought a box of frozen plant-based chicken nuggets.

I don't even like plant-based chicken nuggets, but the brand leaped out at me. Covering nearly 80% of the box, giant rooster head being fed a plant-based chicken nugget. That alone made me want to buy it. I'm a sucker. What can I say? But really, what I do when I buy these products is show a kind of silent appreciation for their branding.

A really good design or logo that pops suggests that the people behind the product have thought very intentionally about what it is they want to convey to you, the person who passes by thousands of. of items at the grocery store. There are lots of choices, lots of plant-based nuggets, but one has a giant rooster being fed a nugget on the box. Anyway, today's story is, in some ways, about branding. Because even if you haven't heard of Dang, an Asian-inspired snack brand that makes coconut chips, rice chips, and energy bars, even if you haven't heard of it,

just keep it in mind next time you walk down the snack aisle at Whole Foods or Target, or Kroger, because you will see it. Dang, in bright greens and oranges and reds. Even the name, Dang, as in Dang, that's good, which happens to be their tagline, jumps out at you. The company was founded by two American brothers of Thai descent. They named it Dang after their mom. Dang is actually her nickname. Today, you can find their products in more than 10,000 retailers across the U.S.

And even though the type of snacks they sell are among the most popular in parts of Asia, getting Americans to pick toasted coconut chips and saracha rice chips over Fritos and Lays hasn't always been easy. Dang is still a relatively small brand compared to others we've had on the show, but the founders, Andrew and Vincent Kittiratrigan, managed to get it on the shelves at thousands of stores without any connections, money, or industry experience at the start. Deng was primarily older brother Vincent's project in the early years. His brother Andrew joined full-time in 2013, so you'll hear more from Vincent in the first part of this interview.

Andrew will pop in more towards the middle. Vincent and Andrew's parents both immigrated to the U.S. from Thailand in the late 1970s, so their dad, Vance, could attend graduate school. Once he finished his degree, the parents launched an import business in New York, selling products like wooden baskets and silk flowers made in Thailand. The brothers were born in New York and spent their summers visiting family back in Bangkok. But their parents' marriage ended when Vincent and Andrew were young, and their dad moved to New Jersey to start a new import business selling candles. Their mom eventually got into real estate. And for the brothers, having divorced entrepreneur parents meant that they were often home alone,

where they learned to rely on each other. I'd say we did everything together. We went, we played chess tournaments together. We played Little League together. We played baseball. You know, we would always, like, make it up games around the house. So I remember, you know, growing up an apartment building on the 23rd floor. Luckily, we've lived here at big park, so, you know, Andrew and I went out to the park to play a lot.

What's interesting is I think back on it, and all of the sports that I played, Vincent played before me. Like I, and it's funny. And chess too, like we both picked that up together. We happen to like a lot of the same things with sports and with that and even with academia. I was like, if I'd had a different brother, maybe I would have liked a completely different set of things. Did your parents have a difficult relationship when you were growing up? With each other, they had a very tenuous relationship. Like I, you know, I remember multiple times where they were in the same room and there were screaming matches.

And there was one time where I was helping my dad at a trade show at, you know, at his booth. And afterwards, we went to go get dinner. And we went to a Thai restaurant near the trade show. And my mom was there. And she was eating at the same restaurant. You know, there was a fight and there was a beer thrown on somebody. One of them threw a beer on the other. So when your parents split up,

You guys ended up living with your mom. Predominantly, yeah. I mean, we'd go visit our dad on weekends. Every other weekend, every Wednesday. And he was in New Jersey, and your mom was in New York City, right? Yeah. And, you know, she was a busy, single working mom. And we both had to kind of figure out how to feed ourselves sometimes because she was too busy to cook.

I remember, you know, we could either order McDonald's because they delivered at the time, or we could learn to cook. And so I think some of my early memories about cooking came for cooking for my brothers, cooking for Andrew, cooking for our other brother. It's funny that we ended up in the natural food industry because we were ordering McDonald's, like dominoes. Yeah. All this stuff when we were growing up and loved it.

I remember we had them on speed dial. Yeah. I loved McDonald's when I was a kid. I loved the Sweden. sour and barbecue sauce. I would dip my nugget, my McNugget in the sweet and sour and then the barbecue sauce. Just like took over the world for us. Sugar, fat, and protein. Tell me a little bit about sort of the culture at home. Your parents are from Thailand. They were born in Thailand, but their parents or grandparents actually came from China. So tell me what that meant at home.

Did you have Chinese traditions in addition to Thai traditions at home? Or was it primarily sort of Thai food and Thai cultural traditions that you remember? I want to say it was a blend, and each parent kind of treated it differently. So, you know, at our dad's house, on Lunar New Year or Chinese New Year, we would kind of get together and, you know, have a meal, and sometimes we're read and collect Angpao, which is these money and envelopes from relatives. house. And so I think he was keen on, you know, keeping some of those Chinese traditions alive.

And at the same time, you know, when we went to his house, we would eat kanji in the morning, you know, which is, there's a lot of Thai Chinese cuisine that we grew up eating. You know, I remember there was a fourth grade school project where we had to bring in a dish from your country, your family country of origin. And so I brought in, my mom helped me make chicken satay, which is like grilled chicken on sticks. With peanut sauce? With peanut sauce, yeah. Yeah. And I remember bringing it in for all the parents to come and eat and looking around

and seeing that my tray was the first one that was completely empty. And I had so much pride, I was like, oh, my God. Yeah. Everybody likes my chicken sette. And, you know, when you move to a new country, you lose a lot of stuff. So you might change your name and you might change the way you dress. And you might change the way you talk. because you have to learn a new language.

But I think food is that one thing that sticks with you the longest. And even though I didn't grow up in Thailand, I have so much affinity for Thai food because that's what I ate growing up. So Vincent, I want to fast forward just a bit because I know you went up to college and eventually finished a master's degree at Cornell in engineering and management. And around, I think, 2009, you were living in Washington, D.C. and working at, I guess, like a sustainability nonprofit. Tell me about it. It was a nonprofit, and they had a program that helped large institutions create and implement environmentally preferable purchasing programs. What does that mean?

So large institutions have to buy a lot of stuff, right? And they have policies on what they have to buy. So universities, cities, states, some of them have policies that say, okay, if you're going to buy a vehicle, you have to buy the most fuel efficient vehicle available. So what we would do with this nonprofit was create guides on how to create these policies. So I was the manager of this program. And why you were there, you also, I guess, started working at a Thai restaurant in D.C., right? Yeah, so I had an inkling that Thai food in the U.S. punched above its weight. There's so many Thai restaurants, but generally, too, they had the same dishes, which were Americanized Thai dishes like Pad Thai, right?

And there's nothing wrong with Pad Thai, but, you know, it's the way that it's served in America is typically sweeter than the way it served in Thailand. And, you know, Andrew and I traveled to Thailand. We have a lot of family there. And every time we went there, you know, we were like, hey, the food here is so different, you know. And so I was like, you know, there has to be something else you could do here in bringing all these dishes from from Thailand to the U.S. And I remember telling my friend, hey, I think there's some opportunity in Thai food. Maybe I'll start a restaurant. He was like, you should probably work in a restaurant before you start a restaurant.

You worked at a place called Thai Crossing, which is for people from the D.C. area, it's like one of the best known Thai restaurants in the city and very acclaimed Thai restaurant. But you weren't doing this for money, right? I mean, you had a full-time day job. I had a full-time job. We did ever do schedule, so I worked four days a week, and with my extra days, I went to help out at Tye Crossing. But you're right. I definitely didn't do it for the pay. And, yeah, I think after that experience, I was like, no way.

What was it about that experience that, I don't know, like, quashed that dream? I mean, the hours, the you're on your feet, you know, for, half of a day. At the end of the night, it didn't feel like I had accomplished something. It felt more like relief that I got through it. You know, I just didn't want that lifestyle. I knew that from the outset. All right. So you're living in the D.C. area doing a stand to a Thai restaurant. And then in 2010, you moved to California, to the Bay Area for a different job. This startup was called Good Guide. Yep. And let's go now. I want to go back to you, Andrew, because now the two of you are living in the same place, you went on to university. I think you went to UC Santa Barbara, and you ended up becoming an accountant, right?

Yes, I majored in business economics with an emphasis in accounting, but the short form of that is economics and accounting and joined a firm called KPMG right after school. Were you perfectly happy working as an accountant? I mean, was it, you know, you're probably getting paid pretty well. And imagine you were doing some travel. Was it pretty good? I think I saw an opening at Santa Barbara to go into accounting and then get into a big four accounting firm. Yeah. I think a lot about risk.

It provides a lot of downside protection. Like in the event of a recession or anything, I could always fall back on being an accountant. There's always a need for accountants. Always a need, yeah. Always a shortage. So, all right. So you are now both in San Francisco in the Bay Area. Yeah. And meantime, Vincent, did you, you had come from D.C. where you were working at a kitchen, clearly thinking about maybe doing something in food. Did you continue to think about that when you moved to the Bay Area or were you now full on in this startup thinking, yeah, maybe this is what I'm going to do?

I think for the first six months, I was very focused on the startup that I was in. I think after about six months, I started kind of keeping an eye open for what else. I could do. And Andrew and I lived in this seven-bedroom house in Chinatown in San Francisco with a bunch of roommates. And I remember we used to have like monthly dinners. So I'd cook these pretty big elaborate dinners for large amounts of people. I just love creating food for people. What kind of food were you making? Yeah. So from the Thai crossing experience, you know, working in a restaurant, I remember cooking dishes like red duck, red curry with duck. and I made that, you know, for my friends. By the way, Andrew, are you a good cook?

No. No, okay. It's funny, I actually am really good at like three dishes. And I only cook those three dishes. Meanwhile, Vincent, you are getting more and more into the food scene in the Bay Area. And I guess you started actually cooking. There was like a pop-up. like this is a big thing.

There were these underground farmers markets and like food markets that would happen in cities. I remember there was a bunch in L.A. and in New York and in the Bay Area, and there's one called the S.F. Underground Market. What was it? How did you even find out about it? Tell me the story. Yeah, I found out about it. I want to say grew a friend who knew that I liked to cook. And it was a group that got together at a night club and created a night market. and they got around your food safety regulations by having people sign a waiver at the front saying, if I get sick, it's not your fault. And what would happen?

There would be tables inside the nightclub of different foods. Exactly. Yeah. And they had an audition. So you had to bring a dish to an audition. And you leave the dish there and they judged it and they either told you, hey, you're in or you're not in. What did you bring? I made a chicken satire.

Burger. And before the event, the New York Times had written an article about this event. So I thought it was going to be way overpopulated. And they told me to make 150 servings. And I was like, no, you know what, I'll make 400 servings because I think it's just going to be nuts. Yeah. Like, way too crowded. So I bought organic chicken thighs at Costco, boneless. And pondesel, which is a Filipino bun. Marinated the chicken. So I have all these buckets and coolers just filled with chicken that's marinating in coconut milk and all these spices all over my house.

And I remember opening up shop and starting to serve people and then realizing, wow, there's not as many people here as I thought there would be. And as it turns out, there were a lot of people, but they couldn't get in. There was a line around the block, but the place only. held a certain amount of people and they couldn't allow in everybody. So after you successfully sold the Sete burgers at the San Francisco

underground market, did you say, all right, I want to come back next week? What did you do next? I think two months later, I was like, all right, let's give it another shot. And my mom gave me an index card with a recipe on it.

And it was for a Thai lettuce wrap called Mian Kum. And she said when she was in college, she would race out of her classes to this one vendor on the street because it's so good. And it's made of these six or seven ingredients. That's peanuts. It has young ginger.

And I was like, okay, I'll do my own spin on it. I'll do it with like brazed short ribs instead of dried shrimp like they do in Thailand. And that was the idea that the next time you wouldn't do satay burgers, but you would do these wraps. Yes. And she said one of the ingredients is toasted coconut. Now, you can't buy toasted coconut in the U.S., but what you can do is go buy shredded coconut and toast it yourself. Just unsweetened coconut. I couldn't find unsweetened, so I bought sweetened coconut.

And the traditional way to do it is you put it in a walk, turn on the heat, and you start stirring. And the moisture evaporates, and it turns golden brown. And what she didn't tell me was it creates this amazing smell. And because I was making 20 pounds of this stuff, had multiple burners going. the entire house smelled like toasted cocoa. And it's filling the house with like a sweet, nutty aroma. And we had multiple roommates, seven roommates, and they all came out of their rooms saying,

what are you cooking? This smells amazing. And they started just dipping their hands in the pan and eating it. And I was like, first off, get your hands out of this pot. This is, you know, this is gross. But secondly, this is really interesting. that, you know, all of these friends of ours love to eat. This toasted coconut straight out of the pan.

All right. So you're making this because you need it for the next iteration of the underground farmers market. But you're thinking, wait a minute, maybe there's something with these coconut chips, this shredded coconut. Yeah. So I was so captivated by everybody's reaction to just the toasted coconut that I was like, hey, maybe we could create a product that's just toasted coconut. So, all right, now, just to be clear, right?

Because when people think shredded coconut, I think, certainly in the United States, they think of, like, coconut and macaroons, right? Like shredded, sort of syrupy, kind of treakily sweet coconut product or like an almond joy, right? Like shredded coconut. You're talking about, like, shaved coconut, right? That's what you're working with. Yeah, long strips of shaved coconut toasted until crispy. It tasted and felt like a crunchy sweet chip.

And just from that experience, you start to think, this could be like a snack food. These coconut shavings could be something that people just munch on. Yeah, because people wanted to snack on it at my home kitchen, why wouldn't they want to snack on and buy it at a supermarket? And I remember I called Andrew, who was in Thailand at the time, and asked him, Hey, have you ever seen any toasted coconut snacks or chips? And he shipped me a box, and then we identified the sample that we liked and talked to the manufacturer. And it was already toasted.

You didn't have to do anything. Correct. But I kept some of that sample, the samples from the box. And I heard about this food show, a trade show called The Fancy Food Show, which was at D.C. that summer. And I was like, you know what? I'm going to bring some there. I don't know anything about this industry. I don't know anyone in this industry.

But if I can get people to taste it, maybe they'll tell me if it can be a product or not. Well, hang on for a sec. I'm just trying to, I'm just trying to understand this because I would not have had the foresight or the competence at that point in my life to think about something like a food show. Because you had no experience in the food world. I remember back to when I was a kid and my parents would take me to trade shows. They take me to gift shows. Oh, right. Okay.

And that's where the entire industry goes. in order to find new items and talk about them and get business, right? So I was like, all right, well, what's the big trade show in food? And decided to book a flight from San Francisco to D.C. And we took some of the samples from the box that I got sent. And I put coconut chips into these little plastic souffle cups and put a lid on it and put a sticker on it that said, dang. And we called it dang because my mom's name is dang. And when you eat it, it's dang good.

You're like, dang, this is good. Dang, these are delicious. And dang is such a, it's a, like, my kids use that word. It's like, I remember saying it when I was a kid. It's a euphemism. Right. It's a euphemism for Dan. Say dang.

It's like fudge. Say fudge. So, and dang is like such a great word. But your mom's name is dang. Yeah, so everyone in Thailand gets a nickname, right? Like a short nickname. And so hers is dang. So people always call her Piedang or New Dang.

And, yeah, it just, it came to me on a run. And I was like, all right, let's put that as our logo. So, all right. So you're going to, you've got the chips. You're going to go to this trade show and you've got the name. And so did you get a table, like a booth at this fancy food show? No. So we didn't want to spend more money by getting a booth.

And we didn't have a product. We had chips in these little cups. Right. But I did want to get feedback. on the product, which is the chips, like just the coconut chips. And so I filled these souffle cups, probably a couple hundred of them, with coconut chips, and then put a sticker on top with my contact info. Right.

And the dang logo. And just to be clear, when you went into the trade show, because you did not have a booth, you just brought a huge duffel bag with you? Like, you were just hauling this huge bag and nobody was like, they're okay with that? They're like, yeah, come on in. You can just bring me. I don't think that they allow that, but nobody stopped us. Nobody, okay.

You're hauling a giant duffel bag full of samples, and you're just walking in, and that was it. Yeah, so I walked in with a messenger bag with samples, and the first person I saw getting out of the escalator had a Whole Foods badge, and I was like, great. And I stopped him. I was like, hey, can you try these coconut chips and let me know what you think? and he was nice enough to stop and try the product,

which I learned later on, like, that's not a good way to approach a buyer. And he stopped and tried the product and said, yeah, this is really good, but you don't really have a product. You have chips in this little cup. I need to see pricing and I need to see packaging. And I thought to myself, great. Like, all I need to do is create a package and then we can sell this product. It was enough to give me a confidence to take the next step.

When we come back in just a moment, how Vincent decides to turn those coconut chips into a product, and how a lucky break from a certain Kardashian sister helps to spread the word. Stay with us, I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2011, and Vincent is sold on the idea of making a coconut chip brand. But he won't be shaving the coconuts himself in the Bay Area. He needs to import the product from Thailand. And thankfully, he knows some people.

So I asked my family, like, hey, is there anybody that can help me? And one of our cousins became our supplier manager. So you had a cousin there who could be on the ground, find the suppliers for you, which is obviously hugely helpful because you couldn't be there yourself. Exactly. So we talked to all these manufacturers, figured out the one that we liked. The next step for us was, hey, testing it with consumers. So I think we went to Thailand that Christmas. And then I brought bag with me a duffel bag full of, I think it was one ounce bags with stickers on them. Because I wanted to show consumers what a product would look like with this. So when you came back to, I think it's on January 2012, you're still working for the startup, right, at the time. But it sounds like you've got the wheels are in motion on this thing. And you want to test this out because you had some success at the trade show the previous summer.

So who are you going to test this out on? I mean, you had, you're still packaging them yourself, right? Yeah. So we patched them in these foil bags. And each of these, you know, now it's a product, right? So we have, you know, coconut chips in a bag with a sticker on it, and it says toasted coconut chips on it. It says, dang. And it has a picture of coconuts.

And I found a consumer show called the New Taste Marketplace, which is like an artisanal market in St. Gregory's Church in San Francisco. And we did pretty well. And that's where we really learned how to talk about the product and say, hey, you know, these are coconut chips. They're a healthy snack. They've got all the health benefits of coconut oil. and you can put it on your salads or your ice cream or your yogurt. And so that's where we really kind of got the pitch down for how to sell coconut chips.

And this, yeah, this was probably right around the time when coconut water was starting to blow up. Yeah, at this time, coconut in general was very trendy. And so that became our anchor when we started talking about it. We said, hey, do you like coconut water? Hey, do you like coconut oil? Like, you probably like our coconut chips. Yeah. And coconut oil also, by the way, around this time, 2010, 11, 12, because this also coincides

of this whole paleo-keto kind of craze that blew up. Not really craze because it's still around. And a lot of people are getting into healthy fats like coconut oil. Yeah, that became part of our pitch. And I think Trader Joe's, Trader Joe's was selling coconut oil. Trader Joe's also came out with a coconut chip around the same time we did, which I thought was bad because I was like, I thought we were going to be the first. Yeah. But it turned out later that it was actually a good thing because Trader Joe stays in Trader Joe's, right? Yes. So it actually helped us with this education component of people not knowing what a coconut chip was. And people who shop at Trader Joe's are also going to shop at Whole Foods and other stores. So it actually helped us a lot. And by the way, were you talking to your dad or mom because they were both entrepreneurs. I mean, did either of them say, yeah, go for it. This is a, this is exciting. Or were they like, not sure. Well, I think before we even started. I remember talking to both of them, my mom said, hey, you're really good with food. I think you should do something with food. And my dad said, if you're going to start something, you should utilize our family in Thailand because we have this huge network there. That could be a competitive advantage. And I ended up doing kind of a combination of the two, which is food with family in Thailand. So they didn't say specifically, hey, this is a good idea to do this. But they kind of gave me a larger framework to think about how to start a business. All right. So you.

you're clearly been sent. I mean, tell me, take me to like 2012, the first sort of four or five months of that year. Is this all you're thinking about? Because you still have another job. Like, you've got a day job working for this startup. I was definitely on a kind of adrenaline rush for the first few months of just thinking about this. And I was pretty committed to making it a company at that point. and we heard about this other trade show in March 2012 called the Natural Product Expo West.

And I didn't know about it until a month before. And I was like, oh, wow, maybe we can get a booth, but they ran out of booths. So what we did was we got two feet of table space in a shared booth with dozens of vendors. And we somehow fit four people into a two-foot table space, one behind the table and three in front of the table standing in the aisles. So we stood in the aisles, just, we made a wall. And in order to pass through that aisle, you had to go past one of our people. And it was me, my dad, my brother, and my girlfriend at the time now my wife. And nobody got through the wall without tasting some coconut chips. People would just toss them in their mouth and say, they say, dang. Dang, these are great.

They say, dang, these are really good. So you were getting business cards from buyers for large and small stores. Yeah, so we had connected with a few Whole Foods regions, with H.E.B., which is a big grocery store in Texas, yes. And then also all these smaller independence in the Bay Area that, you know, are very progressive and are kind of the leaders when it comes to new products. So buy right grocery and rainbow grocery and Berkeley Bowl. And, you know, those were some of our first customers. And that was like, okay, maybe we can, you know, make this a real thing. Let's order a container load. All right.

But when you came back home after the show, what did you do? Did you start to email all the people whose cards you got? Yeah, exactly. So, you know, I remember meeting people at the trade show and asking them, hey, do you want to get a cup of coffee? And, you know, sitting down, I remember one guy at the trade show, he was like, oh, you got business cards. Let's go through them.

And he helped me go through a stack of at least 100 business cards. and we'll pull that ones and be like, this is worth following up on. Like, you don't want to lose this card. That was huge. Like, he helped me kind of figure out the lay of the land. And so, you know, when we, when the first container landed in July, we had a bunch of customers who had committed. So we started shipping it out directly to grocery stores, yeah. Like, H.E.B. was the biggest one at the time.

Meantime, from what understand, you were laid off from your job in April of 2012. Yeah, so the startup I was working at had to do layoffs, and so I got laid off in April 2012. Doesn't sound like you were that sad. I had to decide whether or not I wanted to go full-time into Deng and really work on it or not. I mean, I think I was probably happy that I got a little severance package, which helped me kind of bridge the gap to start the company. All right, let me try to, I want to try to understand something. You have, you're laid off, right? You're now trying to get these chips into retailers.

You get an order from H.E.B, a Texas chain. And how big was that order? $10,000, $50,000. Do you remember? Probably $10,000. Okay. So they order $10,000 to the product. How were you financing that?

Because I'm assuming when you're an HB, you cannot pack, you can't hand pack each bag. now you've got to professionalize the operation, or am I wrong? Were you hand-packing them? No, so we had to professionalize, and the manufacturers that we worked with were the ones to pack and ship the product to us. So we designed the DANG, the first iteration of the DANG label, and it was still stickered. We did stickers at the beginning, didn't print onto bags. But, you know, I used $23,000 of savings to buy the first. was 20-foot container in July.

Were you stressed out or was it exciting? What do you remember? I remember. My girlfriend at the time told me, you're always working. You don't do anything else. And those first few months where, you know, we're starting to ship product and, you know, I'm worried about setting up the company by myself working out of my bedroom. I feel like it was just a blur because I would just work a lot.

And I remember going to a class on how to start a food business. and they were telling us about all the costs involved with slotting and trade spending and just like all the, you know, the cost of doing, starting a business and thinking myself, oh my God, this is going to be way more expensive than I thought it would be. And it was just me and it was really lonely. Like when you're starting something and doing it all by yourself without anybody to kind go through it with, it felt like I was kind of alone on doing, on my own ship in the middle of the sea.

I think later that year in 2012, you managed to get into some Safeway stores. How did you even get on their radar? I still don't, to this day, I don't, I'm not 100%, but I think they sell us in a store. I don't know which store. So they called me and they're like, hey, you know, can you come present to our produce team? And I remember going in there as a huge conference room. And, you know, I gave my presentation about dang and our coconut chips. And they said, we love this.

and we want to create a premium snack destination in the produce department in all of our stores. So they quickly put us into about a thousand Safeway stores with like large displays in the produce section, which is the front of the store, 90% of the people walk through that area. Like that was a game changer for us because up until then it was just, you know, small stores here and there, you know, small orders from AGB. But that's when that's when I called Andrew and I was like, I need help. I need help because I cannot do this by myself. Exactly.

And Andrew, were you still working at your accounting job at KPMG at that point? I was working with KPMG, but actually I had quit that summer of 2012. And then I started working with my father in his candle business. Vincent, I think you and dad had some behind-the-scenes conversations. And you effectively, like, traded, like, dad's like, okay. I'm just going to give Andrew to you because Deng needs the help. And it's funny because I think at the time I think Vincent was what he needed was he needed someone that had a very different skill set from him, like the opposite skill set of him as a partner. Yeah.

He also needed someone that he could trust. And he also needed someone that he couldn't afford to pay in the near future. future. That's like the perfect business partner. I'm not going to pay you. I need all the skill. I need the skills I don't have. All your time. And all your time. And are you in? Are you in? It's interesting because I remember being in Thailand having some conversations about equity split up. Like how are we going to split up this company? Because Vincent owned 100% of it. Because Vincent owned 100% of it. And I started, I would think I was all in helping out for like a month or two. And then I was just like, oh, as a brother, I'm just going to go all in because it is. And then we're eventually like, okay, will the equity split? up be. And I remember being on the call in Thailand and like, I think you've initially proposed a 80-20 split. What? It's like, yeah, like, it's interesting because you could appeal back like, oh, I'm not going to do this for 20 percent. But I also like, I had no experience in food. Like, very little experience running. And he done all the work up until then. He done all the work. He done everything from 2011. Yeah. No, and I remember hanging up the phone and I think I cussed him out.

I was like, I hate you. And then he called me back like the next day. And, and, He's like, listen, I really want you to be part of the company. I think it would be really rewarding for us to go through this together. I'll give you 20% and you're going to earn it over three years. And then later, that got modified even higher later as I've been with the company longer and whatnot. I actually have a very different memory of that conversation. Yeah, please.

Okay. All right. I remember talking to you and asking you what you thought was fair. I remember you saying, I should get one. fourth of what you have. And I think that was probably misconstrued, you know, like that even like one fourth of what you have, maybe one fourth of the company. Like, I feel like there was a miscommunication there that led to this tension, which is why, you know, we had to kind of have multiple conversations to kind of patch things up. And I also remember that being, one of the first conversations that we

had that had tension because we kind of grew up as brothers, you know, like we didn't really, like we fight, but later on in life, we wouldn't fight as much. And we got along well. But this is kind of the first time we had to be a little bit more combative, I would say. And I remember being very awkward. So you finally agree on a split. Andrew, you join full-time. And now you've got to fulfill this big order from Safeway.

I think it was a $50,000 order. Is that right? Yeah. It was $50,000 of coconut chips going to their thousand stores. But really, that's just the beginning of a long journey because you want them to keep ordering, which means you got to sell the coconut chips. And you guys, I imagine, don't have any marketing budget. How are you going to get people to even be aware of this product and try them? So at the time, this is 2013, and these are the early days of Instagram. And my phone started

blowing up, and I was like, why are all these people texting me? They're like, check your Instagram, check your Instagram. So Courtney Kardashian had found our product at an airport because we were selling at a airport stores and put a post of it on her Instagram with the caption, Flight Snack. And our website traffic just spiked. Wow. And that's when I realized, wow, like social media is becoming a big marketing tool, right? And this is the power of it. It's funny because right the week before we were in the New York Times.

So I had sent samples to a bunch of different food editors. And then I got a call from Florence Fabricant, who does the front burner section. And she was like, hey, I think I want to, you know, feature your coconut chips. Florence Fabricant. Yeah. She's. The famous, yeah, wow. Nice.

You know, food. I'm more impressed with that than Courtney Kardashian myself. I was, too. And I remember, you know, after that, I was like, oh, this is pretty cool. And I remember looking at our website traffic. And it was, like, up a little bit. But then after the Courtney Kardashian post, our website traffic spiked, like, a hundred times. And that was just pure luck that Courtney Kardashian put that on Instagram.

That was luck that, you know, We happen to be selling at the right time and the right place, which is at an airport near her. But still, I mean, you're in Safeways, and probably most of those people in Safeway had not seen Courtney Kardashian's Instagram post. How are you going to create awareness among those shoppers? Because you needed them to continue ordering your product, right? You wanted them to sell. So how did you – what was the plan? Yeah.

So how do you get attention, right, when you're in the store? you have less than a second to grab someone's attention, I think the best way to do that is to create a good package. And there's a saying that your package is your product. Yes. You sell in the bag. It's the bag itself because that has to do so many things. It has to educate someone on what's inside, what to expect, what the nutritionals are,

you know, attributes like keto, paleo. And, you know, from the beginning, I knew that we had to capture people's attention with the name, dang, because. You know, the logo, we always put that front and center in a very big font. But then also visually, we had to illustrate what to expect in the bag without actually putting a window. So I remember buying coconuts in Thailand when we were there and they were cheap. They were like a dollar for like five of them. You know, setting up a photo studio and taking pictures of coconut chips spilling out of the coconut.

So you knew that it was something, you know, a natural product that came actually from the coconut itself. Yeah. We also wanted to illustrate that it was a natural product without saying the word natural on it. So we used all these earthy tones like tan and green and brown, basically things you would find on a coconut tree. So 2013, it just sounds like you need a lot of help and your brother comes in. And he is, how do you, I mean, what's the idea of Vincent, you're going to be the CEO and Andrew, you're going to be the operations guy. Was that sort of how you divided responsibility? Yeah, I think from the beginning, it was.

was Vincent was really like the front facing visionary handling sales and marketing and product development. I was handling ops finance and accounting. And it still has held to that to this day. And our company was a mess at the time. I don't have a finance background or an operations background. So, you know, our books were a mess and our products were not shipped in a very efficient way. So we had a lot of things that needed attention. All right, but you had one product line. And you cannot build a company on coconut chips alone, right? And you knew that. You knew that that was not going to be possible.

You had to expand beyond that. So what was the next product you were going to put out into the world? Yeah, we slowly built out the line of coconut chips because people were telling us they want it with coconut sugar or they want it without sugar at all. So we actually had a creative facility to make an unsweetened coconut chip. But then I was on a trip to Japan and I saw these onion chips in the supermarket and I was like, oh, this is really cool. It tastes like caramelized onions, which is delicious. They were just what? They were like fried piece of onion?

Yeah, using a technology called vacuum frying, which didn't, you know, it took out all the atmospheric pressure so that it doesn't collapse when you fry it. And you can spin out most of the oil. Okay. So it's like light, flaky, crispy, like onion petal. Oh, so it wasn't a ring. It was like a pedal. Exactly. And I remember we tested it and people loved it.

Yeah, and it crunches like a chip? It crunched like a chip. And it was like light. It wasn't too oily. And it's just onion. That's it. Just onion and salt. Just onion and salt.

And I was thinking, I remember thinking to myself, oh, we can go after funnions. Yeah. What happened was that at the, like we were going around the trade shows. These were vacuum fried onion chips. They were pretty clean. and when people tried them at the trade shows, people loved them. And I remember one of our industry friends tried it, and he looked up in the air. He was like, oh, dang, they did it again.

Wow. These were going to be like organic funions. Exactly. Funions aren't really onion. They're just puffed corn, flavored like onions. We were so excited about that. They were getting so much positive feedback from the community, just as we did with our coconut chips. We're like, okay, this is going to be a winner.

This was going to be the big thing. So? It failed miserably. When we come back in just a moment, how Andrew and Vincent learn the hard way that the best snack foods have to be addictive, and maybe they shouldn't give you onion breath. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz,

and you're listening to How I Built This. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's several years into Dang Foods, and Vincent and his brother Andrew, think they have the best snack idea since Funnions, a vacuum-fried onion pedal chip. But despite some dang good initial feedback from people in the industry, customers, it turned out, didn't quite agree.

They would eat a few bites, but they would just kind of let it sit, I think, and they couldn't finish it. And when you don't have a snack that you can finish, then you don't go back and buy it again. But why? Was it too much? Like, sounds really light and... flavorful? What was the feedback you were getting? One thing that we didn't anticipate was that people would be worried about onion breath,

about getting onion on their breath, and they didn't want to walk around smelling like they just ate onions. That's something that nobody ever told us when we were testing it out. People don't snack on onions. How long did it take you to discover that this was a failure? I think it was only a month or two. That was fast. That was fast. Supermarkets don't give you a lot of time. if you're not selling well. You weren't thinking, oh, just give a time. People have to come around to it. You were thinking, this is a failure six weeks in.

We've got to pull it. I have to say that there was other considerations. Like, the biggest driver was that it wasn't flying off the shelf. I think from the beginning guy, there was margin concerns. Like, we were looking at, I mean, there were some tariffs associated with this onion from Vietnam. I think when we first launched, I think we were looking at something like 20% margins. And we're like, listen, we can do this because. is this is going to get as big as funnions.

Like when we sell up to 10 million and we get the scale to the next level, those margins will hit 30 and then they'll hit 40. And everything that's going to work itself out if the velocity comes. The velocity didn't come. The velocity didn't come at all. Right. There were yellow flags in the process, maybe even red flags, in the processes of launching this.

I think there was so much pressure from the market and from the industry to be like, hey, we need to launch something new and it needs to be dang good that like, that like the pressure, I think, overrode those yellow flags in the process. Did you take a financial hit? Oh, yeah. I think it was about all in all, I don't know, $2 million. Wow. That's hard.

We had just gotten venture funded. And so for about $4 million and about $1.5 to $2 of the million went to the onion chips. It didn't work. It didn't work. So let me ask you about, venture funding because the first three years it was bootstrapped. And at a certain point, you either, many companies, especially in the food business, it's very rare to be able to continue to do it on your own. Some have done it. Cliff Barr is a good example. But many of them

either sell to a bigger multinational or go for outside funding in order to scale. And you guys, sounds like you had to get outside funding if you wanted to scale. Not only that, but we paying ourselves for the first three years. So we had to get outside funding to make a living. You know, up until then, we put every penny of profit back into the company because we wanted it to grow because we believed it would be worth something someday. But after three years of that, we're like, it's too risky to keep going this way. Yeah, when investors, because I'm thinking, if you came to me then and you said, hey, we're looking for capital, I'd say, well, what are you? I mean, coconut chips alone, I'm not sure. Did you start to think about your company? differently, did you start to say, you know what, we are a snack food brand? Or did you say we are an Asian American snack food brand? How did you begin to think about what you wanted your story to be? You know, I think it was an evolution. So we started out with, hey, we're a better for you

snack company that takes, you know, whole foods that you can identify and turns them into snacks that you can eat. But then looking at it later on, we were like, there's nothing onable. about that. That could describe any number of snack companies. And so later on we realized, okay, how do we make it different? And like, we had to look at ourselves and say, how are we different than everybody else out there? And one thing that we always relied on was, you know, Asian flavors and ingredients. And so we changed that over time to an Asian American snack company that stood for bringing ingredients and flavors from Asia in forms that Americans understand like chips and later on bars.

And when you went to raise money, were the investors saying you're going to have to become something bigger than just coconut chips? You're going to have to have lots of product lines. And ultimately, coconut chips may not even be the thing that is your primary source of revenue. I think we heard actually the opposite also, which was, why don't you just focus on coconut chips and make that as big as coconut water? So after we got an investment, we tried to follow that model of hiring a big field sales team to go into stores. And we thought that that was going to bring us to this next level of growth with coconut chips and the onion chips. But it didn't work out. Like, we didn't grow.

So it's interesting because you had this money to hire salespeople. But what was the discount? Why weren't they effective? I think, you know, hiring a field team. First off, people are expensive, right? So each person, maybe $70,000, right, in salary. And that's in, you know, that payroll, you have to basically sell half a million in order to get that 70K contribution that pays off that person's salary. So, you know, going into store by store and selling displays in, like, how many of those do you need to get a half a million of revenue?

It's a lot. I also think that works well with the people I talked in the industry on a high margin, high velocity item. I think our item was relatively moderate to high margin and velocity, but then a lot more competition started coming in 2016 onwards with coconut chips. So you've got some capital. And one of your investors, and you raise about $4 million, and one of your investors is a big of, food brand. This is interesting to me because I think they actually helped you get even wider distribution, which you need to succeed. You have to be everywhere to actually scale a company. Was that investment you got, was that the catalyst that helped you get even more distribution?

So they did a couple of things. First, they taught us how to think like them. And as a big stack company, you know, they're interested in what they call stomach shape. which is literally getting more of a share of America's stomachs. And to us, you know, kind of running this small snack company, we never really thought in terms like that. But then, you know, after a while, it kind of just started to sink in like, oh, yeah, we need to, who's our cohort? Like, who's actually buying dang? We'd never really had good information data about our consumer before. But they came to us with loads of data saying, hey, your consumer is, you know, highly educated.

tends to be female, lives on the coast, you know, has pretty decent household income. Oh, and by the way, you index really high with Asian Americans. Right. But then they also helped us get into some new distribution channels that we had never considered before, like the convenience store. You guys, the onion chips didn't work out, but you tried other things with coconut chips, right? You did like a bunch of different flavors, like bacon and chili lime and... We did like dark chocolate, milk chocolate.

Dark chocolate coated. I think today you've got three types of coconut chips, right, salted, and the original recipe, which has some sugar and then... And unsweetened. And unsweetened, okay. So what happened? Those ones, the other ones just didn't take off? Yeah, I mean, we tried a lot of different things. And at the end of the day, we kind of learned that people kind of want a less adulterated coconut.

Yeah. Kind of similar with coconut water. Like, they don't want flavored coconut water. They just want coconut water. So that's what we have today. And we've tried so many things that failed. But we had to do that in order to figure it out. One of the things, because it sounds like, I mean, you were trying out a bunch of things.

I mean, you were experimenting and you were failing. And you were experimenting and you were failing. Until you actually hit on a hit, which I think is one of your biggest products today, which are those rice chips. Yeah, it's the Thai rice trackers. I was at the airport in Bangkok, and we saw a lot of, specifically, like, Chinese tourists walking out with like 10 different, at the time, the cartons of these little rice crackers. And if you looked at what they were buying, they were buying, like, very flavors that were good for their market, like crab curry. And we thought that it could be an opportunity. So we contacted the supplier.

We had a lot of credibility in going to other suppliers in Thailand and having a conversation with them about what it would be like to reintroduce a similar product in America. This is, I guess, for people who haven't tried it, it's basically sticky rice, which is a type of rice. This is amazing. Steamed and then soaked in watermelon juice and then puffed, dried. So it's like a crispy... Am I describing it correctly, more or less? Yeah, and that's the way that it's cooked traditionally as a snack, like, on the streets in Thailand and, like, markets.

It's called Katan. And they traditionally have to use watermelon juice because they need to make it sticky, stickier, like the sticky rice. They have to make it stickier. So they need, like, a slightly, you know, sticky sweet solution. And watermelon juice has just the right amount of stickiness to create these discs. So you now have a bunch of flavors. I think serracha is the biggest selling one out of those, right? Yeah.

So that was a hit, right? And was it clear right away that that was a hit? Or was it? Did it take some time? It took a little time, but I'd say that we knew off the back. I think we were so sensitive to what happened to the onion chips that were like how, like, we got to have more evidence of proof of concept before launching. How did you change your process to,

make sure that a new product would work. I mean, you saw people buying it, but what did you do? I mean, how did you test it before you decided to go all in? So we have the family that was helping us with coconut chips, we called them and were like, hey, this is a picture of this package that we bought at the airport. Can you go find out who makes it and go talk to them? And they set it all up for us. So they met with the owner and told them who we were. And he shared with us how much that they sold in the airport, which was 10,000 boxes a day, which is crazy.

Yeah. And, you know, we told them, hey, like, we want to bring your product to the U.S. and, you know, put it under the dang brand and, you know, help work with you on seasonings. And he loved it. And then for testing, we did a lot more consumer testing with that one. Today you have, you're in the energy bars space too, which is a tough. We've done energy bars in the show. We've done RX bar.

We've done Alara bar. We've done Clif Bar. It's a really crowded space. Tell me about the thinking behind energy bars. Why did you get into that space? The people that were buying our unsweetened coconut chip, which is just made from coconut and salt, we're telling us they need more snacks like this because it's perfect for their keto diet. And I looked at the bar space and I was like, nobody's suing a keto bar. Why not? And, you know, we have all this credibility from coconut chips, you know, it's high fat, low carb. So we developed a line of keto bars using cocoa butter and Asian ingredients like matcha. We're like, all right, we're going to put our brand spin on it by introducing matcha to that category and other Asian flavors. And yeah, we started showing it to like, Whole Foods bar buyer. And they were like, all right, yeah.

Let's try it out. Let's bring it in. So we went national in January 2019 at Whole Foods. And they all have some kind of Asian influence. There's lemon macha, as you mentioned. Toasted coconut, obviously. The almond cookie has one of those almond cookies that you sometimes get in Chinese restaurants, right? Yeah. And then there's crazy rich chocolate. Yeah, which we couldn't figure out how to make chocolate Asian, but this is right after crazy rich Asians came out. And Andrew had this idea of like, why don't we just call it crazy rich chocolate because it's rich. So this bar does pretty well.

I think by the end of 2019, apparently is one of the best-selling energy bars in Whole Foods. We were the best-selling bar at Whole Foods in 2019 in terms of like unit velocity. So unit sold it per store per week. And we were just riding high because we launched this new thing. And it finally, we finally got something that like worked really well. All right. So this is great. you're doing well.

I think your sales are just really beginning to grow. Then COVID hits. 2020 and energy bars are connected to gyms and working out. Did you start to see your sales take a hit? Yeah, it was pretty drastic. I think the data was about 50% drop in bar category sales pre and post COVID. And the thing was that Dang bars was supposed to be like, the biggest growth driver for our brand in 2020.

Like it was like our shining star. It was like supposed to be the driver for most of our growth. But became the driver of our decline for that year. Tell me what happened to the company. Did you guys have to do layoffs? Yes. I think it was also, we were in a lot of, with our coconut chips and our rice chips, we were in a lot of corporate accounts.

Yeah. Like we have this pretty fanatical back. at like Google and Facebook and a lot of those tech companies. Right. Oh, these were snacks available at Google and Facebook. Snacks available for, you know, for free at those companies. And because of the state-home, those sales dropped about 90% pre-imposed COVID. And even now, they're not fully back.

So what happens in our industry, probably in a lot of other issues, is, you know, you start to have sales declines. We couldn't raise money. Our burn rate was like $400,000 per month in the beginning. and we had to get to positive. So how long did it take you before you guys were able to maybe breathe a slight sigh of relief that you're going to be okay? Earlier this year, we got to break even. We've been like checking the number.

The first thing we do like the beginning of number is just check a profitability seeing where we're at. We got to break even after being from a 400K burn rate. And that's a huge sigh of relief for us because it's like, like, hey, like the company isn't going to go under in a couple months and we don't do anything about it. Like, we've built a bunch of runway from that. That was a big accomplishment. I would say that we haven't exhaled because right after that, we had these supply chain

issues whereby our ocean freight containers have been delayed about seven weeks on average. Wow. Still to this day. To this day, to this day. You guys are now, well, I think. I think you're now in over 10,000 stores across the U.S. Is that about right? Yeah, roughly.

And I've noticed that the product everywhere, every time I go to a big grocery store, a small one. So you've got a brand out there. It's been a tough pandemic period for you for a variety of reasons, but you came out of it. And battered and bruised, but you came out of it. And you're still fighting your way out of it. How are you feeling about the next 12 to 18 months? I'm a little bit more cautious. I've always been more cautious. I'm always like, it's not just thinking about those containers coming in and what that's impacting our profitability. I think it's just been hard because we've been through so much, especially in the last couple of years, that I think I do feel a little bit battered. Yeah. But I do believe in what we've built and what we stand for. What about the relationship between the two of you?

Because I understand that there was a point where both of you had to go talk to, not had to, but chose to talk to a therapist together or maybe separate. I'm not sure because there was some tension between the two of you. What was the tension? I think it kind of stemmed from me. Our parents had a pretty hard breakup. Yeah. And I didn't really process any of that until I started going to therapy. And it's interesting because I think a lot of people, I mean, I've heard your podcast,

a lot of, there's people that talk about like how, like, in a partner and a co-founder relationship, it's important to get a coach. I think for my specific situation with Vincent, like, it was important for me to get a therapist. Because what would happen was that a lot of tension would come up with my brother. I remember getting really, really angry at him when he wasn't being defensive with me against a sales broker that we were working with. And I remember getting really, really, really angry at him. And it definitely caused rifts in our relationship. Yeah.

I think it's funny, I'm the older brother, but Andrew's always kind of been a protector. And for that, I'm very, very grateful. But I also feel like, you know, some of that, you know, typically as an older brother, brother, like, that could be a role for an older brother. And if I wasn't able to do that for him, like, at a time where he needed it, right? And for me, you know, whenever we had these conflicts and, you know, Andrew would get upset, I, like, closed up. Like, I felt like I couldn't think straight and it wasn't, I just didn't feel safe. And so one of those things that we had to work on was how do we manage conflict? And then how do we both feel safe? Uh, in

order to resolve it and to move forward. You know, Vincent, we don't really talk about this, but, like, I feel like we're closer. I feel like we're closer now than we've ever been before. I agree with that. I feel like we've gone through a lot together. Like, it's kind of like we've gone through the, and, and, like, we mentioned earlier that, like, we were very, very cooperative, and I think there was this, all this stuff that wasn't processed. And then when you get into a startup with someone, as their partner, you're like literally spending 40, 50, 60 hours. together. And it almost force us to untangle this stuff more intensely. And I think we've come through on the other side. And I think like our friendship and our bond has never been stronger.

This is a complicated moment to ask this question. But you know the question coming. How much of where you are today do you think it has to do with luck? How much would you attribute to just the grind of what you and the work you put in? I would say a ton of our early success was attributed to luck. For example, the timing of coconut chips. If we had weighed in another year to launch coconut chips, it would have been too late. And if we had gone earlier, it would have been too early. So we launched right at the right year. And then getting on the radar of retailers and influencers, like, we didn't know that was going to happen. That that was lucky. Also, launching at a time where coconut was on trend, like that was lucky. But more

recently, you know, we have more to lose if we make mistakes. So we have to put forth the effort to ensure that we're successful. So we test products many times before putting them out in the world because you only have one chance to earn a customer. They don't give you a second chance. Andrew? Yeah, my response would be in line with that. I'd say 70-30 luck to effort in the early years. And more recently, it's been 70-30 effort to luck. And would you like to reverse that again? Yeah. In the last last year, very, very. You pay such good attention, yes. But you'll take the luck.

You'll take the luck when it comes. Yeah. We'll take the luck when it comes. That's Andrew and Vincent Kiti Rachigan, brothers and co-founders of Dang Foods. By the way, influencers aren't always so influential. Back in 2019, the brothers released a seaweed-flavored rice chip. Within weeks, the unofficial mayor of Twitter herself, Chrissy Teigen, posted a photo of those chips. with her personal endorsement.

Nikitya Rachargaran brothers couldn't believe their luck. One of the biggest influencers out there loved them. And yet, even Chrissy Teigen's love wasn't enough. The seaweed chips never took off and were discontinued, but it's all part of Dang's try lots of things out and fail fast strategy. Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please do follow us on your podcast app so you always have the latest episode. downloaded. If you want to contact us, our email address is H-I-B-T at npr.org. If you want to follow us on

Twitter, our account is at How I Built This and mine is at Guy Raz. Our Instagram account is at How I Built This NPR and mine is at guy.org. This episode was produced by Liz Metzker with music composed by Ramtin Eri-Looie. It was edited by Casey Herman with research help from Claire Murashima. Our production staff also includes Neva Grant, Faris Safari, J.C. Howard, Julia Carney, Carrie Thompson, Elaine Coates, and Harrison B.J. Choi. Our intern is Margaret Serino. Jeff Rogers is our executive producer. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This. This is NPR.