How I Built This with Guy Raz - Dippin' Dots: Curt Jones

Episode Date: September 9, 2019

In the late 1980s, Curt Jones was working in a Kentucky lab, using liquid nitrogen to flash-freeze animal feed. He wondered if he could re-invigorate his favorite dessert by pouring droplets of ice cream into a vat of liquid nitrogen and – voila! – out came cold and creamy pellets that he soon branded Dippin' Dots. The novelty treat spread to fairs, stadiums and shopping malls, and eventually grew into a multi-million dollar brand. But a few years ago, Curt was forced to walk away after the company was hit with debt, recession and a punishing lawsuit. PLUS in our postscript "How You Built That," how Nadine Habayeb hopes to popularize puffed water lily seeds from India with her snack brand Bohana. 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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a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built. I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, a biologist Kurt Jones dripped ice cream into liquid nitrogen and turned it into dipping dots, the novelty ice cream brand sold at stadiums, malls, and theme parks around the world. So if I were to distill the show down to a single phrase, it would sound something like

future entrepreneur identifies a problem and decides to solve it, right? That's what got us lift and Airbnb and Dyson vacuums. Problem solution. But in the world of ice cream, especially by the end of the 20th century, you could argue that there wasn't really much of a problem to solve.

Yeah, you could make more interesting flavors, maybe use higher butterfat milk, but reinvent it. I mean, where would you go? go beyond scoops and soft serve and shakes and popsicles and ice cream cakes and cookie sandwiches, right? I mean, how do you out-innovate all of that? Well, the short answer? With a lot of liquid nitrogen, which is really where the story of dipendots begins. It was 1988 and Kurt Jones was working as a biological researcher.

And in the lab, were vats of liquid nitrogen, which you may know pretty much freezes anything it touches almost. instantly. Kurt also happened to be a guy who liked to make his own ice cream. And one day, hanging out in the lab, he wondered, could I use that liquid nitrogen to reinvent ice cream? So a few weeks later, he brought in a jar of ice cream base, basically sugar, cream, and some vanilla. He gently dripped a bit of it into the liquid nitrogen and instantly those droplets froze into teeny tiny ice cream beads. Now, they didn't look like ice cream, but once Kurt tasted them, he knew he was onto something. And those ice cream pellets got him so excited. He quit his job to turn that little experiment into Dippendots, the ice cream of the future. And it would soon

spread to shopping malls, theme parks, and eventually sports stadiums. Now, today, Dippendots is a brand that does a report of $300 million in ads. annual sales, except it's also a brand that no longer belongs to Kurt Jones and a brand that didn't actually make him rich, which means that unlike any of our other episodes, this one is almost a cautionary tale about how you can lose the thing you built and the thing you loved. But for now, let's start at the beginning in rural Southern Illinois, where Kirk grew up on his family's farm with his mom, dad, grandpa, and... and two older sisters.

I remember driving a tractor for the first time from one barn to the other when I was seven years old. And, you know, I played sports and stuff in school, but I always felt like when I got home, I had to work, you know, to help feed the pigs and do things like that. So it's kind of a very early age, I guess, learning that responsibility. But, you know, looking back, I'm glad I grew up the way that I did. I have no regrets at all. It was really a good way, a good way to grow up. Did it feel, like, when you were a kid, did it feel like your parents struggled to

key food on the table or was the farm pretty prosperous? No, it felt like a struggle. You're exposed to all the talks about, you know, if it doesn't rain by Friday, you know, the crop's not going to get made or you have diseases that can get in your, you know, your pigs, that kind of thing. So, you know, we never went hungry or anything like that, but we always knew that we were dependent on a lot of factors that were actually. actually out of our control, you know, like weather and things like that. So I think I just,

maybe that was good in a way. I kind of learned to live with risk a little bit. Yeah. Given that your family didn't always have a lot of money around, were there ways that you kind of figured out how to earn extra money for yourself when you were a kid? Yeah. I mean, well, my dad had a radio and TV repair business, and so we had all these old tubes laying around. And so me and a friend of mine actually started our own little radio repair business probably in grade school, like fifth or sixth grade. And then me and him also decided to get into the chicken business one time. We ended up, well, he had ordered 100 chickens to put on his farm and I ordered 100 on mine and we were going to go together and gather eggs and work together on

it. And then me and another friend had a straw business. We called it, which is where you take wheat straw and bail it. And we sold that to a lot of the people that worked on roads because they would do their landscaping when they finished a project and they chop up straw and put down over the grass seed. And so there's always coming up with some little way to make a little extra money. Did you, would you sort of look at your family's situation, you know, the whims of the weather or of whether there was market demand for corn and soybeans or whether there was some kind of disease that, you know, and did you ever think I want to have a different life? I don't want to do this as a grown-up.

Oh, I think so. When I went to school, I studied microbiology because I really was interested in farm-related things like making ethanol from corn and just things like that. But at the end of the day, it allowed me to get a job that actually had a salary, which really felt pretty good because I saw something steady there, and I did enjoy the steady paycheck when I had it. So you, I guess you spent like six years, right, you spent six years getting your BA and your master's degree in microbiology. You graduate. I think this is around 1986 and you get your first job with a company called Alltech biotechnology. Yeah, just outside of Lexington in a little town called Nicholasville. And we lived in Lexington about eight or nine miles from where I went to work at. What was that company doing? What was their business? Well, they were starting to get off into the animal feed business, making bacteria cells that could actually be put back into the animal feed. So in other words, you know, if we eat yogurt and it has lactobacillicin, and that's good for us, and they call it probiotics. Sure.

We would concentrate those down. We would freeze them, and then we would freeze it down into a powder. So that's kind of how I got started with Alltech was in the animal feed side, which is what they really grew with over the next several years. And to be clear, I mean, why were you freezing these cultures? Was it so that they essentially don't die so that they would keep their potency? Yes, and you want to freeze them as quickly as you can because if you ever notice like an ice tray and you put it in the freezer and you come back 30 or 40 minutes later, you'll see little needles across the surface. That's from freezing something very slow.

If you freeze that very fast, those ice crystals are smaller. So if you freeze the bacteria cells quickly, you get a little bit of the colds. tiny ice crystals, and then there's a good chance that those cells can come back to life. So I started playing with liquid nitrogen, which I had never really worked with before, but I knew that it was very cold. It was 320 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. And I found that you could pour the nitrogen into the cultures and freeze a big blob, or you could pour the cultures into the nitrogen and freeze a big blob. But I found that if you dribbled it in a little at a time, that you could actually form pellet.

It's kind of like freezing raindrops in other words. So you still have the active probiotics in these pellets. Let me just ask you about liquid nitrogen for a sec. Because the freezing point, right, for liquid for waters, 32 degrees, 0 degrees centigrade. You're talking about something that is minus 300 degrees Fahrenheit. I have to imagine that working with liquid nitrogen is very dangerous. It's like the equivalent of working with lava, right? Right, just in the opposite way.

Yeah. It is dangerous, but what I tell people, because we've had a lot of people that have worked around it over the last 30 years, but I tell them it's just like, it's kind of like handling boiling water. I said, you have to treat it with respect, but everybody works with boiling water if they're a cook. But the other danger that you have with liquid nitrogen is if you're in a very closed-in area, it can displace oxygen so you're not getting enough oxygen, you know, into your lungs. But other than that, it's a lot like hot water. You know, you wouldn't want to fall in a vat of hot water either. So meantime, we're foreshadowing a little bit here. You used to churn homemade ice cream, even like as a teenager, like on the farm, right?

And this is before we had like one touch button electric ice cream makers, right? This is, I'm assuming this is like salt and rock salt and ice and just turning and turning. You know, churn ice cream maker. Right. No, our family ice cream maker was exactly that. it had a little handle that you turned on a gear and it would turn the middle container, you know, through the ice. And you can kind of feel it when you're cranking it'll get a little harder to crank.

Yeah. But yeah, that's great when you open that up and see all that firm ice cream in there. You know, that's a good feeling. And I guess ice cream like making just continued on, like through college and you would just make ice cream? Yeah. Anytime we got together, like my wife and daughter, we would make ice cream on a weekend and invite the neighbors over. And I think at some point we actually had an electric maker, but I do remember still having a hand crank even with my wife and daughter. And did you start to think, hey, this process of liquid nitrogen and the bacteria seems kind of cool?

I wonder what would happen if I used it on ice cream? Was it that linear? Almost, but not quite. It still took me a month or two to really have that idea. I actually started playing with other things first. Like I was interested in freezing things like watermelon and, you know. By the way, when you drop a slice of watermelon into liquid nitrogen and you pull it out, what is it? Is it like a piece of like steel?

It's like an anvil. Like how hard is it? Watermelons actually a little bit different than like a grape because of the surface area of the watermelon. But yeah, like if you were to put a grape in there, you could, I mean, you could basically drop that grape and it would shatter. Wow. That's what it would be like. And how long does the grape stay in there just for instantly, drop it in and pull it out? Oh, a few seconds. You can actually watch it. It's like introducing heat. So you'll see this nitrogen just boil like crazy. And then when all the heat has been extracted, you'll see it just kind of fall to the bottom and it's as cold as it's going to get.

All right, you're working on this animal feed project on the side. You're just kind of having fun. At what point did you think, hey, maybe I should drip a melted ice cream into this? Well, really my first thought, to be honest with you, was how can I make this ice cream churn colder? And so without even thinking about liquid nitrogen in it, I started thinking about what if I put dry ice in here instead of ice? Well, dry ice is 109 below zero. Into your ice cream maker. Right. But at some point, you know, my mind finally went to, well, wait a minute, you know, you know a even quicker way to freeze it would be using liquid nitrogen. And the reason I remember that is that for about the next two or three weeks, I thought about what it would be like to turn ice cream into bees.

And the next opportunity we got to make ice cream, I told my wife, I'm going to take about a quarter of this out, and I'm going to actually make some ice cream out of it into beads. All right. So I think this is like 1987. you take a cup of the mix that you were going to churn for the ice cream before you churned it, and you take it back to your office or to the lab at Altay, and you start to drip it into the nitrogen, the liquid nitrogen? Yeah. And I actually had a childhood buddy of mine with me that Sunday when I was telling him that I wanted to go try something. So we grabbed about a, I think it was a little quart-mason jar of the mix and drove out to the lab.

and I pulled out probably about a half a gallon of liquid nitrogen into a cylinder, and I took a pipette, and I took some of the ice cream mix, and I dropped it in, you know, drop by drop. And probably after 100 drops or something like that, I said, well, let's try it now. And I meant let's let it warm up and try it, but both of us were so interested in it, We grabbed some before they really warmed up enough. So that was something I learned very early on is you don't want to throw it in your mouth

right after it comes out of liquid nitrogen. Because it's, right? It's like probably burns the inside of your mouth, right? Oh, yeah. Well, it will, it actually will weld your tongue to your cheek, for example. It just sits there and sizzles for a minute, you know. Once we learn not to burn our taste buds and once we let it, you know, kind of warm up to 30 or 40 below zero,

It was really, really good. And what I was really hoping to find out was to see if I could detect any ice crystals in there. With homemade ice cream, you had that real icy taste. Yeah. And the first thing I noticed is that when I bit into the little beads, it was a totally different texture. Smooth and creamy. Yeah. You say that for a few weeks you had been thinking about testing this out,

and you were getting increasingly excited about the prospect. of turning ice cream into pellets. But I'm just curious why. I mean, ice cream is pretty great. So what was it about pelletized ice cream that you thought, this is going to be amazing? Well, there were two things. People like Hagen-Daz, like Ben and Jerry's,

they get to a very smooth consistency in a couple different ways. If you add butterfat, that basically masks the fact that you have ice crystals in your mix. Ah, I see. So you can add butterfat or you can add air. And both of those disperse ice crystals. So if you go to the Dairy Queen, for example, you get a very smooth, creamy taste because

it's got not a lot of butterfat, but it's got a lot of air in it. Yeah, so it's like a lighter, fluffier ice cream. Yeah. So can I not add any air and not have a super high butterfat concentration, but then still have a smooth, creamy taste. And that's what I found. I used a 10% butterfat mix because you have to use it at that time, at that time, you had to have at least 10% butterfat to call it ice cream. Right. So I was pretty excited because now you're going to get a very dense flavor, you know, from that because you're not diluting it with anything. Huh. But to be honest with you,

what was the most exciting is that it was just a new way to consume something. And that's what I really wanted to find out. I wanted to find out what is, what this really intrigued people. I had no idea if it would really catch on, but that was the initial seat of excitement, is that it had the possibility to catch on. So when you brought this home to your wife and she tried it, what did she say? Well, she really liked it. The thing with my wife is that I think she knew when she, you know, kind of saw my excitement, it was kind of, uh-oh, you know, here we go. Here we go. What's going to happen next, right? Because she knew that the gears were turning in your head. Right. And you had this steady job and a child. Right. Now, as much as I like my job,

she knew that I was also growing a little bit frustrated because it was a very fast-growing company and it was a very demanding job. I mean, I was working many, many hours a week and even she was a little bit like, wow, I didn't know I signed up for this, but I wasn't just looking to quit my job right way. In fact, I took the idea to my boss and said, you know, is this something you'd be interested in? I know you're not in the food business, but he said, well, you know, it's a cute idea, you know, basically get back to work. You know, we're doing something else. So he didn't really have an interest in it, but at the same time, I knew that for me, it was something that would percolate in my mind for a while. And it did for about six months until finally I told my wife one day.

I said, you know, this is really not all I think about, but it's really something that I think I'm going to have to try. And she says, well, I know that. She said, you know, and you do whatever you think. I tell people sometimes, I said, you know, it was probably the perfect time for me to start a business because I think we had maybe $10,000 of savings. And I sometimes say if we'd had $100,000 in the bank, we might not have wanted to risk it. But I felt like if it didn't work, I was still young enough that I could probably still get a job

somewhere. And I don't know. For me, it was just like, you know, if I'm going to. to do this, I got to try it 100% to give it a chance. And, you know, my wife was very supportive of it and she knew that we would get by, you know, somehow. So you quit your job, 1987. Yeah. You tell your wife, you quit and you say, I'm going to go for this. I'm going to, I'm going to go for it. I'm going to start to do this. So what did you do? I mean, you had, you mentioned you had $10,000 in savings. Right. But that was everything you had.

Well, what happened? I knew that we had the $10,000. I knew that we had the $10,000. I knew that We had a second vehicle that we could probably get by with one vehicle. And we did sell that our second car. We got $4,000 for it. And before I quit my job, it was during a period of time where we were just starting to get these mailouts from credit card companies. Well, we ended up, I think, getting like five or six credit cards and maxed them all out within the next year. So that's like what? It's like $5,000 limits or something like that?

Yeah. I mean, we had at one point, I think we had between $30,000 and $40,000. in credit card debt with a business that wasn't making money. So we were struggling. You know, well, the first few years, we struggled quite a bit. But you thought with this $10,000 and with this car sale, the $4,000, like, I can start this business. I can start this liquid nitrogen ice cream business. I really thought so, yeah.

And during that time, we collected some business cards of people that found it interesting. And this one guy left his business card. He was from Indianapolis. And he said, I'm putting one of my stores. He said, there's a space open next to me. And if you want to hire me as your contractor, I can build out the store and we can get you into the ice cream business. And I thought, okay, well, maybe it's time to do.

And I think that was even part of my reason for quitting my job in November because he thought we could get open before Christmas, which is a horrible time to start an ice cream business, by the way. Yes, right? Because it's cold, right? Even in Lexington, it's cold. Right. And as it turns out, this center that, he's a lot.

he was talking about it, it did have about 20,000 cars a day that drove by, but that's exactly what they did. They drove by. There was not a good way to get in. So, you know, we made a lot of mistakes in the beginning, but the first mistake we made was was working with this guy because he was basically somewhat of a shyster. He basically took a down payment, which we didn't have a lot to work with anyway. But about a month after I'd quit my job thinking we'd be open by Christmas, the store still

wasn't finished and I was starting to get contacted by some of the subcontractors that they hadn't been paid yet. And so we found out that this guy had skipped town with our money, but we were able to locate him and kind of got, we basically got control of our store again. We paid our subcontractors off and we started, you know, finishing out the store ourselves. But we did not get that store open until March. Until March of 88. Right. And so we were about four months with no job and all of our savings pretty much tapped out by the time we opened the store. Were you stressed out? To say the least, yeah, I was a little stressed. What were you doing during that four-month period? Were you just constantly chasing

contractors and subcontractors? Or were you also still experimenting with the product that you would sell at that store? Oh, yes. I was very much doing all of that. I was experimenting with different pieces of equipment to make it, you know, to make it on a little bit larger scale. I was working on the branding. When I quit my job, we really didn't even have a name for the product yet. And in fact, when we were going home for Christmas, we ended up having a naming party with some of our friends back in Southern Illinois. You know, I actually came up with the name Dipping Dots during that time. Someone had written down DIP and Dot like two characters, but I heard it as dipping without a G in my mind. And to me, that was like the perfect name for it. Because I was wanting to describe the product just a little bit, but yet have a, have a, a very fun name.

What was the name before Dippendat? Well, we had, you know, yogurt was very popular at the time. Like TCBY was very popular. And so most of our flavors were actually yogurt flavors. And we actually were going to call it the yoglet shop. The yoglet shop? Yeah, which, you know, Yoglet being a piece of yogurt, basically. Oh, like yogurt and pellet.

Right. Joglet. And, yeah. I don't think my kids would be running to the yoglet stand at the baseball stadium. Right. Yeah. So disaster averted there. Yeah, so Dippendott's.

becomes the name. And you open the store in this little shopping center in Lexington, Kentucky, in May of 88. And what's the reception? Do people line up? Are there lines out the door? Is it empty? Is it crickets? What's going on? Well, it's pretty much crickets because, remember, we had no money left to do any advertising with. Fortunately, during our little test market we did, we got a little newspaper article. And so when we opened the store, we actually had a local TV station. within a week or two. Yeah. But basically the first customer that came in, we gave her a sample,

and she asked if she could buy a Coke. And so we sold the Coke was our first sale. And my wife always tells this story, but not too many customers later. Someone came in and they said, well, you know, I don't get it. I want my ice cream to be soft. And I said, oh, I can make it soft. And so I went in the back and I actually took the beads

and I added some ice cream mix. And I basically made her a, kind of a soft serve. And my wife just stared at me like, you know, we didn't open this store to make soft serve ice cream. And so I kind of learned my lesson, you know, to stick with what we had. And, you know, but what we found over the next few days, especially because we opened on a Friday night, so we weren't very busy. But Saturday we got a few customers in. And then when the TV spot ran, it was totally different. We had people kind of coming into the shop and actually

trying it. How were you making? enough of the products, were you literally, like, manually dripping the ice cream mix or the yogurt mix into liquid nitrogen yourself? Yeah, well, during that time when we were waiting on the store to be built, I designed a piece of equipment that could be described as a large cylinder. It probably held 30 or 40 gallons of liquid nitrogen. So I pumped the ice cream mix with a little peristaltic pump, which basically, basically, squeezes a hose, so it never comes in contact with the product. You basically use a hose. And I would run a two and a half gallon bag, which is pretty standard in the restaurant industry,

of a mix that I had made from a local dairy. Just like cream and milk and sugar. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And we would just add flavorings to that, and then we would pump it, let it drip through. And so after I ran two and a half gallons, I would take everything loose and I would pour it in the, bigger container and then scoop it into like cork containers and put it in the freezer. Right. Okay. So as a somewhat, it's something of a dip and dots connoisseur, myself, an expert with two

children, I know about the different flavors. What, you know, you have the rainbow sherbur and you've got the banana split, which has some chocolate and banana and vanilla beads in there and cookies and cream with different kinds of beads in there. What flavors were you serving? Well, in the beginning, on ice cream, it was vanilla, chocolate, strawberry, Neapolitan, which is a mixture of all three. We had a peanut butter, a mint chocolate, but we also had a lot of yogurts. I think we had a strawberry cheesecake yogurt. We had a pinia colada yogurt and, of course, vanilla and chocolate. So almost more yogurts than ice cream when we first got started.

So how did the store do? It didn't do that well. We ended up on the wrong side of town. Remember we had taken the advice of this guy that ended up being kind of a shyster. Yeah. But, you know, I think our total sales for that whole nine-month period was like $52,000. And, of course, we had more than $52,000 in expense, I can assure you. So even though we did all the work ourselves, I think we did hire, you know, just three or four, like, part-time employees from time to time for weekends.

But for the most part, we... But it was you and your wife. Yeah. And my five-year-old daughter, she would run the cash register for us sometimes. And she'd take a nap in the corner sometimes. But yeah, so we ran the store. Can you remind me what your wife's name is? It's Kay.

K, right, okay. So it's the three of you. It's you, K and your daughter, running this store more or less. Nine months, you close it down. It's not working. You cannot keep up. Right. What was your financial situation like at that point?

It was pretty not very good. So your instinct was not to walk away. from dipping dots entirely, but to stick with it? Yes, I mean, at that point, I knew that we had had enough positive reactions that it had a chance to work. I mean, we had a few other things going on while we were running the store. Like we took it to the state fair up in Illinois and gave out samples up there and got reactions. And so eventually we started doing a few little fairs and festivals. And we started talking about theme parks.

And, of course, we thought, well, there's no way we can get into a theme park. Nobody knows us or what we're about. But my sister Connie, she said, well, I'm going to call around a couple places. So she actually called down to Opryland Theme Park in Nashville. It was like a country music theme park, right? Right. And it was a very nice park. So she called down there.

She got a hold of the food service supervisor. And she would describe what we had. And he would ask, it's almost funny to hear her tell the story. But he would ask her questions like, well, how long has it been around? Oh, it's brand new. Well, well, how do you do with sales? Oh, well, we don't sell very much of it. Every question he asked, it was she didn't have a good answer for it.

And then she knew that we weren't going to get an appointment. But then at the very last he said, well, why don't you guys come down and see us on such and such date? This is, I think, around what, 1988 or maybe early 89. Exactly. And so they actually agreed to put the product into the park. Wait, how did you convince them? You took samples down and you got a meeting with them and you explained what it is and everything? And that was it?

Yeah. They look for new things, and they really like the taste of it. And they got so excited about it. They were building a new ride in the park called Chaos, which was an indoor roller coaster. And they wanted to feature it in this. And they started doing these projections about how much they would sell. They estimated they would sell 100 gallons a day. And my little machine would only make four gallons an hour.

So I figured, okay, well, we're going to have to go into the ice. ice cream business. We're going to have to actually build a bigger machine. And so we made the decision to kind of move back home because we had a little two acre piece of land that my dad had given all of his kids two acres of land. And we put a trailer on there when we got married. And then, of course, my daughter grew up there the first four years. But we had built a garage on that piece of land. This is back in southern Illinois on the farm. Right. On the family farm. Yeah. We decided that we were going to convert this little garage into an ice cream plant and supply Opry land with When you got, when Opelan said, yep, we want to do this with you, want to partner with you, did they give you like a cash advance? I mean, how did you finance? Because you were going to have to make a lot of ice cream ahead of the, you know, of your opening at Opeland. How did you finance? Well, no, they did not give a cash advance. And what happened is my dad and my mom said, you know, we want to, we want to try to help you raise a little bit of money and see if we can make this thing work.

So they went to the bank and the value of land at the time wasn't really, really strong, but it was strong enough that we could get a $30,000 loan. And that was really, my wife and I'd already run out of money and we were in credit card dead. And by then we were all kind of partnered together. My dad and my sister had a little bit ownership in the company. And so we started converting this little garage into an ice cream plant. And we're expecting to make all this cash, you know, from off your land. but it didn't work out that way.

Yeah, why? What happened? When Offreeland opened up in 89, they had to rush to get their ride done. So our concession area that we had been shown got changed. And so there was not near the demand for our product. In fact, when people got to our little stand, they thought they were getting ready to get on the ride so nobody would buy anything. And so these 100 gallons a day projections ended up being more like two gallons a day or something like that. Wow. So when it didn't do real well the first year, of course, and then the second year came around.

They still like the product. They still liked us. So this year we want to get your product out closer to where the customer is where they don't think they're getting on a roller coaster ride. So this is when we kind of jointly came up with the kiosk concept, which you see in many theme parks today. It's a little standalone ice cream stand where someone stands behind and sells it. Because up until this point, they were just selling Dippendatts. where they were also selling chicken fingers and burgers and fries. Yeah, cotton candy and everything else.

So you wouldn't really even know what it was. You wouldn't ask for it. Right. So we were excited again. We'd already kind of went through one year of failure there. But again, they weren't ordering very much product. So about halfway into the year, I was starting to inquire about, well, how come we're not selling very much?

And they said, well, and they were very honest with this. They said, when we get busy, we only have so many employees, so we don't even open the Dippendton. stand. We put them... Wow. And I said, so in other words, it's only being open like on a cloudy or rainy day or when you don't have a lot of people in the park. And they said, yeah, unfortunately, that's the way it is. And so at the end of that year, we got a nice letter from them, basically saying, you know, we really like you guys. We love your product, but we just haven't had success with it, so we need you to come and pick up your equipment. Well, this was at kind of the lowest point because, you know, by then we pretty much spent the money that my dad had went and borrowed on the farm,

And it was a pretty low point. Well, what happened, though, is that there was a guy, his name was Kenny Parapoli, and his father was actually the general manager of the park. And I never really met his father. Anyway, he told me, while I was picking up the equipment, he said, hey, you know what, I still think this could work. He said, we're actually getting a new food service supervisor. And he's coming from a different side of the park.

It's where they do the games and stuff. And I think he might be open to doing something a little bit differently. down and meet with him. I said, well, I'd love to. So he got me a meeting. And when I went down and talked to him, he liked the product. And he said, well, I understand it's not done very well here over the last two years. I said, no, it's not. I said, we've had success other places, though. And he said, well, it sounds like maybe we didn't do a very good job with it. And he said, I'll tell you what, if you can come up with a little bit of money to remodel this building, we have a building over by the Petting Zoo. If you want to turn that into an ice cream shop, we'll let you run it and just

pay us a percentage of sales. I said, well, that would be very interesting because we'd love to have access to all these people, but I didn't really know where we would get the money. And my sister and I went to a bank, and we found kind of a young loan officer. We were giving him samples and telling him about what we had and about our experience. And he said, there's no way I should really do this, but I'm going to recommend that we get you a loan. And we had to have $20,000. because that's kind of what the remodel was going to take and a few other things we had to buy.

But he helped us get that loan. And then at the same time, my dad was able to get an additional $18,000 on our land because the land prices are going up that year. And I mean, all those things that happen, I mean, obviously a series of lucky breaks. But with all that money, like, you guys had a lot on the line there. Right. I was very nervous during that period of time, mainly because we had put our family farm up for mortgage, and I knew how hard it was to get the family farm even halfway paid off.

I think because of that, though, it's kind of like when you hear the term vested interest, I mean, I had a very vested interest to make this work somehow, and that's kind of what kept me going. And we opened this ice cream store in Opryland on a weekend, and the temperature was, Well, it was snowing the night before when we were putting up the menu board. Thank God.

But even with that, the next day, though, we sold almost $300 worth of ice cream, which was higher than any day that they had done in the previous two years. Wow. And so when we finally got good weather the following weekend, we were actually doing close to $1,000 in sales, I think, on one of the days. So we were off and running. In just a moment when we come back, how Dippin'DOTS spread well beyond. Opry Land, but eventually faced a meltdown, brought on by debt, recession, and a whole bunch of lawyers. Stay with us, I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This from NPR. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz.

So it's the early 1990s, and dip and dots are doing pretty well at Opryland in Tennessee. And Kurt starts selling them to a few other places, a few restaurants, even a video store. And all of the dots, they're shipped in dry ice from his little factory in Illinois. But one day, two women show up and they want to sell the dots way up in Minnesota. And they ask Kurt if you can make them a machine to make their own dip in dots. And I said, well, gosh, I don't know. I mean, I guess you could. I said this one's kind of a manual machine.

I can probably make one that would be a little more automated. Well, anyway, long story short, after a couple of months. months of talking with them. We actually sold a piece of equipment to them. And I think the total sale was like $20,000 by the time we installed it. Now, here's, here's some curious about it. I mean, it sounds like the value of your product was really in the IP. You had invented this product, and yet somebody wanted to make it themselves and you just sold them a machine without any concern that they would go on and just kind of rip you off? Well, we actually had a lot of concerns, but I think sometimes you're just in a position where

you have to say, you know, well, I've got to take a risk because we need the money, you know. Yeah. And that's kind of where we were at that time. Now, that's the only time we ever really did that. Yeah. And I think, and I like what you just said because I think a lot of people do look at me sometimes and think I was almost naive in some of the things that I did and some of the things I tried. but I try to tell people, like if I'm talking to a group of college kids or something like that, I'm like, you know, I really wish that business going forward there would be more trust because sometimes you just have to trust and give things a chance. And you will get burnt a lot of times, but you have to stay open-minded to get to the next level as well. So it's sort of the early 90s.

You start to find your footing at Opryland. do you remember, like, by what point did you start to see some money coming in, like, where you thought, hey, we're going to be okay? Well, it would have been 1991 that we would have started getting some actual income from Opryland. I think that first year, we ended up doing $350,000 in sales. Wow. And then I guess, like right around that time, you guys started to get into a few more theme parks, right? Right. We ended up getting into the Kennedy Space Center in the summer of 1992. Wow.

And my wife and daughter, and I drove down in basically an old farm pickup that we used to deliver product in. And we put a kiosk in. It was a blue and white kiosk. And they wanted it to say, they didn't want to say dipping dots. They wanted it to say space dots. Uh-huh. And so we had come up with the term ice cream of the future the year before. Ice cream of the future. Right. So we had come up with that term and it worked. You got people to stop and see what we were doing. And so I was setting it up one morning. We were trying to get open like it was around 10 o'clock in the morning. And one of them came over close to where I was at. And I said, how's it going? I said, are you sampling? And she said, no. She said, people have just lined up to buy it. Wow. And I said, what do you mean? I said, I've never seen that before. And I went over to where the kiosk was. And sure enough, we had. like seven or eight people in line. And I thought, holy cow, you know, this is amazing. And all of a

sudden we went from telling them how much they'd have to sample to, how are we going to keep enough product down here. Wow. Is that because people wanted to try the ice cream of the future? Yeah, I think, you know, it was just a perfect environment for it. You've got this bright blue and white kiosk that says, you know, space dots ice cream of the future. And somehow it just clicked. And so they started going through where Opry land had projected one time to, you know, to do 100 gallons a day, they were almost doing that much. I mean, they were... At the Kennedy Space Center.

Right. And as you were kind of growing in the mid-90s, where were you, were you in Kay, your wife, were you guys mainly working at the Opry land kiosk, or did you just start to travel around to various kiosks that were selling Dippendots? Well, during the theme park months, we ended up renting an apartment in Nashville,

and we would take other people down. with us because it took several people to run the park. So sometimes we would have six or seven or eight employees. And instead of putting them in hotel rooms, we rented one apartment. And my mother was a nurse. And she would get these things we called eggshell mattresses that were little foam rubber things, you know, like once they were used and they threw them away, she would grab them and bring them home. And we would use those for beds for people to sleep on. So Kay and I were typically in Opryland most of the time. during the summer. And what about the revenue? You know, by the mid-90s, was revenue pretty good?

Did you, were you able to kind of pay back the loans? Were you, I mean, were you making a lot of money at that point? Or was it still kind of touch and go? Well, by the mid-90s, we were starting to make a little bit of money. So within five years or so, we had reached a million dollars in sales on a wholesale level. And then in addition to that, we had the retail profits from Opryland, which it was starting to become profitable. And then, of course, the park shut down, unfortunately, because we just got it figured out how to make money there. But we were starting to get some revenue and not rolling in the dough by any means because when you wholesale a product and you start getting customers, you always have to kind of bring up the back in. Like we had to figure out how to make kiosk.

We had to figure out how to keep freezers in stock. and we had to build, you know, we went from like the garage to a 2,000 square foot building that needed to be built out. So you're always spending pretty much what you made, but we were starting to generate some income at least in the mid-90s. I guess by the late 90s, you decide, hey, you know, instead of selling to wholesalers and then they have kiosk, let's franchise this thing. Let's get people to take on a franchise and set it up in shopping malls and wherever.

And how many people signed up to become? franchisees? So we had 105 of our dealers sign our franchise contract. Okay. And then what were the terms? They'd have to obviously buy dipping dots from you at wholesale prices, right? Right. And then what was your take from that from the sales? We actually lowered our price when we converted to a franchise, but we did start collecting 4% of their sales. Four percent of your annual sales would go to dipping duts, which is a pretty good deal, actually. It's not, it's not bad at all. Right. How do you, by the way, how do you account for that? How do you make sure that people are actually giving you 4% of their annual sales? Well, that was a real problem because these folks were out doing fairs and festivals handling a lot of cash. We knew that we weren't getting all of our royalties at the end of the day.

But we pretty much knew how much product we were selling and we could estimate what we should be getting back. And eventually, many years later, we actually kind of changed the way that we collected. we actually started building the franchise fee into the product. It was kind of like you pay for the product and you paid an additional 10 cents a bag for the franchise royalty, if you will. And then we collected like a penny for the advertising fund and kind of set it up and did it that way. And it actually made it better for everyone. Do you remember what your annual sales were at their peak? At the peak, that would have been 2006.

We did almost 47 million in sales, I think it was right at 47. million. Wow. And that was wholesale sales. Wow. You know, I'm sort of curious because I've read that, you know, you also had some competitors, people who were trying to do what you were doing. There was one in particular called mini melts. And I guess this guy was making it in Texas. And it was a product pretty close to yours, to dip in dots. Right. And this actually turned into this like very complicated legal battle with lawsuits and counter lawsuits. And it lasted for like 10 years and cost you like 10. And cost you like 10. million dollars, is that right? It is. And, you know, I think at the time I probably was naive, I thought that, I really thought that our legal system, and I don't want to sound wrong, but I really thought you would get justice, if you will. Sure.

And all we really wanted the guy to do is to stop what he was doing because we felt like he was infringing a valid patent. Right. The first name that he used, when he was just directly infringing every step of our patent, was where we were dipping dots, ice cream of the future. The name of his company was Dots of Fun. Wow. Tomorrow's ice cream today.

Wow. You know, so totally playing what we were doing. And so we were suing him for, I think, around $16 million. Well, he countersued us for $10 million. And ours was based on infringement. His was based on antitrust because he, one of the defenses you have, if you're being sued for patent infringement and your car. red-handed is you can say, well, we want to see if the patent's valid.

So my patent basically got put on trial. And what they ended up doing is they said that our patent was going to be invalidated because of fraud that me and my patent attorney back in 1988, 89, perpetrated on the patent office. Well, there was no fraud. But when it came down, they basically said, well, you're going to lose your patent. That was hard enough. But then the judge said, well, because we proved that there was fraud, yes, you should have your attorney's fees paid.

So all of a sudden we were stuck with a $600,000 bill. Wow. Well, then the attorneys from Dallas that had been in all this time, they said, well, we want our attorney's piece paid. So we ended up having to come up with basically $4 million at the end of this lawsuit. So we had spent $6 million. We ended up spending four on them. Wow. And I had to spend an additional.

$750,000 to appeal this decision to get my name cleared that I had not committed fraud, but we did not get our patent back. It's ridiculous, to be honest with you, but that's... I mean, I'll say it. You don't have to say it, Kurt. At the end of the day, the only winners are lawyers. Well, you did say, and you're exactly right. And looking back, you know, a lot of... Some people ask me and say, well, what would you do different if you, you know, if you look back now? And I suppose the correct answer is, like, well, I would have settled, and then it wouldn't have cost me $10 million. But my answer is that I probably would do the same thing again because you're built the way you're built, you know. Yeah.

Here's what I'm wondering. 2007, a couple things happen. Sales start to slow. You've got to pay all this money for lawyers, and you've got to pay the lawyers of the other side of this lawsuit, which is crazy. And then 2008, financial crisis. It's like a perfect storm of just bad news. Do you start to feel the impact on the business pretty quickly? Well, we do.

You know, in 2007, we actually had almost identical sales that we had in 2006. I mean, within $100,000, we had another decent year in sales. But it was actually different for us because we were used to growing every year. So it was kind of a level in it. And it was a little concerning. But the real concerning part was the fact that milk prices had gone up. 34% that year. Gas prices start going up a lot between 2006 and 2007.

And then our liquid nitrogen cost went up like 10%. And so all of a sudden, on almost the same sales, we had went from like a net of two or three million dollars in profits to a loss, actually. And we're looking at it and thinking, wow, well, you know, hopefully it's a one-year thing. Nobody really thought about, I mean, the recession hadn't really started. yet. In fact, someone in our accounting department contacted our local bank. They said, hey, you know, we're having a rough year. We might not be able to pay this down the way we normally do or we want to talk to you about restructuring something. And the local bankers like, oh, yeah,

we're familiar with your business. You guys are, you know, you have $40 million in assets. And so they said, you know, look, we'll, we know you just spend a couple million dollars on your plant doing some things. We'll, you know, we'll look at all your collateral, you know, basically don't worry about it. We'll just give you the. We'll just give you the. three-month extension. The bank said this. The bank said this. But on the day that that three-month extension was due, we got an email that said, you're in default because you have not paid your credit line down. This puts all of your term loans in default as well. Wow. And of course, again, being a little bit stubborn, I'm like, well, we'll just go to another bank. Well, that's when

the banking crisis was starting to hit. So by the time we did all of our paperwork and everything and had one or two banks that were interested, all of a sudden, everything started going upside. Everybody just tightens up, all the doors shut, no money. Everything freezes. No one wants to give you money. So you have, you've got this $13 million in debt. And I guess from what I read, your creditors kind of also devalued your assets. And so it meant that there was a point where Dippendot's as a company owed the creditors more than you actually owned in assets.

Yeah, and that's the sad part about the way that this all works because fear comes into the play. A lot of things happened to where all of a sudden, yeah, we were upside down. I mean, there's no other way to say it. So you start this now what's going to become a multi-year, I think a three-year kind of standoff with your creditors trying to restructure these loans. Meantime, are sales declining, continuing to decline? they are and that that's the part that really um i mean part of our standoff and part of our strategy was that is that we know we'll pick right back up and we're going to have good sales next year you know we just got to survive until next year but i don't think anybody saw the

recession that we had at that time i don't think anyone knew how bad it was going to really be and yeah like i said fear sets in because i'm thinking we can sell our way through it but you know i think a lot of our franchisees and just everybody kind of wants to kind of hide under a rock till the storm's over. And so less product is sold. And before long, you've got a negative trend, which, you know, doesn't work out for you. What about your personal finances? Were they in trouble at that time, too? Yeah, you know, I mean, we could have taken the position of, well, you know, here's the keys of the building. You know, you bankers come in and figure out how to work it, and we could have walked

away and been okay. But, you know, we also had 200 employees. And by the way, I grew up on a farm in the second Forest County of the state of Illinois right next to the poorest county. And I knew growing up that, you know, the job that you get in that area, if you weren't farming, were you could be a teacher or you could work at the prison. And that was, you know, there was a few other little factories and things around there, but not much. And we had provided, you know, about 200 jobs for that area. I guess we were just thinking, you know, hey, we just got to get through this and everything's going to be better. I mean, I just kept that going and then, you know, 2008 comes 2009, 2010. I mean, it just keeps going on and on and on. And it certainly affected us personally

quite a bit. You essentially get to a point where you, you know, you can't, the banks are just not going to refinance this and you've got to figure it out. And you got to the point where you had to file for bankruptcy for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. At that point was the idea to restructure the company and come back to fight another day? Or did you think it was going to be the end of the road? Well, I always thought that Dippin' Dots would survive. It's such a strong brand. Yeah.

We actually felt like we're going to dig our way out of this. We just really need to work out of something with the bank. well, it ended up, you know, when you go into a bank and somebody wants your business, they're friendly just like anybody else trying to make a sale. But when you get on the wrong side of the bank, it's like you're dealing with, well, I don't know how to describe it, but you're not dealing with the same pleasant salespeople that you signed up with. Yeah.

So this meeting ended up getting a little bit heated. And they actually said, well, we're glad you could come up and meet. And unfortunately, this isn't going to work out. But by the way, we've actually already filed foreclosure papers on it. So we call them make a meeting in good faith. And while we're on our way up there, they're actually putting foreclosure papers together. Well, the only option you have at that point, if you don't want somebody coming in and running your business the next day, is that you can file for bankruptcy.

And I learned more about bankruptcy in those next few hours driving home than I ever knew. And so the idea is that, yeah, well, we'll file for a chapter 11 because we knew if we could just restructure the debt. if we could get somebody in there that would just work with us, that we could figure out how to make everything work. So the idea was you'd restructure and then come back and see if you could get it off the ground again. But what happened was somebody came in and made an offer to buy Dippendots. Right. So it was May of 2012. Chaparral, I think it's pronounced Chaparral Energy.

Scott Fisher, his dad, Mark Fisher made an offer bought Dippendots. and that was it. It was no longer your company. Were you sort of in a position where you kind of felt like you had to, you had no choice, you had to sell? Not exactly. I mean, the way that that happened was about three days after we had filed for Chapter 11. Of course, this hit the press, you know. Sure.

And I got an email from the Fisher's. I don't know what I said. Initial email was basically, you know, are you looking for an investor? And I thought, you know, yeah, I wouldn't mind that. Right. We thought, well, hey, you know, let's just be partners, you know. And we kind of structured up or kind of had kind of a deal that we kind of put together we thought would work for each entity. And so unfortunately in doing that, though, I kind of put my eggs in their basket.

And I don't want to be very negative here because I don't know everything that happened on their side. But basically, my deal with them kind of kept getting worse and worse to where I ended up with really. no ownership in the deal. They basically bought the company for the debt. They kept me on as CEO for three years and I was supposed to be able to earn back into the company, you know, based on performance. And we did have good performance once we got the bank out of the way. And with very little money being put into the company, we got our sales up 16 percent, you know, the rest of 2012. We went up 22% the next year and then about 25% in the third year. But there was a point in there where it was an automatically renewable agreement,

but it could be terminated by either side. And they dealt me out of Dippin' dots, basically. I don't know what the reason was exactly. They just said, you know, well, I think we're going to not renew your contract and we're going to run it ourselves. And so basically we were kind of left on the street. And what, you walked out of there with nothing? Well, I stayed there for three years, and I made a decent salary.

And we cooperated during that whole process of that six-month period of backing things out of bankruptcy and bringing in new owners because we thought we would always be a part of it at some level. You know, those are things that we might not have done a lot of the things we did. you know, had we known how things were going to turn out. But, again, we don't have any regrets. I mean, dipping nuts was great to us for over 25 years. And so we're not complainers. I understand.

What we've learned to do is just accept it, you know. And you get up and you fight the next day and you do something. You know, I always say to my wife, I said, hey, fortunately, we've been able to keep our health through all this. And we all know how to work. And, you know, we started this new coffee company. And it's kind of like we're back in 1988 again, to be honest with you. That's kind of where we've been the last year or two, just trying to take something that we know and do something similar to what we did. Which I guess we should mention that over the past few years, I guess two or three years, you started this company, 40 Below Joe, which makes coffee dots.

So, like, you know, like kind of dipping dots, but for coffee, like a shot of caffeine, right? Yeah, and I started playing with freezing espresso right out of the espresso machine with liquid nitrogen. And part of my thinking was that I'd always heard people like baristas at Starbucks and different places say, you know, you really want to use your espresso shot immediately because within seconds it starts breaking down, you know. And so I thought, well, what if you captured it right when it was made and froze it and then kept it at a very cold temperature? would it change? And in doing some experiments, I found that it didn't. You know, not only could you bring it back to life a day later, you could bring it back to life a month later.

This new venture, the 40 Below Joe, it may take off. But either way, your legacy, you know, your story is a story of incredible success and the odds were against you. And you kept coming back because you believe, in this thing and you got it to be a $40 million a year company, which is extraordinary. And then obviously, you know, we know what happened later. But when you think about it, do you feel like that success was the product of luck? Or do you think that success came primarily from how hard you worked?

I think luck always has a little bit to do with something. But I think it came, and not just me, I mean, believe me, I had, you know, a lot of family members and a lot of other people, you know, that were close to the company in the early days that worked really, really hard. But, no, I think luck always plays a little bit of a role, but I think most of it is just from perseverance that we all had. And the belief that we had in it because it's funny, you know, Dippendotch is just one of those things that when you get around it and you're working with it, it kind of takes on a life of it. its own. It's kind of like a magical thing, and we don't really know what made it that way. If you told me to go invent a product that all kids would like or the majority of kids would like, I wouldn't know where to start. It's just one of those things that happened. Yeah. And as much as we talked about how much we don't like the way the American legal system is,

I really believe in America because, you know, you have opportunities to do anything you can dream of. And I think I'm a perfect example of that. Right. During all of these points where, like, you almost failed, you ran out of money, you went back, you raised more money, you ran out of that money, then you got a lucky break, and then you had some success. Did Kay ever say at any point, hey, Kurt, like, you have a degree in microbiology. Like, let's get off of this hamster wheel. Let's just get a job with a paycheck. Let's just stop doing this. No, she never did. And, you know, Kay and I are high school sweethearts. We went together for five years and have been married almost 40 years now. But I think she just knew what she got, you know, and she kind of knew my personality.

And she's been with me every step of the way and has agreed with decisions that I've made, you know, right or wrong. Sounds like that was probably the greatest decision that you made. Yeah, I think so because we've certainly been through a lot together. and we are closer today than we probably ever have been. And it's just a new chapter of our life. And we'll just see where it takes us. That's Kurt Jones, founder of Dippendots, and his new company, 40 Below Joe,

which is now available in about 200 locations. And by the way, you can also enjoy 40 Below Joe in fully melted form. Kurt says that Kay actually likes to heat up the frozen espresso pellets in the microwave, add a bit of water and hazelnut creamer. and voila. She's got a hot cup of hazelnut Joe for breakfast. Hey, thanks so much for sticking around because it's time now for how you built that.

And this week, our story is about snacks. The majority of snacks that we eat in the U.S. are made of three things. They're made of corn, wheat, and rice. But Nadine Habaya thinks Americans should, you know, branch out a little. There are so many beautiful ingredients that exist in the rest of the world that we just don't know about yet. And Nadine actually discovered one of those beautiful ingredients about three years ago when she was hanging out with her friend Priol who'd just come back from a trip to India. She pulled out this bag of these homemade snacks that at first glance looked like popcorn.

What looked like popcorn to Nadine were actually popped water lily seeds. Popped white fluffy seeds. Harvested from lily pads that grow in northern India. and people there have been snacking on them for centuries. It has a very beautiful smokiness to it. It easily sort of dissolves in your mouth. And almost immediately, Nadine kind of got addicted to these crunchy little puffs. And she remembered saying to Priol, you know what, I bet we could sell these things.

Yes, it was that immediate. We looked at each other and we thought this is something we have to bring to the U.S. market. Now, conveniently for Nadine, she was in business school. at the time, and she started to do a little research on water lily seeds. They have about 50% more protein than popcorn. They have fewer calories in fat. And my favorite part is that they actually have no kernel, so there is nothing to get stuck in your teeth.

Anyway, Nadine decided to experiment with her own puffs. She went to an Indian specialty store near her apartment in Boston. She bought a bunch of puff seeds and made them with all different kinds of seasonings, cheese, Indian spices, saracha, and she started giving out samples to classmates and complete strangers, asking every question she could think of. If they would buy it, how much they would buy it for, what kind of flavors they wanted, what kind of texture were people looking for? And Nadine got enough positive feedback that she and Priol decided to order a half of a shipping container

full of puffed seeds from India. And then they started to look for a copacker who could roast and season them. And so we called tens of hundreds of different copackers to try to see if somebody would be willing to work with our product. But the second that somebody heard seed from India, they were like, nope. And they deemed was actually sympathetic to why the co-packers were saying no to her. An agricultural product from India, you need to be very sensitive with because the quality standards are not the same as they are. in the U.S. But eventually, Nadine's partner, Priya, was able to work with Indian farmers to make sure

the seeds were top quality, and the two of them were finally able to convince a co-packer to start roasting the snack. They called it Bohana, and last April, they launched. We definitely didn't know how people were going to take it. We just kind of hoped that people would love it as much as I did. And so far, so good. After about nine months on the market, Bohana snacks are sold online and in about 150 grocery and specialty stores across the Northeast, and the brand has made about $100,000 so far. And Nadine says they are no longer the only puffed water lily seeds on the market.

This snack is actually becoming a thing. We're seeing the same kind of thing happen with this ingredient around the world in the same way that we saw kinawa or assay or chia happen here. in the U.S. That's Nadine Habayev of Bohana. And if you want to find out more about the company or hear previous episodes, head to our podcast page, How I Built This.NPR.org. And of course, if you want to tell us your story, go to build.npr.org. And thanks so much for listening to the show this week.

You can subscribe at Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And while you're there, please do give us a review. You can also write to us at H-I-B-T at NPR.org. and if you want to send a tweet, it's at How I Built This or at Guy Raz. Our show is produced this week by James Delahousie with music composed by Ramtin Arablewe. Thanks also to Julia Carney, David Jha, Sanaz meshkampur, Neva Grant, and Jeff Rogers. I'm Guy Raz and you've been listening to How I Built This.