How I Built This with Guy Raz - Headspace: Andy Puddicombe and Rich Pierson

Episode Date: September 23, 2019

Andy Puddicombe is not your typical entrepreneur – in his early twenties, he gave away everything he owned to train as a Buddhist monk. But after ten years, he decided he wanted to bring the benefits of his meditation techniques to more people. While running a meditation clinic in London, Andy met Rich Pierson, who had burned out on his job at a high-powered London ad agency. Together, they founded Headspace in 2010. Nine years later, Headspace's guided meditation app has users in 190 countries and an annual revenue of over $100 million. PLUS in our postscript "How You Built That," how a quick fix to a broken pair of sunglasses inspired Jensen Brehm and Nikolai Paloni to create an armless set of shades: Ombraz Sunglasses. 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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This is a terrible business, like, well done, but enough's enough. From NPR, it's how I built this, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built. I'm Guy Raz, and on today's show how a Buddhist monk and a stressed-out marketing consultant sat down at a Starbucks and wound up launching headspace,

a meditation app that has millions of users around the world. So we've had several episodes that feature co-founders. And if there's one thing that's clear, it's that all of them brought different skills to the table. At Method, Adam Lowry mixed the ingredients to make the soap. Eric Ryan designed the now iconic bottles. At Reddit, Steve Huffman did the coding. Alexis O'Hanian did the content.

And at a way, Jen Rubio focused on building buzz, for the suitcases, Steph Corey figured out how to get them made. So you get the point, right? And it's almost hard to imagine any of these companies making it without both co-founders. And that is also probably the case with today's story, because it's a story of two totally different people with totally different strengths. One of them, Andy Puddlycomb, trained as a Buddhist monk for more than a decade. The other, Rich Pearson, was a rising star at a top-tier advertising agency in London. They met because Rich was spiraling. He was burnt out and looking for help. And Andy was the person he happened to come across. At the time, Andy was offering one-on-one

meditation sessions out of a back room of a doctor's office. Neither Andy nor Rich could have imagine that eventually the two of them would build a meditation app, Headspace, now used by millions of people, and a business that generates more than a hundred million dollars in annual revenue. And the story of how they came together at the exact right moment, each with the exact skill set they needed to co-found and build Headspace. Well, it's a pretty long journey. And Andy, the Buddhist monk, he would say that it took as long as it was supposed to. But it actually starts when Andy was growing up in the UK in the 1980s. He was first introduced to meditation as a kid.

Around the time, his parents' marriage started to fall apart. Yes, my parents split up at 10, and my mom was, I think, she was looking for a way to cope. Meditation definitely was within her kind of sphere of interest. And in Bristol, there was a local group. It was a TM group, Transcendental Meditation Group. And she decided that she was going to do a six-week course. And my sister, I found out, was going along with her, and I didn't want to be at home on my own. So I asked if I could join them.

Yeah, and it led to actually kind of a couple of years of doing that kind of thing into my early teens. This is in, like, the early 80s when meditation was by no means mainstream. I mean, even sort of Western. Oh, it was so outside of mainstream. Yeah. And did it feel weird or different? When you were a kid, did you feel like this was a little unusual? It did, but I don't know if I had that point of comparison.

You know, as a kid, you don't necessarily have the, this is weird, and that's not. My mom was going there, so I was going there. It wasn't until I told a really good friend of mine. He's still a very good friend of mine. I shared with him, confided at him that I'd been going to do this thing, because I knew it was a little bit kind of weird. And I went into school the next day. all the other kids in the class were sat on their desk, cross-legged, sort of oming at me as I walked in the room.

And it was at that point, I think then I registered that, oh, okay, this is definitely not something that is mainstream. And it's probably not something that I'm going to be able to talk about too much to other people. And what was it? Was it focusing on breathing? Do you remember what those group sessions were like? With TM, it's typically a mantra, so you're given sort of a word or a phrase and you repeat it over and over. for sort of a 20-minute period. And at that time, I found it really, really difficult

as an energetic young kid to sit there and be still and to focus. But it was definitely something that I still found, you know, I still looked back at it with a sense that it was a very positive influence at an early stage in my life. When you were like 16, because in the UK it's a little different than in the US, which is certainly at that time, like the drinking age, Yeah.

Probably wasn't really enforced, and it was typical for 15, 16-year-old kids to go to pops and get pints of beer. And drinking cultures is very different there. Were you into that? Were you part of that? I was very into that. By that stage, I was playing in a rugby team as well, and it was very much part of the culture. Yeah, we'd go out at the weekend with our fake ID and go and find some drinks. I read that around this time, like in your teens, why you were at.

at a pub one night. You went through a kind of a pretty traumatic experience. Yeah. What happened? It was Christmas Eve. We'd had a party at the local rugby club in Caneonsham. And so it was Christmas morning by the time we all sort of came out onto the street. And we were standing in a big group outside the club.

And a drunk driver came down the road and crashed into the group of us and I was just very lucky to be standing on the edge of the group, but it killed two people and injured, sort of put in sort of critical, like intensive care, like 12, 12 of the group. And, you know, every single one of us there that night dealt with, dealt with it in a different way. I think we were all very confused. You know, we're still young, like 18 years old, you know. I don't know if we ever really kind of know how to deal with that kind of thing. I just wanted to get away. I think we often do this, right?

The idea, the sense of getting away in a physical way, kind of we think that we're going to be able to outrun it mentally as well. And of course we never can. So, yeah, like I think a really, to this day, you know, kind of a really important and impactful part of my own journey. So I guess eventually, you left home, you went to college. And you started starting at a place called De Montfort University.

By the way, where is that? Yeah, it's in Bedford. So it was a sports college. And actually, I didn't go straight there. So my grades weren't good enough. So I went and spent a couple of years. And actually here in the US, doing some coaching sports. So I already trained prior to university.

I trained as a personal trainer. So I was already working in sort of gyms and things. I'm really enjoying that until eventually when I was 21 I got in as a, they called it as a mature student in England. It just basically means your grades don't have to be quite as good and you're a little bit older, so they let you in. I think it's a pity thing. And I started studying sports science. So you're at university and you decide to drop out in the middle of it. Yeah.

Why? What happened? Yeah, so I was just increasingly, you know, I just felt this. sense of disturbance or unsatisfactoriness. I kind of felt like I was doing something I enjoyed, but I just didn't feel like it was really making me happy. And at the time, I was going out with this girl, who lived there kind of locally.

And we talked a lot. You know, she was really into Buddhism and stuff. And, you know, she talked with a huge amount of admiration about these monks and nuns that would go away and meditate and try and understand their mind. you know, and it was just into the second year. It was pretty early on. Just had a day, you know, where all of a sudden that seemed to make a lot of sense.

I just, it was like an inexplicable feeling that I just had to do this. So much so that I went into university that same afternoon and said, I'm going to leave. This is what I'm going to do. So just, I just want to understand this. You are in your second year of college. Yeah. You're kind of just something's missing, which is not unusual for a young person in their 20s, early 20s to kind of experience. Yeah.

And you decide that you want to go and study Buddhism and become a monk. Yeah, I mean, just... Yeah. I would frame it ever so slightly differently. You're absolutely correct. But my experience of it was not that I sat there and chose to do it. I genuinely felt nothing else made sense. It didn't even feel like a choice.

I didn't sit there for days thinking, should I do this? Shouldn't I do this? What are the pros? What are the cons? It sounds, I'm aware of how strange that sounds. I just suddenly think one day you're going to quit college and become a Buddhist monk.

But at the time, for what it's worth, it felt like a calling that I couldn't sort of ignore. So this is like sort of really pre-internet, you know, browser days. Definitely. So you could just like go to the internet in your university library and like look up, you know, how to become a Buddhist monk or like, where do I go? Yeah. Yeah, so what did you?

So you decide that you're going to drop out of university and how do you even find out what to do? I mean, firstly, I just love the idea that that's even kind of a search option on Google these days, how to become a monk. But I guess it is. and there were probably people kind of Googling that. But no, back then, I'd read a little bit, and most of the stuff I had read was from Southeast Asia. So it has its home in Thailand and Vietnam and Sri Lanka.

So I started thinking, okay, I'm going to go to Thailand. I knew of a teacher who was there, who I really kind of respected. I enjoyed their writing. So I thought, okay, well, I'm going to go there. But this girlfriend of mine said, oh, a friend of mine has just come back from the Himalayas. She went to visit the Dalai Lama.

He was in northern India in this kind of small town. I went and got a lonely planet guy from the local library and looked it up and thought, well, that looks interesting. Okay, maybe I'll fly to Delhi instead. And, you know, the Dalai Lama's there. Must be a pretty good place. So I flew into Delhi. I think I'd done a little bit of research and I've printed some stuff out before I went.

And I knew of a retreat center. So I went to a retreat center and said kind of, you know, this is, this is what I'd like to do. Could I just start off maybe by. working here, kind of maybe doing some retreat. And I was there for probably six months or so before then going on to Thailand and Burma sort of to actually train in a monastery. And when you got there to Burma, what, like, what was a commitment you were making? Like, how long were you going to be there? In that particular tradition, you don't make a time commitment. I did it later on, in the Tibetan tradition I did. But I started training as a novice monk. And it was, of all the

of all the training, it was really full on. It was way more full on than what I'd come from in India. Yeah, I mean, what do you mean? Like, what was a typical day like? So in Burma, it was just meditation. So we were doing an 18-hour day. So it's eight hours of sitting and eight hours of walking meditation, all in the same room.

Plus, then there are two hours for eating. At five in the morning and 11, you'd have lunch, and then no eating after midday. And then you'd have somewhere around three, three and a half hours sleep at night time. And that was it, seven days a week. Wow. So it was a really, I mean, really kind of quite extreme.

Retrospectively, I think I would have done things a little differently. There was no one there. There were no English people there. There was no one who spoke really English. Even my teacher there didn't really speak any English. So every afternoon I had 10 minutes with him. And I'd go and sit there and he'd look at me and he'd sort of smile and look very kind of warm and happy and sometimes I'd sit there and I'd smile and kind of laugh and other days I'd

sit there and I'd cry and he didn't really have anything to say because he didn't speak English sometimes he'd just speak Burmese anyway and I would just sit there and kind of you know so there wasn't a lot of instruction taking place yeah I've talked to people who've done vipasana which is like 10 days silent retreat and who've had like in certainly in the first few days really broken down you know really just emotional breakdowns is so hard um it's so really feel so isolating, you must have experienced that. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I definitely, I met a part of myself that I had never previously experienced, and it was

vulnerable, it was painful, challenging in ways. Yeah, I don't even know how to describe. Were you still thinking, yep, I want to become a monk? Like, I mean, to me, I think 90% of people would have just dropped out of that point said, this isn't for me. I think there's different ways you're looking at that guy. I think through the lens of a Buddhist monk, I think you just look at it and say,

well, it was karma, you know, kind of that was my journey and, you know, this is the journey I'm on. And I kind of, it did, you know when you're living your life and it just feels like you're in the right place and the right time, even if it's difficult, there's still a sense that this is,

this is just where I should be right now. So even when it was difficult, I still felt that this is where I should be right now. but yeah eventually kind of there was a point where I think I kept getting ill in Asia as well you know like that is the additional challenge it's not just the challenges of the mind it's the challenges of the stomach and the bowels as well and I remember eventually a teacher from Australia coming and he said look honestly he said if you want to kind of go and do like a year retreat or a two year retreat or something like that he said I'd probably try and do it in the west if you can he said find a good teacher but he said it's so much easier to do that So, yeah, I started sort of looking at some, some other places as well. And I met this teacher, this Tibetan Lama. And, you know, we talked a lot. By that stage, I'd already kind of done multiple years.

I don't know, probably four years, something like that, a training. And we talked to, we talked a lot. And I was so moved by his warmth, by his compassion, by his sense of joy. Things that I'd not necessarily, I'd witnessed a lot of awareness and focus and attention in other monasteries. but I hadn't really kind of seen this other sort of side. And, yeah, I made the decision. It was really easy, again, kind of actually. This is what I've been looking for.

And yeah, now, I don't know, how many years later, 25 years later, he's still my teacher now. So, Andy, I mean, during this period, like, I assume that you'd go home now and again, you know, to visit family and friends. When you did, like, what did they think of you? Did they feel like you changed a lot? Yeah, so I do remember going back,

So I was fully ordained and I remember walking down the high street. So I mean, this is a small town in the southwest of England. I'm walking down there in my bright sort of maroon robes and seeing kind of old school teachers and, you know, old mates. And then saying to my friends kind of, hey, be great to all meet up together. And they're like, sure, yeah, just come down to pub. We'll be there like where we always are. And I'm thinking in my mind, you know, there's this conflict of, oh, I'm a monk. I can't walk into a pub as a monk.

And maybe it's okay if I just drink water. And look, they're not going to meet me anywhere else because, like, genuinely, they've been sat in those same chairs for many years. Yeah. They weren't going to give them up. So I did. I walked into our local pub where we all used to hang out as teenagers. And I sat down around a table. I remember there were eight of us around this table.

I drank water. They drank beer. And we talked about the Himalayas. Wow. But I never felt like I lost touch with the character or the person. I grew up with. It wasn't like a different person. Yeah. It was just I was having a different experience.

Okay. I want to kind of fast forward just a couple years to the early 2000s because I guess at a certain point you actually wind up in Moscow, in Russia, teaching at a meditation center there. Yeah. And I guess you were sort of, you were supposed to be there, like, waiting until you get a spot at one of these long-term retreats. Is that right? Absolutely. So there was a four-year retreat. coming up at one of the monasteries. And this retreat just kept getting pushed back. So I found myself in Moscow for a number of years,

kind of teaching meditation but waiting to go into long-term retreat. And so I think on the one hand, I was thinking, okay, I want to make a long-term commitment to retreat and better understanding my mind. And on the other hand, I was getting this kind of experience of what does it mean to teach meditation, you know? And it wasn't what I'd set out to do, but I kind of accidentally found myself in a position where I was then teaching.

You were teaching meditation in Moscow to Russians in English? Correct. And mixed in with the Russians were a bunch of expats who lived in Moscow. And I got to know people who would come along to these centres, kind of alongside the sessions that we'd have at the center. I'd meet up with them. And then one of the expats had invited me to go in and teach his execs, an oil company in Russia.

And he said, look, you know, kind of you can't come in dressed as a Buddhist monk. You know, it's an oil company. We're in Moscow. And that had got me thinking about this whole idea of, you know, demystifying this and trying to make it more accessible. You go back to the UK in 2004 after a couple of years in Russia to study circus arts. This is a total, like, let's say out of left field. People are going to listen to this and say, wait,

What? I know. Wait, I think you were a monk. You were doing, when you were join the circus? What, what's story? Yeah. So it sounds crazy. I know.

It actually, stay with me, you guys. It does actually make more sense than it first sounds. What happened was I was in Moscow and I'd already made the decision actually to sort of hand back my robes to no longer be a monk. Why? So I found increasingly. increasingly over the years that I was there, that as I say, I was meeting people and I was finding a way of talking about meditation in a way that I had never experienced myself and but that seemed to really resonate with people. You found a way to explain it to people language that you.

Exactly. You wished you had had. Exactly that. So I found myself living in Moscow, still teaching in the meditation center, but no longer living as a monk. and I hadn't done any exercise for 10 years and I was really excited about doing some exercise and a friend of mine there was doing a degree at Moscow State Circus

and he said look you know I used to a lot of acrobatics and stuff and juggling and he was like why didn't you just come along you know meet some of my teachers so I did and I don't really kind of know how it happened but I was there and one of them said hey look you know you can do a degree in this back in London and I was already thinking

okay, how do I make this transition from Buddhist monk, living in the monastery, to kind of making this content more available? I'd no money. As a monk, you give away all your belonging. So I'd given away all my clothes, money, everything. So I was thinking, how am I going to go from Russia back to England? And I kind of saw an opportunity, I guess, as now a very mature student at 32, I was in a position where the government would essentially kind of pay for everything. Fund your education to study circus? So, yes, so they funded not only the degree, but they also funded my living as well. So, you know, I got into a situation where I didn't have to find kind of a job when I went

back to the UK. So during the day, I went to school and studied circus art. It was a big, big difference. And meantime, in your mind, you had this idea of, I think I can make meditation more accessible. Yeah, I mean, every available, I was up at 4 o'clock in the morning, writing content, and trying to work out. Kind of, okay, well, what is this thing that I want to do? But alongside that, running in parallel was, I managed to find a place where I could teach meditation, just doing one-to-one at that point. I found a doctor who ran an integrative health center in London

where they had everything from sort of rheumatic specialists to cardiac specialists, you know, right across the board, all different disciplines. And he had heard of mindfulness. And he said, well, look, if you can make it work here, then I'm happy to give you one of the clinics rooms. Who were the kinds of people who were going to see it? Were they people who were suffering from medical elements? Were the people who just had work stress?

or were they kind of hippie-dippy kind of people or people in suits and ties? Yeah. Yeah, I deliberately chose that clinic or that kind of approach because I didn't want it to be in an alternative kind of health clinic or something. I wanted it to feel really kind of mainstream. That was intentional. It was also in the city. It was in the financial district of London.

So most of the people I was seeing worked in the financial industry. They were struggling with depression, anxiety, insomnia, migraine. It was broad, but I would say that they were all struggling with many of the things that we all suffer with in life now. So in London, were you convening larger meditation groups, or was it mainly one-on-one groups? So I did, I'd started with some workshops. So in the clinic, I was primarily, yeah, but by that stage I'd finished kind of studying at the, at the at the school. I was working full time in the clinic, seeing anything from, I don't know, six to ten people a day. And I started at weekends. I did a few workshops. But it only really changed to

sort of much larger groups after I met my now very good, good friend, Rich, who's the co-founder of Headspace. So this is probably a good time to bring you, Ian Rich. You've been sitting here patiently. Yeah. Yeah. And that's, I understand it. Like, when you met Andy, you were I guess in your mid-20s and working in London at this sort of high-powered ad agency called BBAH. Is that right? Yeah, I was working on Kingley Street right in the middle of Soho, yeah. Right. So your, like, sort of day-to-day life was probably, like, working all day and, like, not getting much sleep.

And was that more or less what it was like? Yeah, I was working a lot. Like, we, you know, if we were pitching, we'd often work 15, 16-hour days. And we would, it was client services. So you were, you know, you were at the behest of clients. So you had to work crazy hours. But at the same time, there was just a lot of, there was a lot of drinking and partying that went with the culture.

And it was a way to kind of really let off steam. Everyone worked really hard and played really, really hard. It was very hard living, I would say, for in those early years when I was working for sure. Did you like that life? Well, I loved, to be honest with you, I absolutely loved it when I felt like I'd found my career calling. and I loved that I could be around creative people

and come up with creative kind of products. Over time, I think when I gave up drinking, when I kind of decided that I was not going to kind of live as hard, you know, I just knew I didn't want to do that anymore. And I kind of felt the kind of the shallow nature of selling people things that they maybe didn't want. And I just wasn't getting, I just wasn't getting joy from that experience. And I didn't know what I wanted to do.

And I was getting acupuncture at the time. because I was just getting more and more anxious, as I kind of didn't really feel like I understood my place in the world. And then the person that was giving me the acupuncture said, and I was obviously telling me about my job and how unhappy I was, said, look, I've actually got a course starting next month. Have you ever thought about being an acupuncturist? I think you'd be a brilliant acupuncturist.

And I said, no, I've never considered that. But I, yeah, I went in the next week and I quit. decided I was going to go and become an acupuncturist. Yeah, that's how that happened. Wow. So did you start taking classes? Yeah, I just felt like I wanted to do something that had some impact. And so I started the course three days a week in a normal academic kind of calendar.

And then I was freelancing for the rest of the time to kind of make money. Do freelance advertising? Well, freelance kind of just marketing and advice. It was weird. When I kind of quit my job, lots of people reached out. And so I kind of managed to cobble together quite a few independent jobs that was enough to kind of pay my mortgage and I got a flatmate. And I managed to kind of survive that way and pay for my course. So you're doing that. And how did you come across Andy? I mean, at that time, he's teaching meditation in the city in London. Did you hear about him from someone else? Yes, one of the, this guy called Adam Breeden who had a business called All Star Lanes and he had asked me to help him out with some marketing so I was helping him. Yeah.

We'd become good friends and I was open about, you know, how anxious I was feeling and just how that was getting progressively worse. And he'd been getting one-on-one lessons from Andy. And he suggested I should go and meet Andy. Like Andy had this clinic and he'd wanted some help with it. So it was the skill swap. You know, I met Andy and he had the clinic. And so he said, look, why don't, you know, I'll put you through the clinic experience. And I think I can help you.

And maybe you can help me with some ideas for the clinic. And Andy, what did you think that Rich could help you with? Did you think he might be able to help me figure out a way to get this out to more people? Yeah, I think, I think exactly that, you know. I could see that it was working for people. And people who previously wouldn't have looked at meditation were getting benefits. from it. At that time I was starting to put together, I was thinking, like, do I start trying to train other people to teach meditation? Do I try and take this into workplaces? I just didn't really

kind of, I had no idea. I put zero business experience, but also no idea how to, to brand it or anything, you know, kind of. And I just thought that Rich could, could help sort of help me, yeah, take this idea outside of the clinic and beyond. That's right. So there was a Starbucks that was over the road. And so we would, before the session, we would go over the road and Andy told me all his ideas. I'd give him a lot of ideas. And then we'd go over to the clinic and he would teach me meditation. So I really kind of started. It was a very much an exchange of skills with no real sense of where it would, where it would go. But Andy, I mean, what did you say too rich? Like, did you say, hey, you know, I want to start an education company. I want to make like pamphlets.

Like, was it, was it not that specific? I think it was more about, look, I really want to demystify meditation. I want to get meditation out. I want to get more people meditating. I don't know how to do it kind of outside of the clinic. At which point I said, how do you feel about the name? Because it was called the, I really want to demystify meditation. Talk to me about the name.

It was called Asunia. That's right. Which Andy can, but is. That was the name of your clinic, Asunia? Yeah, Asunia. It was called Asunia. So Sunya, Sonia and Asunata, which sort of old Sanskrit words. But Asunia means kind of bringing the, making something real out of emptiness.

And so the sentiment of it was kind of right in the sense that kind of I wanted to bring something into the world that kind of, you know, people hadn't necessarily experienced. But I mean, an old Sanskrit name, probably not the right way to demystify something. So you guys start this process of just kind of brainstorming. In the meantime, Rich, you're going through a course, right? Like a meditation course. Yeah, Andy's teaching me as he would his clients in the clinic. It was a 10-week course, and it was just a really good kind of training experience. The aim of it at the start, it really was just the kind of simple exchange.

This was almost like a barter. It's not a great word, but like you gave, Andy gave Rich free meditation sessions, and Rich you gave Andy free consulting. Yeah, that was. very much how it worked. Yeah. I've got the better end of that deal. Like who was going to lose more money out of it?

Because Rich, you're probably charging a lot of money for your consulting fee. I think I got the bad thing. No, I don't, no, honestly. I do genuinely, I kind of, you know, I remember when I, the second time I went to him, I basically wrote out a stream of consciousness of everything that was in my mind. Because I couldn't make sense of it. And so I didn't know how to explain in words what was going on in my mind. and so I just wrote this

when I think back of this, this madness of a like double-sided kind of 18 sides of pure drivel really when I think about it and Andy I gave it to Andy and said look this is what's going on and he patiently read every single word in front of me and never like

a look of judgment or anything on his face and at the end of it it was just like look I think one I think this is like very normal and two you know I think I can help you with it and so to hear that when you felt desperate is, yeah, one of the kindest things anyone can ever do for you. So I think, I genuinely definitely think I got the better, I got the better end of the deal than Andy.

So, Andy, I imagine that most of the people who came inside you really liked you because you are there to help them. What did you like about Rich? Did you, I mean, there must have been some kind of connection between the two of you pretty quickly. Yeah. You know, obviously we got on very well, but we had a shared sense of anything is possible. I think that was just our character. I think whether we were born with it, we kind of got brought up in different households, but we both had a shared sense that anything was possible.

We both shared a naive optimism and ambition, I think. We both got energy from being with the other person. So you're meeting regularly and you're kind of brainstorming. And at what point did the two of you say, hey, let's do something together? Was it the feeling from the beginning or did that evolve? Well, I think, yeah, I don't think it was right from the beginning. I definitely didn't think that that was going to be the thing. I thought I was genuinely just helping Andy.

And I just felt very grateful that I was getting help with my anxiety. And so I just thought it was genuinely like a skill swap. But I think the moment it kind of became clear was when we were talking about, what it could be and we got a sense of that kind of shared understanding and Andy actually said to me would you come and would you like to work with me and I thought he was saying it's my business would you like to come and work for me and I was like yeah sure he said well I can't afford to kind of pay you but would you do it and I was like yeah of course and it was at that point Andy said to me, no, like as a 50-50 partner, like I want, let's start this thing together.

And that was the first time genuinely that I thought, oh, he actually wants to do a business with me. When we come back in just a moment, how Rich and Andy turned the one-on-one meditation experience in the clinic into an app used by millions of people all over the world. 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 right around 2010 when Andy Puddycombe and Rich Pearson decide to go into business together.

But at this point, they still don't really know what the business is going to be. They have a hunch that Andy's meditation training could help a lot of people. The problem is, how do you scale Andy? The very first idea, actually, that I think on the first or second time that we met in Starbucks, I said, you should put this on an app. And Andy's like, yeah, I like the idea, but it won't work because traditionally it's always been taught in a kind of teach-to-student model, like in a kind of live in person. And so that's when we started to play around with the idea of events and live events. So you were going to be like a live-events business?

We were. We were for several years. Two years, yeah, we were live events. We did live events. Andy, I had curiosity. I mean, Rich was kind of marinated in this world. He'd been in advertising and business development. Like, this was a totally normal pursuit. But you had been, like, you had given away all of your stuff, right? Like, you were, like, living in monasteries and wearing robes. Like, was a part of you uncomfortable with the, with the idea of, like, a business? Yeah, I don't know if we really thought of it as it was almost more like kind of how do we just change the behavior in the way people think about something. Obviously, to survive while I was working at the clinic, I'd had to charge money. And so I'd kind of got past that point.

That was at the beginning of the clinic, that was a really big leap for me to charge money to teach somebody meditation. felt so fundamentally different from where I'd come from. I spoke with enough teachers that really kind of coached me through that and help me understand that, well, that is the reality of living in the world. Like, your landlord is going to want some rent. And if you have a skill, it's kind of okay to put a value on that and in order to share it. So I'd gone through that, kind of more through the clinic process.

So by the time we got to Headspace, it was more about just this big idea of demystifying meditation and getting it out there. So you guys needed to build an events company or to, and events company is probably not the best description, but this idea that if you wanted to spread this idea, you still needed money to mount events and to advertise. So where did you go first? Well, we went to, Andy had some clients at the clinic that he'd worked with and people that he knew in Russia that had kind of contributed. So friends on that side. Went to my dad. my poor dad

Rich's dad by the way like have to give him a shout out he was amazing I mean honestly if it hadn't have been for Ian we we wouldn't have we wouldn't have made it and I remember going down

to see him and we presented him with this big kind of pitch we put together a business plan and everything and at the end of it he said I don't know if it was like it's a terrible idea

he said I don't think this idea is going to work but he said if anyone can make it work. He said, I think you two guys can. And he said, so, you know, I'm prepared to, I'm prepared to help. To give you a tenth of what you've asked for. Exactly. But it's, it's on you guys, not on the idea. Yeah. And I read that, um, that your dad invested or gave you 50,000 pounds, um, to help started. Yeah. But I'm, I mean, I'm wondering, I mean, did you tell him, you know, oh, we're going to have events and people are going to buy tickets and, you know, we're going to create a sustainable business that way? Or was there more like, I mean, how would he have seen a return on

his investment? At the time, it was purely just the events and we felt that we could build a business from that. And that was the business that my dad quite rightly actually in hindsight said would never make a good business and it didn't. But the thing that I would say is, one, he never ever once asked for any shares in the business or any return for any of the money that he gave us. And to the point that actually when we finally did do a fundraise in 2015, like our first proper fundraise, that was when we kind of forced him to take shares for the amount that he'd invested in the early days. But he never genuinely, he said to me, I was never expecting to see any of that money back. And how did you come up with a name, Headspace? It was one of those

beautiful moments. And trust me, there were so many bad names that we'd, I'd, uh, I'd, I don't remember them all, but we were, we were actually going, I think we were going down to, um, was it down to your dad's? See my dad. And we were on the way, on the way down there. And Rich kind of said, like, I really feel like it just, it needs to have something very tangible in there. Like the mind is so intangible.

Like, you know, kind of the word head, I think is really kind of clear what it, what it's about. And I was sat in a passenger seat and I said, yeah, but it needs to feel spacious. Like, that's what people want. That's what people are looking for. And we, you know, we looked at each other and went headspace. It was just one of those. And we, I mean, we'd spend months trying to go through brainstorm.

There's so many bad ideas. What were some of the names you were thinking? I've got some. One of them was recognition. I know that, which sounds like a bad German techno club in Berlin. There was recognition. There was like mind space. Oh, there was mind lab.

Mind lab, mine gym. Yeah. I mean, every combination that was none of them good. None of them are good All right So you have a little bit of capital to work with It's 2010 Yeah

And what's the first thing you do Do you like mount an event Tell him how you spent the money, Richie Oh God Tell him how you spent the money Well There's a few things But I mean I winced now

But the I felt Well we both felt Meditation was really intense manageable and you couldn't touch it and you can't see it and you can what is it and so we really wanted to create a physical experience so we spent off the 50,000 pounds we spent 20,000 pounds of it on the kind of physical collateral to give out at the event so we we designed these beautiful cards about 60 different cards leading you through the 10 steps of meditation tips for how to sit and it was

really the first version actually of the app in a way. Yeah, I think so the 20 grand went on that. And then I remember sitting on the back of Ritchie's moped, traveling around London, looking at trying to find the right venue. And we eventually settled on BAFTA. The film break. The film and television kind of fairly kind of luxy kind of feeling.

Just as far away from the community center vibe as we could get. Because we were trying to, you know, put meditation in this new space. and I think it was £10,000 a day. So basically on that first event, I think we'd already blown 30 before we even kind of turned up. Okay, so this first event happens, I guess, in May of 2010, right? And by the way, how many people showed up?

Yeah, we had about 200 people there. And this is in London at BAFTA. It was in London at BAFTA, yeah. And it was off the back of we'd had an article in the Times, and it launched about four weeks before the event. it was double-page spread which is really hard to get in the times and it said Britain's he's whittance it and he's Winston he's Winston's good. He said Britain's top meditation guru, the expert's expert and it was about how Andy had been

training some politicians and sports, you know, professional athletes who had been coming to the clinic and it was a kind of profile piece on Andy and that one it helped to sell tickets to the events and secondly it started a process where we managed to get a book deal, a three book deal with Hodder and Staunton. And the advance from that, which I think still at that time it was like one of the highest advances paid for a debut non-fiction author, really funded the rest of the business. Yeah, it really did. Yeah, exactly. It gave us, that was it, 180,000 pounds. Which at that time, at that stage in the business, that was huge.

transformational probably, yeah. It was. Because I have to imagine that the events that you launched weren't really generating because they're expensive, right? You've got to pay for a venue space and maybe provide... We were losing money on them, guy.

So describe what they were like. Would you sit like on a stage or in the front of the room and lead meditations? Was there food? Was there coffee, a tea? One of my favorite headspace moments was in the taxi on the way to the first event with Andy. and I just looked at him

and I've been so busy trying to work out all of the you know to get the event the logistics of the event I just turned in him I said look what have you got a plan for the day

do you know do you know what you're going to talk about and he's like I'm just working it out and I was thinking we're like five minutes from all these people turning up and it started like the first event was Andy on stage for eight hours

with some breaks it isn't an all day event you got to feel sorry for the audience but it was it was just It was me. It was me. In fact, probably I'd say all the BAFTA ones, right? So probably for the first, I don't know, six or eight events we did, that was the format.

It was, it was eight hours on stage. A break for lunch, like a couple of breaks kind of midway through morning and afternoon and a break for lunch. Yeah, we did. We used to try and put them on every four to six weeks. And they got shorter. Yeah. As they got shorter, so we went from a full day to a half day, from a half day to sort of two hours, then eventually down to 45 minutes or something.

And I think the shorter they became, the more. often we did them and we would do maybe sort of two or three in a day on a Saturday rather than sort of one big one every six weeks or something. But it was, it was like hindsight's no site, but we got to speak to pretty much every single person that came to those events. And I don't know, if you think back to 2010 in the UK, probably the most cynical market in the world at that time around this type of subject matter. So it was just really interesting for us to see how different people responded. We got feedback cards that were very detailed that we made people fill out before they weren't allowed to leave. They weren't allowed to leave until they filled them out. But it was brilliant because that really that input and that feedback, it was just a big research group for when we eventually did launch the app. So I guess it was 2012 when you launched the first version of the app. How did that happen? I mean, it sounds like Rich that you had already in your mind, you were thinking we've got to put out an app. And Andy, it sounds like you were a little. a bit reluctant about doing that.

So how did you kind of come to terms with turning it into an app? So we talked about how could we recreate that 10-week journey in the clinic? How could we kind of give somebody that sort of same level of sort of benefit? And definitely I was reluctant. But then when we, I think eventually they just locked me in a studio or something and just try and record some stuff and see what happens. but like yeah together we chatted and translated the 10 week course into a 365 day program and the reason that we got to that point was that we knew the business that we had wasn't

working and our friends and family had said look we really love you guys but we're not we're not giving you any more money this is a terrible business like well done but enough's enough and so with the last bit of cash that we had we managed to put in every single favour that we had left. And where were you recording the audio? I mean, did you have to get studio space and do that? Yeah, we, I mean, so much of headspace is down to generosity and kindness of friends and people we knew along the way.

And Rich had, you know, whenever we needed something or had a problem, he'd be like, oh, I know a guy. Well, I know a girl. And we phoned him up. And he had this friend, Dre, who's not the doctor. who's a very who's a very dear friend of both of us now and Drey was

I mean he was amazing I mean the first version of the app he basically gave us free access to his studio for the first couple of years right he had a recording studio he yeah he had yeah he had a recording studio as part of his business his production business and

I mean maybe we pay for the engineer but other than that I mean he did everything for free wow he was again we just couldn't done it with without him you would just you would record 10 minute meditations that you could yeah they're actually longer so it was and at that time we you know we just did them all real time and everything and so it was um yeah it was 10 minutes for 10 days 15 minutes for 15 days and then it was 20 minute meditations for the rest of the year and it was just your voice speaking a little bit silence coming in silence

like in real time yeah all in real time yeah and we put together and we put together this year-long course. But when it came to the app itself, like the coding part, did you like hire a tech team or did you just like have some outside company put it together for you? Well, my old agency at BBAH helped us. They gave us some kind of help in kind of pulling it together. And then we also had a lot of freelancers. So we had a freelancer in Bulgaria.

We had someone in India. We had people in London. We just, it was really as scrappy as we could make it just to get the thing up. And then we managed to convince, this was a really big thing for us. There were two things that happened that really helped. First thing is a woman called Kathy Waters at Virgin.

Agreed to put our content on every single Virgin Atlantic Plain. And we pitched her down at Gatwick. Yeah. And she came back a couple of weeks later and said, yeah, we're going to put it on. We're going to put it on Olaful. Which was massive. We're going to put Andy.

recordings on our planes. And were they going to pay you for this? Or do you just work for it? No. No. They definitely weren't going to affect it. But it was a great exposure, right? Marketing. It was massive.

It was massive. And then on the back of that, we then managed to convince the Guardian newspaper in the UK to put a million booklets on the front. And we didn't pay for it. The booklets of what? So we put together. They wanted content and we wanted exposure. So it was a great deal.

They said, could we come up with? a booklet on how to meditate. But they would actually kind of, you know, put the, pay for the booklets. Yeah. So we put together a little, a mini sort of manual for the start of the year on how to meditate and how to have a mindful year.

And did that immediately have an impact on the downloads of the app? That's exactly right. Like in that first month that we launched, we took 32,000 pounds in revenue in that first January. And that was, you know, based, that we'd never made a single penny in any month leading up to that. That was a really amazing moment for the team. And then it was like, oh, my God, this thing's going to fall down unless we rebuilt it.

All right, so you guys are scrappy, and this thing starts to get a little bit of traction. And then you decide, pretty early on, 2013, you're going to relocate. You're going to move, uproot your lives and move to Los Angeles. Yeah. And why? we were coming over to the US and we'd done an event in New York, which was covered by New York Times. And what we found was that every time we came over to the US, we were making great connections, great relationships, great friendships, but we would always be saying, oh, we're from the UK,

we're going back to the UK. And very often those conversations would be, well, great, when you move out to US or when your company kind of moves out here, let's pick these conversations up. And so it got us kind of chatting. and I think both of us, I mean, we used to love coming to California especially. It always felt like home for both of us, you know. I think we really connected with the feeling here.

And there were a lot of really good business kind of reasons for coming here. Yeah, I think, well, it's two things. I think in the UK you speak to someone about an idea and they'll give you a thousand reasons why you can't do it. And I think in America, you say the same idea and they go, there's a thousand reasons why it will work and have you thought about making it bigger and can I introduce you to X, Y, and Z?

And it's just a different, it's built into the culture and the psyche here in a way that it's not extra. Like you don't have to, it's kind of just part of the way that this country's being built. And I think that if you are positive and you dream big, like there is no

better place I think in the world to build a project like Headspace. And I think we felt like that. I do want to ask you, Andy, about shortly after you moved to California, you were diagnosed with cancer. I was, yeah. So all of a sudden, you guys moved business there and you're trying to grow it. And there's this huge setback.

First of all, you are fully recovered today. I am. Thank you. Yeah, I am. Yeah, we're five, I guess five years on from it now. Did you, I mean, this is a real tech. because you would work with people who are recovering from cancer treatment, probably the clinic in London. And it's different when it happens to you.

It is. And it's also different. You know, I'd spent many, many years kind of doing practices, specifically reflecting on one's own mortality and impermanence and death. And it's very different doing that in an abstract way in a monastery when you're healthy. But I did find, I found meditation was. kind of my rock throughout that period. It was it was something that I came back to not just once a day but sort of many many times a day. You know it's not that I was free from fear, don't get me wrong,

it was a scary time. But I think the temptation in those types of situations in life is to leap ahead to what might be what could be and to get kind of caught up in a lot of anxiety about that or maybe to even get into a kind of a conversation in your mind of you know is it fair or am I you know, and thankfully, like, that training kind of allowed me to, you know, as much as possible to stay fairly kind of present and not to get sort of too, too caught up in that stuff. So were you kind of out of commission for a while? I was, you know, so I, you know, the first week, obviously, you know, we didn't, I didn't even have medical insurance. We were so new in America.

And in the meantime, you know, we were having to establish ourselves. in the US and kind of get set up here and also manage the team back home as well because there were sort of, yeah, 12, 15 people in the office back in London. Yeah, it was, I think it was a challenging time like all round, really. It was a really, I didn't really know anyone. We didn't know anyone. We were really kind of out here on our own. And so there was no other choice.

And Andy had all these things booked in, all these speaking engagements, and the company needed money. And so we couldn't turn them down. and we'd signed contracts, so I had to learn how to kind of go out and do that. And it was a really challenging time, but also just to see, I think Andy and Lucinda and his wife go through that and feel very helpless. It's tricky. Like, it was just a really tricky mix of emotions, I would say, that I had and a lot of, just uncertainty.

I mean, guy, the load that rich to, like, alongside just running the business, the day-to-day. of running a fast kind of growing company. He basically took on all of the events and talking kind of, you know, engagements, which were in Europe and in Asia. And I mean, Rich was, I can't remember how many miles you flew in. There was a space of like a month. I mean, tens and tens of thousands. Just he was living on planes.

So it was really amazing to kind of watch, actually, just the capacity that he had to do that. When you guys got to LA, was it already clear that to build this into something bigger, you would have to raise outside money? Well, to be honest, we were a bit, not a bit, we were very nervous about it. And it took us a, well, I think it took me a long time actually to get comfortable with it. It was kind of irrational fear about losing control of the vision and the mission. I don't know if it was that irrational. It happens a lot.

It does happen a lot. And we probably heard a lot of bad stories. So when we got to California, it was, the product was, it really did take off in a different way. And the business was really making serious kind of money. And so at that point when, like, when people were coming to us saying, we want to invest in your company, I do think we had a lot of leverage because the business was generating a lot of cash and we didn't have many people working at the company. So it enabled us, we probably. to be honest, we probably went overboard, but we met over 60 different investment houses, would be the best way to describe it, until we found someone that we really felt aligned with

and we could get the deal done that would work for us. I'm trying to imagine, like, pitch meetings. I know that a lot of investors, when you got to California, were really interested and you probably didn't have to sort of sell them on the idea too hard. But Andy, I mean, just wondering, given, like, your background and, like, you know, you started to be a monk. and you gave up all your possessions and you had this epiphany as a, you know, 24-year-old, 23-year-old to live a simpler life. Now you are, all those things that you did were going to be built into a business that these investors were talking about scale and, you know, a billion-dollar company. And was a part of you uncomfortable with that?

I have to imagine it was. I'm sure there were moments of discomfort. I think the bigger kind of thing, look, if they're talking about scale, well, that's great. We were talking about the same thing. We wanted to get this out to as many people as possible. And we couldn't do that without the money. I think the temptation very often is to look at it in a very sort of black and white way, just in society in general and say kind of like, you know, okay, money's bad, you know.

You guys are trying to do this. It's good. Money's bad. I didn't really look at it in that way. I kind of, I think money can be incredibly helpful. You know, I was really excited about getting meditative. out there and getting it to more people. So that was a way of doing it. It seems like one of the ways you guys have also managed this process, because I think you've raised almost $75 million

after a few rounds. The first round was 2015. I think you raised about $30 million. That Rich, you handle the business side, really. And Andy, you kind of focus on just really the content. Yeah, they don't let me near the books, and rightly so. Yeah, Richie, Richie was after the Yeah, but we, you know, like Andy said, like we, we work more as a kind of creative partnership on the things that, you know, Andy's passionate about and I'm passionate about. And, yeah, the day-to-day running is, Andy's not involved in a lot of that. Yeah. You know, once you guys raised to these rounds, you had capital for marketing and to really push this out in new ways. And there was an ad. I think it came out in 2016. It was a,

It was the ad was something like, you know, when I meditate, I crush it. When I meditate, you know, I'm focused. And so some people criticize this and said, look, you know, meditation is not about performance. This is not the point of meditation is not to make you a better investment maker. It's not to make you a better football player. That is not what it's about. How do you feel about that when people say that? It was interesting that campaign because,

I think he actually did something really kind of helpful. We wanted to show people that meditation isn't this thing, you know, and we're going to tell you how you're going to benefit from it. We wanted to say, look, there is this skill. Anybody can learn this skill, and you can apply it with your own intention to any aspect of your life. The reality is, as I've seen over kind of a lifetime, is that very often the reason people start meditating

isn't the reason they necessarily continue meditating and that they might begin it because they want to be better on the football pitch but over time they start to realize it's showing up in other areas of their life as well and yes they're performing better but actually they're starting to have perhaps better relationships and

we wanted to break the mold and kind of say it's not just about feeling calm and having relaxation you know that kind of traditional way of thinking about meditation that it can also be active It can also be exciting. It can be joyful and it can be different. And I mean, I guess one of the reasons why you have to advertise your, you know, your app, your product is because you have competitors, right?

There are other meditation apps out there. Yeah. Which is like one of these kind of weird aspects about this whole world because you kind of expect the meditation space to be like peaceful and kind and gentle. But like this is a big business now, right? Yeah. There are other people in the space. So do you guys, I don't know, I mean, do you sort of, if you've got competitors, are you kind of looking over your shoulder to see what they're doing and are you trying to beat them?

No, I think there are different ways of kind of looking at it. Personally, I don't necessarily look at it as competition in the conventional kind of sense. I feel like we have a job to do. And we'll sort of keep doing that and what other people do, other people will do. And I don't really like the idea of, I think it's a very strange idea of competing for people's happiness. I mean, that sounds like a, it sounds kind of absurd in a way. So I kind of feel like, look, if our mission genuinely is to improve the health and happiness of the world, then if anyone's out there doing things that will genuinely improve the health and happiness of individuals,

then that's something to celebrate. It's not something to, you know, feel bad about from a competitive point of view. So anyone listening to this interview who's familiar, with Headspace, we'll recognize Andy's voice right away. I don't know, Andy, you probably like people come or to you in cafes. Are you Andy from Headspace? Sure. Because it's so distinct.

And I wonder, I mean, is Headspace a company and idea that can live without Andy's image and brand and personality behind it? Can definitely live without my image. I mean, this is a face for radio, trust me. But this is probably a question for Rich. I think, so if you think about it, we do have an English female voice in the product at the moment. So that shows you that the essence and the quality and the authenticity of the content is still there, but it's just delivered by someone else. So we're in French, we're in German, we're going to be in Spanish. There's other languages coming out this year and the same kind of idea.

So I definitely think it's not just about Andy's voice. And so as long as we always stay true to the way that we build products, I think there's a huge room to bring in other voices, other experts that aren't Andy. Yeah, but you almost have to. You have to think about what is, right, because the value of a company can't be wrapped up around a single personality. And I don't say that. I mean, I love Andy's true. I love listening to you, you know, on the app.

But if one day you both decide that you want to. step out of this and your investors want to sell it or whatever, it can't be wrapped around. No, that's correct. Exactly. And it's a lot of pressure to have it in just that. I think, I think that that cancer kind of scare actually was a really good, you know, a good wake up for for us to start thinking about that kind of, you know, it's too risky to have it. You know, what if that person, you know, or if I, in October by a bus or eaten by a shark or whatever happens in California. But, you know, like there is a risk, right? And so I think it's not only part of improving, you know,

it's de-risking things for the company, but it's also helping to improve the experience for our members as well. Andy, when you think about all that you had wanted when you were 23, 24, in a life of simplicity, you have a very complex life now. You guys have, what, 200-plus employees. You know, you've got investors. You've got to have investor calls. You've got family.

you're running a business people depend on you now. That's a very different life than the one that you had originally signed up for. But do you prefer it this way? I honestly can't compare the two. I can't say, I can't look at one and say I prefer it to the other because for me they're not separate. Obviously they are different experiences of life, different environments. but the mind's still the same, right?

And I didn't necessarily go into the monastery because that was necessarily how I would always want to live. It was more I thought it would take that long for me to understand my mind. And I feel really lucky to have been in a position where I was able to go to that environment, to experience the simplicity of that, and then have this incredible, almost what feels like a second chapter, where I get to kind of share that.

But it's a, you know, it's something that, all the kind of complications and stuff, yeah, they're not easy, but you kind of, you live with them because you care about it. How much of what happened with Headspace do you attribute to your hard work and your intelligence and your skill and how much to just luck? Did the laugh give it away? Yeah, I think, I don't know, I would describe it as just a lot of jazz. generosity, I'd say. It's one of the things that without that from a lot of people that really did just believe in us in the early days. Maybe you classify that as luck, I don't know, probably. But I would also say we've worked really, really hard. As hard as, you know, I've never been more committed to anything in my whole life because our hearts are in it. Yeah, I think there's just a set of ingredients that come together and we've contributed to that. But we've often said as well that, that sometimes. Sometimes it feels like there's just this, there's this momentum. It's almost like a train that's just going.

And it's like we grabbed on to the back of it. And to start with, we felt like we were kind of, you know, sort of just comfortably sort of traveling along. And then it just sort of picked up a load of speed. And now we're just hanging onto it at the back of the train. Because it's been incredible to be a, we feel like we are part of something rather than necessarily making something happen. That's Andy Puddycombe and Rich Pearson, co-founders of Headspace. Today, Headspace has millions of users in 190 countries and a last reported valuation of $320 million. And even though Andy is no longer the only voice narrating on the Headspace app these days,

he and Rich joke that if anything ever happens to him, at least he still have hours and hours of his meditation recordings. So I think they've worked it out as a couple of thousand kind of in total. So if you are eaten by a shark, there's a thousand hours that are still there. on tape. Exactly. Exactly. I'm hoping it's not going to go down that way, but look, if it does, yes.

Got that cheery, you know? Thanks for having us. And please do stick around because in just a moment, we're going to hear from you about the things you're building. Fall movies are about to heat up and Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR has you covered.

We'll tell you whether some of the big films on the way are as good as you're hoping they are, and will help build a list of gems you can uncover for yourself. Start your Oscars Prep Early with Pop Culture Happy Air from NPR. Listen and subscribe now. Hey, thanks so much for sticking around because it's time now for how you built that. And our story this week starts about nine years ago on top of a camel. I was on a camel safari in the Thar Desert in Western India.

This is Jensen Bram. And it was scorching hot. My Scandinavian skin was burnt to a crisp and then snap. Someone sat on my sunglasses. His only pair of sunglasses in the middle of the desert. The arms were completely crushed, totally destroyed. But fortunately, the front part of the frame was still intact. So Jensen took a piece of twine and tied it around the hinges

to secure what was left of the frames to his head. And it actually worked really well. They weren't falling down my nose. They didn't fall off as we were racing camels through these sand dunes. They didn't pinch his head or his ears. And when I didn't want them on, I could just drop them around my neck or put them in my pocket and not have to worry about breaking them. Jensen liked the sunglasses so much that when he got back to the U.S., he kept using them. He just took off the twine and replaced it with a leather cord.

And I wore that MacGyvered pair of sunglasses for the next five years. And wherever he went, people noticed them. Even strangers would come up to me on the street and be like, hey, where did you get those? And Jensen started thinking, you know, maybe I should start selling these things, like to bikers and backpackers and people like that. But I just didn't know where to begin. You know, sourcing the materials and finding a manufacturer is such a daunting task. So Jensen partnered with a friend from college named Nikolai, who knew a little about manufacturing,

and the two of them started to call around. They found a company to make the lenses for the sunglasses, but they still needed a really important component, the cord, to take the place of the sidearms. You know, it had to be soft because it's going around your head and over your ears, but it had to be rigid enough to kind of keep the sunglasses secure. It also had to look nice and elegant, so it couldn't just look like a shoelace. But the cord they started with was actually a shoelace from a high-end boot company, and it looked really great, but Jensen and Nikolai wanted to make it waterproof.

We would melt cedar beeswax in a pot in my kitchen and dip all these cords in the wax and then bake the cord in the other. for two or three minutes, pull it out and dab it dry, and then repeat the process. But in the end, those first cotton cords kind of fell apart, and the guys had to keep looking. We must have gone through 12 to 15 different cord manufacturers. And when they finally found the right cord, they still had to find just the right thread for stitching it into a loop. But the first iteration came out, and it looked like someone had coughed up a hairball,

onto our cord. And by the way, at this point, Jensen and Nikolai were under a lot of pressure because they'd already done an Indiegogo campaign and had to assemble 3,000 pairs of sunglasses. And they were doing all of that by hand. Every pair has two cords, so we had to tie 6,000 cord ends, tie them, and then clip it, and then fuse it with heat, and then countersink it in the bead. After two months of working 12 to 17 hour days, And it was so stressful. Jensen and Nikolai were finally ready to ship out the glasses.

They got some great reviews from outdoor magazines. They got into a few REI stores, and they're doing pretty well online. And they're going to finish their first full year on the market with about a million dollars in sales. Oh, and they call the shades? Ombras. People always are like, Ombras, Ombras. It's Ombras, because Ombrah means shade in Italian. That's Jensen Brem, his partner is Nikolai Poloni, and they run Ombras.

out of Seattle. And for every pair sold, they plant 20 trees. If you want to find out more about Ombras or hear previous episodes, head to our podcast page, how I Built This.NPR.org. 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 HIBT 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 Casey Herman with music composed by Ramtinara Blui. Thanks also to Candice Lim, Julia Carney, Sanaz Mechkampur, Neva Grant, and Jeff Rogers.

Our intern is Sequoia Carrillo. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.