How I Built This with Guy Raz - JetBlue Airways: David Neeleman

Episode Date: February 4, 2019

In the mid-90s, David Neeleman wanted to launch a new airline. He had already co-created a regional airline out of Salt Lake City that was acquired by Southwest. And despite his admiration of Southwest's business model, Neeleman felt there was a market for a different kind of budget airline. He envisioned flights to cities other budget airlines avoided and excellent customer service, with high-tech amenities. In 2000, he launched JetBlue and in its first year, the company flew over 1 million people, and cultivated a loyal customer following. Then came the 2007 Valentine's Day ice storm. PLUS in our postscript "How You Built That," how Lisa Dalton turned a relationship mishap into a game-changing braille label that solves a daily problem for blind consumers. 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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Airbnb.ca.ca. slash host. Herb invited me to Ruth Chris Steakhouse in Dallas and said, this isn't going to work. You know, you're driving everybody insane in this company. And he reached across the table and held my hands. I was crying. And he said, everybody. Even the people that your biggest supporter said, you had to go. From NPR, it's how I built this, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built. I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how one man reinvented airline travel again and again and again to create one of the most innovative carriers in the U.S. JetBlue.

So a few days ago, I flew on a budget airline. You know, it's public radio, guys. Anyway, this was a short flight, so no big deal. I know what to expect. Non-refundable ticket, middle seat in the back of the plane. I board last, no recline, no legroom, no TV, no snacks, print my ticket out at home. And it's fine. That's the trade-off.

As long as I get to where I need to go safely, I'm more or less fine. But once in a while, the route I'm taking is one that JetBlue flies and the price is the same. And with that ticket, I get a seat that does recline. a snack and a beverage, really nice flight attendants, and even a little TV. Which is why when JetBlue debuted in 2000, it made such a big impact. It was a discount carrier that offered stuff the more premium airlines were already offering, or in some cases not offering, and customers noticed pretty fast. In less than a year, JetBlue flew more than a million passengers and quickly built a super loyal following.

And that was the vision of JetBlue's founder, David Nealiman, to build a more humane airline. But the thing is, David's passion for a better flying experience actually came from his own background, his own faith. David's family is Mormon, and the Mormon faith emphasizes civility. And every practicing Mormon is encouraged to go on a mission when they're in their late teens or early 20s. And back in the 1950s, David's father was sent on a mission. trip to Brazil. He loved it so much. He went back as a journalist and started a family, which is why David was born in Sao Paulo in 1959. And when he turned five, David's dad moved the family back to Salt Lake City, where being a Mormon was just kind of baked into everyday life.

I was, you know, a pretty conservative place. I mean, it was obviously a place that was founded by Brigham Young. And as they, you know, started the church, they moved across the country and my mom's side of the family were pioneers. They came and covered wagons. My grandmother, seven generations back, a lady by the name of Sally Hewlett, the family stories that she was given a book of Mormon by Joseph Smith himself, who was the founder of our church and a lot of people have those stories. I mean, almost everyone you meet in Salt Lake has a story of somebody who either crossed the plains or crossed the ocean or had a grandmother die on the planes. It was just kind of part of our lore of our religion and these pioneer families.

And as a kid, were you entrepreneurial in any way? Did you like wash cars or walk dogs or anything like that? My grandfather had a few grocery stores, small grocery stores. He called the miniature markets that were like fast food and we would make the sandwiches in the back and bring in fresh donuts and, you know, kind of a precursor to maybe a 7-Eleven, but everything was done fresh. So when I was nine years old, I got a job there standing on a milk crate, working the cash register, checking out people, you know, counting money. And so that was kind of my introduction to business. And my grandfather was a really kind of old school. He was born in Salt Lake, but his whole family came from Holland. And so, you know, he paid me 50 cents an hour, which

kind of made me mad because everyone else made a dollar an hour. He expected more out of me than the other kids. And he was really focused on customer service. If somebody... If there was something in the store that somebody wanted and then we didn't have it, he'd run out the back door and run over to Safeway and buy it and bring it back for him. He never wanted to lose a customer. You know, I looked back on those years and I didn't get to participate as much in high school and do things as sports as maybe as I would have wanted to do. But, you know, I think it probably taught me a lot about a lot of things.

Was Church a big sort of center of life for you as a kid going to services and going on Sunday and things like that? Yeah, I always was. I mean, it was three hours on a Sunday, and it's a cultural thing, you know, I think as much as a religious thing. So you have both elements. You know your neighbors.

You talk to them at church on Sunday. You have a boundaryed areas in our church where if you lived in a certain geographical area, then you have to go at this church, at this time. And when it was my time to serve a mission, there wasn't even a question. It was, you know, I'm going to go on a mission just like my dad did.

How were you as a student? Horrible. I was, you know, it's not that for lack of not wanting to be. I just, you know, it was something I discovered later in life, but I had a raging case of ADD and I know everyone likes to say they do today, but it was really something that was tough for me because I, you know, I was gregarious and I could get my way through things, but I couldn't read. I mean, it was really hard for me to read. And, you know, I would read a page in a book and I could tell you everything that I thought about why I was reading that page except for what was on that page. You couldn't concentrate on the book.

No. No, it was really hard. And, I mean, if you asked me today, what was my favorite book I read in high school? I couldn't tell you because I don't recall even reading a single book in high school. You know, I got through it, you know, with pretty well decent grades, but did horribly on the ACT. I think I got like an 18 or something. And I think my reading was below 10. My counselor said, I don't know how you got a score of the slow.

had you just marked C on every answer, you would have gotten a higher score than what you did. It's like you tried to get the lowest score possible. And this is what I learned about ADD afterwards. If it was something I was interested in, I would devour it. But if it was just something that I wasn't interested in, I just couldn't focus on it. It was really hard. I mean, this is like the 70s when people weren't really diagnosing ADD. It wasn't like a common thing that people talked about.

Now, it wasn't. And it wasn't until years like that. later when my little brother, I have a little brother that is 18 years younger than I am, almost 19 years, that he was diagnosed with it. And my mom, she read this book called Driven to Distraction by Dr. Hallowell. And my mom sent me the book and she said, you know, Mark's has been diagnosed with this. I think you might have this. And it was the, you know, I, of course didn't read the book, but I did read, there was 21 characters. characteristics of somebody who has ADD.

And I read those 21 things, and I just put the book down. And I just got tears in my eyes. And I go, wow, this is me. So I guess you were 19 when you went on your mission for the church. And basically, you are sort of assigned to a country to go and do mission work, right? Correct. And I was so fortunate to be assigned to Brazil. And I think part of the reason is because I was born there and I had a Brazilian passport.

So it was just, it's just kind of random. You just put it in and you receive your call and your call says you're going to Brazil. What was your impression of it? I mean, what stood out to you when you got there? You know, I had been there several times. But my dad being a journalist and being a foreign correspondent and, you know, he knew all the rich and famous. And so every time we would go visit Brazil, we were hanging out in sports clubs, we were hanging out at the beach, we're going to the best restaurants. And, you know, everything was just like, wow, Brazil is a cool place.

Everything's so amazing. But, you know, when you're a missionary, you don't hang out with those rich people. They've already got their gods, you know, it's their money or, you know, or whatever. They're not humble enough to change. It's really the people that are really downtrod and really down on their luck, those that have virtually nothing that listen to your message. And so I spent all my time with those people. And wow, it was an eye-opener for me. You know, obviously in the United States, we have disparity of income and classes,

but at least you have an ability to move from one class to another if you work hard and you're like, you know, you have some luck and, you know, you do certain things. You have student loans and other things. In Brazil, it's virtually impossible to do that. And it made me very resentful. And, you know, I really, in that, you know, I got tucked away. in my mind that I wanted to come back to Brazil and I wanted to do something to help these people at some point in time in my life and kind of make my contribution. And did you, because I'm just trying

to remember my experience seeing young, young missionaries. Like did you wear a black tie and a white shirt and like go around on a bike? Just like the guys in the play in New York City in the Book of Mormon. We didn't have a bike, but we had white shirts, short sleeve white shirts, you know, just a tie not necessarily a black tie in slacks. But I also, I was very successful in kind of, you know, being a leader in the first time I had ever done that before. And then, you know, also just learning discipline and kind of overcoming my ADD, being able to read scriptures and to learn a language. And when I came back for my mission, I was able to go back to university. And where I left getting C's and D's, I was home getting straight A's. Because, you know, it made me, I grew up a lot.

and it taught me discipline, which is something that I hadn't learned in my childhood, you know, because of my ADD. And it might be kind of a stretch, but, I mean, in some, in like a weird way, it's almost as if your experience as a missionary. Because, I mean, you are essentially pitching something to people. You're pitching, in this case, the word of God, right? You're pitching your faith and you're trying to convince people about what it's done for you and how. it's fulfilled your life. It's like business, right? You're pitching people something you believe in.

Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of companies that are in Provo, Utah, that do door-to-door cells of alarm systems and pest control and whatever. And, you know, they take all these guys that have come in, gals that have come home from missions that are kind of fearless now. And then they say, go sell alarm system or go sell pest control. That's so interesting, yeah. Some people go out for the summer and make $50,000.

just, you know, selling pest control or selling alarm systems door to door. So when you got back to the U.S., were you single at the time? I was. And, you know, got married right away and started having kids and went to work. Even while you were in college? Yeah, yeah. It's kind of what you do, you know. It's the way it works in the church.

You get home and you're encouraged to get married. And we got married in December and our first child was born on November 1st. So we didn't kind of 11 months later. And it was just kind of off to the races from there. When you got back and you started up at college again at the University of Utah, I guess you started a business, right, while you were a student? I did. I was sitting in my accounting class one day.

And I was talking to someone who was seated behind me. And her name was Lily Rona. I can still remember. And she told me about this guy who was, man who was a friend of her mothers that owned some time shares in Hawaii at this place called the Imperial Hawaii Resort, and he was having difficulty selling the timeshares. And so I got this idea to go talk to him. I said, give me his name, and I'll call him up, and his name was Al Lieber. And so I called him up, and I went down to meet with him, and I said, hey, how about if I just rent

your time shares out? Because he was paying a weekly maintenance fee on all of them, and it was kind of draining him. And I said, let me fill him. up and he said okay so i under the resort accommodation section of their local newspaper at the time i would just run little wandads and say hey hawaii condo for 75 dollars a night or whatever 50 bucks a night sleep six and so i'd started getting phone calls and i'd book him and i'd pay him 135 bucks i'd collect 400 bucks and then i'd just keep the difference so he was i was doing a couple days a day and next to you know i was making some pretty good money just uh filling up these condominiums and and then I started getting other ones and one day I I heard about an

airline it was right after deregulation this is like the early 80s yeah the early 80s 78 was deregulation so there were airlines that were kind of sprouting up so there was an airline called Pacific East and I called the guy that was running it in LA and I said hey I'm not a travel age or anything but if I send you some money will you can you send me some airline tickets and he said sure so I would send him the money he'd send me the tickets and then I would package them with these hotels and And then I would say $2.99, you can fly to Hawaii, but you got to drive to L.A. So people would say, oh, we love Hawaii.

Wow. You know, Utahans have always loved Hawaii. So they'd jump in their cars and they'd drive down to L.A., hop on this Pacific East old DC8 and fly over to Hawaii. You did this while you were a college student. You would just, like, create package holidays for people. Yeah, that's how I did it. And I eventually dropped out of college. The company was doing $6 million a year.

Wait, your company was doing $6 million a year? Yeah, and it was, I had a whole staff of people, and we were salespeople, people would come in and sit down, would show them brochures of different hotels that we had or different condos, because then I would call in Hawaii over to other places and say, hey, could I buy a block of rooms for 20 bucks a night that's okay. And so I just started packaging them. Wow. That was all working well until there was a new airline that started, and I was a little enamored with this because it was Hawaii Express and had a big pineapple on the tail and they flew 747s. So I said, well, I'm going to switch to these guys. So I started

buying tickets from them. And then right before Christmas, it was 1982, or maybe 1983, they called me up and said, you know, hey, we're ceasing operations tomorrow. And I said, you can't cease operations tomorrow. They said, well, we don't have any money. And I said, well, I've prepaid all these people who was right before Christmas. People had paid for their hotels, but I had no way of getting them over there. Of course, all the airplane tickets were full. I didn't have. have money to send everybody over there. And so it was kind of a disastrous time. And I learned a huge lesson from that that suited me well through the years. But it was obviously very difficult to go from a point where I had this thriving business to one day and the next, I virtually had

nothing. Wait, that wiped the business out? It did because I had prepaid every single ticket. And it was about a half a million dollars. And, you know, I probably had, you know, a couple hundred thousand that I had of my own money and you know I should have at the time just called everybody up and said like I could just give you half your money back but of course you know you file for bankruptcy not personally but it was the business and and then the you know the lawyers end up getting most everything so I was at the time I was in my early 20s I think it was 20 23 or 24 so like that I really didn't know anything about business or how this all work wow so you were like a living you were probably like thinking I'm

set. Like, this is going to be, like, I'm going to be a millionaire. Yeah, I was. I, you know, went out and bought myself a BMW. I thought I was, you know, things were great. You know, I never, I never bought another one again after that because I learned, I learned my lesson. You know, you're young, things are coming easy. It's good. The money, you know, I mean, you can imagine you, you know, your first condo you sell, you get to make 350 bucks on it. You're like, wow, that could last me for, for two weeks, just for that one sale, that one phone call. So it's started up fast, it was very successful, and then boom. Collapsed.

Collapsed, yeah. All right, so you are a college dropout with a failed business, and by that point you had at least one kid, I guess. Two kids by then. Two kids. So what did you do? What did you do for work? Well, my father-in-law had a drapery business, and I was kind of working the back room,

kind of doing the accounting and stuff. So I went back to doing that. And my grandfather's grocery store, I went back to work on my grandfather's grocery store just like I did when I was nine years old. Without the crate, without standing on the crate, I guess. No, I didn't. I lost the milk crate. I could stand up the cash register. But yeah, it was pretty devastating.

I mean, it's like maybe they don't want to get out of bed and do anything. But, you know, I just kind of like said, I got to keep going. And so, and then I got a call from my uncle Stan who just happened to be. the estate lawyer for the Morris family, June and Mitch Morris. And June ran a very successful travel agency in Salt Lake City. It was dealing with mainly corporate travel at the time. And so Michael Stan called up and said, June Morris wants to talk to you about doing some of the things that you were doing on your own for her company. She was older than you, I guess, right? Oh, yeah. She's about the age of my parents. And so we sat down and she gave me her big smile and she said,

you know, if you come to work for me, I'll make sure you get a piece of the company. You know, we can do this together. And, you know, I really like what you did. And so she convinced me. She convinced me to do that. And so I kept the job at the store at night and I would go there during the day and called up all those hotels and said, hey, I'm back. And then I called up Hawaiian Airlines. And I had this contract in my drawer at my old office.

office, it was a charter contract to fly a Hawaiian Airlines chartered from Hawaii to Salt Lake directly, you know, bypassing the drive to L.A. And I just didn't have, I was just getting together the bond, you needed a $250,000 bond because it was a public charter. And I was just trying to arrange that when the other airline failed. So I went back to the drawer. I got the contract out. I went to June and I said, if Mitch, your husband can help with this bond, we can launch these flights directly from Salt Lake City. A Hawaiian Airlines flight direct from Salt Lake to Honolulu or wherever. Yeah, it was a what we called a reverse rotation.

The plane would on a Friday night would start in Honolulu and it would fly nonstop to Salt Lake. And then it would turn around Saturday morning and fly back. So that was the flight. You'd spend basically seven days, six nights in Hawaii and then fly direct in the whole package. It was $3.99 because we were buying the charter flight. And so we started this company called Morris Air Charters. And that was kind of the hallmark of our trip was this DC8 that would make this trip. And so Hawaiian called me after one season and said, hey, this plane's going to be going back in about six months.

Can we come and base the plane in Salt Lake? And so you can fly straight to Hawaii and back. But for the other six days a week, is there anything you want to do with this airplane? And I said, yeah, I want to fly to L.A. You know, there's lots of Mormons in L.A. and lots of family interests between the two. my grandparents were there. And, you know, I kind of spent my whole life in the backseat, you know, back of a station wagon driving Death Valley between Salt Lake and L.A. And I thought if I could sell those tickets for cheap and I had read up a lot on Southwest Airlines,

you know, Herb was my, Herb Keller, who was my hero. And I had read every annual report ever on those guys. It was kind of my dream to be like them. So I put flights on to Los Angeles for $69 using this old airplane flying into the old West Imperial Terminal. So this was a Hawaiian Airlines plane that was just parked in Salt Lake for six days a week because it was going to Honolulu once a week. And they said, look, you can lease this from us and do whatever you want with it for those other days. Right. So I said, let's fly to L.A. three days a week.

And so we ran an ad in the newspaper. And the first day I didn't give me calls. And then I remember coming in the next day at work. and I heard Verla, who is our receptionist, saying, I have 24 Los Angeles calls on home. Will somebody please help me? And so I went running it there and started answering the phones myself and booking people on pieces of paper.

And it was funny because there was a glitch in the system. So we were basically overbooking every flight by 100 people. As we were booking everyone, we lost a little bit of money on that. But, you know, it was kind of a big success from the very get-go. So June Morris had set up a travel agency, which then kind of focused on package tours and chartering planes. And that seems manageable. But then you essentially become an airline. Did you and June sit down? Did you ever sit down in June and say, hey, let's become an airline? Or did it just kind of happen that way? Well, it was about that time that Steve Hasey, who's a well-known entrepreneur in aircraft leasing business, he called up and said, hey, my wife's from Utah. You know, my relatives come flying. on you guys all the time. You need to get legitimate. I have some airplanes. I will lease you, but I want you to get your own airplane certificate. At this point, this is what, like mid-80s,

something like that? Yeah, it was probably late 80s. So Steve Uvarhazi, famous guy, he's made tons of money in aviation and funded one of the air and space museums outside Washington, D.C. Right. He comes to you, he says, hey, you should start your own airline with your own name on it? Right. And he said, I got a guy that can help you. And it was a guy named Yusto Schultz. And Yusto was an old FAA guy. So I called Yusto and he was living up in Idaho and he came down. It's okay, let's certify this airline. He's still alive. He's in his mid-90s, this guy. And he called me up recently and said, if you got a little something for me to do, I'm still here. But he went through the certification and June was really funny. She wanted a compass rose on the tell because that was. a logo of her travel business. So we put a compass rose and then she wanted it to be magenta. That was her color. And so we made these planes with a blue towel with a magenta compass rose. And it was called Morris Air. Who financed this? I mean, did June Morris and her husband finance this? Did you get investors to, because you had to buy planes, I guess, or lease them?

Well, initially we were just making enough cash flow. We were just using that and you know, you aren't buying the airplanes. You're just, you know, agreeing to pay them. like a monthly rent payment on the airplanes with leasing. And then they take a certain amount per hour in reserves for maintenance. And then when the plane's going for maintenance, they use that money to do it. So it doesn't require a lot of capital from the very beginning. And so we were just kind of bootstrapping it. And that's what we got. Mitch was really funny, though, because during those years where we were making money, Mitch wasn't a Mormon. And Mitch was June's husband. Yeah. He was really a great guy, one of the most amazing men. I've very,

ever met and he was a great mentor. But he'd say, okay, this is what we're going to do, guys. We're going to do a third to third and a third. Third's going to the government. A third is staying in the company and a third is going to be whiskey drinking money. That's our whiskey drinking money. So it's okay. So that was our term for what we distributed. So one year I got my, I was in my maybe 26 or 27 and I got my whiskey drinking money and it was enough for me to pay off my house. And so I went, the first thing I did is I went down to the bank where my family had done business forever. And, you know, where this banker was kind of knowing that my dad was always, he was always covered my dad's overdraft treks and my grandpa's overdraft checks kind of knew that these Nealermans,

you know, didn't have a lot of money. So I walked in there with, I think it was a $165,000 check. And I said, I just want to pay off my house. Wow. And he said, okay, took the money. and so by the time I got back to the office, June called me in and said, hey, your banker called and said that he had to inform me this, but someone in your company is embezzling money. She got the biggest kick out of that, so I went back and closed my account and moved on to another bank.

But she couldn't imagine that somebody, my age, kind of a neelman, that, you know, always hardworking people, but didn't have that kind of money. Yeah. could walk in and pay off their house when they were in their, you know, mid-20s. And then just a few years after you launch Morris Air, Southwest in 1993 buys the company for $130 million. I mean, it must have been incredible to have that happen. Well, a couple, you know, really incredible things happened around that time. I idolize Southwest.

And, you know, I kind of, I just like, I can't even tell you how. I felt about that company, you know, when I was building. I would pattern everything we did after Southwest. You know, there was a few things that we did at Morcerra that Southwest wasn't doing. One of them is that we invented e-ticket travel. I mean, the first ticketless travel was done at Morcerra in the world. And it all came about because a guy who worked from at the time named Stuart Thatcher came into my office and he goes, yeah, you know, I just went up to the fourth floor.

We have like 50 people up there printing tickets and stuffing them and mailing them out. why don't we just come up with a computer-driven form that we can just go through it, you know, automatically gets done and has a confirmation on it. We just mail people that way and we just accept their confirmation number. And I said, well, why don't we just give it to them over the phone? Why do we have to mail them anything? Because, well, people want to have something in their hand. So I said, well, let's get a fax number. We can still mail it to them, but we don't really need it at the airport. You know, rental cars don't have it. And so we didn't have a repository for that information. So I had a young guy that it was backing up the computers, and he kept telling me he could write us a new reservation system.

So I said, why don't you ride us a reservation system? And he said, I don't know if I can do it. And I said, well, I'll give you $20,000 and you can buy yourself a Jeep if you can do it. And so he went out and wrote the system and got it all done. And we launched this thing as the first e-ticket airline. Well, Southwest didn't know what a great thing they were buying. that was really kind of the best thing that they were buying from that. They were, and have credit today in the Smithsonian as being the first ticketless airline,

but it was really our system that did it. Wow. But kind of going back a little bit. So Herb called me up and said, hey, you know, I hear you might be interested in selling. This is Herb Keller, her, your idol. Yeah, I couldn't believe it. When he was on the phone, I can still remember hearing his voice. I'm like, hi, Herb.

Would you want to come down and meet with this? And so I went down and met with them and smoke-filled room with all these guys in there that I had idolized over all the years. And then I came home, and then we found out that June had a very serious form of cancer. It was called inflammatory breast cancer. And so I went to my office, and I was just sitting there staring at my phone, and it rang, and I picked it up, and it was a guy named Jim Weikert. And he said, how you do it?

I go, I'm just sick. He's a guy we had chartered planes from. I said, I'm just sick. I just found out June has this terminal breast cancer, inflammatory breast cancer. I don't know what I'm going to do. And he said, get her on an airplane now. And I said, what do you mean?

I said, she's scheduled for surgery. No, no, don't let her have the surgery. We know this doctor, Blumenstein, that is having amazing success with this. So I called up June. I said, June, I just booked you tickets on American Airlines. You need to get on the airplane. So she raced out to the airport, got on the airplane.

But he said, get her on a plane for what? Because what they found is if you had the surgery, it spread the cancer through your body. And they needed to zap it and get rid of it first. So she got on the plane and he convinced her to go into the treatment. And they just took her almost to death. I mean, bone marrow transplant, everything. And she lived and she's still alive today. Wow.

She and I have a very special relationship from this day because of that. It was a miracle. And so she was going through this treatment and Herbs there. And so I'm saying I assumed you and you want to sell this company. She said, yes, I do. You see, you're like in your early 30s, you've got a decent amount of cash, like at least $20 million. And all of a sudden you become an employee of Southwest Airlines, I guess. Yeah, well, Herb, he always tells the story that I had my Book of Mormon, my Bible, and my Southwest

Airlines annual report in my car. That was my scriptures. And it was not too far from the truth. So we were close and he said, look, I want to put you on the executive planning committee, which is our top steering committee. And I would just sit in this meeting and I would just watch these guys and they would just go on and on. And every time I would say something, they'd look at me like, what does this guy know?

He's this young punk. He doesn't know anything. He's never been here. And so I used to just, I used to just write, don't say a word, don't say a word, just keep writing it. And I just blurt out something else. They asked me to take two years to integrate Morris into Southwest. And within six months, I had it all done.

I basically joint fuel purchase, joint ground handling, you know, joint everything was all done. And Southwest had this deal where they were charging off-peak fairs on Saturdays and Sundays. and after like 8 p.m. at night. And I went to him and I said, guys, my highest fares are on Sunday. And you just switched them all to off-peak. I'm losing like millions of dollars every month because you're charging off-peak. Let me charge peak on these flights. And so I sat down with, you know, Key Taylor at the time, who was the head of revenue management.

I showed them all the numbers. And it was during that time, they switched, you know, and started charging peak for Sundays. And they, you know, Southwest has made profit for four. 43 years in a row or whatever it was. And they were so successful, you know, they didn't really need to find, and I was just absolutely paranoid all the time. And I had to keep tweaking everything all the time. And so I was pressing all that stuff with them.

And finally, Herb invited me to Ruth Chris Steakhouse in Dallas and said, this is going to work. You know, you're driving everybody insane in this company. And I said, well, you're paying more for long distance per minute than we are. I'm just trying to get them to take our contract instead of your contract. And Herb, I got the peak fairs, and I got the thing integrated, and I got this. He said, I know, David, but that's five months. It should have taken you longer to do all that stuff. And I said, all right, I'm out of here.

I was in tears, you know, but. So you were supposed to stay at Southwest for at least two years. And within six months. I mean, he kind of led me to believe that if I just mind in my peas and cues that I would be a successor one day, you know, that I could follow in his footsteps. And, you know, obviously there were other people that wanted that job. And I was young and, you know, but I was completely didn't fit into the corporate culture. My ADD was just raging. So you were supposed to, I mean, this was going to be your employer and maybe you would have succeeded Herb Kelleher as the head of Southwest.

And you were, basically were fired after like five or six months. Yeah, in May. So I started in December and they fired me in May. Because he's a nice guy. He's been on our show. Like, I can't imagine him like yelling at you and say, Get out of my office. Did he let you down gently? Oh, yeah, yeah. He reached across the table and held my hands. I was crying.

And he just said, you know, it's just not going to work. He said, everybody. Even the people that your biggest supporter said, you had to go. David Nealiman may have been out of a job, but not for long. When we come back, how he built the framework that would become JetBlue. 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 from NPR. So it's 1995 and David Nealeman was just fired from Southwest Airlines.

Southwest, the company he idolized. Oh, and he cannot work for a domestic airline for five years because of Southwest's non-compete clause. So, David, he went home. I went home and I spent a couple days at home and I feel like I can't do this. I'm not going to retire. And so I went down and I ran to a little office and started going to work every day in Salt Lake. And by this time, Dave Evans, who was my partner, had been going back and forth to Texas. And Dave Evans, I'm guessing you guys worked together at Morris Air.

Yeah. And he came to me and he said, look, ticketless is the future. Why don't we build a system and sell it to all the airlines? So I say, well, how much money do you think he'll take? And he said, oh, a million dollars. So I said, okay, let's do it. It means hard to remember, but like even in the mid-90s when you were running this company, like an airline ticket was like a booklet with carbon copy pages in it.

Like you would bring this physical booklet to get onto a plane. And having to help you if you lost it. You know, you were in trouble. If you lost it, you had to fill out big forms, lost ticket forms, and then they had these big auditing departments who would look for them. And you'd have to keep calling them back every three months to see if anyone ever claimed your ticket. and if not, then maybe they would give you a refund at the end of the time. So it was a real pain.

So, okay, you guys, I guess you guys wanted to build a reservation system that you could essentially then sell to the airlines, but why wouldn't airlines just do it themselves? Well, they didn't, airlines had these big mainframe computer systems that they were using at the time and everything was done on a flat file. So there was no relational databases. The actual, the database was actually the ticket. So if you lost your ticket and, you know, it became a negotiable document and they didn't have any other way of tracking anything. And then they would look at things in the rearview mirror that happened three or four months ago.

They had no forward-looking ability at the time. And so by us building the system, we allowed people to have real-time information and all their reservations that were coming in. You know, we could tell them, you know, what the average fare was, what the load factor was on each flight, all the stuff that they never had before. And so it was a huge, it was a revolutionary change for the airline business at the time. And so, you know, did that during this period of the non-compete. And about halfway through the non-compete, I called, or a couple, maybe a year or a half into it, I called Herb. And I say, hey, Herb, you know, I've consulted, you know, legal counsel. This thing is not really enforceable.

I mean, I didn't get in consideration. He said, David, you're the last person I want to see in the airline business. So I will fight you tooth and nil. I do not want to see you in the airline business. And I said, all right, fair enough. You know, I signed it. That's, I'll live by my word. You ended up selling this company to HP at Heelopackard in 1998.

And that's when you kind of, I guess, put your head down on this, the jet blue idea. But even before then, my understanding is that you actually started to think of the jet blue idea, like, within a year after leaving Southwest. Is that right? Yeah. I mean, I knew I had four years. You know, I had the reservation system, so I knew exactly what the reservation system would be. You know, I just kind of bided my time. What I'm trying to understand is why, I mean, the graveyard of like failed airlines is huge, right? Like Trump and Laker and people movers or whatever it was called, TWA, Pan Am. People Express. Yeah. Like, what did you think the world needed? Like there were a bunch of airlines. Southwest was thriving. Like, what was it that you thought you could contribute to that industry?

Well, I thought that a couple of things. Southwest had a rule book that they didn't really violate at the time. One of them that they never flew into kind of congested airports. They didn't want, because on-time percentage and, you know, turning airplanes in 10 minutes was just so important to them that they didn't want to go to New York, for example. Boston, they weren't in Boston. They were in Providence. And so they kind of skirted around airports.

They never went into SFO. They were in Oakland. And so they didn't really, you know, go into these East Coast congested airports. And, you know, Don Burr, who was the founder of People Express, came to see me one time. And I remember he was looking at starting an airline and he wanted to do it in JFK. And he was saying, you know, during the middle of the day, you could really, run a bowling ball down the middle of the runways at JFK. They're only busy at night.

There's nothing in the day, and there's a lot of people there. So I just kind of filed that away, and, you know, his airline didn't materialize. So when it came time for me to found, you know, JetBlue, I wanted to find a place that I could start in an area where I knew there was a lot of people. I studied the New York travel market, and so I thought, well, this is a perfect place to put an airline. You thought you could do a discount airline. that would fly to places that discount airlines were not flying to?

Yeah, where Southwest Airlines wasn't. And, you know, you got to remember at the time, too, all the carriers, these legacy carriers, had accumulated so much stuff. I mean, pension programs, and, you know, the customer service at that time wasn't very good. And we wanted to bring humanity back to air travel. And, you know, and this is something that I've kind of learned over the years. Number one is you don't just go start an airline for the sake of stuff. already. You have to have a reason for being. But also, just because you're in a place where no one else

flies or can fly doesn't mean that, you know, you can treat people poorly. So let's treat people awesome. Let's find a place that nobody else flies. Let's fly between routes. And so layering all this, I say, obviously to my team, guys, too much overkill is never enough. Let's just keep layering it on, make it better and better and better. What did you want? I mean, did you have a vision of what you wanted JetBlue to be? I mean, traveling in the 1990s, like there were some, I mean, Virgin, for example, like that was revel. I remember going on a Virgin Airlines flight in the 90s. You got little TVs and great food, and it was just, it was very different. It felt completely different from any other airline. Yeah, and I, you know, I was talking to Richard Branson early on.

JetBlue was going to be called Virgin America. You know, kind of a funny story. You know, I'm still a little bit off the tournament truck coming from Utah, you know. So Richard invites me to fly over to it, and I go to his house. And, of course, he's there with his wife and speaking in this suave British accent, and I'm completely enamored. And then he says, let's go eat Indian food. And I'd never eaten Indian food before, if you can believe that. I love Indian food.

And he said, let's go watch a movie. And he took me to his Virgin Theater. And he and his wife and I, and we saw the full Monty, which was for a Mormon guy, It was completely, you know, a little off color for me, but I came home, kind of chuckled about that movie, but loving chicken curry, which I had that night, which I haven't been able to stop eating ever since. So, but Richard at the time then he wanted a franchise fee and he wanted to maybe change, go to, he had gone to Washington and they had convinced him that maybe he could change the laws

on foreign ownership so he could control it. And I just said, now Richard, it's not going to work. So, so there was a moment where you may have, instead of launching JetBlue, would have launched Virgin's U.S. domestic airline. Yeah, I mean, I thought having a brand was important. I flew on Virgin. I saw those little TVs. I, you know, saw that whole service.

And I thought, wow, you know, if I could create this, this would be amazing. So that five-year, like, period of that like a non-compete would end, I guess, around 98. At that point, like, right when it ended, is that when you announced that you were founding JetBlue? Did you announce that publicly? Yeah, I mean, I couldn't sell a ticket, but I could do everything but. So, you know, I had the reservation system ready to go. Oh, so you were already ready to go. You could start working on it even before this non-compete ended. Yeah, I mean, we started flying in February of the year 2000. So we were working hot and heavy. We moved, I moved the family to Connecticut in July of 99. And we were, you know, a full bore had raised $135 million. And so we were ready to go. One of the things that Southwest revolutionized was they'd just, you know, they'd never served food, right?

They, it was peanuts or pretzels and free drinks and very friendly service. And they also only flew and still do, only fly 737s, Boeing 737s. So did you kind of look at that and say, yeah, that's the model that we should go for. We should get the same exact plane because then you only have to maintain one kind of plane and not worry about food and all that stuff. Yeah, that was it. Yeah, I hired to be my CFO at JetBlue, a man by the name of John Owen, and he was the treasure at Southwest. And so he knew all the financial stuff about Southwest. You know, they were buying their airplanes from Boeing from, and they had Boeing 737s.

And we tried to go to Boeing. We wanted the 737. We really wanted it. And we just said, look, how about giving us this price? And they said, too low. Can't do that. We're going to go see our bus. and they said, well, go ahead.

So flew back to Washington, D.C., where their North American offices were for Airbus. And Henri Coupeon walked in. He was a good friend of mine today. And he said, he was the CEO of the head of Airbus. Yeah, CEO of North America for Airbus at the time. He walks in and he says, you know, are you just here using us as foil?

Or are you really interested in buying our airplanes? And I said, I'm just here using you as foil, but convinced me you have a better airplane. So he started selling us in kind of the wider cabin, the fly-by-wire, all this stuff, the more seats, because we could go to 162 seats on an airplane. And so I completely got converted. And Boeing ended up coming below that number, which I would have shaken with him on the first day. But we went with our bus, and we've had a great relationship with the A320s. Is that what you?

Yeah, the A320s, yeah. So, and that's their version. I mean, the 737, 830s, there are the competing. planes, you go with the Airbus A320s and put TVs in the back and free TV and nice seats, snacks. I remember, I've read some of a quote of yours. You said, look, JetBlue is a customer service company or, you know, you described it as a customer service company that happens to fly airplanes, which reminded me a lot of Tony Shea and Zappos, because he describes, you know, we were a customer service company that happens to sell shoes. Yeah. Is that how you saw that? I pledgerized that with not even knowing. I don't know when he started when I started when I started. That was my thought. I just wanted to do everything. And maybe it was

because I came up with this whole notion of servant leadership. You know, maybe I learned that on my mission of serving others and just saw how Southwest had built their culture. And, you know, I just developed this thing that, you know, we're going to go out and we're going to take care of our people and the people are going to take care of our customers. And it was funny because when I was talking to the investors in New York, they said, dude, you're in New York. You're not going to find friendly people in New York. And I said, well, I've got a lot to choose from. So there's 15 million people there. I'm sure I'll find some nice people. And we sure did. You guys were profitable pretty quickly, I think, and at a difficult time after 9-11. And one of the things that you did a lot, you'd fly in the planes all the time. You'd make an announcement that you were the head of the company. And then you would sit on the planes and serve snacks. And, you'd and help clean the planes. Was that a schick or was that real?

I mean, what was that about? No, I just really wanted to stay in touch with our customers. I really wanted to hear from them. You know, not only would I get up and introduce myself, but I would also say I'm going to come buy and serve snacks, but I also want to hear from your experience with our company. I want to know what we did good, what we did bad, you know, what we can improve on, you know, any ideas you have for us.

And then I had, you know, other people in our company doing the same. I just think it's just incredible to stay in touch with your people. And then, you know, those working the flight see that you care. One of the things, I mean, Southwest, their staff is unionized, and you did not have a union staff. Why? I mean, did you feel like I don't want to deal with unions? That's going to just drag us down. Was there a reason behind that?

You know, I always thought, if our people need someone else to come tell us how to treat them, then that would be pretty tragic. If I thought I didn't treat our people well enough that they needed somebody else, then, you know, that's not the company I wanted to run. So by not being unionized, you know, I could chip in and, you know, pick up trash on the airplane and there wouldn't be a grievance filed, for example. Or, you know, one of the questions we ask in the interview process is, you know, in your career, in your life, can you give us some examples of where you left your area of responsibility and helped somebody else out in another area? because that was really something that we thought of.

And it's amazing how many people couldn't come up with one single example of how they could chip in and help out. You know, we didn't hire a pilot that had 15,000 hours, and he was called me up screaming. I can't believe you wouldn't hire me. I'm an experienced pilot. So I went to the interviewers and they said, well, he couldn't come up with one single excuse of anything he's ever done to help anyone other than himself. So, you know, it was a cultural thing and building the culture was important. David, one of the things about the airline industry is that it's volatile, right? Like the price of oil is a huge factor.

You've got recessions, security scares 9-11, right? When people traveled a lot less. So, I mean, my understanding is that in general, the margins, you know, even though we think of these airlines as hugely profitable, they're generally, the margins are generally pretty thin, right? They can be, yeah. I mean, it's a business that you can make a lot of money and you can lose a lot of money. Yeah, so what is it that you guys, I mean, how are you able to be profitable so fast and for so long compared to the other airlines? Well, I think it was just, we were a differentiator. I mean, people saw us and, you know, we had the word of mouth and people love flying us. But it's just building a better mousetrap and building a better company. And, you know, I became enamored with this whole thing when I was running the company.

and I read this article called The Constant Customer. They said, look, some companies just grow quicker. They're more successful, you know, and they did a lot of research into what it was about these companies that differentiated them from other companies. And there was actually United Airlines in Southwest in the article, and it talked about the differences between the two and how they ran their businesses.

And the three things they named was, you know, number one is having people who work for you that are ambassadors, for your brand, that adore your company, that feel valued and feel loved in the company. Number one. Number two was flawless execution. On every single level, you need to be completely flawless. And so we have dashboards every day where I can tell you everything that's going on at my

companies, you know, from on-time percentage, when the last bag made it to the carousel on the most delayed flight. Everything about that experience. So you need to be flawless. And then the third thing is you need to make it right with the customer. If you make a mistake or you treat some important or whatever, you need to make them more loyal having had an issue with your company than if they had not had an issue in the first place. So JetBlue is like riding high. It's profitable. It's a darling of Wall Street. Customers love it. And then comes Valentine's Day, 2007, the biggest ice storm in the northeast in like decades. And what happens? Well, it wasn't just an ice storm.

It was the FAA had come out with this regulation. It was only that year. It was only in 2007 where they said if there was what they called ice pellets in the air, then you can't take off. They reversed it the next year. They didn't have it any time before that, and they haven't had it any time since. So it was just one of these convergence of events where our planes got out to the runway to take off. They called ice pellets. Planes were stuck.

Planes were landing. And then this storm moved in. We had people stranded on airplanes. We couldn't get them back to the gate because... For like eight hours, right? People were seeing airplanes. Yeah, eight, actually more. I think one of them even ten hours.

And so it was a disaster. And it was something that... And then, you know, Humpty Dumpty was all over the place. And it took us a long time to recover. But what happened? Our operational team failed the airline. You know, it was just simply that simple. I mean, it was, you know, they just didn't do a good job of handling the situation.

And, you know, as I was in the command center for four straight days after, you know, obviously we got people off the airplane and, you know, after the first day. But when we had the whole place was scrambled and there was all kinds of bad publicity, you know, to the airline, which was, you know, devastating for me. Personally, because we had pride ourselves in running such a great airline. I think I set a record on that day where I started on that. Today show and I ended up on the Letterman show. You were just, you were apologizing? Apologies, explaining what happened, 27 live interviews on, you know, all kinds of TV.

But I came up with this list of things that, you know, we were going to do and a bill of rights saying, if this ever happens again, this is how you'd be compensated. But how did it, I mean, how did it happen? Like, I think there were 1,200 flights that were canceled over the next couple days. Like, why did it, did this winter storm hit, jet blew harder than other airlines? Like, was it just a failure of management? Well, ironically, I think the others may have recovered better, but Delta had planes out there, you know,

for about the same amount of time. You know, everybody was affected by it. It wasn't just us. It took us longer to recover. But also, people expected more from us. I mean, I think sometimes the media likes to build you up and then they like to tear you down. You know, it's kind of like, If you're flying too high, you know, we're going to come after you. If you're a rising story, we're going to tell about you, but you mess up even just this much. And I was, you know, well on the way to fixing it and making sure that it would never happen again when in a couple months later, the board asked me if I would just step up to be chairman and, you know, kind of let the COO at the time be the CEO. How did you feel about that? It was, here we go again, you know, and now it was Herb and this.

But it was different with this time, obviously. This was my baby. This was your baby. I know. It was, I killed myself for this company. And the board, because you didn't, it was a public company, and now you work for the shareholders, they said, we don't want you to run it anymore. I can't imagine that wouldn't be devastating.

Yeah, it was. It was not only devastating, but it was just absolutely the wrong decision. That was the worst part. I mean, if I, maybe I was. was, you know, my perception is better than what I actually was. My persona has taken on a much bigger role, but we had a couple of, you know, guys on the board that were, had developed this thing about founder syndrome and thought, hey, maybe it's better to turn it over to someone and, to, I can run the company without the, the passion and just, you know, kind of run like a regular business. I mean, they, they felt that, that you had to be held accountable, fair or not for the, the Blizzard fiasco, I guess. absolutely I mean I had to be held accountable and you know and I was taking responsibility of it

I mean one of the board members kept saying to me quit apologizing you know we don't like you to apologize I go why not and said because you don't you shows a sight of weakness you know or whatever so were you blindsided by it I completely I mean it was the most shocking thing in the I couldn't believe it I mean how did they break the news to you I was my office was just off the board room and you know two two of the board members came in and said, you know, this is what we're going to do. And then they got up and left, got on airplanes and flew away. Were you personally hurt?

Oh, yeah, totally. For years, as I would land in JFK, it would be hard to even look over at JetBlue because it was hard to even see my airline, you know. And I wrote a letter to the crew members when I left, and I still had access to everyone's email. So I sent it out, and I just said, you know, I've always taught you that it's not really what happens to you is it's how you deal with it. And so, you know, I've always had this lifetime dream to return to Brazil and make a difference in the country of my birth. And I'm going to do

it. So I'm going to leave the board. And, you know, I just want you to remember all those values and, you know, treat each other well. And I'll miss you terribly. And, you know, nothing I'd like more to be back as you're a CEO. But, you know, that's not the way life is sometimes. You don't get to make all the decisions and wish to ever win the best and I was gone. We can stop this podcast now and like end of story. You start another airline. You start a brand new airline in 2008 called Azul in Brazil. By the way, which means blue. Was that, was that deliberate? Did you call it Azul deliberately? Yeah, I did. It was, I think, you know, I obviously have great affection for JetBlue. And Azul was the closest.

thing and his little blue in Portuguese and in Spanish. So I had made some trips down there and, and, you know, I had this thing tucked away in the back of my head about going back to Brazil and making a difference and that I had when I was a 19-year-old boy. And one of the things that was amazing to me is how few people were traveling in Brazil. And I determined that there were two major reasons. Number one, the service just wasn't good as far as non-stopped between cities. The 25 largest cities in Brazil only had non-stops about 20% of the time. But then there were like 50 cities that had no service that needed service. No one flew to these cities.

They were making people drive four hours. And Brazil makes airplanes. It's a major aircraft manufacturer. Yeah. They had, you know, during the military rule, the military had done a nice job of building airports, but nobody flew to them. And then fares were really high. They were about double where they were in the United States.

So I thought, well, I'll go to. of Brazil, I'll buy Brazilian-made airplanes, which are a little bit smaller, have a lower trip costs, and then I'll start flying to all these cities that nobody flies to, and it will be a big success. And it happened. I think it's the third largest airline in Brazil today. It's the number one airline in terms of daily departures, number one airline in numbers of cities serves.

We serve over 100 cities in Brazil. We have 800 flights a day. We fly about 80,000 people every single day. Wow. That's 10 years. 10 years after you launched it? In just 10 years. Did you, I mean, you must have learned so many lessons along the way, right?

At Southwest, you were, you know, they fired you after five months and you couldn't do anything about it. And then, you know, JetBlue, obviously the board decided that they wanted somebody new there. When you structured Azul, did you make sure that that could not happen to you again? Absolutely. Absolutely. I can't be fired at Azul. It's privately owned. No, it's public.

It's on the New York Stock Exchange. but I have a voting control, yeah. So you made sure that that could not happen again, fair enough, which is part of learning lessons along the way. Absolutely. David, you have 10 kids, right? Yes. How were you able to do all this stuff,

like fly all over the place and go to board meetings and run these companies and also raise kids? How were you able to make time for them? Were you? Did you have to make sacrifices? Well, I had a couple of rules, number one is I always was home on weekends. I never, since I don't golf and I hate people who golf, no, it's kind of a joke I have, but no matter where I was in the world, I would make sure I was home on, you know, either Friday morning or Saturday morning and stay till either Sunday night or

Monday night. So that was really important to me. I needed to be home. I needed to be charged with my kids and I needed to be with them and, you know, and if my daughters were dancing or my sons were playing football or lacrosse. I always tried to make sure I work my schedule around it so I would always be there for them if any of me. And I, you know, tried to be the best father I could. I mean, obviously, I wasn't there at five o'clock every night to have dinner with him. But, you know, I had a lot of support from, you know, my wife and the kids, you know, really helped each other. I mean, my oldest daughter was amazing, and then the second daughter, and then the third daughter, and then finally got a son number four. And so they helped with each other, and they chipped in.

And then when the first one got the driver's license, they were, you know, helping haul the kids around to their lessons. And so it was really a family effort. It's a great family. And I, you know, you didn't mention that I have 18 grandkids and three on the way. What is your sort of like guiding principle as a leader? Like now that you've made mistakes and you've, you know, driven people crazy and kind of had time to reflect on the kind of person you are and the kind of leader you are, what do you aspire? Like how do you aspire to lead? Like what do you want people to say about you when they're like, oh yeah, David, he is?

He made my life better. You know, we have this thing at Azul where I tell everyone, I tell everyone. I want this to be the best job you've ever had. I want you to look forward to coming to work every day. And so I walk around the company saying, is this the best job you ever had? Is this the best job you've had? If not, why not?

Because I think if you do that, you know, if you matter. If your company matters, then you're going to be more successful. You know, if you were plucked from the face of the earth, anybody care, you know, who would show up at your memorial service? And how many lives have you touched? Because I think the more people you touch and the more good that you do and the more people you serve and the more lives that you change, the happy you are too. So all these things all work together.

At 22, 23, you were totally broke. You reached these heights and then you were broke and then back to working at your grandfather's store. And then all these amazing things happened to you in your life. How much of that do you think is because you were really smart and hardworking and how much because of luck? Well, I think obviously you have points of luck, but I think you make your own luck to a great degree. You know, ADD, people's, and I tell people this that have ADD, embrace it. It's you, and it's who you are, and take all the good from it. And my form of ADD has it, I have an ability to just look at a situation that's very complex

and simplify it and say, let's just do it this way. And it drives my team's crazy because they're like, no it's not that simple I'm saying yes it is just go do this this and this and this and we'll have it solved and so you know sometimes it's not that simple but you know that's just who I am and that's how I'm wired I can look at a situation and you know I can I can see solutions and so rather if it was in the airline business or any other business I think I would have probably had that skill and but you know certainly the airline business has been my ticket to a lot of exciting times in my life. And there's, you know, there's nothing like sitting in a cockpit

landing an airplane and a 4,800 foot runway in Rio de Janeiro to give you a thrill. And knowing that that's your plane and your people and your happy customers on board, it's quite a thrill. That's David Nealeman, founder of JetBlue. On top of building one of the most successful airlines in Brazil, David now wants to launch another airline here in the U.S. It's still on the planning phase, but the project has a name that kind of fits David himself. Moxie. Oh, and you probably noticed how Southwest founder Herb Callagher played a huge role in David's life.

Well, Herb actually passed away soon after we recorded this interview, but I was lucky enough to talk with him a few years ago, and he told an amazing story, and you can find that episode on our podcast feed. Hey, thanks so much for sticking around, because it's time now for how you built that. And today's story starts in May of 2018 in Queen Creek, Arizona. Lisa Dalton was dating a software engineer named Brian, and Brian is blind. And one day, Lisa was at his house looking through his pantry and making a shopping list. He had 18 cans of refried beans and didn't know it.

So Lisa decided to reorganize. A nice gesture, but also a big mistake. He had used a memorization-based system to organize what he had in his pantry. and in my manhandling the goods, I had completely messed them up. But Brian was forgiving. He said, it's okay. You didn't know. But really, it wasn't okay.

Because Brian's personalized pantry, something he relied on every day, was gone. And now he had to reorganize and rememorize. And Lisa, she felt awful. I felt like melting into the floor. But she also thought there has to be a better system for Brian's pantry. So she started to research, and she found a few solutions like putting braille on an index card and then wrapping it around a can with a rubber band. But that seemed wrong for a guy like Brian. I just thought this is not the level of household.

He's a stylish dude. I wouldn't want him to have to do that. Okay, something to know about Lisa. She actually sells customized and commemorative bricks using stamps she makes with a 3D printer. And as she tried to figure out how to solve a problem like Brian's pantry, She thought, what about using my printer to make reusable labels? And so she did. She came up with something that's kind of like those live-strong wristbands,

but with braille on the outside, something you might slip around a container. It's a rigid plastic. It has a little bit of give in it where you can just slide it on, and then they pop right off. Now, Lisa had kept all of this a secret, so when she gave Brian the labels, he kind of cracked up and his face changed and he's like, that's weird, but that's really cool. And the next thing he said was, hey, you should really sell these. So Lisa started working on more Braille labels for all sorts of cans and jars. And after a few months, she packed up her prototypes and she went to a convention hosted by the National Federation of the Blind.

She didn't really have any expectations. She just wanted a little feedback. But instead, people kept coming to her booth. And then they'd come back with friends and say, hey, check these out. and one woman asked Lisa if she would sell her a few of the prototypes. She had packed her husband's lunch and grabbed the wrong container. She packed him a beer. I mean, I know how mortifying that is,

and to know that you potentially made a job-ending mistake over something so simple, that's got to be terrifying. She said that she didn't pack his lunch anymore. And that day, talking to the people at the convention, it was a revelation. I got to the car that day and I totally cried. It was ridiculously moving the stories, how they've been trying to solve that problem, and how they wish that this had come out 20 years ago. So Lisa went home and she built a website.

It went live in October of 2018 and now she sells her Braille labels for $2 each. She also sells them in starter packs and the name of the product. Well, it comes from a kind of mantra she had four years ago while she was recovering from a stroke she had when she was just 30. There's a lot of things that I thought, you know, I can do that. I can do that. So Lisa Dalton calls her products, can-do labels. I just thought this would bring a lot of independence to people who are also wanting to be able to do their own things.

I thought these are yes, can-do things. And Lisa Dalton's business is can-doable. This year, she's planning to make it her full-time job. If you want to find out more about Lisa 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. Thanks so much for listening to the show this week. You can subscribe 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. Our show is produced this week by James Delahousie with music composed by Rompeteen Arablewee. Thanks also to Mia Venkat, Casey Howard, Nor Kudsi, Neva Grant, Melissa Gray, Sanaz Mechkampur, and Jeff Rogers. Our intern is Candice Lem.

I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This from NPR.