How I Built This with Guy Raz - Madison Reed: Amy Errett

Episode Date: August 18, 2025

Amy Errett had a successful career in finance and venture capital before taking a leap into an entirely new business: hair color. When her wife complained about the indignities of coloring her hair at home, Amy realized the sector was ripe for a makeover. At age 56, she dove into the minutiae of dyes and developers, launching her own formula in 2013, and naming it after her daughter. Madison Reed’s early successes were marred by a management meltdown, when Amy had to break with three of her co-founders—an experience she describes as one of the most difficult of her life. Today Madison Reed is available in thousands of stores across the US, and runs nearly 100 of its own salons.This episode was produced by Sam Paulson with music composed by Ramtin Arablouei. It was edited by Neva Grant with research by Iman Maani. Our engineers were Patrick Murray and Kwesi Lee.You can follow HIBT on X & Instagram and sign up for Guy's free newsletter at guyraz.com or on Substack.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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Two were personal friends. And I thought I could will it to work. And it didn't. And it cost the, I would say it cost the company a couple of years in retrospect. And I learned a lot. My Series A investor said Amy four co-founders is too many. And I said, no, it's not. And boy, was he right.

Welcome to 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 Amy Erick decided that hair color needed a makeover and how she built Madison Reed into a national, multi-channel brand. The startup world is full of stories about young people who take huge risks. And when they fail, it can actually be pretty great, because when you're young, obviously, you can recover from a significant failure.

You have time on your side, which is part of the reason why I have so much respect for founders who take those risks later in life. Because if you're older, like 45 or 50, the stakes are higher. If you lose everything at that age, you might not have time to get it back. But being older can also have huge advantages. You have experience, perspective, probably a bigger network, and you have to be really deliberate about the kinds of risks you take. which is exactly how Amy Arrett had to operate. Amy was 56 when she launched Madison Reed. It's a hair color brand that you can find at Walmart,

Alta, Target, and thousands of other locations across the country. The idea for Madison Reed came in part from Amy's wife, who was having a hard time finding a decent, at-home hair color product. Amy saw an opportunity, the same kind of opportunity that led to companies like Harry's Razors and Dollar Shave Club, take an old school product with a frustrating experience and offer a better option. Now, at the time, Amy didn't know anything about hair color. She did know that about half of American women who dye their hair do it at home.

And at first, that's exactly who Madison Reed was built for. Now, before she launched the brand, Amy had a completely different career. She was in banking and finance, consulting, even venture capital. But eventually, she realized she didn't want to be the one. listening to pitches, she wanted to be the one making them. And as you will hear, Amy dealt with a pretty big setback before Madison Reed. She was fired as the CEO of a company she ran for several years. But she took the lessons she learned from that experience and tried to apply them to her new role as a startup founder, including a painful decision to separate from three of her co-founders.

It's a story I've rarely heard a founder speak so candidly about, and it's worth hearing. Anyway, before all of that, Amy Arendt grew up in the 60s and 70s in Philadelphia and Long Island. After college, she did an MBA and then worked in banking and finance before starting her own consulting firm called Spectrum, which specialized in mergers and acquisitions. And so the idea was, we will help these deals go through and you get a cut of the percentage of the sale. Exactly. And it turned very quickly as well that we would do the transaction. And then the buyer would ask us to come in to consult about how to integrate that business into their business, which then turned into consulting fees that kept us going. And did you run a pretty lean operation? Or did you guys start to hire, I mean, hire a bunch of people?

We started to hire a bunch of people. I think at the apex, we probably got up to about 40 people in the firm. Wow. So you guys were doing really well. We were doing well. We were a profitable company from the first six months and never became unprofitable, never needed to raise any more money. So it was a very different thing than raising venture money, which we'll get to. Yeah, we'll get to it. Yeah, I guess for business and personal reasons, you eventually decide to move spectrum from where you founded it, which is New York City, to the Bay Area. How did you find San Francisco? in the 90s. It was exciting. And remember that I had spent my whole career in New York City on Park Avenue or down in Wall Street. And it was completely different. The whole fact that people didn't put a business suit on to go to work was like a mindblower. I mean, we had an office, and I hired an assistant here. And Halloween happened, and the assistant came in their costume,

which was very customary in a place like San Francisco. But in New York, you would never go to work in your costume. And so things like that were just foreign to me. And what about socially? Did you start to feel like you could breathe? Definitely. It was much more gay friendly. I had told my family before I moved, and I had a lot of acceptance. So I wasn't somebody that was struggling with their family, rejecting them, which, you know, I have a lot of friends that's happened to. And it's, for me, was shocking that it was happening, but it was definitely happening. But yeah, I met a social crowd. I had a lot of friends and I had told my business partner and I was out at work. And also like at that time, the early 90s, there probably just weren't as many resources available for people who,

who, you know, were trying to figure out their identity, right? Like there just weren't as many books and obviously the internet wasn't what it is. I mean, there just weren't as many tools to connect with people. Most people did that through their friend circles. You had a close-knit group of people and that's who you sort of did everything with and you met other people in their circles of people. So really, communities were very tight, much more than today where, for instance, my wife and I have an equal number of gay friends and straight friends. Like it just doesn't, in those days, if you had straight friends, that was outside of your gay circle. You mentioned your wife, Claire, you met her in San Francisco.

And what was she doing at the time? She was a massage therapist. So very different. And we met each other through a place that I had gotten very involved in called Glyde Church. This is a well-known Methodist church in San Francisco. go. Yes, Methodist Church and has largest set of social service programs in the city, a food program, housing program, recovery program. So I was very involved and had gotten on the board and I was actually chairing the board and Claire sang in the gospel choir. Right. And how did you get involved of that in that church?

I, a friend took me because my stepmother was dying of cancer. And I was going through a hard personal time. I was close to her. And so I watched the dying process and was a caretaker for her back east. I used to go back and forth. They lived in Florida at the time. So I was in a grieving stage. And a friend told me about the spiritual pieces of glide.

And so I started going because of that. Yeah. And did you grow up going to church as a kid? I grew up Jewish. So this was, yeah, my mother, who just unfortunately passed away at the end of last year, a very hard moment, had this famous saying that I've talked about all the time. I was okay when you came out as a lesbian, but now that you're chairing a Methodist church, you're killing me.

So that was her comment about Judaism. But I didn't grow up religious. I grew up more with tradition. I would say. To this day, it wasn't about reading the Bible. It was about helping people and the goodness of paying it forward. That's where my spirituality lies today. All right.

So back to the timeline. I guess around 1996, this is it about six years after you launched the consulting firm, after you launched Spectrum, you get acquired. And from what I gather, the terms are pretty good. And I have to imagine, Amy, I mean, this is, I mean, for somebody who grew up with not a lot of money, I have to imagine that this is really a life-changing transaction for you. Yes, an absolutely life-changing transaction for me. But I was three years of can I get more money because these earnouts are about you get a

payment and then you spend the rest of the time chasing the remaining payments. And so I did that and I was really focused on the bottom line of that. I mean, at this point, let's, let's be frank, you probably didn't need to work. You probably could have stopped working, which is not interesting for most people. I don't think that's true. No, okay. Yeah, I don't. I made a good amount of money, but I didn't make enough money to live the lifestyle that I wanted.

So I was still chasing more. Yeah. Yeah. You get a job in a completely different industry. in travel. You got you got recruited, I guess, to become the CEO of a company called Olivia. This is a company that is still around. It is a travel company that at the time, I think, was focused primarily on gay women. It says, I look at the website, lesbian and LGBTQ plus women. Yeah, we actually, they were very large vacation experiences. So we would rent Holland America ships, cruise ships,

and reinvent the entire experience, the entertainment, the activities, thus excursions, to tailor it to what gay women would want. So it was a premium. It was a great experience. And, you know, we had people like Melissa Etheridge or the Indigo girls or people that were iconic in the gay women's community. All right. You're there. You would end up being there for five years. and the, let's say the ending was not what you had imagined. You were actually like, oh, you were fired. I was fired in a hotel lobby on a Monday morning, completely blindsided. Completely blindsided. There for five years.

You grow in the business. You think everything's going well. The founder had a health issue. And so I hadn't seen her in a really long time, but was reporting to her in the the form of emails or sort of updates. So I thought we were just having breakfast. We weren't having breakfast, by the way. What did she, I mean, did she give you a reason?

Did she say, hey, I'm not happy with what? What's, like, what was it? Well, I walked into the lobby and she was there sitting on a couch. And I went to give her a hug and she sort of moved back. And I thought, well, that's strange. And then she handed me an envelope and said, we're taking the company in a completely different direction, you're no longer the CEO. And I was completely startled.

What was in the envelope? A lawyer's letter describing how I was being let go for cause. And cause was very nebulous. And so I was really blindsided. And yeah, it was one of the hardest things. in my life and it was one in retrospect the best thing that ever happened. I mean, it was a, it must have been particularly hard because it was a public story. And it was, you know, this kind of juicy story, this lesbian-focused travel agency.

And there's this kind of internal rift. And it was covered by the advocate and other publications. So it was out there. People could read about this because you eventually decided to sue. And then they countersued. and now it's a bigger story beyond just an employment dispute. Exactly. First and last time I've ever been in a lawsuit.

And you guys basically settled for an undisclosed amount. Yes. And that was it. You were out of the picture. Tell me, you said it was the best, it was the hardest, but the best thing, paraphrasing what you said to happen to me. Tell me why getting fired was. was in some ways the best thing that had happened to you. I started to understand what motivates me,

and I had a, the Madison Reed was a little kid, three years old at the time. Your child, your human child named Madison Reed. She had been born in 2003, I think, at the time. Correct. Yeah. So I felt financial pressure, but I also, as you said, felt a lot of shame

and reputation, you know, damage. And I started to go down a journey. I got a therapist. And I think it was my first opportunity to understand that things don't happen to us. We have 100% responsibility for what does happen. And I was really unhappy in the job. And in fact, my wife had been telling me,

for about a year, I don't think this is a great job for you. You're frustrated, the business, you know, you have bigger things you could do. And so I don't understand why you're being loyal and staying there. And I just blew that off and thought I was, you know, I had made a commitment and so I was going to stay and try to do the best I could. And I think that's just an important lesson in life, that sometimes shit happens to you. And the key for my life has been a certain amount of resilience and persistence. And so I knew what was true about me. And so I just decided that I needed to release myself from that shame and just put my head down and follow my heart, important word, heart, not head.

I tend to go to my head a lot to the analytics rather than the feelings. And I made a conscious decision I wasn't going to go take a job again that didn't satisfy me. It sounds like that was quite a transformational shift for you mentally. Like it sounds like if I'm reading between the lines, you really were not somebody who kind of confronted your emotions. You were focused on success. You were hard charging. You were, you know, but now you are forcing yourself to kind of. peel back the the the the the onion layers just i'll go back to not being able to be out right there is

some analogy here with absorbing a certain amount of things that that you don't want to be true that are true uh and when you're not out you're living in a sort of numb state anyway and so i think i was used to living in a numbed state. I wasn't being in my life at work. I was doing. And why I say it's the best thing is that I got really clear about what motivates me and what's important to me. All right. So you, you're sort of get through this, you're going through this kind of mourning process of being fired and losing a job and also a lawsuit. But you get, you do find, get back on your feet, you find a job in venture, in back, sort of back to the world of finance again. And this is a venture firm called Maverin, which is founded by Howard Schultz, who was his venture capital firm.

Correct. What are some of the things that you, because I'm assuming you had some FaceTime with Howard Schultz, who's been on this show before. What are some things that you learned from him? I learned that this thing inside of me, which is mission-based and values-based, was an important factor in whatever I did next. And so he validated that that could be true and have success through that. And I had the good fortune of walking into stores with him and seeing that he started to get on the line when there was a line taking orders, right? That he was just part of Starbucks, regardless of him, whatever role that he was in. I also learned that he saw things before other people saw things.

He had a gift about spotting a trend. I will never forget it was the fall of 2007, and we had an investment meeting in Seattle, and he walked in and he said, we need to slow down our investments. Now, you remember that bank collapses happened in the fall of 2008. Yes. But this was 2007 a year before that. Wow. And he was seeing a trend about the first.

purchasing patterns at Starbucks. He was starting to see the consumer's pain or the consumers, you know, the afternoon drink, so to speak, was something that I think they were starting to experience that slow down. So validating one's gut is an important part of what I saw in Howard and an excellent brand builder as well. I have to imagine that you as somebody who really is not built to work for other people. Here you are working for other people and obviously have immense respect for Howard Schultz. But you're seeing all these like founders come in, energetic. They're psyched about their business ideas.

You're vetting them. I have to imagine you're starting to get like like, like, like, fomo here. Like I'm, I need to be on the other side of the table. the other side of the table. Absolutely. I remember my experience being in boards where I'd be watching the CEO wishing I was that person, while all the other investors got in their Teslas, as I say, and drove away. Probably completely relieved that the board meeting was over,

and I was sitting there thinking, what would I do if I was in their position? And that became more and more and more of what I was feeling. And tell me where that comes from, because look, this point, you're in VC. You've got now you've built up a considerable net worth, like you've got a nice life, and you probably could spend a bit more time with your daughter. Like, I don't know, but what was it about seeing these startup founders who were just grinding working 100-hour weeks that made you think, I want to do that? I never felt like I had the big outcome that I wanted. I had a really nice outcome, but I didn't have a big outcome.

You're seeing other people who have like $100 million plus exits, and you're thinking, you know, I could probably do that. Yeah. And this is one of the things that I'm not sure when I say that guy that I feel proud of that, but it's a vulnerable thing to say, which is that I, I'm, I'm not sure. when I say that guy that I feel proud of that, but it's it's a vulnerable thing to say, which is that I did not think that I had the outcome that other people that I was hanging out around with. You know, I am in something called YPO. And my counterparts, you know, are the, you know, the top of whatever mountain there is in Silicon Valley. And I'm thinking, I'm smart. I need to do that. So I think it was ego driven as much as it was.

And I think I used the excuse, which I've done all of my life as a working class kid, that I needed more money. I think I used that excuse because when is enough ever enough of anything in life? I really appreciate that vulnerability because I think what you just said is something. many people think but don't say. And we do, especially when you're in a status-conscious environment, you know, when you're in the San Francisco's or the New York or Los Angeleses of the world. I mean, that story can be told again and again and again in many different industries and categories.

And yeah, I mean, I hear you. When you're a working class kid and the first one to go to college and you go to Wharton and you work at a blue chip bank and you just keep trying to. to prove that you can be successful. This is a game I can play my whole life. I can decide that no matter what happens at Madison Reed, it's not big enough. Because there will always be an AI company that's bigger. There'll always be a SaaS platform that's bigger.

And I have a hard time seeing myself as successful. I don't think of myself as a successful person. I mean, if the story ended with your time at Maveron, And you would be a successful person by any definition of that word. But we haven't even gotten to the thing that we're about to get into, which is the marquee part of this story. And so you are, back to the timeline, you are seeing all this happen and you start to think to yourself, I got to start something. I got to get back in the game. You got to get back in the game.

And you land on this idea to do. hair color. And we're going to get to that in a moment, but, but, but what it was going to be. But how did you, tell me what you started, because in your, I imagine in your mind, you're like, I'm going to start something. What, but, but you probably didn't land on, on sort of the cosmetics or the hair care industry or whatever. It was going to be right away, did you? No, not at all. And I would say that where I landed initially, the, a little bit of a twist to what you said is that I want to be an operator again. Right. Like that in the, and that's the way I was thinking like, oh, like, do I want to be an investor? Like, I was bored. You do a deal a year. You kiss a lot of frogs. It isn't results oriented for 10 years or eight years or, right? So it's just a different lifestyle. And people that love it are great at it. And I found a way to be good at it, but I wasn't great at it because it isn't my passion point. It didn't. make me spring out of bed every morning saying, I'm, I'm here. I'm ready. So the operator part was an itch. And we saw an investment at Maveron called Dollar Shave Club. Yes. And we passed. I know the story well. He was on our show. Michael Dubin. Michael is now my independent board member at Madison Reed. So you had passed on that. And then I think they were eventually acquired by Unilever.

Correct. They were eventually had a very good outcome. Yeah. And I was intrigued by the concept of disrupting

consumer products by the internet and bypassing someone's shelf. And that's exactly what Dollar Shave Club did. Yeah. So how did you land on, on hair color?

I had an analyst who worked for me as a summer intern from GSB. And she did a scan of analogous products with repetitive use in the women's beauty category or women's category. And hair color was the number one thing that came up.

And I kept saying, this can't be true. These numbers just seem very large. And that's what came up. And then I started to do a bunch of research about online solutions for buying hair color. There must be something that I'm missing. And I wasn't missing it. So I think at this time, it was like $10 billion.

It was a report that showed $10 billion was spent on hair colors globally, super fast-growing category. And like in the U.S. alone, I'm just reading from my research that at the time, 90 million women colored their hair. Every six weeks. Every six weeks. So it's a huge opportunity. Yes. All right. So 2013.

Yeah. You is the year that you founded Madison Reed, named after your daughter. But what did you, what did you start to do? I mean, I'm assuming you start to buy some hair dyes and just test them out and find a pain point or something you could improve on. Yeah. So I'm a believer of synchronicity in life. And so while I can't make this story up while I'm thinking about this, my wife, who turned gray at 25, who spent every 10 days sitting in a high-end stylist chair because she doesn't want to be gray, was saying a lot of things about,

what do you think is in hair color? Like, I'm doing it this often. It doesn't feel that good. Like, it smells, it burns. It's kind of crazy. I'm in Whole Foods doing a Saturday morning shop. And she texts me and says, do you mind buying me a box of hair color?

And I text back at Whole Foods? She says, yes. I said, well, where is it? And so you go, I go over to the beauty section and, you know, have to, there are six shades. I say, this is not high quality. Like, why are you going to do it at home? She said, well, at Whole Foods, it must have better ingredients.

And so I buy a box with dust all over it, meaning it's been sitting there a long time, of the darkest black hair color that I can find. And the next stop on the Saturday morning errands was Walgreens. And I was picking up prescriptions and how. happened to walk down the hair color aisle and turned, and if you've ever looked at it, it is crazy. There is no product differentiation. It's all $10. It's just an inferior consumer experience, and I bought 30 boxes randomly.

Just put them in my basket and went home, and now Claire and Madison are like, what are you doing? And I'm taking them apart looking at the consumer experience and seeing like this is, torturing a woman, smelling the developer, torturing a woman. And the irony of it is she's supposed to feel beautiful at the end. And so that was part of the mix of all this research that I started to do, talking to a lot of friends, how often do you get your hair color, do you care what's in the ingredients? And just, I spent about six months digging deep into just, is this a good idea? Could work? Why hasn't somebody had a $30 prestige box?

What are the limitations of that? And then found out the access you get when you're a VC is that I ended up getting what was supposed to be 30 minutes on the phone within the executive at

L'Oreal. And just started to ask a bunch of questions, not under the guise of me starting it, but like I want to find out about the industry and what goes on. and he started asking me questions. Like, are you going to start something? Like, are you going to, like, why are you asking this?

And then I finally said, I'm contemplating this. And he said, well, this is something that somebody needs to disrupt because there's no prestige box that goes to somebody. And if you do it, I'll invest. Wow. This is a L'Oreal executive. Yeah. And he left like two months later, so I didn't know that he was leaving.

And he was like, this is a really good idea. It's hard, but it's a really good idea. Now, I would just want to put this into context because, and this is really, I think, my favorite part of the story in some ways, which is you're 55, maybe 56, and you decide to do a startup at that age, which I think is awesome. Because you really, I mean, you're at a point in your life where you could really kind of throttle back and then, but you're, you're hitting the gas. Yes. I never doubted, did I have the energy? Did I have the, you know, brain power? Did I have the persistence? It was like everything I've done up to this point, I felt like positioned me uniquely to be successful at this business. I'm a better CEO because I was an investor and because I got fired and because I faced into adversity and boy, do you face into adversity every single day in these jobs? So what dawned on me was like, oh, I've waited all my life for this. I have waited all my life for this one.

When we come back in just a moment, Amy launches Madison Reed with a coupon deal, which does not go according to plan. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2013, and Amy is trying to learn all she can about the business of hair color. And one of our best contacts in the industry is this guy she knows who happens to be

an executive at L'Oreal. I emailed him and I said, hey, this is a crazy question, do you know scientists? And he said, I know these people who have a consultant company that help people develop hair color. And you know, the private label industry is all in Italy. And so I went to Italy with these scientists, these hair color expert stylists. That you hired as consultants. Hired as consultants. And they introduced us to 13 hair color manufacturers. And the first...

And what were you looking for before we talked about the meetings? What were you? You wanted to just find somebody who was willing to make a dye for you? Yeah, I wanted to figure out whether you could do it without harsh chemicals. Like, was it really... feasible. There must be a reason that people aren't doing it. Right. I kept thinking, I'm missing something. I'm missing something. And the first 10 contract manufacturers I met with were all guys, and they literally laughed at me. They said, you have to use ammonia,

ammonia, PPV, resource and all sulfates. This is all the things that stabilize hair color so it works. And you're going to try to sell it on the internet. So they were. like, I don't understand. And then lucky number 11. I spent five hours with them. And I was meeting with the CEO. He's since become a very close friend. And he's listening to this idea. And he's like, yeah, you can take the chemicals out. But nobody wants to do that. Like, it's more expensive. And you need to spend more time in the lab. And you need to really do a lot more testing and stabilization. And then he paused and he said, and you're a venture capitalist. And so are you going to raise money for this?

And I said, yes. And then he said, we laugh about it today. He says, well, you have to pay me up front 100% for the first run and all in euro. Wow. And how much was that going to cost? I think altogether it ended up being like maybe 160,000 of US dollars. Because remember, the first run was a limited, you know, minimum. order quantity. And when we launched, we only had 19 shades. You wanted 19 shades. They only could

make 19 shades. I wanted as many shades as possible. But that to me sounds like for a first run, I'm thinking 19 shades. Like I'm thinking about ice cream. Like if you're starting an ice cream business, you just start with vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry because all of the data shows that that accounts for most of what people order. And then you get into the chocolate chip cookie dough and the honeycomb brittle and whatever you want. And I'm thinking it's got to be the same in hair dye, right? No way. No, it's not?

No, I mean, look at every person has a different hair color. So the nuances of your hair is very specific to who you are. So there's, you know, 15 today different brunettes, you know, and 20 different shades of blonde, right? And eight different shades of red. So we had to have a full enough spectrum of color that people could take us seriously in order. And so we started out with 19. And 19, this is going from what to what? Like blonde to black?

Dark black, yeah. Okay. We have close to 100 today. I mean, it sounds like a lot to me, but I don't know this industry. The last time I dyed my hair was when I was in junior high and I was a punk rocker. I just sprayed it. Oh, you did. It was a punk rocker.

Yeah, it doesn't count. But I mean, how long between that visit and the time that they actually had a formulation ready? Like, did they have to do a lot of research and a lot of work on it? And we had to spend a lot of time there because one of the things you do is when you make a color, it has to sit in testing sort of quarantine for three months, for stability. To make sure that it's going to be shelf stable. Exactly.

So you're just waiting for. three months and yeah and then we're getting models so we recruited models in Italy that come into their salon and then they color their hair and then we see what it looks like pre and post and then you start doing things like looking at it in sunlight looking at it under UV looking at to make sure that it's actually the representation of what the consumer thought they were going to get What were you willing to spend before you went out seeking seed money? Like, was there a number in your head? About $200,000.

You said, I will spend $200, and then if it doesn't work, I just'll eat it and move on. Yes. But clearly, that didn't happen. I mean, so as they're developing this product, and you're building the business model, how were you going to sell this? Were you going to, it was going to be a wholesale model? Were you going to go to cosmetics brands and Walgreens and Walmart? No. I was going to do what Dollar Shave Club did, which is direct to consumer online. Yes. Because that is more profitable if it can work. Absolutely. More profitable, higher gross margins. And the one little thing that I realized was color matching the person coming into our site was going to be the most important thing. When you walk into a stylist, they are looking at what your hair looks like at that moment. Yeah. And they're deciding what your hair could. look like if they put various colors on it. That's what they get trained to do. There is science

to this, not just art. And so I was thinking, well, geez, maybe we could do a quiz. And it had 18 questions that you were answering, including what color is your hair now, how much gray do you have when the gray grows out, what's the texture of your hair, and then what is your desired result. And we started to see very early on actually measuring customer satisfaction and net promoter score, whether or not this algorithm, because that's what we built, machine learned algorithm, worked. And that was the moment that we understood we had something here because the retention from the beginning and the color predicting from the beginning was very accurate.

All right. So you were going to sell this direct to consumer. And you had a hunch that there was an opportunity here. So here's a question. One of the, was one of the ways you, you, you thought about positioning it in relation to your competitors, your potential competitors, was we are safer or we don't have harsh chemicals, or did you want to avoid that because that's also can be like a minefield? Yes and yes. We marketed and still market as ingredients you could feel good about. And we talk about an eight free formula.

So we're very, we're factual. Yeah. We're not aspirationally. We don't use the word clean because that's a word that's a meaningless word. It's a meaningless word, but lots of people use it. So we knew that if we got early adapters, maybe people that had been sick and they cared more about what they were putting in and on their body, that we had an opportunity. And so the marketing in the beginning was about better for you. And looking for in like influencer types in. Initially? Looking for influencers. But also, we saw an opening with the age group that we were actually targeting, which was women that are starting to go gray. So, like, late 30s? Yeah, 38 to be exact. 38 and older. That's when acceleration of gray hair starts showing up. And our business model makes sense is based on the repetitive usage. So the more someone colors their hair, they're more money, they're worth. to us. And so it was very important to get that market. Fifty percent of women in the U.S. color at home. So that is a bigger market than people thought. And that's who we were focus on. The at-home user that wanted a prestige product with better ingredients who had gray hair. So, all right. So it's 2013. You're working on the formulation. You find this Italian manufacturer.

and you decide to raise or you need to raise money because you don't have the funding to do it yourself. And in April, I believe April of that year of 2013, you raise $4 million in a series A round with participation for Mavron and where you'd worked. And you weren't going to launch until, remind me when were you actually going to launch? 15 months later, July of 2014. And so, and I believe that even before you launch you to series B round. That is correct. So was the idea here to go in big, to really go in hard in case some of the established players catch on and try to compete was the idea? We're going to go in well-funded and we are going to go out of the gates just like guns blazing.

Yes. And the idea was since we knew that we wanted it to be a subscription-based business, that build the core of the subscriptions would scale the business faster. So you need a splash to get above the sort of noise for these women and figure out a way to stop them from using what they're using now and have them come to you. So having been a VC, I knew that it was going to cost a lot to acquire customers initially. And the cost was going to be through advertising, presumably. Correct.

All right. So in 2014, July 2014, you were ready to launch. You've got a website, ready to go. What was the launch plan? How were you going to get on people's radars? So we had hired a PR agency that was pretty well known in beauty. And we had developed a launch plan of getting a very famous stylist to tell people that this was efficacious that this was salon quality hair color that they could trust and use at home.

And we had a big, what would now be called an influencer event in their salon in New York City. And lots of press came. Lots of people let us do their hair, believe it or not. And it was very, very successful. And so now all of a sudden, all of these blogs, all of these magazines, all the online magazines and content are saying this hair color is amazing and you can buy it online and it's got it's better for you and so initially the first bang if you will was really PR and influencer driven and you do I think early a deal early with Groupon yes the which we've also told the story and the show's an amazing

story yes and at the time it was one of the hottest you know startups maybe the hottest startup in the United States. And what was the deal that you did with them? They could offer to their base, which was extensive, a free box of hair color. If people came to our site, gave us their email address. And it was trial, right? The whole concept was trial. How much did that cost you? You must have given away a lot of free boxes. We gave away a lot of free boxes. The good news of our business is it's very high margin, right so it appeared like a lot of money but compared to the cost of acquiring a customer it wasn't a lot of money compared to a Facebook ad right so I'll never forget um one of our engineers

early on said uh I'm gonna I'm gonna build this thing in the office where a bell would ring and the bell would ring every multiple of 58 because our first address was 58 South Park and the Groupon thing went live on Groupon and the bell just there was like three days where the bell was ringing every millisecond. Wow. There were a lot of people that took the offer for the trial. And did you pay for the shipping cost too? Yes, we paid for everything. Oh, wow.

So that was a big, big risk. Yes. Because you're basically saying, look, we might give away a million, two million dollars worth of this stuff and retail. price or who knows I don't know but but it's a big risk I mean because you're hoping that people are going to come back to you exactly buy you yes and so um we had really good success with the we were shocked the number of people who took the box but then again it was free but it was hair color and a big risk do you remember how many people yeah I think that it was maybe 7000 or something like that so in a small company

That was substantial from the beginning. Out of the gate, you got 7,000 customers. Yeah. Then the not good thing happened. Very few of them came back. That's Groupon. That was the Groupon story. Yeah, exactly.

People went to the mochi shop and got their macho lattes and whatever, but they never came back. Yeah, that's called not. The business model wasn't sustainable. And for us, it was like, oh, okay, this was deal seekers. That's what we thought. These are just deal seekers. The box is probably sitting there never used, right? And so that taught us like a lot about these kinds of deals.

However, the boomerang of that was all that email that went out to people that didn't take the offer, there was all of a sudden a lot of exposure and the PR articles and the influencers talking about it. And slowly but surely we started to introduce in those days just Facebook ads. which in those days weren't expensive compared to what they are today. And we were able to start targeting that very specific 38-plus woman professional of a certain household income level. And sales started to trickle in, trickle, the word trickle. But the great news was people that purchased it stayed. Yeah.

So we learned trial by free, not so good. If I pay for it and I love the results, they stay. And that has been a homework of the company, high retention. Amy, I'm curious about fundraising, right? Because on the surface, somebody could say, okay, well, you know, less than, you know, in 2015, so, you know, about a year after you launch, you raise to a series C and it's $16 million. By this point, you've raised $32 million. A lot of people might hear that and think, you know, wow, she had no problems raising money. There were people throwing money at her.

you were a very experienced VC. You had run several businesses. You had started your own business. So you were very experienced. I mean, you're in your 50s, and there are reasons why somebody at that phase in your career was going to be successful. But I don't think that's the entire story, even though the number looks high, from what I understand, it actually wasn't as easy as it might seem to raise that money. the series A was highly sought after for some of the reasons that you talked about. And then when we got to the series C, not so much.

And from that period on, it has been a difficult business to raise money for. And here's the key. Most people invest in things they can relate to. Yes. So if you are a guy and you know nothing about hair color, and you don't color your hair, or if you do, you're not telling anyone. You don't pay attention to how much your wife or your daughters or those people are doing it around you.

It isn't relevant. So it wasn't a, in retrospect, it felt very personal at that time. Remember, I identify myself with being successful, successful. What do you mean? You said no. Are you telling me my baby is ugly? But in retrospect, I've come to realize that this was not personal. it was just relative to using your capital, this isn't the place that you'd want to invest in.

Because you didn't think this is the important part that we get venture returns. Right? Venture, it's the, it's not, I don't believe you're going to have a successful business, Amy. I don't believe you can give me a 10x. Right. That's the, that's the piece. All right. So you've got this, you've got, you know, you're sort of growing, but imagine it's going to,

be ways before you start to see, you know, the kind of growth that that you were hoping for. But, I mean, this, again, this is an exciting category and you're getting more and more attention for it. And I know in 2016, you kind of start to explore like a physical shop. You do a pop-up in New York. At that point, had you already started to talk to people about having like coloring locations where people could actually like salons? or were you not quite there yet? There were two things that happened that spurred that. One stylist started reaching out to us asking if they could buy our color directly from us to apply to their customer's hair in their salons.

Like at a wholesale. Yeah. And that was like, oh, curious. That's curious to me. And it was not like three. It was like hundreds. And at this point, we had maybe eight stylists that were in our call center. And I started to ask them, do you think this product is good enough to use as salon quality as we advertise?

And they're like, absolutely, these are people that used to work in salons. So yes, I went to the board and the board said, interesting idea. Why do you think you can disrupt salons? Because the only reason to do this is if you could do it better than a traditional salon, which took us down a technology path, much like the path. much like the path of that color matching quiz. Could we make appointments on a mobile phone? Could we keep all the data for the customer?

Could we build an app for a stylist that work for us that made the application only be 90 minutes, which is part of the model. You're in and out in 90 minutes. And so they said you have $75,000 go wild. See what you can do. So we opened a small pop-up in Flatiron. we spent 25,000 of the 75 for out-of-home advertising, like billboards on sides of the buses and phone booths, still phone booths in New York.

And in five weeks, we were totally full. And we had no idea what we were doing. And it had been an operating salon, so we didn't need to do the renovation to put sinks in and stuff. But it was really clear that there was a lot of things that were going well, but a lot of things that we had no idea. But that was the That was the genesis That was where you were like We've got to have a permanent location

A permanent color bar Hair color bar We need to play in 100% of hair color Not just the at home box And I know the model was Direct to Consumer And now you've got You've got colors, stylists

contacting you So now you're thinking Okay here's another distribution channel And then the color bar would be your own salons Correct. So, I mean, now you're talking about, you know, much more diversified distribution model,

but still not yet thinking about working with retailers. Actually, I believe the pop-up happened in 16, but shortly after in the beginning of 17, Alta contacted us. All to contact you, all to beauty. And they said, hey, we want to sell these in our stuff, which is great to be contacted by, them rather than try and pitch them.

Yeah, it's amazing how branding works. I do radio and podcast commercials to tell the story about naming this after my daughter. Yeah. And a very senior person at Alta kept hearing it on the way to work and went into the buyer and said, do we have that hair color that's named after a founder's kid? Because it's better ingredients and we're going in that direction. And the woman was like, I don't know what you're talking about. And then they contacted us. And it just, again, synchronicity, the buyer used to work for our head of product at Sephora.

They knew each other. It was just serendipitous. And in my infinite wisdom, I said, we don't go on other people's shelves. We're a D to C model. We control all of our own business. And my head of product looked at me and said, Amy, I think we should just hear what they have to say. I think you're crazy. Tell me a little bit about your hires.

You know, when you started to raise money, you know, let's go jump back to this sort of 24. when you launch, did you think I'm just going to go for the top people in this, you know, in the industry and I'm going to recruit them and try and get them to work with me? Yes. And we had four co-founders when I started. And I believed that they all represented sort of the cream of the crop from where they came before. and all three of them are gone from the company through some of the most painful experiences that I've ever had in my life.

These were three people that I care deeply about. Two were personal friends. And in one case, I've lost that friendship that is really hard. And it set us back as well. Because when a business starts scaling, but the people that you have there can't scale with it, the business moves at the rate of the slowest senior person.

Yeah. That's what I've come to understand. And I learned a lot. My Series A investor said Amy four co-founders is too many. And I said, no, it's not. And boy, was he right. When we come back in just a moment, Amy learns some very hard lessons about hiring, firing, and moving on.

Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's shortly after launch around 2014, and Amy's discovered that running Madison Reed with three other co-founders is a lot harder than she thought. This is on me. This is definitely on me. These are three extraordinary human beings, wonderful human beings. this was Amy's magical thinking, as I call it, to put something together with a group of people that I liked, which is a bias, by the way, that one hires for liking a lot as a certain bias that I would suggest. Everyone start thinking about. It's not just about like. And I thought I could will it to work. And it didn't. And it cost the, I would say, I would say, I would. say it costs the company a couple of years in retrospect of of of what I would call substantial developmental leaps that we needed to take I mean it's it's very hard like I think

like I think a lot of co-founder success stories happen because of luck or really do it's like marriages but you know some people have certain strategies for figuring out is this person going to be the right fit what do you think happened I mean where you just Do you think you were mainly focused on sort of resume and credentials rather than is this person the right fit with me? I think that all four of us were the right cultural fit with each other. Like we wrote the values of the company together and there's still the values of the company. So there wasn't a difference of, if you will, how we wanted the company to operate or how we treated people or what were the values. I think that I did not get the level of expertise that one needed to be in a technical business like this.

So, you know, one co-founder was focused on finance and the supply chain. And a supply chain part of this business is really a big deal, especially when you have product coming from Mnily. And what I thought was that his experience would suggest he knew how to do that. And that started to fall apart as soon as the company scale. How did you how did you unwind that? I mean, you are now the only, you're the last, last person standing here out of the four. How did you, I mean, it must have been so complicated because you're running a company, you're raising money, you're trying to be a leader in this category. And then you've got this executive team that you realize it's not the right, it's just not the right team.

I had to learn really quickly honesty and directness with people. And to be really clear about expectations and to try to separate that I like you from this isn't working. You're not doing your job. Here's tangible examples of what is going on. In the first case, it was just clear to everybody in the company that this, the first guy that left just he was going through a hard personal time which made it even worse because you know it was a hard time and his life and so there was a lot of honest conversations between us and that was amicable in

the leaving um i think the key about someone's leaving is to figure out what they need what motivates them to be okay and in that case you know kept a desk came kept being listed as a co-founder kept an email address. In the second case, it was clear that this person couldn't do their job as the CMO of the company. That there were no, we couldn't get things done. The hiring was slow. The branding was not as crisp as it needed to be.

The media allocation of dollars was off. And that required, that was my closest friend. And that required just really honest, really honest painting. conversations. We have remended that relationship, but it took a long time. And then the third one was the hardest because he was the closest to me as the co-founder and handled finance and handled logistics. And I'll never forget that two other relatively senior people came to me and asked me to come into the conference room and said, Amy, where are you? And I'm like, what do you mean? And they're like, so-and-so is really terrible at his job. And why aren't you doing anything about this? Like, are you not

paying attention? And so my denial, I have this saying now when you know, you know. And I have spent a lot of time like rationalizing and this would be bad and here's the reason why I can't. And every single person that is no longer at Madison Reed has gone on with great things in their life with courage and dignity and we've treated them well. But I could have skipped a bunch of humiliation of them. I think it's humiliating for someone to do a bad job. Yeah. All right.

So let's get back to the time. timeline of the story because where we left off was you were now ready to open a permanent salon, a permanent location. And I think the first one was in New York, right? The first one was the pop-up in Flatiron closed and we found the permanent space one block away. So Flatiron was the first one. In New York. Flatiron. Okay. Yep. And that was in 2017. Correct. But now, I imagine, there are two things happening. One is, Or three things. You've got Alta. They want to get into the Madison Reed business and sell your stuff at Alta stores. You've got a plan to grow to create more of these color bars or people could go in and get their hair dyed instead of doing it at home, you know, or they'd have an option. The third thing was you were really leaning into early into AI. You guys were like you, I think you really thought and maybe even still think of your company as almost like an AI company that you. using the tools that were available and they weren't as good as they are now, I guess, to help people choose the products? Yes.

We have a technology-enabled company. We all know that a busy woman lives her life with her phone. And so the camera, you know, we talked about taking a photo. The camera became something and is something where we let you take a picture. And on one side of your hair, you see your natural color, and then you can swipe and see Madison-Reed colors. see what you might look like. When somebody uses that, they convert 30% more than any other customer that doesn't use it. And in addition, the same quiz is given to every customer on their first Madison Reed hair color bar visit, because we have a belief that we should allow you to go

to any one of our 95 locations and have the same outcome. And so if we don't log in the color that the stylist puts on your hair, that wouldn't be possible. How many shades do you have today, by the way? Close to 100. Wow. It's a lot of shades of hair. What is the biggest sort of challenge in terms of convincing people that this is what they should buy? Like there's L'Oreal's of the 800-ton gorilla on the block here and they probably sell more in a week.

I don't know what it is. Or globally. But can you say this is safer or is that kind of treading? I mean, could you say, hey, you know, we. because of the ingredients we use, you know, you're not going to die of some disease. You can't say that, right? But, I mean, how close can you get to making claims without running the risk of getting sued? So we've invested a lot here to be safe about this.

And we talk about a better for you formula. And we are very factual about these eight things that we factually have taken out that nobody else is. taken out. What have you taken out? Tell me. Okay, you're going to test my ability here. I don't have to remember all of them, but just give me. Ammonia, PPD, resource and all, phthalates, gluten, blah, blah, blah, right? And we've put in three things, ginseng root, extract, organ oil, and one other thing. And that it is, our hair color is much gentler on people's hair. So we can use words like that. I'm curious about the branding, again, though aside of this because when you look at a Madison Reed box at Alta, it doesn't say that on the box right away.

It just says radiant hair color kit or, you know, like, you know, sometimes you see like food, like an ice cream brand. Yeah. It says like, you know, 200 calories and no gluten. Three grams of sugar and blah, blah, blah, blah. Just big like the macros, right? They call it in food. Is, would there be an advantage to putting those macros or macro equivalent like argon oil for beautiful blah, blah, blah, blah, collagen. for a great skin. Like, I don't know. Would that help?

Would that make a difference? On the back of the box, it says those things. But I think, you know, have you thought about being a CMO guy? I'm right. That's my next job. That was pretty good. All right. As you, okay, so as you begin to expand by 2019, you've got nine locations.

New York, San Francisco, Dallas, and then. Atlanta. I think Atlanta. Yeah. To expand. And you come into 2020 with like 130% growth in sales. You're reportedly generating like 100 million revenue. And then we've got the pandemic.

Yeah. At this point, you had nine locations that had opened up and you got to shut them down, especially hair. I mean, salons, that's, they were hit so hard like restaurants. But you did something interesting, which is you did not, I mean, you didn't furlough the 300 people who worked at these color bars. You basically, I guess, retrained them to be sales reps. Yeah. One of the things that was happening was the online business exploded. But it was a lot of women that went to salon.

So they had no idea what color to buy, even when the quiz told them they were unsure. So our inbound, we were getting 16,000 inquiries a day. Wow. Yes. So you can imagine how overwhelmed our customer service department was. And so I decided, I said, I don't know how long this is going to last, but these people need jobs and we need more trained colorists. The majority of the people in our customer service are ex-colorists. So we had a way to say, okay, out of the 300, how many of you want to stay? And we'll send you a, we, I think bought, well, we bought 300 Google Chrome. books in two days with headsets and shipped them to the people that wanted to stay and then did what would have been months of training in four days and put them to work. Some of them are still in customer service and never went back to stores. I mean, but from a business perspective where you did you have, I mean, we've had a lot of brands on the show that, you know, they were running out of cash. They were not doing well. Their sales went down 80% overnight. It sounds like the opposite was happening with you guys. yes, the opposite was happening. However, I had this instinctual thing like, this is going to come to an end. So sure enough, past, you know, pandemic, our e-commerce business started to, you know, we weren't gaining as many customers. But we also did an interesting thing was we took a lot of real estate because we understood that commercial.

real estate in four walls was at an all-time low. So basically, you took advantage of all of the cut rate prices to sign leases, and that enabled you to expand. Yeah, you're never going to get real estate in places that we have it today. We could never afford it today if these were brand new deals. And I knew that all those people that came to us were going to go back to their stylist. Yeah. So could we give them an opportunity to stay in brand?

and it's hard to measure that we think a number have stayed in brand, but we've also grown since then. So our numbers as a company never went down. We kept the doubling of the business and then have grown since then every year. All right. Here's a question for you. In that heyday sort of crazy COVID days where, you know, many of your customers or most your customers, they couldn't go to their stylists or their colorists. So they were buying your products, doing it themselves, calling the customer service line getting help, knowing that there was a possibility that they were going to go back to their colorists and they were not going to buy your products.

Was there any moment where you thought, now was a good time to see about getting acquired? I mean, we talked about Dollar Shave Club. He founded in 2011. I think he was acquired in 2016. Yeah. Right. And so did you ever, did that ever cross your mind? like, hey, we better strike while the iron is hot.

Yes, but having been an investor, I thought the chances of that were slim. Because remember, in the pandemic, a lot of these strategics just went away. They pulled back. They pulled back. And in addition, remember, I have a very nascent business model. So I got it really quickly like, oh, this could be really good, but not now. And there's a other window that we had already passed. many of these strategics buy things that are sub $100 million in revenue.

When something gets bigger, it becomes harder for them to get the board to approve it. Then you have to go to a unilever or a procter and gamble at that level. So our window sort of we self-qualified ourselves out of a certain window. And now I will say that to you that, you know, there's a limbo window now, a significant limbo window for consumer companies now. Tough window because for consumer in general. If you're not AI, you're not, right? That's the conventional wisdom that if you're not AI, you're not something that's going to give venture returns.

Yeah. Of course, the founder's going to tell you how different we are, right? I'm going to, as I call it, the lies one tells themselves. This is one of the things I talk about in the company all the time. You can believe your own stuff because you're used to. to saying it. I mean, everything is cyclical, of course. And so we're now talking in mid-20205. And yes, I hear this across the board that for consumer brands, it's just a different category, especially in food. Like it used to be, if you had 20 million a year, you're going to get acquired for, you know,

six, seven X of that, you know, and now it's a different world. You have to be doing at least 100 million to get even the attention of a big multinational choir. And, you know, and, And so when you say there's this limbo window, you mean there's a certain threshold that you have to hit to even attract the interest or there just is a lot of... Well, the, you know, when Mike sold Dollar Shave Club and in those days, growth was the factor that everybody looked at, right? Profitability wasn't. Now the world has shifted to wanting both. people want you to grow, you know, at least 20 plus percent top line, but they also require profitability. And to do both those things is not easy. Very hard. Yes. Extremely hard. So,

and if you look at the IPO window, it's non-existed for consumer companies. So we're still like anybody else fighting the good fight. I mean, it's not gotten easier. So, I mean, here we are 2025 and you have a lot of stores and it is a known brand in in in this space and it's kind of changed the conversation around hair color but it is able it is a more challenging time for all consumer brands for a variety of reasons I mean you know there's uncertainty in the economy and and there's fair competition tariffs all kinds of things going on I mean did you when when you started this process in 2013, did you think that it was something that you would probably sell or it would get acquired in about within about 10 years? Or was that not on your mind?

I thought it would take 10 years. I thought that this kind of category because you have to build your reputation and efficacious feedback, you know, really different than a razor, right? This is like you've altered my appearance. So now I've got to figure out whether I'm willing to give you the business to take that risk. So I thought it would be slower. I also thought that we had a chance to build something that was a legacy, an iconic brand that changed the industry. Remember, we're using the same box of hair color in our hair color bars that we sell. It is not a different product.

It's the same. So we're an omni-channel business where the box of color we think is superior. Would I have predicted this curveball now? No. So I, just like every other entrepreneur in growth stage company, because that's what we are, we are more a private equity target, I wouldn't have predicted the IPO market closing. I wouldn't have predicted some of the instability that consumers are feeling. But my head's down every day because I want that big outcome. And so now that the goal, not just for you, but for virtually every consumer brand is growth profitability.

Exactly. You got to hit both of those things. And we are doing both. We are a profitable company now. We crossed profitability last year. Congratulations. Thank you. And we are growing pretty significantly.

And it's still heart. I think consumers in general are fatigued and scared of the price of events. eggs and gasoline. And for any consumer company, it has an impact on the emotional state of your buyers. I also think that this is a good thing for us to prove that hair color is pandemic proof and recession proof because that just means it's going to happen no matter what happens. Like lipstick. Like lipstick, the lipstick effect. Yeah. When you think about the journey you took and all the twists and turns of where you are now. Again, I know that's the word success,

you have a difficult relationship with it, which I think is healthy. I think a lot of people actually do. I do too. But would you say that your success has more to do with how hard you worked or has more to do with just luck and being at the right place? I think there's an element of both. I think I work really hard, really hard.

and I think I've been lucky. As I used to say in venture, a great venture capitalist positioned themselves to get lucky. You know, they hang around in the right places and they talk to the right people and they know enough relationships and they have the capital.

But most of the time, their outcomes have some luck to do with it. So I think it's a healthy mixture of both those things. And I feel grateful for that. I my only concern and I'm just going to be very frank with you is that if you do get acquired you're just going to you have such itchy feet you're going to start another company you're going to be like 75 and thanks a lot guy I really appreciate I'm ready to go that's it that's yeah I'll be as I joke with my investors I will have a walker as I ring the bell on the New York Stock Exchange and but they can be 120 they can be like at your desk by the way I'm just I'm going to be with by the way I'm just I'm going to be with you're going to be with your desk by the way. They're kind of of similar age, so we'll be together with three walkers. And so I don't know.

You know, I'm, I don't think I'm cut out to retire. I think you're not. I think you need it. Yeah, I, you know, I think a lot of it is upbringing. I was raised by a strong woman. You know, in some ways the harder it gets, the more I dig in. My coach and I talk about, well, could you still be really motivated but not have to torture yourself? That's the essential question.

And I think the answer to that is yes. I'm getting there. My wife would tell you I'm much more pleasant to work with. That's Amy Arrett, founder and CEO of Madison Reed. By the way, since the hair color is made in Italy, all of the shades are named for Italian cities. There's Parma, Positano, Sienna, Napoli, Verona, Milano, and Amy's favorite, which she happens to use on her own hair, a light icy hue called Roma blonde. Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week.

Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show. And if you're interested in ideas and insights from the world's greatest entrepreneurs, sign up for my newsletter at gairozz.com or on Substack. This episode was produced by Sam Paulson with music composed by Rompeteen Arablui. He was edited by Neva Grant with research help from Imman Maani. Our engineers were Patrick Murray and Quacey Lee. Our production staff also includes Casey Herman, Alex Chung, Carrie Thompson, Catherine Seifer, Carla Estevez, Norah Gill, Ramel Wood, Andrea Bruce, and Elaine Coates.

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