How I Built This with Guy Raz - MGA Entertainment: Isaac Larian

Episode Date: March 25, 2024

Isaac Larian moved from Iran to Los Angeles at age 17 with just a few hundred dollars, and went on to build one of the biggest toy companies in the world. Along the way, he took on Barbie with a wildly successful line of punky dolls called Bratz — a success that touched off an epic legal battle with Mattel. Today, at age 70, Isaac is still the CEO of MGA Entertainment, and says he still has the fighter’s instinct that he learned in the slums of Tehran.This episode was produced by Alex Cheng with music composed by Ramtin Arablouei.It was edited by Neva Grant with research assistance and fact-checking from Carla Esteves and Zazil Davis-Vazquez.Our engineers were Gilly Moon and Robert Rodriguez.You can follow HIBT on Twitter & Instagram, and email us at [e-mail] 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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And that's it. Hope to hear from you soon, and we are so excited to have you come on the show. And now, on to the show. I went to a guy named Ron Stover, who was a buyer at Walmart. Very tough to sell products to. I can't be the next doll.

He said, no. One day he took me to Walmart and showed me this 98 feet of Barbie products. He says, Isaac, you see this? they own 90% market share. They sell and I make my bonuses every year. I said, Ron, what if I came up with something better than Barbie and you didn't buy it? You're going to feel left out.

So I came back and told my design team. Give me something that competes with Barbie. 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 Isaac Larian took on Barbie with a new line of dolls called Brats and built MGA Entertainment into one of the biggest toy companies in the world. There's a reason why most of us love rags to riches stories. They speak to the idea of possibility that even in the most miserable of circumstances, there might be a way out. It's why people like Oprah or Jay-Z or J.K. Rowling inspire us because they all remember what it was like to worry about how they were going to make the rent.

We've told a few of these kinds of stories. You might remember our episode with Howard Schultz who grew up in a housing project in Brooklyn or media mogul Haim Saban who sold pencils on the streets to help out his family. Well, today we bring you a story that begins in the slums of Tehran, the capital of Iran, in the 1950s. This is where Isaac Larian was born and grew up, and at age 17 with just a few hundred dollars in his pocket, he arrived to Los Angeles with almost no English and only one contact. Isaac would go on to build the largest privately owned toy company in the United States. It's called MGA Entertainment, and the company is probably best known for two products. LOL Surprise, which is one of the hottest toys in the world, and brats. the punky, streetwise dolls that at one point knocked Barbie off her market-dominating pedestal. MGA turned Isaac Larian into a billionaire, which on the face of it isn't that interesting to me or to this show,

but to go from zero to a billion, well, that's a really hard thing to do. And so this story is, of course, about how he did it, and how a nearly decade-long legal battle with Mattel almost killed him. But most importantly, Isaac Larian's journey is also about why ego is truly your biggest enemy when building a business. And why the word no is actually the beginning of a conversation rather than the end. Today at age 70, Isaac still runs MGA entertainment. But as a kid, he was an outsider, growing up as a minority, in his case Jewish, in Iran in the 1950s. We lived in actually in the ridded slums.

No running water, no light. And we lived there with my aunt and my two, three other cousins, all in a two-bedroom house. And you had a very big family in Iran. Huge, yes. Everybody was working so hard. I was working since I was nine years old. My mom started buying. clothes out textile and making she was a good seamstress.

Right, and made dresses for the neighbors. And my mother supported us and the whole family. My mom had me when she was 15 years old. Wow. I read that when you were a little boy, you actually witnessed your dad, your dad actually getting beaten. Yeah. My father was a textile merchant.

and he was a good entrepreneur, but he loaned money left and right to these so-called friends and family they didn't give him back the money, and he went bankrupt. So one of the creditors, one day walked in to our house with another big guy, I remember.

I opened the door, they burst in, and the guy demanded money. And of course, my father didn't have money, to give him. So they started beating him with this big stick until he was bloodied and on the floor. I was crying. My mother was crying. My little sister was crying. And then they left. They said, pay me. Or we come back and they left. It was like a mafia shakedown. It was. And that was a defining moment in my life. I told myself one day I'm going to have so much money that Nobody in my family is going to suffer from poverty.

You were eight years old. Yes. I mean, certain things as a kid when you put in your head, it doesn't go away. Yeah. When we lived in the slums, there were a lot of uneducated people that basically they were kind of fundamentalist. And I remember being beaten up by the bullies in the neighborhood because I was Jewish. I was getting beaten up so bad

One day that when I came home I think I was about seven years old From school that I was all bloodied And my mother told me that If you ever come home again, bloodied, I'm going to also hit you Go fight back By 9, 10, 11

I had made two dumbles from two bricks And a piece of wood And I remember that and I was exercising to get stronger. And, you know, one day, when the neighbors gathered around me with the biggest bully in the neighborhood, his name was Mortezau, he started beating me. And I started hitting him back so hard until he was on the ground.

And since then, he became my friend. So they didn't bully me after that. Huh. So I guess in 1971, when you were a teenager, like, well, like 17 years old, you decided you wanted to come to the United States. And you ended up in Los Angeles because I guess you had like a friend who had moved there. And I think you were studying, or planning to go to college and study engineering. Right. But this is, I mean, this was obviously a big step for you, right?

I mean, you were pretty young at the time. Yeah. So to be honest with you, guy, I was scared shedless when. I got here. When I came here, my mom borrowed $753 from her brothers and also gave me a yellow blanket, which I still have, and actually is hung at MGA's headquarters. And frankly, also coming out of Iran, this was my first time on a plane, actually.

It was the first time for me to get out of Tehran ever. So, I mean, I cried all the way from Tehran to America on the plane. And the students is very sorry for me, and they kept giving me food. Wow. By the way, did you speak much English? No, no, no. How are you going to get through university? When you're 17 and you have grown up with hardship through the slums, you have a feeling of invincibility and you have a feeling that, okay, I'll learn it.

It's not difficult. I was trying to teach myself English. I bought an English-Persian dictionary, and that's what I was reading every day and getting LA Times trying to read that and learn from it, trying to watch TV and learn from that. But I had no idea. But you have to get a job. So what did you do? Yeah. So within a month, I was down to 25 quarters in my pocket, and I had no idea what the hell am I going to do.

So I started walking literally on Labrea Boulevard. I walked for 11 miles one day, going to every gas station, 7-Eleven, you name it, asking for a job, and everybody said no to me until I got to a place called Spires Coffee Shop and I asked them for a job. And they said, sorry, they have nothing open. And so behind the counter was this guy with a white hat. He was a cook. You could see it when you were sitting in the coffee shop. And I left.

I started walking back, really crying. And he came and put his hand on my shoulder. And he told me in Farsi, Iran, yes. Are you Persian? And I said, yes. He says, are you hungry? I said, yes. He said, come back.

He made me liver and onion, which I still taste and I still go once in a world there to have it. It tasted great. Wow. It just happened that he was Persian. Right. He saw you there. Right. Yeah.

So, you know, my wife says, you must have had angels on your shoulder along the way all your life. So he told me the only job that they have is graveyard shift. washing dishes, and it's from 11 to 7 in the morning, and pays $1.65 an hour. And I multiplied $1.65 times the Persian Rial. I said, oh, my God, that's a lot of money. Yes. I took the job. I said, yes, I took the job right away.

All right. So you get this job at this restaurant called Spires. And over time, I guess you worked at a bunch of different restaurants while going to college. We went to college and eventually graduated. You got a civil engineering degree from Cal State, L.A. And I guess your plan was to what, to like go back to Iran and go work there? Yes, it was. So when I graduated, I went back to Iran to see what's going on. But when I went to Iran, it was fascinating for me. All of a sudden, the streets looked a lot smaller than I remember them. And the revolution was happening. And I said, you know what? This is not for me. I'm

going to go back. So the revolution was underway, the Islamic revolution, which would obviously transform Iran. You knew that this was not going to be the place for you to start life. Right. No. I just said to myself, this is not for me. I'm not going to do this. I'm going to go back to America. Did you try to encourage your mom and dad? and the rest of your family to come too? Yeah, I did. And my dad was very stubborn. He says, no, this is where we belong and we're not coming.

I brought my brother, younger brother, to America. This is Farhad. Yeah, Farhad. And eventually things got so bad that I was pushing for my parents to come. And they basically were smuggled across Afghanistan, across Pakistan, literally on horses and back of pickup trucks. And they applied for a refugee visa. And they finally got that and came to America.

Wow. And I guess in the meantime, you had already come back to Los Angeles. And this time you came back with your brother, Farhad. And I guess you started a mail order business in L.A. called Surprise Gift Wagon. What did you sell? Brass giftware. These are like little figurines.

unicorns, etc. Right. And then eventually you moved into selling consumer electronics. What was the name of that company? We called it company ABC International. And the reason I chose ABC, because at that time, there were yellow pages. And I wanted the company name to be...

Right at the top. Right, exactly. Exactly. But basically, Sony Walkmans had come to America. and they were in big, big demand, and I had learned about importing with surprise gift wagon. So I started looking for, in Japan, in Singapore, in Hong Kong. Literally, I would get their yellow pages from those cities

and go look for electronic retailers. And then I would buy from them because they were selling them cheaper in Japan that they were selling it in USA. And I would import those 10, 12 pieces at a time and selling them. Wow. And would you go to Tokyo and to Hong Kong? Yes, I finally did go first time to Tokyo.

And I thought, wow, I'm in heaven, all those electronic stores. And literally, I had at that time saved about, I think, $18,000. And I would go to store to store. Do you have Sony Walkman 3? Yes. How many do you have? Four. I buy all four.

Wow. Then I would take it to the hotel and come back again. And one day, one store told me you don't have to do that. You can just put it in a taxi. They'll take it to the hotel. And it will be there when you get there. I couldn't believe that was going to happen. You do that in New York or L.A.

You probably won't see it. They'd keep it. And did you just pack your suitcase with all this stuff and then come home? Yeah. And then you would take out ads and magazines for Sony Walkman, and then you would just, and it was like arbitrage. You could just buy them cheaper and sell them for double the price. Exactly. Wow.

You started this business with your brother Farhad, who I think it was by Fred now. Right. And tell me about how that business went. I mean, you were basically, you just take out Maidle order and sell Walkman. Yes. But again, I wanted to go bigger. So there was a company called Olympic Sales. selling Sony Walkmans, Apple computers, etc.

So one day I put 18 of my Sony Walkman trees in the trunk and went to the store. Went upstairs and asked for the owner. This short French Moroccan guy walks out. He says, I'm Francis Ravel. I said, I have Sony Walkmans. And he says, are they stolen? I said, no. How many do you have?

I said 18. So I went to my car and brought them up in the lobby and showed it to him. He examined all of them. He still didn't believe that they were original. He says, okay, I'll buy them, but I give you a post-dated check. It's only valid two weeks from now. Because he wanted to know by then he will find out. If they're going to fall apart, yeah.

Yeah, exactly. And boom, the post-a-the-check cashed. And I had made $40 a unit in profit. I said, oh, my God, this is big. How big was that check that he wrote you? I think that check was literally $18 times $130 each. So it was a big check. So you went beyond Walkman, I'm assuming.

Oh, yeah, yeah. I went to all kinds of consumer electronics. I was called the King of Grey Market, because that was the... It was called parallel import. It's called gray market. How did you get a better deal than, you know, Circuit City or some of these bigger companies? They were buying from the manufacturer representative in USA. First of all, there was a shortage.

Like, they would buy it from Sony of America. There was a shortage. Secondly, Japanese companies sold the products in the USA at a much higher price than they did in Japan. Singapore or Hong Kong. So I had two things to my advantage. I had the supply. And I had a better price, and they started buying from me. And I'm just curious, were you bought, when you buying them directly from Japan,

do they have, like, Japanese characters on them? Yeah. Or was it in English, right? I remember seeing those Walkmen. I probably bought one of your Walkman because people are like, wait, I can't read this. What does this say on the thing, right? Because it was in Japanese. Yeah, it was in Japanese.

And I went, and there were people who were coming. complaining. You were the guy, you got me my Japanese Walkman. But you bought it cheaper. I did. I got a good deal. But people would complain, they would say, I can't read this. Yeah, so I started translating the instruction to English, making photocopies, and putting it in the units.

I mean, how big did you guys get? I mean, how big did ABC electronics get? What were you doing a year in revenue? We were doing $70 million in a year. Wait, 70 million at your height, but that was, I mean, that's... must have come a few years later. Yes, of course. Yeah, it came a few years later, but this was huge.

Wow. Yeah. That's unbelievable. And this is, you, 70 million dollars. So you were, at this point, I'm assuming, you were selling to not just consumer electronic stores in L.A., but all over the U.S. Yes, I was. I was selling it all over the U.S.

I sold it to crazy Eddie in New York. I sold it to everybody. How does a guy from Iran, named Isaac Larian with no connections, how is he able to find the best deals? I mean, I know this is going to sound, you know, a little bit of a cliche and forgive me, but you did come, you did grow up as a boy, going to the bazaars, negotiating for textiles, right? I mean, so I'm assuming you probably had that skill. Absolutely.

Right? That you could find a deal. Yeah. And the funny thing is my son, Jason, when he was growing up, he was, I think, 22, 23. And we went to Bloomingdale to buy suits. And I picked two, and he picked one. And I told him, go ask the guy for a discount. He got red in the face.

And he says, that, this is not the bazaars of Tehran. They won't give you a discount. I said, trust me, we are buying three. They will give us the discount. And he says, no, you're embarrassing me. So I went to a salesman. I said, we buy all these three. I want 15% discount.

He says, no way, we cannot do that. This is Bloomingdale. I said, okay, then we won't buy it. And my son was so pissed off. We walked over to the elevator. And guess what? The supervisor came and says, sir, okay, come back. We cannot give you 15%, but I can give you a 5% discount.

Everything is negotiable. You know, I knew the salesman at Bloomingdale make 15% or 20% commission. So, okay, give me 5% of it. You still make 10% is more than zero. Amazing. I need to go close shopping with you next time. Yeah, I can't. You need me my personal shopper.

Okay, so this business is getting really big. And I guess there was something that happened, and I remember this because I was a boy, that you basically got the license to distribute these Nintendo game watches. And I remember there were like these rectangular little games. they had a crystal LED screen and you could play like Pong or, you know, basic games with two buttons. Donkey Kong, Mario Brothers. I had a bunch of them. They were like little squares.

They were, you know, about as thick as like 10 credit cards stacked. Exactly. This blew up. This was a huge, huge thing for you, right? Yeah, it was a huge thing because I was reading World Street Journal and Nintendo had become the king of consumer electronics and they'd done $5 billion in sales. It was crazy. This was in like, what, 1986, 87? Yes, exactly, about that time.

So I went to, I found out where their headquarter is, was in Kyoto. And I literally took the bullet train, went to their headquarters, and asked to talk to the export manager. And if you have dealt and you've been in Japan, you don't just walk into some places and say, I want to see the expert manager. So the receptionist picked up the phone, said something in Japanese on the other side, and said to me, sorry, not available. I said, what's his name?

And then she did the same thing and says, sorry, cannot give you the name. So I said, okay, I'll wait until he's available. So I sat there and there's this big, tall guy, walks, talks to her, looks at me, and leaves. and comes back from lunch and comes to where I'm sitting, and he says, I am Mr. Todori. What can I do for you? I said, I want to buy a Nintendo game and watch for America as a distributor, and I'll pay cash and letter of credit.

And he says, sorry, not interested. And I said, can I have your business card? Reluctantly, he gave me his business card. And I came to America, and I opened the letter of credit for a million dollars. full wire to Nintendo attention message to Dori. And then I called him three days later. I said, did you get the letter of credit? And he said, yes, but I told you we're not interested.

I said, I just want to show you that I'm serious about buying and distribute the Nintendo game and watch. So he says, okay, we can ship you in three months, but it's going to be all in Japanese packaging. And I said, that's fine. I'll take it. And so I made the name of the subsidiary of ABC International Micro Games of America. And that's how I started.

So you were going to basically, these games came in, you were going to take them out of the box and repackage them in an English language box. Yeah, I did, yes. Wow. And this guy said no to you three times. Yes, he did. But that turned into a massive. Yes. That went bonkerable, like tens of millions of dollars in sales.

Yeah, the first year, you know, when you're in consumers, electronics, you're happy to make 8, 10%. In toys, I was making 32% profit. And the first year, I saw $23 million of Nintendo game and watch. Wow. I thought I've died and gone to heaven. I mean, just the audacity to sit there and to have the guy look at you and say, I'm not interested.

I mean, a lot of people would feel humiliated and walk away from that in say, okay, but it doesn't sound like you suffer from any feelings of humiliation. Like, you don't care. No, I don't care. I mean, for a lot of people, that would hurt their ego. No, I didn't care. I tell my people the selling starts when the buyer says no. When we come back in just a moment, how Isaac decides to pivot once again from electronic

games to dolls and sets a goal that seems impossible to meet. build a doll that's better than Barbie. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This. Hello, Guy. This is James Caiton from Ave Maria, Florida. And my favorite episode is your interview with Kendra Scott. That is my 12-year-old daughter's favorite brand. And your episode allows me to have a conversation with her around grit and perseverance and what it takes to be successful in that it isn't as easy as it seems at the end.

There's a story behind every famous person, every famous brand, and every famous woman. If you want to share your favorite episode of How I Built This, record a short voice memo on your phone telling us your name, where you're from, what your favorite episode is, and why? A lot like the voice memo you just heard. And email it to us at hibt at ID.wondery.com. And we'll share your favorites right here in the ad breaks and future episodes. And thanks so much. We love you guys. And now, back to the show.

Hey, welcome back to how I built this. I'm Guy Raz. So it's around 1987, and Isaac's toy company, Micro Games of America, has just had its first big success, importing and distributing the Nintendo Game and Watch. All right, so this is a huge, huge fat. I mean, I had him as a kid. I'm sure people listening remember Game and Watch. but I guess about, like with many things in children's toys, that was a fad that kind of passed, right?

About two years in, sales started to fall. Right. Just because what? Because kids at a certain point moved on? Yeah, they were looking for something new. That's for something I learned from that. Literally two years on, I was sitting in $10 million of inventory.

And it wasn't moving. No, and the interest rates were 19% at a time. Wow. And I had the line of credit with Mitsui Manufactured Bank. I didn't have money to pay them. So I liquidated that merchandise

for 25 cents to a dollar. So you saw that there was something in toys, but you also got burned by toys. Because I think when Game and Watch kind of that fad surpassed, it was also the rise. Nintendo at another product that they released called the Game Boy,

And you did not have the license for that. How come you didn't get the license to that? Because that would have made you tons of money. Yeah. So that's very interesting. Nintendo watched the success that I had with Game and Watch. And I still to date say that Nintendo was inspired by the success of my Game and Watch to come up with Game Boy. And of course, they didn't want to give me Game Boy.

I asked for it. They wanted to control the distribution of it. Yeah. So you did not get the Game Boy license. No. No. In the meantime, I guess the consumer electronics business was keeping you afloat, right? Yes, but I also decided to go to licensed handheld games.

Handheld games like Nintendo, but for different franchises, like Star Wars and Batman and things like that. Exactly. So I got the license for Star Wars. My son Jason at the time was fascinating. with Power Rangers. So I went to Heim Saban and got the license for... How you negotiated with that guy. I don't know.

Two master negotiators sitting across from each other at the table. I mean, I don't even know how that conversation begins. Yeah. Yeah, it was fascinating. I got to tell you. And Heim, I don't know if he remembers this or not. So Power Rangers were so strong and we were selling so much. And I called you one day.

I said, can I come and see? his office was in Berbank, I have a big royalty check for you. So he said, yeah, sure. I went there. He made me angel hair pasta. It was delicious. I gave him a check for $720,000. And guess what?

Week after, he sent the auditors to come and auditors because he thought, and I still talk to him and laugh about it, because he thought I was cheating him. It could have been more. But in the end, you were cleared. Oh, yeah. The other came and said, no, they gave you what she was. Yeah, exactly. And we became friends.

You never let him hear the end of it. If I'm here listening, Isaac is not going to let you hear the end of that. Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, fair enough. Fair enough. Listen, you got to be in your toast, right? Right.

All right. So you're doing some licensing. And I think a lot of what you were doing was electronics games. Right. But I think around 96. this guy named Joe Trucius, I think of his name. He came to you with a doll that he had created and he had pitched to Battelle but they didn't want it.

And it was basically a doll that bounced and when you bounced it, would sing something like that? Right. Bouncy, bouncy, baby, me, I still remember that song. And he says, I want you to make this doll. It's going to be big. I said, come on, Joe, you have gone to Mattel, you've gone to Tyco.

You have gone to toy busy. I've gone to everybody. Everybody said, no, why would you come to me? I don't know how to make dolls. And he said, they're stupid. They don't understand it. But you're an entrepreneur. You understand that this is a good toy.

And so I said, okay, all right, let me try it. So I took the sample to Hong Kong, sat with two factories who make dolls from Mattal. And I said, if you make these for $5, I'll buy 200,000 pieces. But did you, just going back for a moment, this guy was rejected by every major toy company, and companies that did dolls. You did not do dolls.

You did electronic games. How come you thought, all right, let me do this. I mean, you knew nothing about this business. I like the toy, you know, and I have the personality when somebody says to me, no, you cannot do it. I'll take that as a challenge. And I made a sample. I went and sold it to Toys R Us, sold it to Target, sold it to Kmart. They all liked it.

You pitched it to them and you showed it to them and they said, all right, we'll take it. Right, exactly. And at that time, you had to make TV commercials and put it on Nickelodeon and Fox Kids to sell the product. And you needed to have at least four major retailers in order to be able to have. afford to go on TV. But then I went to a guy named Ron Stover, who was the buyer at Walmart, and he says, I won't buy it. I said, come on, Ron, why? He told me, Isaac, you are microgames of America. Nobody will buy a doll from a company called MicroGames of America. I said, Ron, I'm going to change the company named right now. I'm going to call it the MGA.

And he says, you're too fast for me. Okay, all right, I'll buy it. And that just took off. Huge. Wow. And at the time, in order to get into those stores, it was like a chicken and egg thing. You had to have TV ads on Nickelodeon, which probably just the marketing of that thing was, what, millions of millions of dollars, right? Right.

So they would demand that you have an actual TV commercial. Ready. When you went to pitch it, ready. You had to have a commercial ready when you pitch it. like a VHS tape that you put in and you had like a big TV and an AB system in a boardroom. And you're like, this is the commercial. Yeah, exactly. Wow.

So you had to, you had to spend all that money just for the pitch. I had to spend $125,000 to make that TV commercial. Wow. But by then, I mean, by that point, you were doing well, but MGA was still, I guess, relatively, would you call it a small business or at that point would you call it? Yeah, we were a small business. We were doing less than $100 million at that time. Okay, so very nice business, but tell me about what you took away from that experience with that singing, bouncing baby doll.

Was your mind kind of blown? Or was there a moment where you thought, uh-oh, this could be like the Nintendo Game and Watch? We might be stuck with $10 million worth of inventory that nobody wants in a year. Yeah, so I was actually, I learned from my mistake, from my failure with Nintendo Game and Watch. And this time I did not buy inventory like crazy. I would sell to retailers on what you call FOB is free on board. So they had to open a letter of credit and buy it. So they owned a risk, not me.

And from one doll, we became next year we had bad time bouncy baby. We had giddy-up baby. And we became one of the biggest doll makers. So essentially what you're saying is unlike the Nintendo Game and Watch, which required you to buy the inventory, hold it, and then sell it. You sold the dolls already before they were manufactured. Yes, most of it. Wow.

Okay. So you've got the doll, but you're also doing a lot of licensing, as you mentioned, right? Because you've got the Power Rangers, and I know you did licensing with Pac-Man and Space Invaders. And so I wonder, so when did you start to say to yourself, maybe I need to focus more on building IP, our own property? Frankly, one of the things that was a turnaround for me was when I got the license for Star Wars, nobody wanted the Star Wars. And the license for Star Wars was to make a handheld game? Right, handled games and walkie-talkies. Crazy.

This is in the late 90s. Nobody wanted the Star Wars license. It's one of the most valuable properties on Earth today. It's crazy. Yeah. So I got the license. I got it pretty cheap. and I got it exclusively.

Because at the time, it was owned by George Lucas. Right, exactly. And then Lucas said he's going to make a new movie. And all of a sudden, the demand for Star Wars went up. Wow. But then I still have the exclusive license, and it's two years left of the contract. And when I went back to Lucas to renegotiate

the contract, they said no. Huh. And they had given it to Tiger Electronics. And that really pissed me off, to be honest with you, because I had worked all these years when nobody wanted Star Wars. And we ended up in litigation with Lucasfilm, which I won. But that really put a bad taste in my mouth. And I said, the hell with it. I don't want to work for these entertainment companies.

I want to make my own ideas. Yep. Meanwhile, I want to talk a little bit about something that was happening in the background. This was your relationship with your younger brother, Farhad Fred, who was also your business partner. Because from what I've read and I understand, there was tension between the two of you. You wanted the company to grow faster. He didn't. He wanted to grow more slowly. And, you know, Isaac, everybody's got family and family is sensitive. And so we talked about this gingerly. But I guess, it got to a point where the tension was it just it wasn't working and you offered to buy him out around 2000 and you guys valued mGA your company at 20 million dollars right basically he had to get about 45 percent of the company you gave him about nine million dollars to buy him out and that was it he was out of the company right but just putting aside the the financial transaction from a family perspective what did that do to your relationship with your brother you know we had had a But frankly, I love my whole family. I love my brother. And it bothered me that the business became like a business situation like this happened. And I had offered him because we were fighting every day. I had offered him either he buys me or I buy him.

And I did buy him. And, you know, and I asked him to keep some of his shares in the company. And he said, no, thank you. Good luck. I'm going to go on my own. But unfortunately, he sued me. Yeah. He sued you a few years later because of the success of Brats, which he felt, he felt that you had known about it when you bought him out and that he would have made more money. And like anything, it's complicated. But of course, money can always tear apart friends and family. Right. Absolutely. So to me, that was really. really like a stab in my heart. It was, in our culture, it's unthinkable.

To sue your own relative. Yeah, exactly. You won the case, the court found in your favor. But I imagine it was very tense. Did it, what did it do for the extended family? Yeah, it created a lot of rift and issues within the whole extended family. I mean, Fred being the younger one, my mother started saying that, oh, no, they give him money. You have made money. Give him some money. Give him the money.

And my dad, may he rest in peace, told me, I know you didn't do anything wrong. It is not your fault. He made a mistake. But please forgive him. And later on, we reconciled. But I told him, it's like when you have an expensive piece of porcelain and it falls and it breaks, you can get crazy glue and put it together. But still you can feel the crack. Yeah. And you're not the first of the last brothers to have a rift. And it's hard when you're somewhat estranged from family.

All right. Meantime, so you buy him out. And sometime around, I guess, late 2000, you're approached by this guy named Carter Bryant, who was, I guess at the time he was a freelance designer. And he comes to you with some sketches for a new kind of doll. Yeah, but you're going to go back a little bit. This guy runs Stover, who was the buyer, I told you, about Walmart.

Yeah. Very tough to sell products to. I can be the next doll. He said, no. One day he took me to Walmart, right across the street from Walmart headquarters, and showed me these 98 feet of Barbie products, all in coffin boxes. He says, Isaac, you see these? They do everything for me.

They own 90% market share. They come and set up the planogram. They sell, and I make my bonuses every year. Why would I take a risk and take a portion of that? and give it to you. I said, Ron, what if I came up with something that was better than Barbie and you didn't buy it?

You're going to feel left out. He said, if and when you do that, I will buy it. So I said, okay, remember this. So I came back and told my design tip, give me something that competes with Barbie. And everything they showed me was a Barbie knockoff. Yeah. So one day, and I used to.

take my kids to work. And my daughter, Jasmine, I think at the time, was 10 or 11. And this guy comes in, his name is Carter Bryant. And he says, I have the next doll concept. He showed me these drawings.

And they looked like aliens. They were these like plump-lipped dolls. Yeah, probably big face. Big heads. Yeah. Exactly. So I said, I'm not sure if this is going to work. and I asked my daughter and she says, Dad, they're pretty cool actually.

So I asked this guy, okay, how did you come up with this? And he says, he works at Mattala. I said, okay, but where did you make this? If this belongs to Mattala, I don't want it. And he said, no, I did this in Missouri where I was not working for anybody. I said, okay, you could. quit tomorrow. You come here and work on this. You're going to give it a chance.

He said, I don't want to be an employee. He said, okay, what do you want? He says, I want to get the royalty. I said, okay, fine. We give you 3% royalty on the dolls. But you must quit Mattel and come here right away. All right. So wait, just to pause for a minute, because I think this has been ruled on in court. You're saying that Carter Bryan came up with this idea for Brats on his own during a break, a period of time when he wasn't working for Mattel. Right. But then later, when he approached you,

At MGA, he was back to working for Mattel again. Right. And did he ever pitch Brats to Mattel? No, because I said to him, why didn't he show him to Mattel? He said, Mattel will never do a doll that competes with Barbie. Barbie was on the pet stool. So the biggest mistake he made guy was he decided to be a nice guy and give Mattel two weeks notice to finish some of the things that he was working on.

Because that two-week period essentially later on would be the basis for a case that Mattel would file. Bring against you. Okay. We'll get there. But he brings you this. So on the strength of your daughter saying, hey, these are cool, because you thought they looked weird. Right. But on the strength of your daughter, you said, okay, let's see if we can maybe do something here.

Right. By the way, did he call them brats, Carter? Did he have a name for them or no? Yeah, he called them brats. Brats with a Z. Yeah. And these dolls were going to be the anti-barby in a sense because they were going to have big heads and different sort of street fashion. And they actually looked more ethnically different.

Yes. They didn't look like a northern European white. I mean, there were other. There were non-white Barbies. But basically the archetypal Barbie was. Right. Exactly. So we decided to make what we call Brad's pack.

And I insisted we make all four, four dolls and sell all four together. In one package? Yeah. No, the retailers had to buy a pack of four. But as an individual, as an individual, you could buy one. You could buy Sasha, you could buy Jade. I got you. And what were they?

Yasmin was, she was basing your daughter, so she was more sort of Persian-looking. Yeah, but you know what I didn't want to do is bring a stereotype. So like Sasha was supposed to be kind of African-American, but not African-American. or Jasmine was supposed to have olive skin because she has olive skin, but not Persian. I mean, I remember I went to Brazil and I asked a whole bunch of kids about Jasmine and they said, oh, she's Brazilian. She's Brazilian.

Yeah. So basically we did that on purpose to make sure that it appeals across the world. And how long did, so he brings this to you in 2000. Yes. How long did it take to get a physical purpose? prototype of a doll that you could show to Walmart. Yeah. So I said we need to have samples with packaging ready for Hong Kong toy show.

It was on January 2nd. Yeah. And they said there is no way you're crazy. Yeah. It's not going to work. I had a head of sales and marketing who worked for me who used to work at Mattel before. And he told me anybody who has taken on Barbie has gone out of business. and gone bankrupt.

Hasbroo tried. Don't do that. You're going to go out of business. I said, no, we're going to do this. He quit because he says he doesn't want to have a failure on his resume. Wow. So I take these four samples to Hong Kong. And this is a trade show at Hong Kong.

Right, yes. Okay, and this is an important trade show. Very important trade show. Okay. So we show this to target. They like it. The buyer says, yeah, it's different. We'll buy it.

we showed these to Toys R Us. They said, yes, we will buy it. Bandai in Spain, they liked it, and they said, yeah, we will buy it. Comes round store, again, he says he won't buy it. The Walmart buyer. Won't not buy it, okay. I said, why? And he says they don't look attractive.

So I was so pissed off at the time. I went all the way up to the CEO of Walmart. So he told them, okay, Ron, buy it. So he says, okay, I will buy it, but I only want Chloe. Only blonde dolls sell. And I said, Ron, you know, my daughter was born in America, but she has darker skin. She doesn't want a blonde dog.

She wants a doll that more looks like her. If you want to buy this, you have to buy all four, or I won't sell it to you. And he ended up buying it, but one pack, only one. Can you imagine you had to look for it in the sea of Barbie to find it? It was just one sort of like one part of the shelf, a tiny part of the shelf. Yeah, just one box at the bottom left corner, the worst area of the shelf. So that's what happened.

And we launched the doll first, believe it or not, in Spain. They were first in the market. And the product sold out instantly, instantly. Wow. Toys R Usa, USA, Deborah Tral was the buyer. She gave us an order for $6 million on FOB. Yeah. And we started advertising.

On Nickelodeon and the usual channels? And Fox Kids. Yep. And the doll didn't sell. Well. The doll didn't sell in the U.S. At that time, no. It didn't sell.

sell well. But it was selling in Spain. Yeah, it was selling in Spain, but it wasn't selling well here. And the reason was we were not putting enough advertising behind it. But you were advertising on Nickelodeon and Fox Kids. Yeah, but not enough GRP to, you know, instead of spending a two, three million dollars, we were spending a million. And we were not getting enough eyeballs on it. Because so there wasn't awareness of the dolls. They might have been on the shelves at Target. it and at Toys R Us. Right, yes, exactly. But kids were just passing them by. They didn't know what they were. Yeah, exactly. Okay.

So comes October of 2001, Toys R Us cancers five and a half or six million dollars worth of Brad's orders. Wow. I thought, now for sure, we're going to go out of business. So I went without my wife's approval, got a second mortgage on our house. house and put another one and a half million dollar TV advertising on this doll. Wow. And the sales went through the roof.

What was the ad that you did? I wanted to have a live action animation combined and with the great music because that was going to cut through the clutter on Nickelodeon. It was a little different. And now we pumped that TV commercial and it was. so catchy. The sales went through the roof. Wow. And Toys R Us came back to us, I think two days before Thanksgiving. So we want to buy that order that we want to buy it back that order that be canceled. And I said, those goods I don't have anymore, but I have goods in L.A.

And they cost 25% more. And they bought it. They bought it. And I paid off the market. That is unbelievable. So basically, the dolls were not selling. Right. Toys R Us had canceled their order. Right. Many people would have just kind of said, okay, this is not going to work, and let's figure out how to reconstitute the business. But you had probably invested. How much had you invested in Brats at that point? Oh, my God. I had put everything we had behind it. Like how much, do you think? 10, 20, 30 million? More than $15 million. More than $15 million. So if that didn't work, I would not be in business right now talking to you. I would have gone bankrupt.

You bet the farm on the same. That farm and my house on it. When we come back in just a moment, how Brats and Barbie and their parent companies wind up in court in a bitter dispute that lasts for years. 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 2003 and Brat's dolls are a huge hit.

MGA Entertainment sells a billion dollars worth. And that cuts deeply into Barth's. Barbie's dominance of the doll market. So the maker of Barbie, Mattel, starts to investigate. They started to find out about the origins of this product because they had a feeling that maybe was stolen from them. The IP was stolen from them. Yeah.

When you look at the history of Mattel, they have basically used litigation as a business tool to put, compared to other business. And this is, by the way, this is a playbook that many big companies use to try and quash upstarts. But your trajectory was so fast and must have overwhelmed Mattel. I mean, you got to a billion dollars within a year and a half. And then by the end of 2005, two, two and a half billion dollars of brats had been sold.

You really, it was like, and what was the appeal of these dolls? Why do you think that those dolls just landed with girls? They struck a court with the girls. because they were, first of all, didn't look blonde. They had what I call passion for fashion. Their fashions were new. Baggy jeans, baggy cargo pants, sort of the crop tops and things like that. I mean, I guess because Barbie was, you know, sort of the, let's just say the country club doll.

And Brats was like maybe it was perceived to be more rock and roll, maybe. Right, exactly. So when they found out it's not a fat, they tried to not. knock it off. They basically tried to make a Brat's knockoff. Yes, and they called it Mycine Barbie. Mycene Barbie. Yes.

Yes. It didn't work. Then they came up with a line called Flavos. Flavors was like an urban-looking doll with graffiti packaging, etc. And I did an interview with Wall Street Journal. You can pull it up. And they told me, what do you think about flavors? And I told Wall Street General, they look like gangster Barbie.

The only thing that's missing is the cocaine vile. And she wrote that in the article. Why did you say that? Why did you not have somebody sitting next to you saying, Isaac, shut up? Keep your mouth shut. No, I didn't have. Okay, all right. So you say that.

And I'm assuming that pisses Mattel off. Well, I did more than that besides the cocaine. Well, Bob Eckert, who was the CEO of Mattel. came from craft foods. And I also sell making and selling toys and selling cheese or two different things. And apparently Bob Eckert said, sue that son of a bitch. I'm not surprised. You pissed them off.

I did. Why did you poke that bear? I shouldn't have. So they sued you for what? They didn't sue me first. So they sued Carter Bryant first. They sued Carter Bryant, your designer, basically saying, hey, that's our intellectual property.

Right, exactly. And then they leaked that lawsuit to Wall Street Journal. And I am walking in to this restaurant, Katana, on Sunset, the Japanese restaurant, my cell phone rings is the Wall Street Journal. Hi, Isaac, I want to talk to you about this lawsuit that Mattel just filed. They said, what lawsuit?

So this lawsuit, they filed against Carter Bryant, saying that he worked at Mattel for two weeks while he was working for you on Brats. And I called Carter Bryant right there. I said, I was just told about this with Wall Street Journal. Did you work at Mattel two weeks at the same time working on Bratstall? He said, yes. I got so angry. I said, why the hell did you do that?

Because now gave him a cause to bring this lawsuit. Anyways, that's how the lawsuit started, and we countersued Mattel for copyright infringement with Mycine doll. I see. Okay. And we countersuit them for theft of trade secret because I thought there's a mole in my company, to be honest with you. I thought Mattel had a mole in my company. Okay. Here's what I understand. By 2006, Brats had about 40% of the worst.

Worldwide toy market in dolls, number two doll in the U.S. market. Right. Now you begin what will be a protracted battle. There have been articles, books, there have been documentaries about this war between Mattel and MGA. They teach that case in universities. They teach you. I've read some of these case studies. And I've walked away from this just thinking, oh, my God, all the money that lawyers made from this.

Because really, that's who made the money. Oh, my God. Coen Immanuel, the law firm that represented Mattel made 450. $50 million. It's unbelievable, right? Okay, so this, now you begin what would be a protracted legal battle. But I think at a certain point, a court basically said you had to stop selling the Bratz dolls. 2008.

They said, you cannot sell Brat's dolls while this litigation is happening. So what did that mean? I mean, this is a billion dollar. Yeah, so they, they Mattel asked for an injunction. Worldwide injunction. You got to pull all the Brats told. and products. You had to stop selling rats.

So the injunction came literally on week before Thanksgiving. Which is like the time you've got to start selling for Christmas. Right. So we went to an appellate lawyer and the appellate lawyer says, we got to file for an emergency appeal. So we filed our appeal and literally guide the day before I had to sign the paperwork. to do the recall was the hearing on the Ninth Circuit. Can I just mention one thing?

Yeah. Part of the ruling by the previous court was also that you had to pay Mattel $100 million in damages. Yeah, that's exactly. And that Mattel would have the rights to the doll. Yeah, they belong. Everything brass belongs to them. I mean, it was totally a draconian. I mean, you guys got absolutely hammered in that.

Exactly. Everybody thought we're going to go bankrupt. To be honest with you, I became for the first time in my life suicidal. Wait, wait, stop. That's a serious thing that you just said. I mean, you felt that you were finished? Yes. And that you didn't know if you were going to be able to survive. Yeah, exactly. I really felt like that. But, Isaac, you're a fighter. You're the guy that sat Nintendo and heard no.

And you felt like this really, you were going to be defeated. Yeah, it was, I mean, every ruling was coming against us. Did you, Isaac, because I've talked about this on the show before, and I certainly times of my life I've been depressed and have had depression and I've learned to manage it over the course of my life. You don't strike me, and maybe this isn't fair to say, as somebody who dealt with that, but did you or were you, are you prone to getting depressed? I am, yes, I have been diagnosed with depression because the way I grew up, I mean, I didn't have a childhood. I worked. since I was eight or nine years old. So, and I went through a lot of hardship. And yes, I do have depression.

And I've tried to manage this with a lot of things. I meditate. I still go to therapy all the time. I'm not ashamed about that. Was it hard for you as a Middle Eastern man coming from a macho culture to acknowledge that? No, for me it wasn't. I mean, people who know me, they say, oh, my God, Isaac, at the drop of anything, he starts crying.

So I'm not afraid of being in touch with my own internal emotions. But that time with that injunction, I mean, they took me to ER at Cedar Siner. It kept me overnight. Because you thought you were having a heart attack? Yes. How did you, I mean, this is a long period of time and a long period of time under stress. It was like two years while you were fighting this. Ten years.

Well, ten years. But the most, the injunction over the course. order. Yeah, that was the hardest part. How did you manage through that? Personally, for me, because I don't like to quit, I hate quitting. I did not want my children to see that, oh, my God, our father is defeated. And in the Persian closely knit environment, I don't want people to see that I'm a failure.

And there were days that I was so down, but then I would get energy. And I said, I'm not doing anything wrong. So I would go back and fight harder. So let me take you back to the timeline for a moment, Isaac. Back to, I think, 2009, when you're finally going to have your appeal hearing on your lawsuit with Mattel, what happened there? So, you know, when we went to that appeal hearing, literally it was the day after was supposed to be the recall. And during the break, I told Josh Rosencrantz, who was our apparelalant, I said, Josh, go ask the judges for a stay. A stay that would enable you to sell the dolls again.

Stay the injunction, yes. By 4 p.m., I was in the car driving for Pasadena to my office. And Josh called me and says, Isaac, you don't believe it. court of appeal just issued stayed in junction and it was oh my God and boy I again

as usual I burst into crying I screamed I called my wife got my whole company people together and I told them this we opened the bottle of champagne and I said now let's bring Brats back and kick Mattel's ass

that was not the end of it because you would go back to court and it's too long and complicated to get into all the details. But eventually you won. Mattel was originally ordered to pay over $300 million in damages. And then it was, it was a long time of fighting against each other. Hundreds of millions of dollars in legal fees. Hundreds of millions of dollars in damages and in judgments. But I have to assume that you walked away from all those lawsuits down, like in the red. You didn't make any money from them. You actually lost a lot of money, even though there were

judgments in your favor. In the end, you actually lost a lot of money. Yes. I mean, a guy for six months, I sat in court. I would not come to my office. I hired a guy named John Barber to run my company while I'm in court. You know, one of the things I remember vividly when with jury verdict came and of course all the press was there in the courthouse. And my son Cameron, who at the time was 19 years old, the elderly. The elderly, the elderly, A really times reporter started asking him, how does it make you feel now that your father has won this long battle? He said to the reporter, yes, my father won this case, but Mattel took away our father from us for the past 10 years. Wow.

I still have pain about that lawsuit. I still do. You can tell. I mean, you can hear it. Right. Right. But, I mean, it goes back to my childhood. And coming home, bloodied, and my mother saying that if you ever come back,

bloodied, I'm going to hit you, go back and fight. Don't be bullied. I don't like to be bullied. And I think in general, and I tell my kids, if you are right and you believe in something that you're right, you fight to the end. And I will not change that. You know, it's interesting because Mattel had obviously a resurgence last year with Barbie in the Barbie movie, and the Barbie film was so successful. And I imagine it's had an impact on their sales.

And clearly, they also have not forgotten because I'm sure you saw were aware of it, but there is a scene in the Barbie movie when Barbie goes to high school and the high school girls are kind of like berating her with this brutal honesty. And they are named after the original Bratstalls, the girl, the mean girls are Yasmin Saer. A crush of Chloe and Jade. Exactly. So they're taking a dig at you. Yeah, they were. It was funny. You know what?

It's a good thing they did that because Brats is under resurgence and growing again. So on my LinkedIn, I thanked them. I thanked them for this. All right. So you now Bratz is back. But, you know, again, like, you know, these things could be cyclical. And so I have to imagine, because I know that you, in the meantime, we're trying to expand. We didn't really get into this.

but you actually bought another company. Yeah, Pixel Zoo in Australia. And I bought actually, bought Zab, which is a German company. I bought Little Tykes. Little Tykes, which makes like... Cozy Coop. Right, and toys for little kids. But this was...

Bratz was still kind of the center of MGA. And I wonder, you had to be thinking, like, we can't... This can't be the center of our business forever, because it might not be a forever toy. Right. So we came with many, many new toys. Yeah, I want to talk about one of them because this is now a huge seller for you called Law Surprise. This came out in 2016 and basically it's like a doll that you unbox in layers.

And anybody who's got kids knows that many kids for a long time have been obsessed with these unboxing videos of other kids just opening things. Tell me about the genesis of Lawl Surprise. How did that come about? So, you know, my kids were saying to me, Dad, do you know what unboxing is? People buy Apple iPhones going in front of the camera, unbox it, and they get 18 million views. And some of them have YouTube channels like Ryan's World that turn into multi-million dollar businesses. Exactly. Huge. So the next day I couldn't wait. I came to. my office and I went to my head of design. I said, I want to have the ultimate unboxing toy.

We had something called Baby Brats. They were so cute. And I said, I want these to be at the center of the ball once people unwrap it. So it's a ball and you would unwrap it and in different layers there'd be a little surprise, like stickers or something. But in the middle would be this doll. Right. And it became the biggest toy ever that we have launched. much bigger than brands. It's amazing because there's so many elements of this story that were, like even the name, L-O-L surprise, I guess, came from a consultant that you had who said, look, if you do searches in YouTube, you'll see a lot of L-O-Ls or surprise. And so let's just combine them and call them that because it'll show up in search. Exactly.

I mean, the reason I point this out is because to build something out of nothing oftentimes can be a failure. Right. And you've had, I mean, there have been plenty of, I'm sure, dolls that you've had that just didn't go anywhere. Yeah, like we had the doll line called Novi Stores that everybody in the retail thought it's going to be huge. Novi stars. Right.

Okay. And it was based on aliens. And I thought it was going to be a biggest seller. It was the biggest failure we ever had. But why didn't they were? They are kind of weird and creepy, but why didn't they work? Because I thought as an adult they look good. Retailers thought it looked good.

But then after they failed, we went to research and the kids said they don't like aliens. Huh. Period. They get scared of aliens. So what, you just don't know if something is going to work, right? You just don't really know. For every success, there is at least in the toy business, 15 to 100 failures. I call toy business legalize gambling.

Because you have to constantly come up with new innovations because kids are fickle, right? They're into something for a short period of time. Yeah, exactly. The key is to be able to listen to them and translate what they're saying. Yeah. I'm curious today, I mean, it's been reported that the company, you know, at various times, does over $5, $6 billion in revenue. Yeah, in retail sales, yes. You're not an upstart.

I mean, you are as big, if not bigger, than Mattel. We're not as big as Mattel, but we are the number one privately held toy company in North America. So we're big, but I always think like an upstart, and so does my team. So even though you're still a competitor to Mattel and Hasbro and you still see yourself as an outsider, as like the guy fighting these giants? Absolutely. How long until you, I mean, here you are now. you've become a billionaire.

Right. And in toys. I mean, when do you feel like you don't have to fight anymore? That's a very, very good question. You know, I told you I go to therapy. And one of the things that my psychologist kept telling me is Isaac, okay, I know your childhood and you had these issues, tough, hard upbringing. But you're still fighting.

You've got to change and relax. And unfortunately, I think some ingrained habits is hard to break. And as you get older, it becomes harder. I have tried to get better. I work less. I'm much calmer with my people, with my family, et cetera. But for good or bad, I still have that fighting instinct in me. You have obviously, you know, made a lot of money and done very well.

You've got a private, it's privately owned. Right. You're 70. You've got a long life to live. But I wonder what you think about the future of MGA. I mean, at what point do you sort of stop going into the office every day and running the operation? I get to tell you, I still enjoy what I'm doing. I love it.

I mean, I just came up with five new toy ideas. I got COVID. So I was home. for five days. I came with five new toy ideas where I let home. Huh. I mean, when you think about

the journey you took, you know, from where you came from, coming to the U.S., no connections, very little English, to, you know, building now the largest privately owned toy company in North America, one of the largest in the world,

privately owned, and becoming hugely financially successful, how much, of that do you attribute to the hard work you put in and how much do you think has to do with the luck, the fortune that you've met? I don't believe in luck and I never put my hand in front of anybody for a dollar. So it is the hunger. You need to deprive of winning and succeeding. And I have lived the American dream. I could not have done what I've done in any other country. This country has a lot of issues, but if you work hard and you believe in who you are

and you're not afraid of failing, you can become successful. There's no other country like it. That's Isaac Larian, founder and CEO of MGA Entertainment. By the way, Isaac's planning to keep the business in the family. He's training his son Jason and his daughter Jasmine to take over MGA once he retires. Jasmine's already built a successful brand of her own. It's a fashion label called Cult Gaia. And random bit of trivia? The co-founder of Sweet Green, Jonathan Neiman, is Isaac's nephew. And if you scroll back in our podcast queue to 2020, you can hear the story of how they built Sweet Green. 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 as always,

it's free. This episode was produced by Alex Chung with music composed by Rumtin Arableu. It was edited by Niba Grant with research assistants and fact-checking from Carla Estevez and Cecil Davis Vasquez. Our engineers were Gilly Moon and Robert Rodriguez. Our production staff also includes J.C. Howard, Casey Herman, Sam Paulson, Carrie Thompson, John Isabella, Chris Messini, Catherine Seifer, and Malia Agadillo. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.