How I Built This with Guy Raz - Ooni Pizza Ovens: Darina Garland and Kristian Tapaninaho

Episode Date: November 7, 2022

When you think of pizza, the first place that comes to mind probably isn’t Finland…or Scotland. But that’s where the two founders of the outdoor pizza oven brand Ooni grew up. In 2012, Kristian Tapaninaho was experimenting with making his own pizza, but he couldn’t get his home oven hot enough to produce an authentic, Neapolitan-style crust. With no background in product design, Kristian decided to design a portable, wood-fired outdoor oven. He used some basic 3D modeling software, enlisted a nearby fence-maker to build a prototype, and raised about $26,000 on Kickstarter. Since launching in 2012, Kristian and his wife Darina have grown Ooni into a $250 million business, accelerated by the home baking boom that happened during COVID. Based in Edinburgh, Scotland, and sold in 90 countries, Ooni has defined a new product category that has helped transform home pizza making.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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Find out how much at Airbnb.ca.com slash host. Not only did I not have a manufacturer for this product, but also I had to make this thing manufacturable as well. And fast. Within a few months. So I promised to the Kickstarter. campaign backers at this stage that, hey, it's going to be there for you in June. Wow. So just six months after the campaign.

I'm imagining, like, you're starting to call numbers and you're like, hey, can you make Pete Evans? No, sorry. Can you make Pete Simmons? Oh, no, sorry. I can't imagine there are many metal fabrication factories in the UK at all. No, it turns out there's not very many that want to talk to you if you've got a Kickstarter campaign.

Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovative. entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built. I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how Christian Tapanino-ho built a portable, wood-fired pizza oven, financed it on Kickstarter, and along with his wife, grew Uni into a $200 million-a-year brand. I grew up eating what I would now describe as cardboard pizza. You know, your standard home delivery pies made by the usual suspects. But I remember a moment in my late teens. I was in college.

I was visiting a friend in New York. And she took me to Patsies and then to Grimaldi's. And it was at those places when I first understood why people are obsessed with pizza. The crust was thin, but not like a cracker. It was crispy and chewy. It was smoky and charred, but not burned. And by the way, it took about 90 seconds for that pizza to cook. The pizziolos were Italian.

Americans, the sauce was a simple combination of crushed tomatoes and salt, and on top, a few dots of fresh mozzarella and some basil leaves. And from that point on, I joined the legions of people around the world obsessed, always seeking out the best pizza wherever I went. Even during times of my life, when I went gluten-free or paleo, I secretly made an exception for good pizza. How can you not really? But the One challenge I always had was making them at home. For years, I would do what most home cooks do. I'd slip in a pizza stone into the top rack of my oven. I'd crank the oven up to 500 degrees Fahrenheit.

And then an hour later, I'd slip in a pizza. And while the pizzas were fine, they were never as good as what you could get at a pizza restaurant. And the reason? You need really, really high heat to get that char on the crust. And home ovens can't get that hot. You need an oven that can get up to 900 degrees Fahrenheit. And to do that, you have to build an outdoor pizza oven, which for most of us is both impractical and prohibitively expensive.

And then, about six years ago, I came across a product that promised to solve this very problem. At the time, it was called the Uni Pizza Oven, spelled U-U-U-N-I. Today, it's still called Uni, only spelled O-O-O-N-I. And the product was created by a man born and raised in a place no one listening would ever associate with pizza. Uni was invented by Christian Tapaninojo, who is from Finland and lives in Edinburgh, Scotland. And he came up with this idea to solve the same problem I described a minute ago.

He wanted a relatively affordable, portable, portable home pizza oven that could reach 500 degrees Celsius or 900 Fahrenheit, a pizza oven that could bring Naples right to your backyard, no matter where you live. So in 2012, Christian, who at the time ran a small educational consulting firm with his wife, Dorena, decided to launch a Kickstarter campaign to raise the funds to build the first uni pizza ovens. A lot would happen over the next decade, but today Christian and Dorena have built a massive

brand, a company that sells over $200 million worth of pizza ovens a year. Now, if you're trying to figure out how to finance a multi-million dollar idea, but you have no money, you will definitely want to hear this story. Christian, as I mentioned, grew up in Finland. He came to the UK as an art student to study photography, and that's where he met his future wife, Dorena, who was also a student at the University for the Creative Arts in Kent, which is just outside London. There wasn't much to do. There was a lot of house parties. And I went to a lot of house parties that there was lots of Finnish people and Scandinavian people generally. And the first time Christian I met was at one of these parties, like a really tiny chat in the kitchen. I've actually

got a paper cut out in our house that was a gift I gave him on our first wedding anniversary, which is paper and it's the first line that we exchanged where I said oh I like your glasses it's a witch Christian completely panicked and sort of blurted back I like your hair and so that's cut out in paper as art in our house do you remember that Christian saying I like your hair I do remember the situation but and I think I'm no more articulate in today than I was back then All right, so you guys meet at a party and that's it. You kind of become a couple, I guess. Yeah, I think we became a couple, maybe six months after that. We'd kind of see each other at different things. And then spring 2004, we got together. That was it. Yeah.

So the two of you basically stayed around Kent for a while after you graduated. And I guess there was this like a British government initiative called Creative. partnerships. And I don't know if I've got all the details right on it, but from what I understand, it was this initiative to bring all kinds of creative people to schools and to work with teachers to kind of help them think more creatively about teaching. And you guys kind of got involved with this somehow. Yeah, we did. It was really an excellent initiative. So you've got it right. It was, I guess the idea is that everyone's inherently creative, but often it's educated out or certainly because of the system and the pressure. And so we were trying to empower the teachers to do things differently.

And we were both creative practitioners, so working as photographers. And yeah, you might be paired with a scientist and then a couple of school classes. So it was incredibly helpful for us and the foundations of all of our business to get to experience this really unique insight into school communities. because teachers aren't really used to having other adults in their classroom, unless they're being judged or assessed. So that was a super interesting insight. And then when you could work with them and you were helping them do their stuff they want to do anyway and reinvigorate their love of teaching, because it is a vocation.

And it's just really sad when that fun is sort of battered out by the pressures from external. Yeah. And I guess this kind of inspired the truth. two of you to start a business that focused on doing this kind of work. It was called Sukla and I guess it was like an educational consultancy that you led for quite a while. So tell me some of the things that you, that it did. I mean, you would basically go to a school and do what? There was absolutely masses. It's generally to help people change how they did things. So we did a classroom project where much like when we ran a workshop, you know,

tend to move the chairs and the tables out of the space and design the room as you'd like for that session. So we had really flexible furniture that the kids could move and put into position based on how they thought the lesson should go or how the teacher would like the lesson to go and basically had whiteboardable walls. So we took the budget that the school would have for renovating classrooms anyway, didn't spend any more money, but worked with them to design a really flexible space so that they could genuinely be adaptive. So those kind of things both practical and change-based. So I imagine many of the groups you would work with are like non-profits, right? And you would essentially consult with them. But as a business, was it a good business?

Was it a sustainable business? Yes. And it's still going. And I think that it's very different from uni today in the sense that the majority or almost everything was based around. our time and we did projects for Nesta, so the National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts, really big projects that were run for multiple years that were, you know, relatively lucrative from our point of view. And I remember we won them over such big organisations and they basically said that they just loved our pitches, which had colour and visual and like excitement that sort stood out. So it was a good lesson for anyone pitching is go hard on the imagery. But yes, It did well. It really washed its face. And so we had good earnings, I think, for the stage we were at in life.

All right. So basically, by, you know, from what I gather, because I think the two of you get married in 2010, and Sucla is doing well, but your time is really the challenge, right? Because people want you involved and it's hard to scale the two of you. Absolutely. Going a little bit further back on the idea of how much of our time and ourselves are made. sort of almost not a limiting factor but it's definitely I mean it's a service business I look back to around 2008 or 2009 remember drin and I were in in France for for like a weekend and I remember speaking with her about this that I'd love to make a product business something that doesn't require the same kind of daily involvement of delivering the work but actually you could focus on building something that could be could be scaled out so all right

So you've got Suclo, this business is happening. At a certain point, from what I understand, what I've read, shortly after you had your first child, which is around 2011, I think. Yep. You decided that both of you decided you needed to just kind of reduce the amount of hours that you were working because you wanted to be with your child. Yeah, it was actually, well, that's a good way of looking at it as well. Also, child care is incredibly expensive.

Yeah. So, but actually really great things came out of that. We were both doing about three and a half days of working and then spent the rest of the time doing other things as well as spent time with our newborn. And you were living in Kent at the time? This was in London already. So we moved out of Kent quite soon in 2007 and stayed in London all of about eight years in the end. All right. So you've got a baby at home. You've got this consultant. building business. And Christian, I gather, I mean, from what I understand, like you are a baker and also cook, like would you do most of the cooking at home? No, I think we share cooking quite a lot, definitely. I think we're quite different types of cooks. I'd say I'm more of the type that

I'll get a recipe out and I'll follow it. And maybe put in a twist here or there, but I'm pretty good with kind of going with what's suggested, whereas Drina's incredibly creative. and been able to take a number of ingredients and just throwing something really tasty together. But I would also do some baking. My mom used to run the bakery in Finland in the mid-90s for about five years. So baking and cooking has always been really massive part of my childhood and growing up. And I don't know where it came from exactly, but I got into making pizzas at home and just learning the craft of making pizza dough and pizzas by hand.

And this is now 12 years ago, and I was just thinking about it, how different of the world was back then with YouTube. It was really just in such an early stage with being able to know. Now you can go in and you can find the instruction for every single type of pizza you can ever imagine. But it was quite a different world back then. So there was a lot of trial and error, but really fell in love with making pizza. And you'd have like one of those stones in your oven?

like those pizza stones? Yeah, I had a, had a pizza stone finally at some point in the oven. And I sometimes invite people over for pizza and I'd make a few pizza and realize that, well, the first pizza takes like six minutes. The next pizza is eight minutes. The following pizza is 12 minutes. Then it's like you're waiting for 20 minutes for the fourth pizza. Every time you open the oven, the heat comes out, right? It all comes out and you put a pizza in that that cools it down. So I wasn't really happy with the experience that I was getting with it and started looking into this, that is there a better way of cooking pizza? And at the time, Jamie Oliver was cooking with his stone ovens on TV. And I thought, well, one of those would be

really useful, getting up to very high temperatures. And I didn't really have the money to invest. We were renting as well at the time. So it wasn't really an option to spend thousands of pounds into an oven like that. And I guess we should, we should, pause here to explain something, which is a home oven, for very good reasons, does not go above 500 because then there'd be just home fires all the time. People would just like burn their houses down. So it's good. It's a good thing. But when you go to a pizzeria like that does these Neapolitan-style pizzas, they're cooking them in ovens that are like 700, 800 degrees Fahrenheit, 900 degrees Fahrenheit, which your home oven can't do. And just that that heat creates this chemical reaction that builds.

that charred, bubbly, beautiful pizza crust that you just can't do in your home oven. It is exactly that. You need that incredible heat for the pizza dough to react in a way that actually makes for Neapolitan-style pizza. You just cannot do it at a lower temperature. The best way that I like to explain this to people who've never made pizza before is that it's a little bit like trying to sear a steak on a medium-warm skillet. It just doesn't work. It just doesn't. You can't replace the temperature with more time.

So it's the same thing with pizza. Temperature is very, very important. All right. So you're thinking, this is annoying. But to install a pizza oven, it's thousands of dollars, and it's a lot of wood. And you're renting a place. You can't do that, and you didn't have the money. So did you start to look around for, like, another option?

Yeah, I started looking around. that surely someone has made something like this. Someone's already thought of this same problem. They've gone and built something. Something cheap that you can make a hot, like a trash can oven or something. Yeah, you know, at the time, there's a guy who had this, it was called Frankenweber. He was kind of hacking a kind of kettle grill. Well, he called it the Frankenweber.

So you can imagine. He would take a Weber like a Weber grill and try to hack and turn to a pizza oven. That's it. That's it. And so I tried a kettle grill as well myself, and it wasn't really there. Because it's cooking the pizza from the bottom, right? Exactly. It keeps coming from the bottom, so it's not the same.

And you've got to get the both. The balance has to be right. You've got to get it up from the bottom and then also from the top. So I started thinking that, well, I mean, if no one else has made one, I still want one. And I start doing some sketches on my iPad. I think I spent probably about four weeks of just kind of quietly doing some sketches and things. And it was December 2011, then I remember this very distinctly, sitting down in our living room in London and said to Durina that, can I pitch you this idea that I've got? What about making very small pizza ovens?

Wait, so Durina, what do you remember about how he told you about this idea? I remember probably having a baby in my arms whilst making pasta, whilst with a headset on, you know, running a multi-school project. I was like, oh, okay, cool. Yeah, I like the idea from the beginning, but I was like, yeah, go for it. I think the biggest segue between our first business and this one is that generally, we always talked about creativity being problem solving, you know, and he was truly frustrated.

It made sense to me that he wanted to get this better. It was a great challenge. I was positive, but I definitely was a bit distracted, I would say. Yeah, so Christian, let me understand how you, what were you sketching? So the problem with these large ovens is that they weigh hundreds and hundreds of kilograms. And with a traditional oven, you have to spend a huge amount of energy first of wood, of wood fuel logs to get that whole thermal mass to a certain temperature, so very hot. So you spend hours and hours to heat it up.

So what I was sketching was really just kind of thinking about, well, how do we get rid of that thermal mass but still have a great cooking experience? And one of them was really just to bring the fire closer to the food that's cooking. So you don't have that sort of a middleman of hundreds of kilos of stone in the oven, but you bring the fire. And so it's very energy efficient in that way. I'm trying to understand how you started to figure that out because you didn't have a background in engineering or even physics or chemistry.

I mean, so how did you kind of educate yourself about what to even begin to sketch the designs, like the dome shape or how the fire would work? How did you even know how to do that? part of it is that just to see it as a problem to be solved. And I think the other side of it, despite, I mean, I didn't have education as an engineer or a product designer, but I'd always been really into science and engineering. So I'd subscribed to science magazines when I was 10 or 11 and read those. Yeah. I was really into that. I was making fireworks with my uncle. So actually Fireworks? Homemade fireworks. Homemade fireworks with your uncle with an adult.

Yes. An adult was supervising this. Adult was supervising and they were making fireworks that blew up and flew to the sky. Oh my gosh. Wow. This is Finland in the 90s, I guess. Yeah. And maybe still no. Very permissive environment. Yeah, absolutely. We'd buy the ingredients from a drugstore and we'd mix the ingredients to make fireworks. and he had an engineering degree.

And so that sort of influenced me. The other parts of it that I think influenced was that I've always had, ever since I was as far back as I remember, anything that I've really got into, I've always started to kind of try and figure out if there's a problem to solve or is there a business here that could be taken forward or an opportunity that no one's found yet.

So already at the beginning, when you were just sketching, you were thinking, is there an opportunity here? Absolutely. So I was really into, at the time, listen, there's a podcast called Critical Path. And through that, I've been introduced to Clayton Christensen. Yeah, famous Harvard Business School professor is no longer alive, but wrote The Innovator's Dilemma, right?

Yes, dilemma and innovative solution. And I was reading those books and really kind of like the same time realizing that, oh, maybe there is a connection here that has repeated itself over years and years and years in other industries that there are these large machines. They used to be mainframes and then there was the personal computer. Things happened in between there as well. But what about what if this is a similar situation where we can take a traditional pizza oven and shrink it down to a size of a suitcase?

Wow. And so when he talked about this, you're thinking, This is the same kind of analogy with a pizza. Obviously, the technology is not as complex, but still, like, massive pizza oven, small pizza oven. I'm very fortunate that the technology required is not to that level. All right, so you start sketching these ideas and thinking, all right, I've got this concept. You bring this to Dorina, and she's supportive right away. Yeah, definitely. I was excited.

You're like, I love it. Yeah. But when he came to you and he said, I think we can make this. and you're like, yeah, I'm excited. There's a lot of details to work out at that point. Like, you'd be really excited. There's a lot of stuff that now, like, that's the easy part. You made the sketch awesome.

You're making it sound much neater than it was. It was definitely stretched out over it a long time. Oh, man. We did have time, as you said. Like, we had a baby. We were working compared to now. We had so much time to sort of tinker and to mess about with it. And he definitely did that.

Yeah. So, Christian, once you had these sketches, right, and you're working on them, what's the next step? So next step was I tested out a few concepts in the first sort of half a year of that. And then I think one of the breakthroughs for it was in the summer of 2012 when my father-in-law, Trina's dad, Dave, mentioned wood pellets and that he'd come across these as a heating fuel. Wood pellets, which is compressed, if you use like a tregery people know, these compressed wood. Exactly. But these at the time, especially, were much bigger in the US, weren't really known here in the UK. So I got a hold of some of these and started thinking about this idea that what if we take like a jet engine?

But instead of injecting fuel, like liquid fuel into it, we sort of kind of let wood pellets flow into it. So the original Ouni had this little fan at the back of it, that blue air. through this kind of column of wood pellets that would just gravity feed into the system and then you'd light them up and you'd get this intense flame that then flew over the pizza. Who did you get to fabricate this prototype for you? So there was, I found a small metal workshop down the road from us in an area called Gatford in London and there was under these railway arches, there was this small metal workshop that predominantly just made like garden fences and things like that.

And there's this guy there and I said, hey, would you be able to fabricate something like this? And it was not much more than sort of back of a napkin kind of sketches. I'd use this program called SketchUp on my computer to draw up lines and they would then sort of fabricate it based on those. He agreed. He said, yes, I'll take time away from making garden. fences to do this? Yeah, yeah, no.

I basically just asked him, how much would it be? And he was like, well, I think the first prototypes were like 40 or 50 quit or something silly. 40 or 50 pounds, that's it. And it was just, he basically took sheets of steel and, like, welded them together based on your design. Yeah, that's it. All right. So four or five days later, you go to this welder and he hands you this basically a metal box. And there's like a, there's like a hole in the back.

where you can just put in the wood pellets and light them up. Describe what it looks like. Yeah, so it was a rectangular metal box at this stage, and this is where this idea of sort of a jet engine, but it's wood-fired, came from. So it was this metal cylinder that sat horizontally at the back of the oven. And I'd take a computer fan, sort of PC fan, that I'd power with a 9-volt battery that just sat at the back of that.

And then there's a vertical tube that then let pellets into it. And you'd get this really cool, quite a long flame that flew into the oven. And then the flame would then just come in and cook the pizza from top down. All right. So from the time you brought this home until the time you were able to cook your first pizza to experiment, how many more days was that? It was pretty quickly. I was quite quick to then try it out with pizza itself.

But a lot of the testing would be actually with just a thermometer in there to see how hot is it getting and kind of trying to get to this. These days we do so much just pizza testing where we just run through new products through like enormous amounts of pizza. But at that point it was just myself doing it. So I'd have to rely on also just kind of measured temperatures and these kind of things. All right. So you knew and you knew how to make pizza dough because we know that from the story. But now you get this thing. You're like, okay, let's go.

Here goes nothing. Do you remember the first pizzas that you made? I actually kind of say, I don't remember too much of the first ever pizzas that I was making. I was so focused on the product itself and getting it better and better at that stage and getting it to a stage that I could actually launch it. I will say I remember them being fantastic,

but actually looking back at the video footage now of 10 years ago, they're incredibly anemic and they definitely don't look fantastic. I think we were just so excited that it works and it was decent. Yeah. But with that early prototype from the welder, that was the one you were going to go to Kickstarter with as the demo product? That's right. And that's really the next maybe six, seven months are probably the kind of, when I even think

about the spirit of time in the Orniz history, it just gets my part. I'm sweaty because it's quite, quite risky. I had this prototype that was working. And all along this time of developing it, I knew that I wanted to launch this thing on Kickstarter. Right. I've just got to get this off the ground. I was really keen on being because Kickstarter was launching in the UK. So it was truly the kind of the essence of Kickstarter in the terms of like, okay, here's an idea. Let's get this group of people together to back it and see. if we can take this forward. When we come back in just a moment, how Christian gets lots of early orders for the oven,

but then discovers that the fence maker down the street is not going to be able to fulfill them. 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 2012, and Christian has just launched a Kickstarter video for his very first portable, wood-fired pizza oven. And the goal for this first campaign is pretty modest. He's looking to raise about $10,000. That's it, yeah, around $10,000. So the original idea there was that I'd raised just about enough money for this metal workshop down the street to be able to produce maybe, I don't know, 50 of these units to fulfill the backers on Kickstarter and then have a few more

to sell. So the idea was you would have that same metal shop that made your prototype, you would just have him do like 50 of them. At the time, that was that was the idea, yeah. Right. It's important distinction because we weren't like, this is the business at this point. It was like, this is cool. Well, can we test the concept? Christian and I really wanted it. And we thought this will be a really nice way to test proof out there in the world. So, and also we were really naive. We worked in education. We weren't used to big budgets or thinking on the kind of global scale we think today. Yeah. All right.

I've seen that video. Anybody can go watch it. It's the first uni video. It's low production quality, which is fine. It should be. I mean, I hope at that point you didn't have a slick video because you didn't have any production budget.

Audio is terrible. Barely, could barely hear you. There's like a weird music soundtrack in the background that's kind of there. And you're like, not sure if it's coming from the video or another part of your house. when I was watching, I was like, is that my kid playing music or is that in the video? Anyway, it's you.

And there's planes. There's a plane flying overhead at one point. And you don't show the whole oven because you're like, hey, you know, I'm trying to protect the IP, so I'm not going to show you the oven. So it's a little sketchy as you're like, who is this guy and this thing? And then you kind of make a pizza. And was there part of it, I mean, Kickstarter was still so new, but was part of it also like maybe I'll get some media attention from this? Yeah, I was really hoping that there would be something that came on the back of that. And during the campaign, there wasn't a ton of press or anything.

Actually, I don't know if there was any press at that time. But what was the big driver was that about three or four weeks after the Kickstarter campaign closed, one of sort of at the time really big sort of gear website called Coolhunting.com, picked it up and noticed it. And on the back of that, quite a few other different blogs, including one really big one called Uncreate.com, picked it up and published a post about it and sent a ton of traffic coming to the website.

And you ended up raising 17,000 pounds from that first Kickstarter, I think. Yeah, so the Kickstarter raised 17,000 pounds. Yeah. And this was the kind of funny part of it was that, okay, there was 92, ovens were sold through the campaign, but we sold another 200 on the back of the extra press that happened in the following month. Wow.

But once you have raised the money, you've got to deliver. And people are like, where's my thing? Yeah. Where's my pizza oven? Yeah. And now you can go to this guy, this metal shop guy, and say, all right, can you make these? And that's presumably what you do.

So that was definitely the plan. However, what happened was that we kind of outgrew. that metal workshop really quickly. And this was kind of clear by the end of the campaign that, okay, well, I've got to make at least hundred of these to fulfill all the backers. I think I need something else. I need an actual proper manufacturer for this. And so straight after the campaign, I basically started scrolling through the internet and finding different metal workshops all around outside of London and also reached out to a few places in Finland. But were you at all stressed out about this?

Hell yeah. You were promising this to people, and you didn't actually have a manufacturer. You were thinking, I'm going to have this metal shop dude down the block make them. And he was like, are you kidding? I can't make 100 pizza ovens. I'm making yard fences. And I'm imagining, like, you're starting to call numbers, and you're like, hey, can you make pizza ovens? No, sorry.

Can you make pizza ovens? Oh, no, sorry. First of all, I can't imagine there are many metal fabrication factories in the U.K. at all. No, it turns out there's not very many that want to talk to you if you've got a Kickstarter campaign. No. They're like, yeah, we'll do a million dollar order, not 7,500 pounds. It was quite a fast education there, but it was not only did I not have a manufacturer for this product, but also I had to make this thing manufacturable as well. So within a few months. So I promised to the Kickstarter campaign backers at this stage that, hey, it's going to be there for you in June.

So just six months after the campaign. Wow. Yeah. I mean, the good thing was that the order had grown because of the extra press on the back of the blocks and these. So I'd actually built up an order book of, I think, around 300 units this point. In terms of orders for a manufacturer, there's maybe 20 grand or something like that. So not a huge amount. But actually, I asked my dad as well to do a little bit of searching again in Finland.

And he found a place in not far about a hour's drive from my hometown that was a metal fabricator and had these presses. They could fold steel in the right way and had the right contacts to do some subcontracting. And that's where I found the first manufacturer. That's actually amazing that in Britain, which is a country of like, I don't know, 60, 70 million people. You couldn't find, and in Finland a country of like four or five million people. Five, yeah. There was a metal factory that could do this.

Yeah, yeah. It was, I think there's Finland's a little bit more isolated. So maybe some things would be made more locally there than flown in or shipped in. But there's a healthy manufacturing industry there still. Christian, when you went to Finland to this factory, I mean, you had this crude, welded, oven, but obviously you wanted to look nicer. And did they have like an on-staffed designer or somebody who could help you kind of smooth it out and make it look a little nicer? No, no, they didn't actually. I still continue to use sketch up, essentially, to draw these cat models and that I would then

print out into sheets. And they would, they would translate it onto their machines and be able to kind cut the pieces in the right way but one of the defining kind of things of making this and what the spec of it would be was actually the shipping of this product to customers so because i knew i'm shipping this from finland at the end of the manufacturing had a hard limit of 10 kilograms that the product would have to go under and this has a bit of funny kind of reason why there's three legs on an ui the fourth leg would have taken it over 10 kilograms so Yeah, because it's got it. It's a tripod, right? It's three legs under it. Yeah. It's a tripod, yeah. And, I mean, it turns out that it makes a lot of sense of course for stability to do that.

Yeah. All right. So you get this fabrication place in Finland to start making them. You've got the cash to do it. And you've got to fulfill those orders. And by the way, these are orders presumably not just from the UK, but from overseas too, from around the world. Yeah, absolutely. So there was a lot from the US. I think maybe about. 40% from the US. And because I was so desperately keen on getting this into people's hands that summer and not to have this experience of months and months of delay in getting this into people's hands, so I actually decided to ship this by just regular parcel mail from Finland to those backers in the US. So Trina and I and my mom and dad would pick them up on a small trailer from the

factory which was like an hour away and then take them to a local post office and just ship them one by one basically. Oh my god. You just stood in the post office and just slapped all the labels on. Yeah. Here you go. Here's one. Here's another one. Here's another one. Yep. Here's another pizza oven. That's it. Wow. Darina's like holding a baby and slapping the labels on with the other hand. Absolutely. Awesome. Awesome. Very wholesome. I mean, he was over one at this point, so he was working as well. He was like sitting there like slobbering on pizza crusts. he was tester. Yeah, you didn't need teeters.

You just had pizza crusts. Yeah, that's how he was raised. All right. Meantime, Doreena, you are... Just paying the bills. You're going to pay the bills. So what are you doing to pay the bills? I'm working.

I mean, are you got to do this consulting work, right? Yeah, we're working hard with Suklau. I think we're mid-nesta projects, so like multi-school projects and doing fine. And during the Kickstarter campaign, though, clearly I was excited. Anyone who's ever run a crowdfunding campaign sees how obsessive they can be over that period. Yeah. Was anybody in your world in the educational consulting world like, hey, Doreena, what's that pizza oven thing that Christian's doing? Like, wait, what is this? I think people were pretty excited. We had, like I say, we're part of creative partnerships and had all these, like hippie, very creative friends. You know, so people were generally quite buzzing. And I'm not saying we didn't.

get some pushback. So we had friends who were in our like baby groups who were just like, what are you doing? Get a proper job. We definitely had some people challenge us as a business. All right. So you get these first ovens out and the backers get them and what's the feedback that you're getting? Because, you know, again, this is still 2013. There aren't that many YouTube videos on how to make pizza. So what was the feedback? I mean, it's hard to say. What was the feedback? I mean, we never had a return. But I think there's also something about that sort of life arc of a company or that sort of you start with those early adopters. And they are so much more willing to put in a little bit more effort into learning how to use a product.

And well, it doesn't do this, but it actually does this thing really well. So actually, I do really like it. And so I think that really helped. It really helped that the. campaign didn't blow up to be one of these, I don't know, million dollar campaigns overnight successes that I think at that stage would have invited so many more people that the product just isn't ready yet. But you knew that you were going to continue this and now you were getting just organic orders in from some media and by 2013, you know, you're getting orders are trickling in every other day or so. Orders are trickling in. I think we did something like in dollars, about 170,000 in the first year of operating, which is compared to what we'd been working on previously. It was really, really, really good. Of course, when you're working in a product company, the economics are completely different to working in a service company. So much of it goes into inventory. And if you're growing, more of that goes into inventory. All right. Now, meantime, it's just you and I guess Doreena is helping out. too while she's trying to earn money but also helping you out so you're the product guy you're the manufacturing guy you're the customer support guy legal team logistics everything and and darina

you're still very much involved in in this other business that you guys had this educational creative consulting business which starts to mount like events yeah uh and conferences and meantime like just tell me how you were managing all that stuff in your personal life. You get a child. I think you get two kids by then maybe. Yes, we were really busy. Looking back on it, though,

it was just really fun. It was super fun. It was very fast-paced. We're used to, I think some of the, you know, running the festivals and conferences and making things happen was in our DNA from all of the Sukla work, carrying favors and being agile,

I guess you would call it today, but was definitely how we operated. and also because we'd sort of been freelancers before and then designed suitclah to be a bit like that, we were used to putting on different hats. So I guess by your second year in business, which was 2014, you guys are already rolling out your next oven. It was I guess it was called the Uni 2.

And you also decide to make an accessory called the Uni Stack, which is cool. It's like these three like stack, glass bowls that you can put the pizza dough into to rise. Yeah. But I guess this turns out to be a pretty major stumble for you, right? Because I read that shortly after the Uni stack came out, you sent a letter to your Kickstarter backers because there was, I guess there was some people were not happy with certain

elements of it. And the letter, which I've read, it says, you know, we've been going through some growing pains lately. You know, I'm just starved of time. I can't keep on top of everything. Just a few of us are making this happen. and I know, like, you even said the feedback for the first production run hasn't been all good. Yeah.

What were you hearing? So probably the first really dramatic event that we had was when this first production run of these Uni stacks arrived at our South London office. By the way, where were you manufacturing them? These were made in China. So by this stage, I'd moved manufacturing for Uni itself as well to Southeast China. Right, because it was scaling. You could not do all of this in that place in Finland, presumably. Couldn't do it in Finland.

You couldn't get the quality and the materials and the parts in any Western country, really, unless you paid a lot. And at the same time, we were able to bring the course down to something that was kind of more aligned with the original vision of this being affordable. Yeah. So these stacks, we had, I think, two or three or four pallets of them arrive on the back of a lorry at our office. I remember Drina was there with both our kids and we were all there. We had two part-time employees at this stage and we'd take these pallets down off the lorry. We'd carry all these stacks inside the small office that we had and we'd open the first one of them. and they didn't fit together.

There were odd shapes and sizes. Some were broken already at this stage. Yeah, it was pretty horrible. I would say that when we saw the samples that we approved, they were perfect. They were, you know, they all sat together. They looked really nice, quality, thick glass. There was not a bubble in sight.

And unfortunately, when we opened the box, it was, you might be lucky if there was kind of one or two that were any goods. and so depressing because we paid for all of this and the whole concept was that they stacked together so we had quite a fun wasn't fun at all we had

a time kind of putting together could we salvage some or some good enough to stack together and repackage? Yeah is there enough here that we can fulfil the backers again like thinking these backers have put money and they trust in us and

we'd open every single box find the matching pair and matching triplets, I guess, and back them up and ship them to our customers. And if they'd have any problems, then, of course, we're trying to be as responsive as possible. But they variant the quality at that stage just wasn't right up there. Yeah.

They did not look very good. When we come back in just a moment, how Christian and Darina start learning how to grow uni gracefully until the pandemic hits. 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 around 2015 and Oonie is going through a lot of changes. For starters, after the disastrous rollout of those glass stacking bowls, Christian finds another manufacturer for them in China. And the brand is actually getting some traction to the point where Dorena quits her job at their other business so she can work full time at Oonie. Also, around this time, they decide to move. move their family and the business back to Dorena's hometown of Edinburgh.

When we came up in 2015, we were instantly able to connect into business groups here. There's one called Scottish Edge and then we became part of this program called Scale Up Scotland. So being overfamiliar and connecting was easy for us here, but actually because we had already shown some success, we were definitely a bigger fish in a smaller pond. We're still tiny in relative terms, but there's downsides in Scotland in the sense that there's an incredible modesty about, you know, there's not that many companies who think they can take on America. And I don't know why. I think that there definitely should be. But in terms of the support, it was lovely.

I think it's a British thing, right? Because in America, you start a company, you're like, we're going to be the biggest in the world and take it over and we're going to, you know, and being ambitious is not something to be ashamed of. But I think particularly in Britain, it's like keep your head down and it's just culturally different. Definitely, yeah. It was a good thing for us to move because as soon as we came up, we won a Scottish Edge Award. You got a grant, right? Yeah, it was 50 grand grant to spend exclusively on IP. Yeah, because it's this very unique design and shape.

And once people start to see that it's working, then, you know, we know what's going to happen. happen. So what's, I mean, I'm not the first to point this out, but it is kind of amazing that this incredibly accessible pizza oven that makes Neapolitan-style pizzas at home comes from a place that I love Scotland. My wife lived there for the first six years of her life. So no, I'm not dissing Scotland, but it's cold and dark and rainy for a lot of the year. That is true. When you think of outdoor pizza, you're thinking about like, you know, the Amalfi Coast or southern Italy, not Scotland, not Edinburgh, not Finland. And yet, here it's coming out of Edinburgh. Yeah. I mean, were people in the UK buying it or were most of your customers in like warm

weather climates outside of the UK? Yeah. We've definitely over-indexed in the UK. But yeah, comparably in the US where people, they didn't need to be persuaded to cook outdoors, right? It was just about do you know about uni? So a big sort of shift for, you know, us to try and emulate the success we had in the UK. We've always sold into the US. And on the point about Scotland, and it's always been really interesting, what we love about O'Ne is we can tell this authentic story. You know, our messaging today is about making pizza. And when it came to, how much should we talk about Scotland and, you know, people love Scottish accents? Does that matter? Or the Finnish aspect, you know, people talk a lot about Nordic design and that's really

thought off highly around the world. but actually when we interviewed most customers they didn't really know about that I remember one bit of feedback when I did a consumer interview where he was like, do you know what, if I knew you were Scottish, it would definitely put me off

which I was laughing about just like that you wouldn't buy I don't know a rice cooker from somewhere that wasn't known for rice I was like oh interesting and we don't hide it but yeah I think it is a funny one it doesn't have a natural home

in Scotland now it does Yes. All right. So I think in 2017, you launched another crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo. I think this was your third. Yeah. I mean, by this point, you probably could have gone to outside investors and started raising venture money and stuff. But really, this was, it was a privately owned company. You were not going out to, you know, all these investors and stakeholders. You were really keeping this. We still are. So we have a cup table is pretty clean. So Trina and I are on most of it. And we have options and share schemes for some of the exec team and then few friends and family investors from the very, very early days of Uni. And earlier on, we came to a realization that actually we've always been sort of fairly fast growing. So let's just continue doing what we're doing. We also, none of us came from that sort of startup environment or that sort of VC-backed company environment. So it wasn't really a driver for us to have that as a stamp of approval on the door that

he ate. This has been backed by this VC company and they raised this much money. So it wasn't ever like a desire for us to have that. It was more so that we really wanted to run this company the way we want to run it and not have this kind of clock ticking on that, hey, well, you can run this company for now but at one point we'll have to do something that might mean an exit or an IPO or something that

yeah yeah I think that's fair and the first Kickstarter in our subsequent crowdfunding campaigns we learned a lot and I think community is absolutely key to uni's success and you know it's incredibly fast you know you can cook a Neapolitan in 60 seconds there's a real wow moment about it these days it's incredibly Instagramable but people

get together over food. So by the time we were ready to do our second crowdfunding for an oven, we had this wildly engaged community. We felt confident that that was a good business model. And actually, it wasn't until another couple of years that we thought, do we blitz scale this, is the right thing to do to truly scale getting outside investment in. But because of this way we did it, we really didn't need that. So, yeah. And it's, and it's, and it's, strikes me as a really interesting approach. I mean, you sort of kind of hinted at this, which is they're so passionate. So they're like force multipliers. You get people contributing to the Kickstarter. Then they're talking about it. And then it becomes just like viral product. Like, and this is the thing. Like we've talked about virality on the show with like Tesla's work that way. People go into someone else's Tesla and they're like, I want this car. It's unbelievable. And I think that's the key to the growth of Unis is like you're making. You're making. pizzas and usually you have people over and they're like, this thing is amazing. And they're like, how does this work? And you're like, yeah, you just slide it in and then soon enough,

they're making pizzas and then they go out and buy one. Yeah, absolutely. One of the coolest things, especially during the pandemic, we decided to do this mini campaign called Stars Stuck at Home. Everyone was stuck at home. It was quite a miserable time and we reached out to people that we just thought were epic, it connected to. And if they wanted an oven, we sent them one. literally everyone from Beyonce to Dolly Parton. Bruce Willis has one and it's incredibly name-droppy, but one of my favourite times was checking the O'Ney Instagram and saying Jake Gyllenhaugh go, hey, I really like your ovens, how can I get my hands on one?

Yeah. Everyone in the team volunteered to help get him at Anuni. And from Christian's point of view, his parents are very supportive and very lovely, but they're finish and they're practical and hard to impress. And they only, like really made a show when Christian said, you know, Bruce Willis has one. Right, oh, okay, this is real. You got a pizza oven to Bruce Willis.

Okay, we're proud of you. That was the first time. Settlerlitz real. That's it, Bruce Willis. Apparently a great pizzaolo. Yeah. I did not know. Yeah, well, I hope he is.

Yeah, hope he is. I think it was in 2018 that you changed the name from UU.N. to Uni O-O-O-N-I. Yes. And I should mention uni means oven in Finnish. It does. It literally means oven.

Because the first one I had was a U-U-N-I pizza oven. I remember, I was like, wait, did I get the right one? But you guys had a brand and you had recognition and attention and you were growing, but why did you change the name? Yeah, I mean, we wouldn't recommend it changing your name if you don't feel the need. Basically, there is a few good reasons, but one of the key things is that U-U-N-I, we knew, to pronounce it uni but not everyone did and our e-commerce was growing and we wanted people to be able to search for it easily and when you search for you and i often it would also correct to

uni like university or at u and i and so yeah there was that and people didn't know how to say it so we knew for a while we wanted to do it and i think it was gregg who's our co-o who when he started suggested like, why not change it to be sort of the phonetic way you would say in English, just turn those U's into O's. And that's what we did. And it was a relatively easy transition. Obviously it took a bit of time. I wonder as more and more people, now you're like 2019, you're selling to people beyond just like pizza fanatics.

You're selling to people who are really trying to experiment. And that means that a lot of them are going to suck at it at first. most people. Me too. Everybody is going to burn their pizza. It's going to get stuck to the to the pizza peel. And some people are writing like bad reviews of the product saying this sucks. I burn my pizza. But like, yeah, you're going to burn your pizza because it's going to cook it in 90 seconds. Part of what you had to do was to educate people around how to make pizzas, right? Yeah. It was a brand new category we created. So people hadn't, they didn't have pizza ovens. There might be a few kind of exclusive people that would have, you know, high end,

$5,000 or plus installation in their back garden. But even then, they're very different because they take hours to heat up. They're beautiful installations, but they're not, you know, O'Ne heats up in 10 minutes and you can cook a pizza in 90 seconds. And that was brand new. And Oonie can cook lots of other things as well. You know, we can put cast iron in and do amazing roast vegetables or salmon or steaks. So we talked a lot about that.

So in the first few years, we actually called it an Oonie Outdoor Oven. we almost shied away from, even though it was invented for pizza, from leaning too heavily into that because we were worried that people would be so scared about it. And then we noticed our retailers calling it a pizza. We're like, oh, come on, why are you doing that? And then we quickly learned that what are we doing? Obviously, let's be confident and own that. And we learned that actually the vast majority of our consumers,

they already made pizza at home. They didn't need to be told how to do it. In fact, what they loved was the more geeky recipe, so sourdough and, you know, 36-hour approves and the salt levels and hydration. And that was such an eye-opening thing for us because by sort of designing our marketing content for actually a bit more technical and owning pizza, it helped us really focus. I wonder when you, I mean, you're going into 2020, presumably, you know, you're on this trajectory. you're growing. You now have got an office in Austin. So you are, you know, confident, but then COVID hits, right? And I have to imagine that initially you were expecting, like everyone else,

a significant slowdown. Yeah, it was quite an incredible time. I remember I was in the US on a sales store in March of 2020. And I remember this one event that I was in in the morning. people would shake hands and greet you just normally and the afternoon no one would touch you. And I remember coming back from the US and going on the plane. And this was like the day before they stopped all flights between US and Europe and thinking that I have no idea what the world's going to be like when I land. Some of the first effects of this was some of our retailers were canceling orders. And we were panicking because we'd have all this inventory arriving. And at the same time, all our retailers are canceling orders left, right and center.

But the one kind of spark of hope right in the middle of it was that our directly consumer sales through our website, we're just starting to go up and up and up and up. They were just trickling up the way. Suddenly we'd be like, we're in March, and we've just had the best day ever on our website in the UK. Wow. And this was totally unexpected. Totally unexpected. This was just at the beginning of lockdown. And I think at that point, people are just like, okay, what's next? What do I do when I'm not allowed to leave my home? And it turns out that a lot of people, especially in the US, UK, Europe, turned into pizza makers. I read that your growth was like 300% in 2020.

Yeah, we went from the US, UK, Europe, turned into pizza makers. 13 and a half million in 2019 to 55 in 2020. That's nuts. I mean, and that was purely because all of a sudden people were at home and they started to cook at home. How did you deal with the demand? I mean, you've got shipping delays, you've got manufacturing delays and massive demand. I mean, I think partly we just thought that the first spike was going to be a spike and that was it, but it just kept coming.

There was lots of reasons that we were able to jump on it, though we had invested heavily in our digital marketing team. So in lots of ways, we were kind of ready to share the news about Oonie as well as so much of it being about word of mouth. In terms of how we handled it, our operations team really did take a beating. People were kind of complaining a lot. And the only thing they were complaining about is they wanted an Oonie and they wanted it faster. so and yeah you know what happened in global logistics during the pandemic.

Yeah. We had a huge order on board the ever given on the Suez Canal. That was another challenge. You were on that boat. Yeah, yeah. Not us personally, but a lot of unis. Your unis were on that boat that got trapped in the Suez Canal. Oh my God.

Yeah, we had 14 containers, 14, 40-foot containers stuck on the ship. So the people had waited so long already and then had preordered them. And there was all sorts of challenges around that because we wanted them to have this oven. Yes, it was a lot. And I mean, how did you deal with the just like, because you mentioned that before the pandemic, you had staffed up around digital marketing, which is a smart thing to do because you were expecting, you know, steady growth. But you certainly didn't staff up in other areas because no one anticipated COVID and what would have happened. but I think you ended 2019 with about 50 employees.

Yeah, well, in 2020, we're about 45 March 2020, and then we're about 350 now. Wow. So yeah, epic growth. And what was amazing about it is we weren't hammering people to work hard because people are really empowered to work here. I think a part of that was we learned early on all of our Suklai experience from, you know, all that time being in school.

and seeing these little microcosm societies, you'd see some teachers that were incredibly empowered and others that were depressed and broken and a lot had to do with the leadership and how much they trusted their team and the culture they designed. And so when we actively set Oonie up, we were like, okay, let's make this a brilliant place to work and let's genuinely build it with our team. All right, I read that you said that the pandemic accelerated your growth by like three or four years in one year. At least.

Yeah. The other thing that began to happen is because you created a category and people were like, I can make awesome pizza at home. A lot of other people who are like, this is a good idea. I'm going to make a pizza oven too. And now there are probably 30 or 40 competitive brands. I mean, even some of these older Italian, you know, pizza makers are making portable pizza ovens now. You've got, I mean, just going on Amazon now, you see brands that, you know, are close. Clearly, I'm just going to be charitable, inspired by the design of Oonie.

Yeah. And, you know, you could look at it multiple ways. You could say, hey, I'm flattered. You know, you guys have done the tripod bottom. I like that. Or I'm inspired by your dome shape. Or you can say, wait a minute here. This looks really similar to what we've done.

So tell me about how you kind of approach competitors in the space. So first of all, we start by focusing on. what's really important for us, which is our customers themselves. And we have our sights on in the far into the future of really continuing to develop this category and making it really awesome for our customers. There's, of course, on top of that, when we do feel like our IP is violated,

we do take course of action on those cases. Yeah. There's not actually any key brands that we're concerned about. You know, there are definitely a lot of copycats, which isn't great. And we're choosing our battles, but we definitely can't be misdirected to the wrong thing. Yeah.

Yeah, we've only got, even though we're a small team, we're still such a tiny amount of resource, right? And we may as well positively build. Yeah. One of the coolest things is, I think last year maybe, the, basically the Varachi Pizza Association of Napoli. This is like the, it's like champagne, can only be made in champagne,

and this organization can only be made in champagne. only designate true Neapolitan pizzas to be like, you know, double O flour and San Marzano tomatoes and buffalo milk mozzarella and like basil. And that is okay. And then they approved your ovens. Yeah. Like they gave it the stamp of approval. It was awesome.

I mean, we'd started this by wanting to make an oven inspired by a Neapolitan-style pizza and get into those high temperatures and cooking pizza there. Now this body that certifies all these restaurants and pizza yolo's and ingredients and professional events gave us that seal of approval. It was just the most amazing thing. And I should mention, because there are restaurants all around the world that have this seal, this AVPN seal, and it's cool. You know that the pizza in there is going to be pretty great. I think, I mean, it's been reported that your revenues are now over 200 million pounds a year. I mean, it's pretty remarkable, given that you start as a Kickstarter. It's completely

mind-blowing. Crazy, right? Like a Kickstarter to where you are today? I don't know. How often do you just reflect on just that question? You saw a gap, but that could have really been a niche market. It could have been like just nerds who were really into like their pizza ovens. It really could have been just as niche, but I know really early stages before I had that product ready and knew that how to make this thing work. there was this strong sense that look i think we might be onto something here i think this could be something a little bit bigger than just say let's make a couple of hundred ovens every year and nice living out of it i think there was this sense that hey this could become something really

really substantial and something really really meaningful yeah and um there's a thing about the outsiders coming into an established field that uh i think they can look at a problem I mean, with new eyes, I guess. And the fact that I'm not Italian, I'm not, at that stage, actually, had never visited Italy, but just had this love for pizza and wanted to make better tools for it. I think it helped in terms of just looking at the problem with fresh pair of eyes. And I think you often see this in a lot of startup stories, is that there's an immigrant coming into a new country and can combine those two cultures

and into something new. Yeah. When you think about this journey, how much of your success do you attribute to the work you put in and how much do you think has to do with just getting lucky? Christian, first to you. I mean, it's so much of it's luck. It's luck of timing coming up with an idea in the first place and luck of both Trina and I being the people who had this idea. there's a lot of hard work that's gone into it but I mean you can't deny the fact that I mean we have been incredibly lucky with with the original invention lucky with the team that we've managed to build around ourselves so yeah we do we do feel really really fortunate yeah we didn't have to give up city jobs to make this happen which I think is a very important thing when you look at kind of entrepreneurs generally we were used to

whilst we did fine. We had a really nice life on very little money before. So it wasn't that risk really. So we were able to plow it all into the business for so long. And I think that has helped us as well. That modesty, I guess. Yeah. You know, the thing is, I was going to ask you if you get sick of pizza,

but no one gets sick of pizza. You can't. No. I mean, I'm at the office here four days a week and I eat pizza here at least two or three times a week. I look forward to the day. when the Italians come after haggis. We have had haggis pizza,

Haggis Nipsen Tati Pizza, Serb with a... I don't know about that. Oh, shit, stomach pizza. But who knows? I think one thing that connects UK and Finland is that I think Italian ex-Prime Minister Perlusconi has been equally as disparaging of the cuisine of these two countries.

But there's a pizza company in Finland called Koti Pizza that famously won the pizza world champions ship with their... Yes. And it was a reindeer pizza, and Berlusconi, they were so excited that they could chat to Perlusconi and say, we bet you at your own game, so... Yeah, no, they named the pizza Perlusconi to as a little one-up on the Italians.

Ah, so they did. That's Doreena Garland and Christian Tapaninojo, co-founders of Ouni. Also, the great thing is there's so many other types. There's, you know, New York and Roman people. and Detroit and, you know, they're very different. That's true. Detroit pizzas are pretty great. All that cheese and pepperoni, it's so good.

I always think of M&M when I eat Detroit pizzas. I don't know why. Maybe because he's from Detroit. That's really random. Oh, my God. That association's never going to go away now. Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. If you enjoyed it, please help us spread the word.

Tell someone about how I built this or post about it on social media. And thanks. If you want to contact the team, our email address is HibT at ID.wondery.com. If you want to follow us on Twitter, our account is at How I Built This and mine is at Guy Raz. And on Instagram, we're at How I Built This and I'm at guy.org. This episode was produced by Chris Messini with music composed by Rumptine Arablui. It was edited by Neva Grant. Our audio engineer was Gilly Moon.

Our production staff also includes J.C. Howard, Casey Herman, Liz Metzger, Carrie Thompson, Alex Chung, Josh Lash, Sam Paulson, Catherine Seifer, Elaine Coates, John Isabella, and Carla Estevez. Our intern is Susanna Brown. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.