How I Built This with Guy Raz - VICE: Suroosh Alvi (2017)

Episode Date: September 4, 2017

We're hard at work planning our upcoming live show, so we bring you this favorite from the last year: VICE. Suroosh Alvi was a recovering addict when he started a scrappy underground magazine in Montreal. It grew into a multi-billion dollar company that has shaken up the world of journalism. PLUS in our postscript "How You Built That," we check back with Kent Sheridan of Voila Coffee, a company aiming to make instant coffee with the quality of a four-dollar pour over. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. I talk to entrepreneurs all the time who are looking for a way to upgrade their digital footprint. Well, whether you're just starting out or you're scaling your business, Squarespace is the easiest way to build a great website that stands out. It's an all-in-one website platform that gives you everything you need to claim your domain, showcase your products, and get paid. Anyone can use Squarespace's cutting-edge design tools to build an online presence that truly reflects what makes your business special.

There are templates, intuitive drag-and-drop editing, and even an AI-enhanced website builder. Then, Squarespace's built-in analytics tools help you make smarter business decisions. Review website traffic, learn where to focus engagement, and track revenue all in one place. Looking to grow your business, Squarespace even offers fast, easy business financing

through Squarespace capital. Go to Squarespace.com slash built for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code built to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Loans issued by Celtic Bank and serviced by Stripe, all loans subject to credit approval. This show is in partnership with Airbnb. This past summer, I took my family to Vienna, and it was incredible. We spent our days wandering the old streets, stopping for coffee and pastries, visiting museums, and just soaking up the history of one of the most beautiful cities in the world. And one of the things that made the trip so special was the home we booked on Airbnb. It had tall windows, beautiful old details, and plenty of space for all of us. And being in that home on Airbnb, right in the middle of Vienna,

walking distance from so much of the city, made it feel less like a visit and more like we were actually living there. Plus, taking a trip is the perfect time to host your space on Airbnb. Your place with all of its personal touches and its amazing location could make someone else's vacation even better. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca.com slash host. Hey, it's Guy here, so we're still working hard prepping for a live episode coming up in a couple of weeks. In fact, we are looking forward to seeing some of you there in Seattle on September 14th for my conversation with Howard Schultz, of Starbucks. But for now, we've got this one from our archives, one of our favorites. It's the story of vice. Enjoy. I remember walking down the street completely freaked out with a friend of mine who also went to meetings.

And I was scared because I didn't know what I was doing. And he said, what have you got to lose? He said, maybe it'll be like one magazine that you make. And you can go around and say, hey, I made this magazine. And then you can apply for a job and get a job somewhere. Or maybe it'll be huge. From NPR, it's How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built. I'm Guy Raz, and on today's show, how Sirush Alvi took a small alternative magazine in Montreal and built it into Vice Media, which is, and this is totally mind-blowing, now valued at over $4 billion. So I'm sitting here in the studio, and I'm looking at the website for Vice, and I'm clicking

through, you know, it's kind of typical mashup of hard-hitting news and then you've got the sort of oddball feature. Like this one, this is a story as a psychologist analyzes the fights couples have in IKEA, which I think many of us can identify with. And then you just scroll down a little bit. There's this one, how majority Muslim countries are handling HIV infections. And of course, you can, you know, you can click on plenty of slick videos that take you all over the world, like this one, cockfighting in the Canary Islands. Anna Belin Dominguez is a Sarah activist, an organization who fights for animal rights in the Canary Islands.

I am meeting her because she has arranged to meet Jose Luis Martín, the president of the Canary Islands Cockfighting Federation. Anyway, we know that flashy news websites can die almost as fast as they launch, but for some reason, Vice has stuck around. Its YouTube channel has over a billion viewers. And it's even won a couple of Peabody Awards, which is super prestigious. But the thing is, VISA's co-founder, Sirush Alvi, he didn't set out to create any of this. In fact, he barely made it out of his 20s alive.

I was born in Toronto. My parents emigrated from Pakistan a couple years before I was born. Right. They are retired academics. My mom taught at McGill and my father at the University of Toronto, although my mom also taught at the University of Minnesota for a while. And so I ended up going to high school in the States. So I heard a lot of, you have to work twice as hard as white people

to get anywhere in this world growing up. And did that turn out to be true? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What did they want you to be? Well, the two fields that are most respected in Pakistan, at least when I was growing up, was medicine or health.

engineering. So I think that, you know, in an ideal world, I would have been a doctor. With a, with a BA, I'm the black sheep of the family. Everyone has multiple degrees. So you went to college in Montreal, right? Yes. Were you a good student? I was not a good student. I originally went into psychology. I got kicked out of that program. Ended up getting a degree in philosophy. It was a tough slug. I'd come from, you know, a small private school in Minneapolis where I went to high school and going to Miguel was just a different vibe. There's a lot of distractions in Montreal. And that's, I guess that's the place where you kind of hit a low point, right? Yeah, that's where I bottomed out. When I, you know, finished Miguel, it was also with a

full-blown heroin habit. And so I spent a couple years afterwards kind of looking for a geographic a cure, bouncing around, jumping from city to city. Oh, the problem's not with me. It's here, the city, this environment. It's just too decadent and blah, blah, blah. So I ran around and no matter where I went, I kind of took it with me. Ended up in Eastern Europe. And even there in a remote part of Slovakia, was able to stay strung out for upwards of five years and ended up back in grad school at Toronto, studying psychology, and dropped out. And that's when I really was like, you know, descending in the tailspin, hitting bottom. And when I ended up back in Montreal, it was to go to rehab.

How did you know it was time to go to rehab? I couldn't sustain it anymore. I couldn't keep the web of lies going. Yeah. It was this kind of double life I'd been leading. You know, no one really knew that I was, you know, heroin addict. So how did your friends and family react? Again, my parents are conservative Muslim immigrants, but progressive as well, as far as Pakistani immigrants go.

But they thought I had the occasional drink. They didn't know the extent of what was going on with me. And when they found out, I think my mom wanted a bit of a depression. My brother wanted to kill me. My dad had a heart attack. I don't know if the heart attack was directly related, but I don't think it helped. It was bad. It was a really bad time.

And so my mental state at the time was not good. I did go into a bit of a depression at that point. I had to go to rehab twice, the first time it didn't stick. And they found out that I was using again. And it's the only time in my life that my mom's ever hit me. And at that point, I remember that was my bottom. So it's like early 94 on a waiting list to get into a treatment center. No friends.

no, I wasn't speaking much. I was kind of, you know, kicking dope in my parents' house on a waiting list to get into a treatment center. Like, life was not great at that point. How long did it take you before you, you started to sort of feel like you were regaining control over your life? Well, after I came out of the treatment center, you know, I was so scared that I was going to relapse and it was just like, I was going to meetings, just going to, you know, and A meetings at the time. You know, they say you should go to 90 meetings and 90 days when you first stop drinking or doing drugs and I was going like two meetings a day. I got my own little apartment in Montreal and was on welfare and I just rode on my bike from meeting to meeting all day

every day. And it was during that time that I actually started thinking about what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. And I had had this idea that I wanted to work for a magazine. And you wanted to write about like what? Like music or pop culture or like what? I didn't even get that for something. I felt like. I wanted to talk about those things, yes, music, culture. I felt like there was just a lot happening that wasn't being talked about when I picked up magazines. The depraved underground culture that I was obsessed with was not being covered properly in the alt-weeklies. So was it like a realistic possibility?

Could you just go and work for a magazine or newspaper? No, I don't think so. I had no experience doing it. My only writing that I'd ever done was academic, you know, writing in university. And when I was going to these meetings in Montreal, someone came up to me. And out of the blue, they started a conversation with me. And they said, do you have a sponsor? I said, no.

And they said, well, I'll be your sponsor. This is some random dude who was. A random dude walked up to me. After the Narcotics Anonymous meeting. He was in the meeting with me. The meeting ended. And he came up to me. He said, what are you doing?

Like, are you working? I said, no, I'm not working. I can't even get a job volunteering anywhere. I tried to volunteer at this place. and they wouldn't let me. And out of the blue, he said, have you ever thought about writing? He didn't know me.

I was like, actually, yeah. And he's like, well, I know a place. I'll take you there tomorrow. So he took me to this place, these Haitians in Montreal, who had a bilingual magazine going called Image, Intercultural, and it was becoming French only,

and they wanted to start an English magazine. And he vouched on my behalf. He just begged because of like, oh, this is the guy you want. He's really good. Yeah. And he barely knew you. He barely knew me.

He'd worked there before. But he was like this heaven-sent angel who just was like put in my path. And it opens up a whole conversation about like, do I believe in God? Do I believe in a higher power? Do I believe in Allah? All this kind of stuff. Yeah. And for me, that whole story is like this proof of existence moment for me in my life.

Something greater than me. Put me there in this place where this guy. I just walked up to me and chose me to talk to me and happened to know a place that was looking for a guy. To start an English language magazine in Montreal. Exactly. So what was the magazine called and how did it start? So I went in for this meeting and he vouched for me and said that he'd known me a long time that I was going to work really hard. I didn't have a lot of experience, but that he thought I could do this thing.

And they said, okay, and they gave me a desk, a fax, machine, a phone, and a computer. and I started this process of, you know, making a magazine. And, all right, Voice of Montreal is the name that I came up with at the time. Yeah. And I had no idea what I was doing. I just, but I knew a few people around town and started this kind of recruitment process of finding writers to write in the magazine. And I remember walking down the street completely freaked out with a friend of mine.

And I was scared because I didn't know what I was doing. And he said, what have you got to lose? he said maybe it'll be you know like one magazine that you make and you can go around and say hey I made this magazine and then you can apply for a job and get a job somewhere or maybe it'll be huge

and like that conversation on the street that was a huge moment for me because that gave me the kind of strength to continue on when I was like overwhelmed and could barely tie my shoes straight coming out of a treatment center like that was a mess

and I owe him a lot because he didn't realize what he was doing at the time, but he gave me this kind of strength to keep marching forward. So you get to the magazine, what, like, what kind of publication was it? It was a 16-page newsprint magazine. But you were like the kind of the really like the poor, poor stepchild of the two big alt-weeklies in Montreal. Like, you guys were totally like a joke compared to those. We were the laughing stock.

Yeah. Because it was a shrinking English market. Okay. So it's, you know, it's a bilingual city. So there were four Alt Weekly's already two French ones and two English ones. And then we came on the scene and the English market is actually shrinking. There wasn't enough advertising to sustain those two, let alone the third one. It didn't make any economic sense.

But I really believe that there was an audience there for what we were talking about. So you guys were covering like what, like the sort of the alternative scene in Montreal like skaters and... Punk shows and hip-hop and it was like underground music. And I wrote this terrible editorial about the search for authenticity and the need for, like, creating real content. But I stand by that editorial. Like I hope to God nobody ever finds that and publishes it again because it was awful. But the spirit of what we do today was there. So you are basically the editor-in-chief of this magazine in your early 20s, the voice-exam.

Montreal and like who did you who are some of the people you brought in to help you start it and create it um you know one of my friends from college he connected me to a bunch of different artists and also to different writers and one of these writers was a guy named Gavin McKinnis and he was funny and had a comic book called pervert and so I asked him to become my assistant editor and I think I asked him to be my comics editor whatever that means so it was his job to find the different comic artists around town and put together a comics page. And what about Shane Smith, who's now kind of like the public face of Vice, I guess. How did he get involved?

So Shane and Gavin grew up together in Ottawa. And the first night we met, he was just like, he literally said, you're my new best friend. What happened? He was drunk and on acid as well. I should qualify this. Yes, right. He was in a bar called the BifTech. Gavin and I had been driving around the city all day, distributing the magazine.

and it had just come out, and we'd finished our rounds and went to the bar to meet Shane, and he was in there. He'd been waiting for a couple hours for us and by himself somehow managed to procure some psychedelics and was drunk. And I was, of course, sober and tired. And I walk in, there's a drunk man on psychedelics who was like, oh, you're from Pakistan. You must love cricket. And then was pretending to, like, bowl, like, balls at me. And you're like, this guy wants to be our ad sales, dude?

Yeah, exactly. But he had worked for Greenpeace before, and he could actually sell. You know, with Greenpeace, he raised a lot of money for them. And in Eastern Europe, he was involved with some activities where he was making lots of money. And so he knew how to make money. Some activities. Some activities. I'm going to leave it up.

He was good at making money, and he could, you know, sell rattlesnake boots to a rattlesnake. And so then it was me, Gavin and Shane, working in this office with the same. the Haitians. And we were there for like three, four months. But it wasn't working out because we weren't getting paid the commissions on the ads that we were selling. How are you being paid at all? Well, we were on welfare. Okay. I got you fine. And so we talked to the Haitians and said, you know, it's time for us to leave. And we came up with this thing where we said the village voice has a trademark on the word voice and they're suing us and forcing us to change our name. Because you You guys were the voice of Montreal.

Yes. We told the world that we were being sued by the village voice, and that's why we had to change the name to Vice. So you basically made this thing up about the Village Voice to generate publicity? Yeah. And it was a complete lie? It was a total lie. And that's why we dropped the O and how we started Vice.

So you basically created a new magazine. We created a new magazine. Because you didn't own the Voice of Montreal. Exactly. So what did you do at that point? Did you go to find a new office, or did you start working out of your apartment? That's a good question. We got a new loft, like not too far from the original office. I borrowed five grand from my parents. Gavin bought five grand from his parents and Shane got $5,000 worth of computers from his dad.

His dad worked in, you know, IT or something. And so it was with that, you know, $10,000 Canadian that we started, Vice. Okay, so this is now like, I guess the mid-90s and you guys have become. vice. What was a magazine like at that point? What did you cover? We really wanted to, again, it's such an overused word guy, but it's a good one, authenticity. Like, how do you create real content? And we hadn't been to journalism school. Yeah. So the way to do that is to get as close to the source as possible. And if we were going to write an article about the prostitution community in Montreal, let's get the prostitutes to write that story. And let's go out with pimps as they drive around and interview them.

And so we created this really raw magazine. There were a lot of typos, but it was alive. Like, I think the words kind of jumped off the page, and it was kind of shocking stuff. And we were so, you know, freedom of the press was such a big deal. Like we're so anti-censorship that even if you, you know, our view towards advertising, If you buy that page of advertising, you own that page. You can do whatever you want with it. And so we had these skateboard companies from Southern California

that had, like, you know, porn stars in their ads, nude porn stars in the ad. So the magazine all of a sudden has these crazy articles with lots of nudity advertising skateboard companies called serial killer skateboards or whatever. You know, so it was this whole weird little take on American culture that was coming from Montreal. So we were sending this magazine to San Francisco. Francisco, Chicago, L.A., New York, and the Americans were eating it up. So were you guys making money, like, pretty soon after you launched, or were you still bootstrapping it and barely?

We were bootstrapping it because we couldn't afford to have debt. We didn't, we couldn't get a loan. So we just printed copies based on how much we were selling and advertising. And it's what we call this kind of punk rock capitalism, just be really aggressive, be really ambitious, and you can't have debt. those are the rules that we lived by until we took our investment for the first time. And that was when?

That was in 98, when we sold 25% of the company took a guy named Richard Solwinski. So he was like a rich guy who just wanted to invest in the magazine because it seems like kind of a crazy investment at the time. So Shane and I had realized at that point

that we needed some help if we wanted to grow the magazine and we're like, who would invest in us? Like maybe Larry Flint would But there was a guy in Montreal named Richard Solwinski who had a software company called Discrete Logic that he'd sold to Autodesk for several hundred million dollars, and he was starting to buy immediate properties. And we had been interviewed by the French Daily in Montreal called La Press. And so we said in that interview in La Press that he was interested in buying us. And he then read it and then had his office contact us a few days later and said,

He wants to meet you guys. Who are you guys? He has no idea who you are, but apparently he's interested in buying you guys. So we met him and did a deal very quickly to sell 25% of the company to him. That must have been like a crazy amount of money for you guys at the time. Crazy. Yeah. This could have only happened in Montreal.

There was no due diligence that took place. It was literally one meeting with him at a restaurant that he loved, and so he bought it and moved it into the basement of his office and he brought out a bottle of Jack Daniels and kind of forced Shane to drink a bunch of it. And then at the end of the meeting said, I want to buy a piece of your magazine, come back to me in a week and tell me how much and don't try and gouge me. And so we left his office and spent a week going like, how much do we value our company for? How did you even figure that out? It was kind of arbitrary.

We just pulled it from the air. Yeah, we pulled it from the air and came up with this number somehow justified that it was a million bucks and he read it it was all on one piece of paper it said the price of ice he read it and he said that's a lot of money and then he signed it and they whisked us upstairs and they wrote us checks and I think his

advisors were like this is such a bad idea this shouldn't be happening but again no due diligence no like accounting nothing and his office was actually walking distance from our office and we went out it was springtime in Montreal and we literally did somersaults in the grass

when we left his office. You had 250,000 So with that money, you were able to scale the magazine? We were able to move to New York. When we come back, the story of Vices move to New York, and it's almost complete collapse. It's How I Built This from NPR. I'm Guy Raz. Stay with us. It's How I Built This from NPR. I'm Guy Raz.

So it's 1999. Gavin, Shane, and Seroosh have a $250,000 check and a dream to become much, much bigger. We always had aspirations to talk about the world and other things as well. And we had started building up a stable of writers that was international. But we had a ceiling. Becoming national in Canada wasn't good enough for us. We aspired for more.

And we thought, okay, we have to go. If we want to become bigger, we need to go to either New York or London or L.A. And so what did your investor, Richard Zawinsky, want you guys to do with the money? He had this vision. So he had Vice, and then he had a magazine called Shift, which was like a spin meets wired kind of magazine for a slightly older crowd. And then he had another company called Halo 46, which was kind of a luxury goods, high-end brand.

And he wanted all three of these brands to diversify and become multi-channel brands that was going to be tied into a big e-commerce platform, and he was going to take it all public. And so that's what we did with the money. We built a fashion division, a film division, the TV division, a music division, and you should have a brick and mortar presence for your fashion division. So he had like this huge vision that you guys weren't even thinking about.

Like you were, you were thinking we're just a zine. Yeah. And he was kind of ahead of the curve. It was kind of like an Amazon kind of thing. And like we came in and we actually executed his business plan. Like you actually started a fashion label? Yeah. And we had four clothing stores.

Like you got designers to make like vizons. kind of fashion? Yeah. But we also sold a lot of other lines. All the lines that we were advertising in the magazine, we sold their clothes. We realized by doing it that we don't want to sell pants for a living. That we're better at making content. That's really what we want to do.

But it served its purpose at the time. So at that point were things like really like starting to move? No. Very quickly. Solwinsky kind of ran out of money and retreated to Nantucket. And this is when the died. com bubble bursts. Exactly.

So what did that leave you guys? It left us, you know, high and dry. You had stores in New York. You had an office space in Manhattan, and you had employees, and you had no money coming in. 100%. It was bad. It was a bad time. So what happened to Zolwinsky?

We found out that Richard was in Nantucket at his house, and so we rented a car and drove up there. We took the ferry over, and, called him from a pay phone and he picked us up and was very surprised that we were there. We hadn't had any contact with him for like a month or something like that. What was going on? Was he running out of money? Yeah. So we went to his house and we're like, what's going on? And he said, it's over. The money's gone. I'm done. I can't put any more money into this. So all of a sudden we're like, what do we do? And so then we came back and that's when we moved to Brooklyn. We left his office.

unscrewed the mirrors out of the bathroom and took the plants and the desks and filing cabinets that we still have. I'm still using the same filing cabinet that I stole from that office on 27th Street. It all happened so quickly. And we sold more equity to Solwinski. So he ended up taking over control of the whole company at that point. Okay, so wait, before the company basically fell apart, he bought the entire company from you? Yeah. And like we did a stock trade, you know, our shares for.

his company, which was called NormalNet. And they're like, you're worth $44 million now. So we went from being on welfare to theoretically being worth $40 million in a very short amount of time to it just all collapsing and being broke again. And all of a sudden we have these stores and we have debt for the first time. And so once he still owned, completely owned the brand at that point? Yeah. And then we bought it back from him. How did you do that?

For pennies and the dollar, Shane did a deal. And, you know, he was nice to us in a way, like, even though he put us out of business, but he was, he agreed to sell the company back to us. And we did a deal with him. I can't remember for exactly how much, but for when we got a deal to buy the company back. So we got our equity back. How were you able to raise the money to buy him out? I borrowed money for my brother.

Wow. We all kind of borrowed the money. So you guys buy back the company. It's yours again. Essentially, you've got to completely rebuild it. So what did you do? Did you like, I mean, you've got these shops. You've got the film division and this division and the e-commerce.

Like, what do you do? We went back to doing things how we had originally done them, which is we can't have debt. You know, we owed all this money to these Italian, like, fashion companies who were manufacturing our clothes. And Shane went and took meetings with all of them and figured out how to reduce. the debt. So he's like, well, I know you want 200,000. I've got 20. Take it or leave it. Sue me or take the 20 grand. And that's how we worked our way out of that debt and that time. And we just went back to eating beans and rebuilding and doing things, how we'd always done them before we took investment. And so that was, you know, like a really valuable lesson and being able to

buy the company back and have a second chance. was huge. All right, so in the midst of all this, you were still putting out the magazine, right? Yeah, the magazine was hot. It was still doing well, like from a cultural level, maybe not making a lot of money. It was profitable because it had to be. We weren't paying people much money, and we weren't distributing millions and millions of copies, but it was getting out there and it was making an impact and getting some recognition.

And you're still mainly covering, like, counterculture. and stuff like that. But occasionally we would have photojournalists that would come in who had been in Afghanistan or Jamaica and done something with like gangsters in Jamaica and we would run their photos. Like we tried, but we didn't have the resources. We didn't have a network.

We weren't doing reporting in the traditional sense at all. It was a culture magazine that occasionally did some kind of newsy photojournalism. if it was gritty and raw. But in 2006, that was when everything changed for us when we picked up cameras. Video cameras. Yeah. We took a meeting with MTV. And they said, if we gave you money to make a DVD, what would you do?

And we said it would be like jackass meet 60 minutes. And that worked. We were speaking their language, you know? And so they gave us money to make a DVD. And so we said, okay, let's go make the travel, the vice guide to travel, DVD. And so where did you go? I went to Pakistan. We traveled in this area three years ago

when we wanted to visit a massive illegal arms market believed to be a source of weapons for the Taliban. We just kind of recreated what we'd done in the magazine. Is this loaded? Yes, this is loaded, but they locked. They locked in, where's the lock? But it was the first time we were telling stories in a different medium,

and it was like an eight-minute segment. We stuck it on this DVD. That segment eventually ended up on the homepage of, of CNN and they treated it as news. Sirush Alvi, the co-founder of Vice, took a trip to the country's most volatile city, Karachi. I mean, it's crazy to think about it, right? Because if you go back to the early 2000s and the late 90s, there were a lot of really cool magazines. I mean, there were a lot of really cool, like, zines and people doing cool stuff.

And, but for some reason, you guys made it. Like, why do you think that is? I mean, how was it that vice became vice and those other magazines didn't? We refused to die. Again, we're survivors, right? And we always found a way to do a deal, even when times were dark and it was hard. You know, we found a way. And we diversified at the right time.

So we would have some other deal that would keep the lights on while the magazine is going through a downturn and we're having a hard time selling ads, go out and do a big deal with Viacom that will keep us going for another eight months, and then do a deal with a private equity firm and get some money from there. But it is crazy that all those magazines are gone, for the most part,

and they were all so big, and we were like the stepchildren, and they disappeared. How do you feel when people say that BIS is like self-indulgent, you know, and it's all about the reporter and it's not really news? Because, I mean, you have heard that, right? I mean, you hear that from mainstream news organizations. Sure. So how do you feel about it? I mean, do you get defensive?

Do you just ignore it? Or do you think maybe they're right? You know, we ignore it for the most part. I think they're often wrong or they're basing it on one thing that we did. way back in the day or whatever, but I do believe strongly in how we create our content and the importance of having a point of view and subjectivity. Yes, we didn't go to journalism school, but I think that there's a place for the type of content that we're making.

We're winning Peabody Awards for all the people that are taking shots at us. I also think those accusations are coming from a place of where people are feeling threatened as well, you know, while Al Jazeera America is shutting down and that kind of thing. But, of course, we have made content that isn't great, that isn't perfect. There are mistakes, but we're learning. We're going to school in public, you know, and in a way, and I do think there's a lot that they teach in journalism school that we've tried to incorporate into the content we make to be accountable. Yeah. Have there ever been stories that you guys have done that you wish you didn't do?

Yeah. Can you talk about any of them without fear of being sued or? No, I mean, like there's the one, the McCaffey story. I don't know if you remember that one. The guy who did the, who was the guy who did the antivirus software, who was like on the run from the police a couple years ago. Exactly, where we kind of embedded with him and released a photo

where we didn't scrub the G. tag from it. So people, we basically exposed exactly where he was when he was on the run, which we obviously weren't trying to do. And everybody celebrated that mistake, you know, everybody being all of the competition and the other, you know, news organizations that, you know, vice, oh, they're trying to do this reporting and they're making rookie mistakes. So that was, you know, learning a lesson in public the hard way. But for the most part, you know, I don't have to be. I don't have to be. have a lot of regrets about the content that we make and have made because it's got us to this point today.

Yeah, I mean, over time, you guys have attracted a lot of investment. And today, VICE has valued over $4 billion. You started this, like, English-language version of a Haitian French magazine in 1994. Like, how crazy is that? I mean, it takes me back to that time on the street where my buddy said to me, he said, maybe you'll make one copy of the magazine or maybe it'll be huge one day. And in my gut at that time, I felt like, oh, maybe this could be huge. I couldn't define it.

I didn't know that this is how it was going to manifest itself and that we would employ 2,000 people and be valued at over $4 billion. But, yeah, it's pretty amazing. Sir Roushalvi, co-founder of Vice. By the way, since this episode first ran last year, VICE's valuation has gone up to over $5 billion. And as for Saurush, he's no longer editing VICE on a daily basis. These days, he spends most of his time traveling around the world and picking the stories he wants to tell. Are you the only one of Vise without sleeve tattoos?

You know, it's true, I have no tattoos. I'm a minority. Okay. And stick around because in just a moment, we're going to hear from you about. the things you're building. Hey, thanks for sticking around because it's time now for how you built that. And we're going to check in with someone who we first interviewed back in the fall. He's from Bend, Oregon.

I'm Kent Sheridan, the owner of Vala. Vala. It's a company that makes very delicious coffee, Kent says. Even though that coffee is instant and it comes in a little packet. So being able to just add water wherever you are is pretty special, in my opinion, without compromising the quality for even the highest coffee snob. Kent says that he's actually going for a flavor that tastes as good as a $4 pourover. Coffies that have a caramel sweetness, nutty, like hazelnut, baker's...

Leather, wet wool, hyacinth, pine needles. A lot of blueberry, mango, tropical fruit notes. Kent is getting these coffee beans from specialty roasters all across the U.S. and he wants to sell his coffee online. But he's obviously not the first person to try and make a really good high-end instant coffee, right? Like Starbucks has done this. So there is competition out there.

Oh, and one other problem? As soon as we tried to ramp up, everything went crazy, it seems like. You know, when you bump it up in size and you have all of these variables with temperature and pressure, it's not so clear cut. When we spoke with Kent last November, he had just finished a Kickstarter campaign,

and he owed his backers 1,339 cups of coffee. I mean, I remember talking to you back in November and just being like, well, I hope this next batch is it. I was pretty determined that I would find a way how to make it work and give those people their coffee. And at the time, Kent was kind of freaking out because the company in Missouri that was helping him freeze dry the coffee

just kept sending him batches that tasted burnt and metallic. And that batch that we were waiting on, it turned out completely ruined again, and we just decided it's not going to work. But Kent and his partner would not give up. So instead, we just doubled down. And instead of sending our coffee out to contractors to try to process it for us, we just purchased our own freeze-drying equipment and went back to doing it, just ourselves, and it just got so much better.

And in May, they finally sent their first batch to their Kickstarter followers. That was such a relief. I mean, we were just waiting for it to be exactly what we promised and nothing less. That's Kent Sheridan of Walla Coffee, which plans to launch for real in October. By the way, they just caught another really big break, a major investment of $200,000 from a former VP at Stumptown Coffee. You know, it's of course been so many ups and downs, but through every down, there's just this even greater upside. So that's kind of what I love about this whole thing.

To find out more about Voila Coffee, check out our Facebook page. And of course, if you want to tell us your story, go to build.npr.org. We love hearing what you're up to. And thanks for listening to the show this week. If you want to find out more, you can go to how I built this.npr.org. Better yet, subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts or however you get your podcasts. You can also write to us. Our email address is hibt at npr.org.

You can follow us on Twitter. It's at How I Built This. Our show was produced this week by Ramtin Arablewe, who also composed the music. Thanks also to Neva Grant, Sanaz-Meshkentpur, Claire Breen, and Jeff Rogers. Our intern is Lawrence Wu. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This? from NPR.