Guy Raz Fireside Chat with Amit Bendov, CEO and Co-Founder of Gong

Speaker 1: Yes, you've now acclimated to Gong's rockstar tendencies. Little did you realize earlier today, you heard from Gong's co- founder and CEO, Amit Bendov. Yes, this guy, he's bent space and time with Gong's technology. Did you know Amit has also bent our ears with Zeppelin caliber solos because this dude whales on the strengths, let me tell you. Joining him on stage is another rockstar who's bending the airwaves, but in the forum of podcasting with accomplishments too far to enumerate. I'll just rattle off a few of the heavy hitting highlights. We're talking about someone joining Amit on stage that is the recipient of the Edward R. Murrow Award, contributing journalist to multiple DuPonts, a Peabody as well. But because I'm a big foodie, this one really struck a core with me. Here's a guy who, like yours truly, loves a good cast iron skillet. If you're struggling to ask him questions about the titans in business that he's interviewed, please ask for his recipe for a rib eye or a piece of Alaskan salmon cooked on his cast iron. It gives me tremendous pleasure to bring on stage Amit Bendov, co- founder and CEO of Gong joined by none other than podcast host extraordinaire guy, Guy Raz.

Speaker 2: Thank you.

Amit Bendov: So great to be here.

Guy Raz: Thank you for having me. Before we start, do you mind if I just ask a question of the folks?

Amit Bendov: I'm getting nervous now. Go ahead. Yeah.

Guy Raz: Does anybody know what a language this is? Does anybody speak this language? Korean, who said that? This is my book in Korean. My book has been translated into 15 languages and I have so many copies of the foreign translations that I must give them away. That's for you. Thank you. I have an English one here too. And this one is in... Anybody know? Anybody read it? This one is in Thai. I don't read Thai, so if anybody speaks Thai. Anyway, that was it.

Amit Bendov: Well, thank you very much.

Guy Raz: Yes, my pleasure. My pleasure. I'm honored to be here.

Amit Bendov: That's exciting. Thank you for taking the time to share with the team. You're sitting on a wealth of world and knowledge that you're sharing kindly with everybody in your podcast. The word is that you're sitting on 95 days of knowledge of the world's best leaders and best founders out there.

Guy Raz: It's kind of crazy if you were to take all of these. Between How I Built This and Wisdom From The Top, which is a show where I interview CEOs, How I Built This is a show where I interview founders. Wisdom From The Top is CEOs, and then we do other shows too. But between those two shows alone, we have about 2, 200 hours of raw audio. It would take you basically 95 straight days to listen to all of it or one year working in an office full time, 40 hour week to listen to all of it. It's a lot of content and it's amazing because it's also essentially a data set from some of the most interesting and successful founders and CEOs of our time. It's been, for me and our team, an incredible education to sit down with these founders. The interviews that you hear on How I Built This Are Wisdom From The Top are cut down to about an hour and a half, but the interviews last about four hours, three to four hours. In fact, later today I have to race off because I have an interview with Jim VandeHei who founded Axios and recently sold it to Cox Communications and it's scheduled for four hours. These are very long granular interviews where we extract a lot of information from the founder's life.

Amit Bendov: That's incredible. I didn't think about it, but it's actually part of the genesis of Gong because trying to understand, to create data from conversations. I'm personally of a little short attention span. I can't listen for hours. It's even a struggle to listen for 30 minutes straight. Distilling information, and today we're sitting on billions of hours to extract.

Guy Raz: Billions.

Amit Bendov: But you're kind of doing the same thing from the top CEO and extracting the knowledge to make it easy to consume and spread to everybody. How did you start that journey?

Guy Raz: The idea came... For most of my early career I was a reporter and I started out covering Washington D. C. And very early in my career, I got very lucky. I had an opportunity when I was 25 to go to Eastern Europe, to go to Berlin. I was the NPR correspondent in Berlin and this was in the year 2000. For the next seven years, I was essentially a foreign correspondent. I covered the Iraq war, I covered the Balkans, I covered Afghanistan, I spent tons of time in the Gulf countries in and out of war zones. It was an absolutely incredible experience. For two years, I was the Jerusalem correspondent for CNN. So I covered Israel on the Palestinian Territories, which is an amazingly challenging assignment, but also very, very fascinating. And then I was a news anchor for a few years. What happened about 12 years ago, it was 13 years ago, I had an experience. I took a sabbatical year, I got a fellowship to do a journalism fellowship at Harvard. They had this amazing program and I took a business school class for the first time in my life at Harvard Business School. I'd never in my life taken a business school class. What was amazing to me about it and for some of you have been to business school, you'll know this, what's amazing to me about taking a business school class was to learn that business school is taught through stories. They call them case studies. It was fascinating to me. I remember the first case study we read in his class was a story of Howard Schultz and Starbucks. I just devoured it. It was so interesting to learn about what he did and how he did it. And then you had to wait for the next class for part B. Well, what I realized was that you could actually take these case studies, these stories and you could offer them for free. You could create a public service essentially. And we know how to do that. I know how to do that. My team knows how to do it. We've been telling stories for, at that point, already 15 years and essentially offer free case studies to people anywhere at any time that, so they don't have to go to Harvard Business School or wherever, make those available and bring on founders of companies and really dive deep into their life story. That was a genesis of How I Built This. The idea was, and again obviously How I Built This is we are a business too and we have to be sustainable and we earn money and it's a business, but it is a mission. I mean the mission is that we have access to these incredibly influential founders. We can get them into a studio for four or five hours sometimes and really chronicle their life story in a very granular way in service to the listener. The idea is that we are there to serve you. It's not about burnishing the reputation of the founder, it's actually to the contrary. It's about really pushing the founders to go deep on their failures and their mistakes and their errors in the hope that the listener will learn from that. I was telling Amit earlier, the idea of How I Built This, it was almost to be a Yellow Pages for mistakes. Imagine if there was a Yellow Pages and you could just thumb through it and every mistake was in there, and then you could open that page and you could see what was done and then you would know how to avoid it. That is essentially how we think of the show. It's really designed as both a compendium of mistakes, but also as a shot in the arm for people, especially when they're struggling early on in founding their business. Founding a business is really hard as you know. It's really, really hard. Building a brand is so hard. Trying to build a consumer brand is one of the hardest things you can do. This week our episode of How I Built This is on Chobani, it's an incredible story. Hamdi Ulukaya was an immigrant from Turkey, a Kurdish immigrant who spoke no English, who knew how to make cheese and milk because he was a dairy farmer. He grew up in a farming family in Eastern Turkey on the Anatolian plane. He built the biggest yogurt brand in the United States from nothing. It's an absolutely incredible story of how he did it and it required tremendous amount of work, a lot of failure, some bankruptcies and struggles, but he did it. The point of that story and all the stories we tell is for people to understand that founders are not that different from them. That there was a time in your life where nobody would take your call. You'd call, nobody would take it. Now everyone's going to take your call. Of course, they're going to take your call. You found it and you found it gone. There was a time when nobody would take Howard Schultz's call or Richard Branson's call. We want people to understand that that is... We want to take these founders and strip away all of the patina of success and greatness and for people to see the human and how challenging it was to actually get to where they are today.

Amit Bendov: That's incredible. And you interview lots of founders, but many of them have been an enduring brands. Withstand the test of time. It could last a 100 years. Now, we're obviously experiencing what seems like an economic... Not seem, it's like an economic downturn. It could last a little bit. What have you seen from the best leaders? How do they weather these stormy waters? How do they come out of it?

Guy Raz: Well, let me answer this question in a slightly more abstract, but hopefully direct way too, which is what I've seen. We have essentially, this data set. 700 founders and CEOs, you start to see patterns emerge and they all do things in different ways. There are some leaders who are... Some founders who are better managers, some managers who are not particularly innovative, but they also have different strengths and weaknesses. But if you were to take all of the founders and CEOs that we've interviewed and you create these sort of word bubbles about each one and you start to build a Venn diagram and we've done versions of this, what you find is that there are three things that great leaders or strong leaders do to build enduring companies and brands. It's the same across the board. It doesn't mean they're all nice and friendly and kind. That's ideal. You want to have a kind and friendly leader or they're not always empathetic, but what they do are three essential things. They build cultures of collaboration, they incentivize it, they encourage risk taking. And then the other side of that coin is they create an environment where there's a healthy appetite for failure, not catastrophic failure, not end the company and burn it all down failure, but healthy failure. You can apply this to virtually every founder I've interviewed. I think you can apply it to Amit. You can even apply it to founders who are a little bit more controversial and certainly in terms of their interpersonal skills, like Elon Musk. He does all of these things in his businesses. There is collaboration and there is risk- taking and there is an appetite for failure at SpaceX and at Tesla. What you find is that when leaders encourage these three areas, you create an ecosystem where innovation happens, where people feel connected to the mission of the brand. Let me give you an example if you don't mind.

Amit Bendov: Please.

Guy Raz: In 2019, right before the pandemic, I went to Procter& Gamble. Now Procter& Gamble, this is not a company that's been on How I Built This because I interview founders. I would interview the CEO for Wisdom From The Top. But Procter& Gamble is a great example of an innovative company. Most people wouldn't think of Procter& Gamble and innovation. You're going to be thinking of Google or Gong or Amazon, whatever. It's 180- year- old company. They've got I think 60 or 80 brands I think out of all their brands, 20 of their brands are standalone$ 1 billion companies. This is a massive multinational conglomerate. Well, at Procter& Gamble, they really encourage and incentivize a collaborative work environment and cross- pollination across division. So I'll give you an example because it was a story I did not know until I got there and then spent some time researching. Back in the mid'90s, they were getting their butts kicked by Colgate. Obviously Procter& Gamble makes Crest. It is a massive competitor to Colgate. These are the toothpaste wars that you're talking about, Crest and Colgate and Colgate was really winning. And Procter& Gamble in their toothpaste division, they were looking for a new product that they could bring to the market, that could be competitive. And there was a guy there named Paul Seigel. He was a scientist in the toothpaste division and he was interested in teeth whitening. In the'80s and'90s, teeth whitening started to blow up. But it was still something you had to do at the dentist. Could you actually create and over- the- counter product that could whiten teeth that was almost, or maybe as good as the one you get from the dentist? Well, he came up with a formula solution that was very good. But he couldn't figure out how to apply it to the teeth. Procter& Gamble wasn't able to fit and create a personalized mouthpiece for every consumer. They had to make something that was universal. Anyway, one day he's in the lunchroom and he's having lunch with another guy there. His name is Bob Dirksen. He was working in a division of Procter& Gamble that was building a competitor to Saran wrap to Cling film. It was called Impress. It was going to be the best cling film ever. They never made the product, it failed but they did work on it and it was an innovative product. Paul's telling Bob about his problem. Bob says, " I think I can help you. Come down to plastics." They go down to plastics, he cuts them a piece of plastic, it works. They put this solution on and it stays on the teeth. Three days later, they're pitching the CMO of Procter& Gamble. Six months later, that product is introduced to the world. It's called Crest White Strips. It generates$ 300 million of revenue in the first year. Now, it's a much more in depth story, but the point of that story is to show that in a company like that, with so many different divisions, so many different... There's toothpaste and there's shampoos and there's diapers and there's female hygienic products. Throughout that company, people are encouraged to cross pollinate, to meet, to talk, to share information, to share knowledge. Through that kind of incentivized collaboration, they build from within. The Swiffer is another product, massive product that came from within the company. It was somebody working in the Mr. Clean division, working with somebody in the Maxi Pad division. Literally, they took a bottle of Mr. Clean, attached it to a broomstick, put a tube in between the Mr Clean bottle and a Maxi Pad at the bottom and that's how they created the Swiffer. It's a true story. Companies that encourage that kind of cross- pollination become 180- year- old legacy companies. That's why Procter& Gamble is still a massive, massive company that was started before the Civil War, 20 years before the Civil War. There are hundreds of examples.

Amit Bendov: Incredible.

Guy Raz: Yeah.

Amit Bendov: Incredible. I'm sure everybody in the audience seems like okay, what do we have a bottle and a piece of cloth that I can cobble in my company somewhere and create the next Swiffer? Incredible. So you spoke about the collaboration and failure and you also go as far as saying people are the most important things in the company. Obviously they're important, but you go as far as say even more than your board members.

Guy Raz: Yeah. I say that in my book, if you had a Maslow's hierarchy, the Maslow's hierarchy is the most important thing is security, is food and safety and security. That's the basic needs of human being and all the way up to enlightenment, personal fulfillment. But it's not that the board members or the investors or the customers are not important. They're absolutely crucial and critical. What I've said is that you find that in companies where the people, the employees are at the top of that pyramid, everything else flows seamlessly out of that because motivated, engaged employees serve customers, create happy customers, serve the board, serve the investors. It's all part of an ecosystem. Think about the great customer service experiences you've had. I focus a lot on consumer brands. Zappos, an incredible... In-N- Out Burgers, Chick- fil- A, Vitamix, even Chobani Yogurt is a great example. From day one, their focus was on building a culture that shared a mission that believed in each other, that was kind, that encouraged growth. One of the interesting things about a company, I've talked about this in the past, a company like In- N- Out Burgers, it's obviously only based in the West Coast but you... I think a lot of you may know this, you can't be a manager there unless you start at the bottom. You've got to start as a cashier. But it's a great example of a company that essentially if you come in at the bottom level, they will give you a clear path to growth. If you say, " I want to make my career here," they will make that happen for you. That translates down to every part of that business. You see it time and again. Companies where the employees, where it begins with the employees and it begins with their engagement and the connection that you have with each other, those are companies that produce incredible products. Innovation, customer service, return to the investors, return to the board, et cetera, et cetera. You see this time and again. So it's not that the board and the customers and the investors are not important. They are. The purpose of a business ultimately to some extent is to return profit to investors and shareholders. But you can't do that without starting from the top, which is the people who make it happen.

Amit Bendov: 100%. Do you see a risk of that changing? There's shifting now. We experienced a last year or so, or a couple years, the great resignation. But now the news are kind of shifting to more company- led market where there's these massive layoffs and all of that. Do you expect any changes?

Guy Raz: I hope not. I think you probably are aware of this and a lot of people watching are, which is one of what we're seeing now isn't necessarily the result of challenging economic times, certainly connected to headwinds, but it's more about an anomalous economic environment that existed in the previous two years. 2020 to 2022, arguably an anomalous time. All of us, remember March of 2022 when the stock market began to crash and most companies anticipated massive economic disruption. Well, the opposite happened. And then there was a scramble to hire. So many companies over- hired. They hired too many employees, which they cannot sustain anymore. And I think that's what you're seeing now. I don't think that the principle changes. The principle of people first, it doesn't change. Great companies in challenging times also take risks. There's a story that we told on Wisdom From The Top a couple years ago about Autodesk. Autodesk is an incredible company. They produce all kinds of software and services for design products. Back in 2007, 2008, Autodesk had to make a decision about their future. The decision was to migrate to cloud- based subscription service. They'd really pissed off their customers because essentially, you went from buying the product and owning it to having to pay a subscription for updates. This took place at exactly the same time as the entire financial markets were collapsing. Autodesk saw its profits tank. The CEO at the time, a guy named Carl Bass, he leaned into this strategy. He knew that they had to do this to set themselves up for the future, even though they were really getting hammered. At a certain point in 2009, he tried to sell the company. He had to try out of his fiduciary responsibility because it wasn't clear whether they would survive the economic headwinds. They tried to sell Autodesk for$ 3 billion at the time, which if you could have bought Autodesk for$ 3 billion, you would've been a seer. They couldn't sell it, but they weathered the storm and ultimately it served them very well. Autodesk, of course, I don't even know what their market cap today is, but it's in the tens and tens and tens of billions of dollars. But that enabled them, that risk that they took leaning into that shift, the difficult time was critical. Even though it was hard, it was absolutely critical to set themselves up for what would happen when the economy recovered. Eventually, it always does

Amit Bendov: That's an inspiring story. We have a lot of leaders in the audience sort of thinking like, okay, I understand that collaboration, innovation are important. What are some of the practical ways that people can help drive the culture of innovation in the organization?

Guy Raz: There's a guy that I interviewed about 10 years ago named Charles Lynn. He's a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins. He studies creativity. This is what... He's been trying to find the source of creativity his entire career. Now, it's really hard. There's a neuroscientist at Stanford, David Eagleman also really smart, looking into this. And at some point, they'll get there. They'll find out where in the brain it comes from and what sparks it. Charles Lynn, when I interviewed him, one of the experiments he was doing at the time was he was bringing in jazz musicians into his... I know we've got a musician coming later. He'd bring jazz musicians into the lab and he'd put them in an FMRI scanner and he would have them jam, just improvise. He would say, " Just play music, whatever you want to play, just jam." And he would monitor the brain activity and he would see... I'm sorry. Why are you doing that? It's Siri. And he would start to monitor their brain activity and their brains were firing on all inaudible. But he noticed something really interesting, curious, which was there was almost no activity in the prefrontal cortex of the brain, which was weird because this is the executive function of our brain. This is what us allows us to behave like civilized adults and to make rational decisions. But he didn't see any activity there. And so he began to develop a hypothesis that there might be a connection between creativity and an absence of activity in the prefrontal cortex. Why? Because when you're improvising, when you're jamming, you're not afraid to make mistakes. You're not afraid to make mistakes. You're not afraid of being judged, you're just playing. The prefrontal cortex is the part of our brain that actually prevents us from making mistakes. It's the part of our brain that enables us to function right now, like what I'm doing now or what we're all doing. But, we need that part of our brain also to be suppressed in order to create, innovate. The principle is very clear. It's organizations that enable people to throw out radical ideas, to put radical ideas out there, even if they won't be implemented, are organizations where you find innovative thinking. I'll give you a simple example. There is... And some of you may have this, there's an incredible trampoline brand. It's called Spring Free. Okay. Why is it incredible? This is a brand that has eliminated trampoline accidents by 97%. Why? Because the net is around the trampoline and there's no springs. Most of the accidents happen when the kids jump in and they get caught in the springs. The springs are actually under the trampoline, and they're not metal. They're made from fiberglass. They're fiberglass rods under the trampoline. You may have seen these trampoline, some of you may haven't. They're very expensive. They're great trampolines, right? And Steve Holmes is the CEO of the company. He founded it with a guy named Keith Alexander, who was a scientist in New Zealand who invented the Spring- Free Trampoline. He wanted to build a safer trampoline for his kids. Well, trampoline business, I'll be honest with you, not a huge category. We're not talking about a billion, multi- billion dollar industry. There's a limit to how much you can make in the trampoline industry. You can have a sustainable business and they do, and they're a leader in the category, but you're not chasing a$ 10 billion market. What do they do? Well, they discover that the fiberglass rods in their trampoline are actually not just incredibly flexible, they're incredibly strong. And by the way, they're incredibly resilient to water damage. Now, imagine how that might work in construction and the construction industry, particularly in places where the water table is high, particularly in Florida. We all know what happened with that building that collapsed. That building collapsed because the water table's high. That steel corroded and that building collapsed. Those same rods from that company and this all came internally from internal thinking, are now being repurposed for the construction industry. They have a completely different product that's coming out of a kid's trampoline. Fiberglass rods that are being used as rebar and other purposes for the construction building. It's a kind of place where they really do encourage radical thinking, radical ideas. Even things that might be silly. It's an environment where there's no judgment. You see this, by the way, here in the Bay Area, you know IDEO, one of the most famous design companies in the world. They have a no judgment approach too. There are no heroes there, there are no lone geniuses. They are teams of people who solve problems and they get a problem. They approach problems like anthropologists. It's a very famous... The whole concept of design thinking comes out of IDEO and how they think about approaching problems with empathy, with optimism and with a willingness to make mistakes with no judgment. That's key. It's critical. When people feel safe to throw out ideas in a non- judgemental environment, innovation follows. It happens in every case.

Amit Bendov: I love that because sometimes it's hard to tell something like brilliance from stupidity. That's why it goes back to your first thing, like when you start a new company. People don't pick up the phone. Because, " Yeah right, here's another thing."

Guy Raz: Of course.

Amit Bendov: Those ideas, it's very hard to tell.

Guy Raz: Amit, if I came to you 20 years ago and I said, " Hey Amit, I have this amazing idea. I want to take cantaloupe and strawberries and watermelon and pineapple and I want to carve them into shapes of flowers, put them on sticks and hand them to... Delivering people bouquets. It's going to be big business." I would say, " That's the stupidest idea. It's so dumb. Who's ever going to want fruit cut up as flowers?" It's a half a billion dollar business called Edible Arrangements. And that was Tariq Farid who had this idea and he pursued it. He understood that there was a market for this and he saw it.

Amit Bendov: Yeah, 100%. For those that don't know, even we experience the same thing right now. It's hard to believe, but 95% of people do not want to invest in Gong. They say, " inaudible." It's kind of like this cantaloupes.

Guy Raz: Cantaloupes. Eat the cantaloupe.

Amit Bendov: But it's the same thing, when you're innovate in a company sometimes the best ideas, they seem stupid and sometimes they're absolutely brilliant. Many of us might be experiencing bumps today in this kind of shaky economies. You've mentioned the story for Autodesk. What are some of the best ways to create a better future for companies, even in turbulent times?

Guy Raz: I think it goes back to this principle of incentivizing collaboration. Let me talk about it from the perspective of a leader for a second and then let me talk about it from the perspective of a culture, the culture perspective. I think one of the most consequential CEOs of the last 50 years in the United States was Ken Chenault of American Express. When he got to American Express, believe it or not, this is in the late'70s... Can anybody guess where most of their revenue came from in 1979? Anybody? Travelers checks? Has anybody used a travelers check in the last 20 years? You have. You're the only one? I'm not going to shame you. No judgments. This is a no judgment zone. Travelers checks, this a great business, a float business. By the way, a significant percentage of people still have them in their drawers. American Express just got free money. It's like visa debit cards, just don't spend them. It's a great business. But already in the late'70s, it was clear that was not going to be their future. And he was tasked with really transitioning into the credit card business. There was a lot of resistance internally to this idea. Obviously, we know what happened. When he was CEO of AMEX, they did some really, really unusual things. For example, there was a point where Amex, the platinum card was a premium card and then all of a sudden you get the Chase card that comes out offering great products and services competing with the Platinum card. What does Amex do? You would think that they would lower their price. They actually increased the price of the Amex Platinum card. It then became more expensive than the Chase card and they offered more services. But they actually said, " Look, that's fine if you want that card, but we are really super premium." It actually increased sales of the Amex Platinum card by multitudes. One of the things that he has said in our interview was, " My approach to American Express was very, very simple, and I said this to my team," he said, " I always said to them. You want to become the company that's going to put you out of business." So look at what you're doing. And it doesn't mean you're constantly ditching your core brand or product or service or your values. No, you keep them. You build around the core, but you're constantly innovating around it and thinking of new ways to put it out into the world or to build new products or services, but it's become the company that's going to put you out of business. And it was a really important driving motivating thing. Because if you think about it, if you're blockbuster and you're thinking about who's going to put you out of business, if they were thinking about that when Reid Hastings started Netflix in the late'90s, instead of ignoring him and thinking he was just a fly spec, blockbuster might be the company we're talking about today. You've got to think about of your Kodak and you're looking at digital cameras and digital film. You've got to think about who or what is going to put you out of business. I love that concept. But back to your question about, how do encourage that? It really is about incentivizing collaboration. It's about building... There used to be a way of rewarding employees and it still exists to some extent, where you get a P&L and a division and people look at the compensation team looks at the P& L and says, okay, Joe is going to get this bonus and Steve is going to get this one. It becomes this internal competition. Now, healthy competition internally is great. It's really strong. Google has it. Tesla has it, Amazon. All great companies do it. But ultimately you are in a battle against everybody outside. Your company is like an army and you're fighting everybody outside that army. And so companies that have figured out how to incentivize collaboration, reward it, add that to a compensation package and more companies are doing it, have actually been very effective at really nurturing that kind of environment. When people are encouraged to work in teams, are encouraged to cross pollinate and cross collaborate, when you are encouraged to go spend three months in the detergent division at Procter& Gamble just to check it out, or you're in toilet paper and you want to hang out with the marketing crew, you can. You can do that. There's a lot to be said about giving people time to do things that may not actually have a specific clear end point. This is something that... You guys probably do a version of this, but Intuit, this is something that Brad Smith introduced at Intuit more than 15 years ago was 10% time. It was literally time to just do stuff that could be interesting or cool or innovative for the company or for employees or for customers. At a certain point they were like, I think within a year of introducing this 10% time, they had 2000 concurrent projects going on. Some companies call it serendipity time, whatever, but out of that initiative at Intuit came TurboTax Mobile, which is I think still the most popular way to file taxes in the United States. And that literally came from somebody who was taking their 10% time and tinkering and trying to figure out this new product.

Amit Bendov: Absolutely. For the audience, we spoke earlier about Smart Trickers, they are born two years ago. It's an incredible way of understanding conversations with AI. It was born out of a hackathon with you a couple years ago. We put some teams together, " Do whatever you want." And that was one of the ideas. And we got 20 others. Absolutely, you should spend time. It's not a waste of time. It's a good smart investment. Now, one more thing that we spoke about is the willingness to take risk, like mission of Mars kind of things. But how should companies be thinking about risk taking in these times?

Guy Raz: Risk is a relative term. If you are a small business, which is any business under$ 40 million in the United States, that's what they've defined, you cannot afford to take a gamble that's going to lose you$ 10 million. Not everybody can have a Google X. Google celebrates failure and rightfully so, but the kind of failure that they can absorb is massive because it's such a massive company. So it's relative. But it's about a willingness to take all kinds of risks at all kinds of levels, even within a team. Is our workflow, is our productivity, is the way we interact, is that working? Should we experiment? Should we think radically about how we interact? Are there ways that we can alter the schedules that weren't... There are big risks and small risks, but risk taking at any level is absolutely critical because... There are so many risks that you can take that might fail, that have been a waste of time. But that ultimately are going to result in something massive. If you don't mind, can I tell you another anecdote?

Amit Bendov: I would love an anecdote.

Guy Raz: Sorry, I'm full of anecdotes. Apparently Ronald Reagan used to just give anecdotes and his staff would have to tap him on the shoulder and just say, " Stop telling anecdotes. Stay on topic." But there's this guy named James Dyson and he invented a wheelbarrow. The wheelbarrow was actually the most amazing wheelbarrow you can ever imagine. It was a wheelbarrow with a giant ball in the front, like a yoga ball, but a hard yoga ball. So it didn't sink in the mud. Has anybody ever toppled a wheelbarrow? No. Because you're all in the city, but some of you have. I know some of you have. You've toppled a wheelbarrow. It's easy to do, especially when you're a kid and you got... So this is a wheelbarrow that didn't topple over. No one bought this wheelbarrow because they were so big, they couldn't stock them in the hardware stores and they were weird. It was trying to introduce a new product, a new concept is really hard, especially when it's a consumer facing product. This whole business idea is really tanking and Dyson's investors are pulling out and actually they took the IP away from him too, this invention of his. But while he was building it, he spent a lot of time in the factory. He noticed that when they were powder coating the ball barrel, painting it, essentially spraying on a powder of paint. When they cleaned the factory, they had these giant wind turbines that would just suck all the particles out of the factory. Just like aircraft engines, just sucking them. And he thought, " Why isn't my vacuum cleaner this good?" I think you might know where I'm going with this because his name is James Dyson. But he then spent the next eight years building the greatest vacuum cleaner ever invented, a bagless vacuum cleaner. He invented that concept. The reason why vacuum cleaners didn't do such a good job was because they were dependent on the bags. And when the pores of the bags get clogged, they don't suck dirt up anymore. So he spent eight years, 5, 137 prototypes building what become the Dyson vacuum cleaner. He was broke. When they launched it in 1993, he was absolutely bankrupt. By 1995, he got very lucky, a small store in Britain started to sell it. And it was just a word of mouth that took off.'95, it was the number one vacuum cleaner in Britain. And then they went to the US. Today, I think he's the 12th richest person in the UK and I think he's the third or fourth biggest landowner after the royal family. But it is an amazing concept. This really came out of a failed product, a complete failed product. And you see a time and again, you see it with Slack, you see it with Discord. Discord was not built to be discord. Slack was not built to be slack. Slack was a video game. Discord was going to be a video game company, it wasn't going to be probably the most significant audio, social media platform in the world.

Amit Bendov: Love that. Well, I'm not going to tap you to stop the anecdotes. We have some time for people in the audience. I'm sure they have some question. This is all fascinating. Anybody wants to have questions for Guy? Please.

Hang Black: Hi, Hang Black, Juniper Networks. I love your podcast by the way.

Amit Bendov: Thank you so much.

Hang Black: Its fantastic. I would like to ask, of all of your interviews, what has been the most fascinating product history that you've uncovered?

Guy Raz: Gosh.

Hang Black: Because you've uncovered some really cool ones so far.

Guy Raz: Yeah, it's really hard to answer because there's so many. I can't answer that question with a specific one, but I will give you a recent one, which I think is a great, incredible product, which is the Ooni Pizza Oven. Does anybody have an Ooni Pizza Oven? Okay, I guess you're not into pizza.

Amit Bendov: I am.

Guy Raz: You are into pizza?

Amit Bendov: I've not tried it though.

Guy Raz: So if you are into making pizza, you know that your home oven can't get hot enough.

Amit Bendov: That oven? Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Guy Raz: Your home oven gets up to 500 degrees Fahrenheit. Okay. It's not hot enough to make a restaurant quality pizza. It has to get up to 900 degrees or 800- 900 degrees. Well, there was this guy, Kristian, I can't pronounce his name, last name, Tapaninaho. He's a guy from Finland and he essentially designed his own pizza oven by welding pieces of aluminum together and creating this inferno that got it up to 1, 000 degrees Fahrenheit. 570 Celsius or something. It worked. He essentially crowdfunded this product on Kickstarter, I think 12 years ago, 13 years ago. Long story short, today Ooni is a company that does$ 500 million a year in revenue. It's by far the biggest... It's changed the way people cook, not just pizza, but ever. It is the biggest seller of home pizza ovens. There are about$200-300- 400 depending on which one you buy. They're amazingly simple products that really came from a problem he had, which is he loved making pizzas, but he couldn't... It just didn't work in his home oven. Finally, he could figure out a way to get that heat. You need that heat to do the mail reaction and for that crispy, burnt, bubbly pizza to come out. It's just a guy tinkering in his garage who had nothing to do with... He wasn't an industrial designer. He wasn't even Italian, he was from Finland. The guy who transformed home pizza cooking is from Finland and his wife is from Scotland. To me, it's those kinds of stories where I get really energized. Because you can imagine doing something like that. You can imagine... He wasn't a multi- millionaire. He didn't have access to capital, he didn't have a network. He just had a problem that he wanted to solve that happened to be a problem that lots of other people clearly had to. So thank you for the question. But I will... I've got more too. I'll just talk forever.

Amit Bendov: Right. More questions.

Speaker 6: Also a fan of both you guys.

Guy Raz: Thank you.

Speaker 6: I guess this is a How I Built This for Guy, how you do it. So what's the process like? You find someone to interview, how do you identify them? And then can you just take us through that from a production perspective.

Guy Raz: Yeah. So we start with a very simple premise, whether it's for How I Built This or Wisdom From The Top or our new show, The Great Creators, which is I interview actors and musicians about their creative process. And it's really simple. It is this going to be worth your time as a listener? What we do, most of us think that a conversation have is interesting or like, "Oh, I just talked to my friend, we had the most interesting conversation. I wish we recorded it." The reality is might not be that interesting to more than two or three people. It's the same with what we do. There are lots of interactions I have that I think are really fascinating, but then when we really dig into it, we ask ourselves, " Is this going to be something that is worth the time of our listeners?" You have 14, 16 hours of the day depending on how much you sleep. And most of that time has been working and doing other things, cooking and being with family or commuting. And we're asking you to give us about an hour of your day to listen to our show, which is a big ask. Now, we're giving it to you for free, but we're still asking you to listen. It's a big ask. If you're going to give me an hour of your time, I promise you I'm going to make it worthwhile. You're going to walk away from whatever show we do, having learned something, having been inspired by an idea or some bit of creativity hopefully has been sparked in your brain. That's our goal. And if we don't achieve it, we don't run the story, we kill it. That's how we start. We do tons of research before we approach somebody. One of the blessings and curses of How I Built This is we are a very big show. We have three and a half million people who listen every week. So we get 1, 000 pitches a week. That's 52, 000 a year.

Amit Bendov: Wow.

Guy Raz: Your math... It's a lot of pitches. We can't process 52, 000 pitches. Most of them are... It's a lot. We can only do 45 episodes a year, main Monday episodes. And then we do a shorter version on Thursday, which is called the How I Built This lab. So we really do a lot of research before we even approach a founder about their story, their life, their approach, their values. Are they ethical? That's important to us. For a variety of reasons, How I Built This because it's become such a big show. And again, I say it and I like pinch myself because it is crazy. It was a side project that I started. I was doing other podcasts. I didn't know there would be such a large number of people who were interested in entrepreneurship stories, founder stories. But because we are where we are, we have a responsibility also to model good entrepreneurship, good leadership, ethical leadership, kind leadership. And so we really work hard to find leaders that embody those values because we want to encourage entrepreneurship. The greatest engine of innovation in this country and the world is entrepreneurship. The greatest, most innovative ideas come from people who are trying to build something that could have an impact on the world. We really want people to listen and to be inspired by that. That's how it begins. And then we find the person, I do a background call with them just to make sure that they're the right fit. We always tell them, " Look, we're going to ask everything." It's going to be a very granular conversation. It's very personal. It's almost like a deposition or talking to a psychotherapist. Are you prepared for that? If they are, we go through it and we sit down with them. I sit down with them for three or four hours and then it goes through multiple edits. There's an original score for every episode of How I Built This. It gets mastered so the audio fidelity's at the highest level and then it gets sent out into the world. So it's about a three month process, believe it or not, from the time we invite the guest to the time... Sometimes six months to the time they're on the show or it's aired.

Amit Bendov: Well, that's fascinating. Sounds to me you could definitely use Gong for processing these 36,000 pitches in 36 seconds.

Guy Raz: I'm telling you. I'm telling you, yeah. Yeah, for sure.

Amit Bendov: More questions.

Wayne: I have one here and on my phone you'll see. Yeah, thank you.

Amit Bendov: Thank you.

Wayne: It's been great. Wayne from BDP Partners. Guy, you tell a story that is unchanging, that is human, that is eternal about people who overcome amazing odds and make things happen. That's a hopeful message for all of us. But you do so in a world that's very much changing and I'm wondering if we were to get together here, 10 years from now, how would the human side of that story have changed? Do you believe looking at trends that you see in the way people innovate and what about the impact? What are the companies of the future going to look like that are going to have a big impact?

Guy Raz: I really appreciate that question because I think there are times where I'm conflicted about certain elements of what we do. Not in the sense of should we not do it, but in the sense of a lot of the products, the brands that we feature, their brands are consumer facing products. And when you make a consumer facing product, you're essentially encouraging people to buy more stuff. And when you encourage people to buy more stuff, it means that you're creating more carbon emissions to make those things. I think about that from time to time. And so we try to be really mindful and careful about how we approach it. Look, ultimately, I think despite the conflicts around consumerism that I have and some of you may have too, the reality is that the sort free marketplace has been the greatest engine of both innovation and of lifting people out of poverty. We just know that. It's a fact. Whether we like capitalism or not, it's a fact. It has been the most successful engine in lifting millions, billions of people out of poverty in China and Indian Sub- Saharan Africa, et cetera. There still is a lot of poverty. One of the things that we started to do in April was address this very question, which is how do we as a show encourage the next generation of entrepreneurs to pursue world- changing ideas that are not about pursuing financial success or glory? By the way, almost none of the founders I've interviewed did it because they were pursuing riches. It's about building something meaningful that has an impact. That's why you do it. Being rich is boring, having an impact is interesting. What we started to do in the last six months is to bring on founders of companies who are not quite as established. Because on How I Built This, it's usually companies that have been around for at least 10 years but who are trying to build world changing ideas. So for example, this week we have a founder on actually also from Israel, a guy named Shimon Elkabetz, a company called Tomorrow. io. They've only been around for a couple of years. They've raised a lot of money and they are essentially trying to predict weather patterns at like city block by city block level. We know that climate change is creating more unpredictable weather. Imagine if you knew that in five minutes from now there was going to be a hailstorm in this exact part of San Francisco or a dangerous tornado over a football stadium in Kansas City. They are essentially building out these kinds of models. We had a company called Climb Works out of... It's based in Geneva, but they have a facility in Iceland. It's the largest carbon capture facility in the world. Carbon capture, will that change the game? I don't know. It's not enough. We have to stop emitting carbon, but we also know that we have to capture carbon. It must happen in order for us to hit the Paris goals that were set several years ago. It's definitely something we're really trying to push. We're putting on founders who are... Another founder of a company based in LA that's building hydrogen powered airplanes. 60% of aircraft air travel in the world happens on Airbus A320s and Boeing 737s. If you can convert those two aircraft, when Boeing and Airbus make the next models of those planes, if they can convert them, he can help them be powered entirely by hydrogen, which is a completely carbon- free source of energy. That couldn't have a massive impact on our planet. Is it tested? Is it going to work? We don't know. But it's one of the ways we're trying to do exactly that. So in 10 years, hopefully we can look back and say okay, these companies really made it and now also, there are people who listen to these stories and are thinking about ways they can contribute as well. Thank you.

Amit Bendov: I love that question and the initiative. Maybe we can get one more question. Please, I'm blank.

Speaker 8: Hi.

Guy Raz: Hi.

Speaker 8: So as a founder myself who grew up with many traits that I deemed as sort of contradictory to the traditional idea of a founder, this boisterous, male authoritarian, all of these things. You talked about modeling entrepreneurship and I'm curious if there are any recent examples you can think of some of the traits that you've found or some of the patterns you've found in the founders that you've talked to that can help break those outdated stereotypes of what a founder is to encourage other people who may not think of themselves as fit to be a founder to do so?

Guy Raz: Yeah, I love that question. I think that there's a bit of a myth around what a founder is. Risk- taking, brash, jump out of an airplane with no parachute, charismatic. Actually, I would say the very, very few founders in How I Built This fit that mold. In fact, to the contrary, I think most of them are a bit self- effacing. They find their charisma. Amit, you were running a company, now you've got a staff. 20 years ago you probably were not able maybe to be as charismatic. But you find that charisma. As you grow as a leader, it comes. I found it too as I've grown in my profession. 20 years ago, it was harder for me to present and to talk and to inspire a team or to try and inspire my team. We have a business too. But there's one thing, there's one trait that all of them have and that I'm sure you have too or a version of it. It's a trait that I love so much because it's not a trait that most people are born with. Some people are, but most people aren't. Everybody can develop it. It's a very simple one and it's persistence. That might sound like a cliche, but actually if you look at founders who came from sales, they tend to really succeed because when you start out, you hear a lot of no. The presentation before this one, I believe it was Jesse was talking about keep going back, keep going back. They're going to say no, they're going to ghost you. It's critical. When you can withstand the nos and you know that eventually, you can get to a yes, that is a crucial and critical trait that a founder has to develop. We've seen it... With Mark Cuban was a sales rep. Sarah Blakely sold fax machines door to door. Hearing people say no, not interested, no soliciting. She needed that thick skin when she went to start Spanx because she needed somebody to make that prototype, a mill in North Carolina and they all said no to her. But she kept going back and that was a critical thing she needed to have. That is just a crucial and critical trait and a commonality that really reaches across the board. It's not charisma, it's not this kind of boisterous, fist- pounding. It's somebody who understands that eventually there is a yes at the end of that tunnel of nos. Thank you.

Speaker 8: Thanks.

Amit Bendov: There are a lot of people here in sales. So who knows, you might be making the next cantaloupe or pizza oven or Swiffer. Guy, thank you so much for taking the time to share with us inaudible huge fans. It's been awesome.

Guy Raz: Thank you. Thank you.