How I Built This: The Unexpected Paths to Success from the World's Most Inspiring Entrepreneurs

by Guy Raz

“If I’m tired,” he asked himself, “why

am I thirsty also?” By which he meant, why should we have to chug ten to sixteen ounces of a cloyingly sweet liquid in order to get an energy boost? “It would be like Tylenol selling sixteen-ounce bottles,”

This is how Manoj arrived at the idea of shrinking his product down from the standard sixteen-ounce drink to a two-ounce shot.

less about energy and more about focus—“vitamins for the brain,” Manoj called them—he could position his product beyond the beverage verticals and outside the grocery or convenience store channels.

GNC turned out to be a genius side door into the energy “drink” market

5-hour Energy has a 93 percent share of the energy shot business.

great irony of circumventing the barriers

If you’re successful, you stand a very good chance of achieving market domination of your own.

Peter Thiel echoed this sentiment in his own way.

“I have a single idée fixe that I am completely obsessed with on the business side,”

“which is that if you’re the founder-entrepreneur starting a company, you always want to aim for monopoly, and you a...

Go through the side door, please! Do everything within your power to find your way into the market where you are likely to have the most success.

Just make sure when you get inside and set up shop, you avoid becoming what you fought so hard against

in the minds of these founders, there was one ideal place for them to start and grow their business. But it just so happens that there were three different ways to get to that place: some had to move in order to break into their industries; some had to move in order to break out of them; and some were perfectly situated right where they were.

Marc Andreessen described it in his 2007 Guide to Startups series,*

Like Stonyfield, Airbnb’s problem wasn’t the founders’ idea (there was a market for this service); it was their execution.

Marc Andreessen identified as evidence of product-market fit began to turn toward the positive.

They saw an increase in repeat customers and referrals;

people couldn’t stop talking about...

site visits, user signups, and bookings went t...

they got a whole new round of pre...

they started signing meaningful term sheets with bi...

That’s how integral product-market fit can be to the success of a young business, and how simple it c...

“When you get right down to it, you can ignore almost everything else,” Andreessen said, if you just fix these things.

if you remove yourself, find your way up to the balcony, and look down on the dance floor, the view is completely different, often in ways you never could have expected.

This is Heifetz’s strategy for facing the challenges of leadership through crisis,

To know what to do, you need to have a true understanding of your situation.

“the only way you can gain both a clearer view of reality and some perspective on the bigger picture is by distancing yourself from the fray.”

The trick is in taking that perspect...

applying it to the c...

When that day comes for you, when you think seriously about quitting for the first time, getting

some true perspective is going to be the thing that gives you the courage to push forward.

What my colleagues didn’t understand was that while I was technically changing jobs and leaving the news, I wasn’t really changing what I did or who I was.

In fact, I was doing and becoming more of those things that were authentically me.

Embracing my storytelling sensibilities helped put my production company on the same track.

It guided me to, and through, every decision in every phase of our growth—whom to hire, whom to profile on the show, what to say no to—and it also kept us from falling off the right track.

it’s even more critical to know who you are as a...

you are as a ...

That understanding helps point you in the right direction when you have opportunities to purs...

What this engineer had landed upon without realizing it was the disconnect between the type of business Bonobos was in and the type of businesses Andy had come from.

In effect, Andy had come from the opposite of the startup world and was unconsciously bringing that cutthroat sensibility to his leadership of Bonobos.

This is a startup, where people are motivated by joy. It’s about creating something versus making sure that you’re working hard enough to get to the next rung.”

Only a company that has lost its way a little bit, that doesn’t know precisely what business it’s actually in, tends to fight itself like this.

“The organizational harmony at the company was being destroyed by this cross-coastal conflict,” he said. “The culture was deteriorating, and it was becoming harder by the day.”

he sought help—in the form of therapy—to help him figure out who he was and what he really wanted to do.

The closure was the first step toward resolving what Andy called a “broader error” he was making in trying to turn the company into a multibrand technology platform: getting away from who Bonobos was and what it did.

The high-cost Palo Alto office filled with West Coast tech people who had different ideas for what Bonobos should be,

those were experiments that were “outside the scope of the

Bonobos b...

they finally owned what the brand was, and then they took it multichannel beyond e-commerce into physical brick-and-mortar with their Guideshops and Nordstrom partnership.