Book review: When superstar of financial journalism Guy Raz delivers business lessons through success stories

How I Built This: The Unexpected Paths to Success from the World’s Most Inspiring Entrepreneurs
by Guy Raz withNils Parker

Guy Raz is a superstar of financial journalism. His shows at National Public Radio (USA) are runaway hits; The New York Times wrote about him that “According to NPR, where he works on contract, he is the only person to ever have three shows simultaneously in Apple’s top 20 podcasts…” He is one of the most successful podcast creators and hosts in the world. When Raz speaks, hundreds of thousands listen.

And what he says lies at the intersection of business, creativity and contemporary corporate history. Raz interviews successful business founders, asking them how they built their enterprises from day one, focusing on the lessons they learned during their entrepreneurial journeys. The shows and podcast are lapped up by entrepreneurs, aspiring or otherwise, which has brought massive success to Raz himself.

Now, the insights that Raz has gleaned from entrepreneurs come to us in the form of a book, written by him with Nils Parker: How I Built This: The Unexpected Paths to Success from the World’s Most Inspiring Entrepreneurs. The introduction tells us whom the book aims to serve: “[T]his book is for people who aren’t natural-born entrepreneurs or even entrepreneurs at all, but instead are dreamers whose lack of experience is inversely proportional to their desire to bring something new into the world…” And right at the beginning of the book, we are hit with this brilliant insight: “[T]he key issue that… has thwarted many young, aspiring entrepreneurs, is misapprehending the difference between something being dangerous and something being risky. It is mistaking fear for folly, risk for recklessness”. There is a startling, illuminating insight in every page of the book.

The book is, apparently, a distillate of key learnings that Raz has gathered from his interviews. Because these learnings are meant to be mulled over, digested and put into practice in your own enterprise, I recommend that you make liberal use of sticky notes or sticky tabs and mark pages that resonate strongly with you; making notes will also be beneficial. Doing this, you will thank yourself, because it will make it easier to revisit key points from the book. In short, treat How I Built This not only as an infotaining narrative, but as a reference book to be consulted at key inflection points in your entrepreneurial journey.

Raz and Parker write in a winning, engaging, accessible way. Their voice is helpful and enthusiastic, as if they were knowledgeable friends being generous with their trade secrets. You never feel that they are talking down to you.

The structure of the book follows the life of a successful enterprise. The book is divided into three parts: ‘The Call’, which deals with ideating and early stage of running an enterprise; ‘The Test’, which deals with growing as a business and dealing with obstacles, and ‘The Destination’, which explores what to do after achieving the desired business objective. Each of these three parts has several chapters, for instance, ‘Find Your Co-Founder’, which says, “[T]he truth is that virtually no company is the creation of a single individual, but rather the product of a partnership, or even a group of co-founders”. The reason is that “[Y]ou need a partner whose skill set complements yours… whose strengths compensate for your weaknesses, and vice versa”.

We are given a complete range of possible situations that entrepreneurs find themselves in: generating a business idea, finding partners (as mentioned above), fending off competitors, raising capital by various means, changing gears, pivoting, handling conflicts with partners, handling growth pangs, and what to do after the desired objective is met. We are also told about the mindsets and behaviours or the other inhabitants of the entrepreneur’s world – competitors and venture capitalists. Plenty of business strategies are also discussed. For instance, here’s what the authors say about pivoting: “Rarely, it seems, do companies pivot from failure to success. They don’t go from a bad idea to a good idea. Rather, they go from a good idea to a great idea”.

Raz’s own killer insight, if you will, is that business lessons can be delivered effectively through storytelling. Others have used this technique before, but Raz deploys anecdotes with particular efficiency. Every page has at least one anecdote, one ‘hook’ that keeps you glued to the book. You consider these anecdotes to be absolutely credible and irresistible, because they came from lives of super-successful people from companies such as Belkin, Microsoft, Dell, as well as companies in the skincare and fast food categories.

I appreciated the fact that this book deals with more than numbers and strategies; it pays due attention to the psychological and cultural aspects of running an enterprise, as is clear in the chapter, ‘Build a Culture, Not a Cult’. Here, we are given the contrasting examples of Netflix and American Apparel (no spoilers, though).

All in all, this is a compulsively readable, even addictive, sugar high of a book. But it is also more. The authors compare the entrepreneur’s journey with the archetypal ‘Hero’s Journey’, which shows how a hero is made, how s/he meets with mentors, faces obstacles, bests them, and in the process is him/herself transformed. By comparing entrepreneurs to heroes, the authors are in fact putting entrepreneurship, and by extension, capitalism itself, on a pedestal. This is an unmissable book for entrepreneurs.

Suhit Kelkar is a freelance Journalist. He is the author of the poetry chapbook named The Centaur Chronicles.