Audible: Don Katz

Guy Raz: So you guys go public in the fall of 1999. And by the spring of 2000 the.com bubble burst crashes.

Don Katz: Yeah there were 1500 public Internet companies at the beginning of 2140 at the beginning of 2003. But it was that kind of You know of decimation and the stock price which was once $29 or something. It went down to four cents at the end of 2004 cents

Guy Raz: 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 the show today how in the era of clunky cassette tapes, Don Katz created a whole new kind of audio experience online and on demand with audible Back in the mid 1990s. Back before you could plug in a pair of earbuds and choose from hundreds of thousands of different books, millions of different podcasts or tens of millions of different songs back before any of that. A former journalist turned writer named Don Katz had a problem during his daily jog in new york city. He would listen to books on tape literally on tape as in cassette tapes. And Don wondered why do I have to lug around a cassette player and then flip the cassette, decide be in the middle of my run. Surely there must be an easier way he thought and in fact at the time there was mp three technology existed except almost no one used it in the mid 19 nineties compact disc sales were on a tear. It would take another seven years before C. D. S began to decline, But don was optimistic and at the age of 42 he decided to ditch his successful career as a writer and try to start something he knew nothing about a tech company, a company that would create a digital audio catalog of books and storytelling and spoken word and deliver those stories to users through a device specially designed to play that audio. And as you will hear in the early days, Not many people came to the party. The technology was way ahead of its time, probably too ahead of its time. In fact, audible, the company don founded almost collapsed in the early 2000's when its stock price hovered at around four cents a share. But today of course audible holds the biggest audiobook catalogue in the world. It dominates the space with a library of over 600,000 titles and the company is now part of the Amazon family which bought audible for $300 million 2008. But getting to that point was painful and full of setbacks and the story includes a cameo appearance from none other than Steve jobs. Don Katz was a staff writer for Rolling Stone magazine during its heyday in the late 70s and 80s.

Guy Raz: He grew up in Chicago in the 50s and 60s and strongly identified with his dad who owned a small business.

Don Katz: So my father was just incredibly kind of smart, kind and you know, it's a cliche, but he was one of these guys you would want it to be, you're gonna, you know, best friend, I looked up to him, I probably wished he was Home more because he was frankly like I became someone who worked a lot and he was also um he had been a war hero, he ran away from home basically with 17 and uh was was behind enemy lines, highly decorated

Guy Raz: italy or

Don Katz: he was he was in the black forest in Germany, you know, and he didn't really talk about it, He wasn't one of those guys, but he had a different purple hearts every time I broke a leg and hockey or something, I would find I would wake up and find the purple heart on my pillow.

Guy Raz: And your dad, from what I understand, he hit a music store in Chicago called I guess called K musical instruments and it was,

Don Katz: it was actually a guitar man, guitar manufacturer. Yeah, my dad made uh make guitars, he made them for Sears silver tones. But I remember that there were some pretty great bands of the era, no one called Spirit that had a fantastic guitarist named randy California who only would play play case and the like, but but my dad's kind of claim to fame at that time was that he put chord books in guitars and started this whole idea that you two can play the guitar. And it alienated a lot of the musicians including barney Kessel and Les paul and people that he was friends with because they were infuriated to say that their instrument was any easier to play than a stretch than the violin. And of course he said, yeah, but you know it is. And so it ended up that my family was all in Newsweek magazine taking our guitar lessons together because my dad had decided to be part of this Youtube can play the guitar, which was part of the whole mid sixties folk music kind of kind of movements. So I think back and he was definitely somebody who also liked to challenge the status quo, which I think I have come by honestly.

Guy Raz: So was he financially successful?

Don Katz: He was financially successful in the way of a rising entrepreneur of his time, but very tragically, he went out to play tennis at 47 years old on a Saturday. And I got a call when I was in college saying that he died playing tennis very suddenly of a massive heart attack. And it really marked my life in so many ways. It was definitely a you know, I formative experience I I've heard and you probably have heard this too, that uh there's a lot of patterns of fatherlessness in highly entrepreneurial people, whether it's through abandonment or, or early death, including taking ridiculous risks as a journalist in the early part of my career um where I could have easily gotten killed several times, I think I was working out his heroism and other kinds of things. So you know, you come to these things a little later in life but it is interesting to reflect on it.

Guy Raz: So so for college, I know that you went to N. Y. U. And you majored in english and from what I understand, ralph Ellison, like the ralph Ellison, the Invisible Man ralph Ellison uh was a professor there and um and you kind of had an opportunity to sort of work with him to be tutored by him,

Don Katz: he taught me how to read in a way that I fully didn't understand and I knew that I I loved more than anything the sound of literature and I was just and how it felt to me, but I ralph actually kind of flushed it out in a way that it became something that I was fully able to understand. He also, he also gave me the uh I think the, the confidence to try to be a professional writer, which I proceeded to do for for 20 years

Guy Raz: was was was ralph Ellison, your like your thesis advisor?

Don Katz: Yeah, he basically was and uh ralph was a deep and exacting intellectual, so I had to uh work really hard and and read really hard anyways. It was, it was an amazing experience, he would sit with a big stogie and had this amazing story telling voice with his Oklahoma, I've said that his voice was like a coal car coming out of my mind and I would just be mesmerized. And uh and he was a big supporter and uh you know later, even the audible transition right at the time he died, he was incredibly supportive of uh what I did.

Guy Raz: So you graduate from from N. Y. U.

Guy Raz: And you're sort of thinking that you want to be a writer, but it's not that easy to do. So and you did what lots of people do, which is you decided to go to graduate school to continue studying, I'm assume you went to London to the London School of Economics. Yeah, I am, I am I assuming correctly that you didn't really know what you wanted to do, You want

Don Katz: to kind of buy some time? Absolutely. In fact, I thought at the time almost everybody thought if you didn't know what you should do, you should go to law school. But I studied the european economics and Politics and International history and I was living with my old friend Barbara who was a rock writer. She had gone to be a rock n roll writer in London. And so we just paired up and shared a flat and so I would come home and there would be you know Rod Stewart and keith Richards and uh and so that that's who she hung out with,

Guy Raz: wow and you roommate Barbara, this is somebody you knew from college, from high school, from high school

Don Katz: and just to make money. Barbara got me uh little gigs reviewing albums for the british

Guy Raz: likability maker or any

Don Katz: Exactly new musical Express sounds uh and I'll never forget, I wrote one about uh Frankie Valli and the four Seasons, I got to interview Frankie Valli and the like, and I was just kind of trying to, trying to figure it out, I matriculated for a PhD, but I just didn't know you know what I wanted to do.

Guy Raz: All right, so you're you're doing a little writing and and kind of getting into the music scene in London and and I guess one night you're out of dinner and you meet a guy who winds up kind of launching your career in journalism, what's the story?

Don Katz: Absolutely. Sitting next to a guy named robert Greenfield who introduces himself as a Rolling Stone writer and we just get chatting and I basically, I told him about some of the things that were going on, notably what was going on in Spain at the end of franco, and I talked to him about what was going on in Northern Ireland because I had a very different perspective on the world, because I was based in London and reading the european press and he said, you know, you should package one of these things and right, this guy, john Winter who worked with a rolling stone um a letter with some ideas because you could you could just write about these are great stories you've got. And I went ahead and I sat down and I wrote This letter at the two or 3 ideas

Guy Raz: release a handwritten letter or typed letter that you right

Don Katz: now. I went on my, you know, all right, right, on my typewriter pitch

Guy Raz: an idea for an article, which was what, what did you write in the letter? What it was a pitch.

Don Katz: One of them was that at the point franco who was ancient begins to die the great dictator of Spain, it would be very interesting to illuminate the liberation movement of the data basque separatists and the perspective of this last dictator going down and that basically the last of the World War two era, you know, dictators. And it would be an interesting story. And I get a telegram saying, go to Spain And I'm not so sure anyone I work with an audible or my Children know what a telegram even looks like because that's that was the fast way to get to me was to get a get out of here, go, go, go write the story. And it basically said, right, you know, right, 5-7,000 words and we'll pay you $1,500 and reasonable expenses.

Guy Raz: This sounds like this sounds like a dispatch from Hunter Thompson, right. He would say, oh, it's reasonable expenses from john winter. But I mean, you get, you get this telegram from him just curious, did you have a mild panic attack? Because you were 23 and rolling stone was hugely influential by that point.

Don Katz: The attack that actually I think attacks all people who go way out with crazy ideas, whatever they are. Which is that, oh my God, I'm a fraud and they're about to find it out. That's exactly what happened. But it's not the only time of my life that I've got to have that feeling. So I had no idea what to do. And I got myself to Madrid. I knew I'd have to get basically credential to cover what was supposed to be a funeral. And so what happened was all of the, of the World War Two era journalists who were still around the wire service guys, they all descended on Madrid for almost like a last hurrah. And they took me under their collective wing and showed me a whole lot of stuff about how to be a more traditional journalist. And I sat down and I wrote this story and it came out as I had written it and on the cover, it said dispatch from the Valley of the Fallen with my name on it, on Rolling Stone magazine. Now I'm 23 years old and I was like, I can't believe this. And of course, because I really hadn't been a student journalist, I just wrote, you know, um I didn't know that uh as it was explained to me later, that usually they like to edit these things a lot, but they sure they just put it in

Guy Raz: and so I guess, yeah, I mean, you start writing more and more pieces for Rolling Stone and eventually some some other publications. Um and you sort of travel more like to Northern Ireland and I think you went to Ethiopia and a bunch of different war zones. But I mean, you were you were in crowds, so incredibly young when you were getting those, those bylines. Um I read a story and I love the story that you were so self conscious about being like, quote, found out that, you know, because you were so young that whenever one of one of your american editors would come to London, you would actually not be there deliberately like you, so you wouldn't have to meet them face to face.

Don Katz: I thought if they saw How young, I think I looked like I was 12 when I was 23 years old. I was incredibly self conscious and I did try to be out on assignment when the editors, um I was working with, you know, telephonically were in town for a while and uh eventually when I revealed myself and I met them, they did exactly what I expect, come on, you're you're not done. You like, they were incredulous that I was putting out this precocious stuff.

Guy Raz: Imagine Um I I guess you stayed in Europe for for several years and I guess by the what like the late 70s you moved to New York to work at rolling stone. And you, I think I think you also got married around then. How did you meet your wife?

Don Katz: I met my wife Leslie in uh 1982 on a river raft trip in Pennsylvania out of Jim Thorpe Pennsylvania. And uh we were both with different people and uh we kind of hit it off and uh I went off to china for National Geographic and spent uh literally months traveling the Silk Road. It was incredible trip. But it was long and when I got back, the relationship with former girlfriend was over. And uh she said to me, I know who you're going to call what people said lastly Larson and that

Guy Raz: she was right because you had connected with her on that on that river

Don Katz: trip, definitely. I thought she was great. So uh so and life went on from there and uh it's been an amazing marriage and just about nothing. I can think of that. That has been good for me. She hasn't been an amazing part of including memorably referring to my sudden u turn from writer to entrepreneur as a nontoxic midlife crisis,

Guy Raz: which will, which we'll get to in a moment. But I mean at that time you mean you were still a journalist for Rolling Stone you've got this great job, you're getting paid a salary. When did you?

Guy Raz: I know that you you wrote your first book, which was the story of ceres, the department store um I guess The history of Sears and then kind of like the rise and fall of it and the book came out in like 87. Why did you want to write a book about Sears?

Don Katz: Well, I kind of thought how weird would it be to take this, you know, this hippie counterculture storytelling and write about a big old american company. What happened to it? And I wrote another letter, I wrote a letter to the Ceo and chairman of Sears, a guy named Ed telling who was famous for never having given an interview, completely introverted guy. The beat reporters couldn't get anything out of Ed telling. And basically I said that if he If he can deal with the Great American Corporation of the 20th century changing itself. So as to continue to be the most beloved and trusted company of the century, it's a matter of historical record. And he just decided that he'd let me in. And this was really rare because as you well know, corporations tend to be, you know, pentagon like and their control over over the truth. And so uh I proceeded to show up as a bearded, still looking quite young guy and people who worked at Sears decided I was okay because I had sold at telling on something they never thought anybody would sell it on. So I was a salesman in their eyes and I just tried, you know I spent, he hears on this and did I get an M. B. A. In real time?

Guy Raz: I'm wondering if Ed telling because he was widely reviled by the business press, right? He was considered to be a disastrous leader in the end one could argue he redeemed himself. But do you think that he wanted you to write this book? So he would come out being redeemed.

Don Katz: I think he wanted to be part of history. I think he like so many of these series guys who they came and transferred their battlefield loyalties from World War II to this Heartland Corporation. They lived these lives where they would move 1416 times. I mean that was part of a corporate life in those days. But boy oh boy. It was uh it was a pretty epic task to then turn it into this uh you know this tale of America but it was a tale of hubris, it was a tale of the final founder. Sowing the seeds of the destruction of the company. I have a whole chapter remembering their about the building of the Sears Tower. They made this genius conception of every customer thought Sears was the friendly guy down the street. The member of the Kiwanis club and that Sears was this localized reality and once they built that tower and said that they're one of the most powerful companies in the world, all the bad stuff started happening because it was just thought to be Such a, you know, an unfortunate statement of their, of their purpose. But that company's story is, is very much about the, the end of the, what ended up happening in the 70s, 80s as Americans realize that other countries actually, sometimes we're even more productive than they were. And all those, all that wake up call was part of that story.

Guy Raz: You are a runner, right? Or were a runner? Well,

Don Katz: I'm a hockey player who runs or did run a lot so as to keep in shape. But uh, I definitely liked to run in my, my regimen when I was living in new york as a writer, was to take off in riverside Park and run several miles at the end of the day.

Guy Raz: And while you ran, what would you listen to music?

Don Katz: Well, I ran with a partner and we would just chat the whole time, or I listened to the early audiobooks,

Guy Raz: on cassette,

Don Katz: on cassette. Walkman painful. It was at a Sony Walkman in a belly pack, knocking around.

Don Katz: And I just remember the utter irritation of trying to change the tapes when you're aerobically text and uh how, because you rented them in these big brown boxes that they would often not work at all, which was really irritating when you're a couple miles from home. But I remember listening to, you know, john reads 10 days that shook the world. I would take on these long, you know, kind of books and uh and jog along and listen. But at that point, I was the only person I knew who, who did That.

Guy Raz: Okay. So I think this is the early 1990s and during this time, I guess you're you're also researching another book, which I think it was a book about like the burgeoning tech industry. So at what point were you like, wait, I might have a business idea here. Like how did how did that happen?

Don Katz: So so I I had this book contract, I began to connect with people who we're teaching me what I didn't know about technology. And one of the people who was my key contacts was my college roommate from N. Y. U. Ed Lau one of my close friends to this day who was a computer friggin genius. And we were talking about signal compression Basically about analog to digital signal compression. And I was asking all these questions about how text fit through the Internet, which was wait for it, the phone lines, there was no broadband at all. And these discussions were happening in 93, And he had this, I thought he said, you know, you know, you could you could get voice through the phone line, you could be compressed. And we went back and forth. And I said, head, you know, if you could take audio books and send them through the phone line, the cost of the, of the packaging and all those tapes wouldn't be there. You could lower the cost. I remember saying we liberate the signal, meaning how do we get the audio into my belly pack? You know, so I can watch, go around with it. Um how are we going to get it into cars? Because that's where people have, have a lot of time. I remember thinking if you took these audiobooks, you could actually liberate time for people. And we got kind of more excited about it and I got more and more interested in what it would mean to do this because nobody else was doing

Guy Raz: it. Okay, so you're thinking of making some new type of digital device or like a system for playing audio. So what did you start to do?

Don Katz: So throughout 1994 I spent time trying to find anyone I could find to talk about a future that involved these little devices that were filled with the sound, the soundscape of culture, basically the soundtrack of culture. I remember talking in various ways or the sound of civilization. I remember all these things coming out saying, can't you see it? And like people thought I was out of my mind. I mean, I couldn't find anybody who knew what I was talking about except for Ed. And uh, we just decided to write it up into a business plan

Guy Raz: to do a business plan to create,

Don Katz: to create a company that we decided should be called audible words.

Guy Raz: And it would be a company that made what books on tape that were digital.

Don Katz: Believe it or not guy, it was actually a solid state cassette. It was a cassette that you hooked to the phone line. That was the first patent and that the idea was you'd have the signal come over, you'd capture it in the cassette flash memory, You push it into the tape bed in your car, which instantly everybody had at that point and you'd be able to listen and we just played with it. But I have to tell you, I wrote the business plan and uh, it was like 110 page narrative.

Guy Raz: What was the story? It was a narrative saying what

Don Katz: the story was that we would occupy this time of people's life, which was and we said when your eyes are busy but your mind is free, we would create a higher level of purpose that the AM FM radio was for everybody. It wasn't just for you. And you would be able to program your own listening time in the future through digital technology and that we would have a company that would sell a solid state digital device as well as content. It would be about books and literature. It would allow you to listen to fresh air and marketplace and all these shows that played at two o'clock in the afternoon. And we got a patent together On a downloadable system of for media that would be captured by a solid state device. And I remember it was $14,000 that I put on my credit card. Uh because you know what do we know now? I know of course, you know without a portfolio patents are worthless. But you know at that point I didn't know that was the first thing we did, but we actually started to get really excited about this.

Guy Raz: So so instead of terrestrial radio you could get it delivered to the internet instead of a an audio book on tape or a book or a speech on tape or some kind of you know inspiring. I don't know inspirational thing. You just basically say this business is going to deliver this stuff to you through your phone line to do the internet

Don Katz: didn't play up the book part of it because the business itself was so infanticide Immel and and and small. What I said what I did was I realized through just basic journalistic research that 93 million Americans drove to work alone every morning. At that point only department transportation number which you could extrapolate to hundreds of millions of hours of time. People sit in traffic. I then matched the sociological data that showed that the most frustrating time of people's days and least valuable time Is sitting in traffic. And I basically just we said if we only penetrate 9% of them at $10 a month for a service that enriched their lives. Here's how big the business would be. And that's how we were able to get, you know, which now very small amounts of money. But was then to us a lot of money to uh to make audible

Guy Raz: before you went out to seek capital for this, right?

Guy Raz: Because you were writing a book, how did this idea just take over your mind and your life? Because all of us get ideas. We've all had a business idea and sometimes it captures us for a week or two weeks. But this was really,

Don Katz: I think I there were multiple things inspiring me at the time. One was I just thought it was interesting that I daydreamed about this more than I was day dreaming about the next paragraph for the next day's writing. The other thing was I kept going to people who I otherwise respected, who thought I was crazy.

Guy Raz: They thought you were crazy because you had a great gig and you were respected and

Don Katz: they were so dismissive of it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean it was like they just didn't get it. I mean even people who took the time said why don't you just packaged it and try to sell it to Sony for $25,000. It might be something they're interested in. It was such a dismissive reaction to it and that made me more inspired really to go ahead and

Guy Raz: try try to do it. Yeah, when we come back in, just a moment turns out that building a new type of audio player and a new type of audio marketplace and a whole new type of audio experience is hard and that's before the dot com bust. Stay with us. I'm guy raz and you're listening to how I built this from NPR. This message comes from NPR sponsor Edmonds finding deals on new and used vehicles has been difficult due to car shortages and increased demand. Edmunds is here to help they've been taking the stress out of the car shopping process for more than 50 years offering price guidance and shopping advice all in one. Edmonds free appraisal tool gives you an accurate price for your vehicle in minutes visit Edmunds dot com to get your free online appraisal today and start searching for vehicles in your area for cars. There's Edmonds

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Guy Raz: hey, welcome back to how I built this. I'm guy raz. So it's around 1995 and Don Katz is trying to build an audio player and platform for audio books, interviews, comedy and more what will become audible. But first he has to raise money and one of the first people he calls is a former source from the world of tech. A guy named Tim Mott

Don Katz: and tim mutt was a great entrepreneur and is a great, great, great person. He was one of the founding people at electronic arts, the three people who developed electronic arts. And when tim ma read the primitive business plan, he called me up and said, I would fund this. This is amazing.

Guy Raz: Don, when you went to your wife and he said, hey, I want to do this and want to start a business. What what was her reaction was she like, go for it?

Don Katz: I think at one point she said it was, it sounds a little sexist now, but he said it's better than a blonde. She'd already been such an amazing partner for someone who was willing to live without a net. Um, because you know, I was freelancing book writer and everything, but I was scared. I mean I had three kids and a mortgage.

Guy Raz: You were 43,

Don Katz: I was 43 years old And I took an 85% year over year pay cut to start audible.

Guy Raz: And meanwhile, from what I know of the story, you were looking for a business partner and you want it to be Ed Lau, who is your former, your former roommate, the guy who was that computer genius, but he wasn't able to join you. Right? So you, so you needed to find presumably someone else, right?

Don Katz: Yeah. I went out to find a new, you know, science partner and found my lifelong friend and wonderful person guy story who was a senior person at, at bell labs and guy decided to, you know, hear the siren song and he joined me earlier.

Guy Raz: How did you convince him? How did you convince him or basically I

Don Katz: basically said, I don't, I don't know if we're going to overcome what a venture capitalist would call the tech risk, you know, and the execution risk, but whatever we build, we're going to put in front of consumers and you'll get to say that. And I said, you don't have to take the 85% year over year pay cut I took, but you have to take 60 and you're going to get all these options. And guy jumped into the merry band,

Guy Raz: Your initial backer, tim Mott Put in, I think like $400,000 in seed capital. Yeah. And what did you know at the time about how to, you know, like how to deal with equity and valuations? I mean now, of course every company, it doesn't matter what the company is, it seems like they're perceived level of valuation is $20 million. Oh my company is valued at $20 million. And you're like What are you making nothing? We're giving ourselves a $20 million dollar valuation. How did you know how to do that and how to, you know, because

Don Katz: I literally trusted tim and you know, I was a fast study as journalists are. So I was picking the stuff up and taking it in pretty quickly. And tim's first round was allowed us to evolve the team and we took over a doctor's office in Montclair, a single room, uh not from where I'm speaking in New Jersey and we paint, we painted it on a sunday and moved in on a, on a monday. So now we moved out of my attic and uh had a place to, you know, to gather and then tim and I hit the road for California

Guy Raz: to raise more money

Don Katz: to raise more money and also begin the process of building the first download system, The first way of actually securing the intellectual property. This was years before the terms about digital rights management were there because I've had so many outside magazine articles ripped off on the UNIX internet and people put their own names on the like that. I kind of had this idea that this kind of professional grade creativity might need to be protected. So uh company very well known called the radio which does industrial design came in and they were totally excited about all this stuff including everything from you know the idea of securing the I. P. And the download system and building a device with us. So um that process started and yeah we went out and spent a lot of time going up and down Sand Hill Road getting to know people

Guy Raz: all right. So you're able to secure the capitol I think I think if I guess a few million dollars to get an audio player built but also I mean you've got to you've got to get content for that audio player. And you were going to be the Ceo of the company, you were going to manage people and management team. Is that right?

Don Katz: Yes. So I was president and Ceo and Tim was chairman and we meet we formed a board and I believe this idea of seeing the future and seeing these opportunities and doing something that has been done and persuading people to be part of it was the most important thing. But it is also true that you know managing people is a different art in science, which, but I did have all those years of watching both entrepreneurs and others lead.

Guy Raz: Just to me it just sounds incredibly overwhelming, like an overwhelming amount of things to do. I understand that you had written books about leaders, but you never had like a leadership position at any of the publications where you work, you weren't an editor at Rolling Stone. Were you nervous about becoming a manager of people in any way?

Don Katz: I was definitely nervous, but I was I was on point, you know, look, I definitely felt more concerned about having put $3.5 million into play. That was other people's money and feeling deeply responsible to them and to others, particularly people who left perfectly good jobs because a lot of these people left really nice jobs to join this uh this vision of the possible.

Don Katz: So yeah, it was incredibly stressful, but but but you did say that part of the thing was about getting the content, and I would argue that probably our original funders discounted how hard it was gonna be to convince the gatekeepers of, of the content that existed to see this particular future.

Guy Raz: What was the content that you envisioned being on this player? Because you had to pass, right, you're you've got two things you can do at the same time, you've got one team building the actual device that's going to play the stuff and then presumably another team getting the content. So what did you think the content was going to be?

Don Katz: I, I thought the content would be frankly what it became a mixture of literally the best possible public expression in words. You know, if the Churchill club had profound speeches, I wanted to carry that. If, uh, if we, we turned the SAn, Jose Mercury news into an audio program,

Guy Raz: you have people reading the newspaper as content. Okay, so what else, what else, what other kind of content?

Don Katz: Well, we got some of your buddies at NPR, so we could have car talk or

Guy Raz: marketplace, which car talk, which was owned by those guys. So you don't have to deal with NPR,

Don Katz: by by 99, I'd signed up Robin Williams to do original programming for us. And yes, we wanted, wanted the audio books too. But it was many, many years we had much more content that was just different kinds of public content, whatever

Guy Raz: you could get

Don Katz: that. We either narrated or other things before we had a lot of books, but the first download when it finally happened was in october 31st of 97 it was men are from MArs and women are from venus. The, uh, my self help book and remember to, it was to a, uh, customer in Cave Creek Arizona and that was, and it was done at the, and then pretty famous technology conference called the agenda conference, which is where we unveiled the service and gave everybody from, you know, Bill Gates to steve jobs and Michael Dell, um, this digital audio player we made and uh, I'm sure the majority of them were sawed in half back in various labs when people got home to see what's inside them.

Guy Raz: The idea was way ahead of its time. And often when that happens, businesses don't make it because they're too early, which

Don Katz: I think was 95% of the time or something like that. I'm a metrics and we were, I think we were seven years before the vibrancy of the market. So it's a very unusual story to be alive that long.

Guy Raz: So you have this device that comes out in 97 how did the user experience this device? It was, you buy this thing, it's in a docking station and then what you go to the audible website and there's a menu of things, you can get car talk, you can get the speeches from whatever the commonwealth club, whatever it was and you would all a card by those things and then they would download to this device that was connected to your computer through a serial ports. Am I, am I describing this? Right?

Don Katz: That's exactly right. That's, that's how it worked. And uh, it did take a long time to come down the internet was incredibly choppy over the phone lines before broadband. So we had really sophisticated resume features, which ended up being another things people celebrated for our tech chops uh, later because it would drop off and that way, you know, it was always kind of waiting for you in the morning. Um, and then you were supposed to drive to work and come home and put it back in the dock and get to work smarter than the guy in the next cube as we used to say. And uh, yeah, that was it. Now. It should be said. It sounded like crap. I mean the audio quality was not good. It literally sounded like somebody talking to you with a covid mask in the bottom of a bathtub or something. It was just not, it was not good audio, but we kept pushing the science forward. So guy and I would go around and visit these rocket scientists who develop codex and we would work with them.

Guy Raz: The codex is, I should say, I say sure because I'm an audio,

Don Katz: right? But it's, it's basically a software algorithm that deals with the compression factor of the audio and gives you, you know, relative sound clarity versus not. And we did push the labs out there to make much better sounding audio, you know, even month over month that allowed us to, uh, the clarity to go up. But in the end, you know, the user experience was really clunky and primitive to the point that when I meet people who are original customers, I always say we should have been paying you

Guy Raz: Don, when you pitched this idea to investors, you talked about 93 million commuters, people in their cars Not using that time. Valuably well this device was not designed for the car. So who was when this came out in November of 1997? Did you sell any of them? Was it successful?

Don Katz: We didn't sell many. But the people who got them, um, they did use another car. They just, they plugged them into a little speaker that sat on their seat with a, we gave them a cassette converter that we had that would

Guy Raz: ah, yes, you can put that in your remember that, remember that? Yes. And then they would play out of your speakers, plug that into the output. Yeah,

Don Katz: but it cost us $208 to make that little device and we tried to sell it for $215 and that was a lot of money for people to get something that, you know, was of that quality. And mostly that they didn't even understand what it was.

Guy Raz: So, I mean, it comes out in 97 and this is your product that all these investment banker and you know, venture capitalists have to put money in and it sounds like it was a bomb.

Don Katz: It was kind of a bomb. But uh, it didn't, we didn't ever stopped to think that way. We just kind of went forward thinking like, what are we gonna do now? And of course the tech delivery bubbles were so difficult. I mean I have to tell you being in the hardware business to this day, if it is not an easy business as anyone who makes hardware will tell you. But I just remember missing a milestone. That was a big milestone for another funding. And I get to this company called flextronics, which is a very sophisticated contract, in fact manufacturing company that was making the player. And I just said, what do you mean? It's another three months?

Don Katz: He said, we're

Guy Raz: out of crystals. I said, what do

Don Katz: you mean? We're out of crystals? He said, do you know about crystals? I said, I think I know about crystals. He said, well done, you can't shoot a crystal it because they had to grow them to grow the fragrant crystals.

Guy Raz: These are crystals for the for the liquid crystals.

Don Katz: These were like traditional crystals that were in the, in the, in the device.

Don Katz: And you know, you couldn't believe how, how, you know how complicated it was to get this thing built

Guy Raz: done at a certain point, I guess in the first years you ended up bringing on a guy named Andrew Huffman to become the Ceo. Um and he died, I mean 1999, he was just there for a couple of years would

Don Katz: yeah, so Andy Hoffman was a pure tech guy and you know, really good guy, but he was absolutely pure product and tech guy. And in that period, what I was doing and they were talking 99 was convincing my venture capitalists that they weren't the cowboys anymore because what was going on was a bizarre situation in 98 99 where companies like ours, we're going public and they were grabbing a whole lot of money. It was,

Guy Raz: this was the boom. Yeah.

Don Katz: And it was very much a bubble, but it was a bubble that I did not want to miss because if nothing else, my London School of Economics training is like when capital costs almost nothing, you probably should take it. So I just, we pushed forward.

Guy Raz: You went to your, you went to your investors and you said I want to go public.

Don Katz: Yeah. And then of course, you know, most of them said, what are you talking about? You know, you only have 3800 customers. So Robin Williams had come in and bought like 500,000 shares of common stock before when the public, he was part of the roach, you know, and he was because he was real techie guy. And uh, and so it was a blast actually and the whole thing of selling of going to europe and selling this like, it was, it was a real experience.

Guy Raz: And how did you do, by the way, when you went public?

Don Katz: Great. We walked away with almost $40 million. We had 5700 customers. The investors made a great return. Yeah. But in that year, a few months later Andy at 39 years old was a university of Maryland basketball star was playing basketball on a saturday with people like ralph Samson. It was a great NBA star from the past and others in a New Jersey game. And he died of a brain aneurysm. And uh, and this was, you know, one of those moments where I realized I was the only person of the 38 of us who'd ever experienced sudden loss and trauma. And I brought in actually a great friend who was a grief counselor and we kind of work this through together. But it ended up I think stealing those of us who were left to a survivor mentality that, you know, probably served us well.

Guy Raz: All right. So you guys go public in the fall of 1999 and by the spring of 2000 the dot com bubble burst crashes. So I think, I think when a company goes public, the officers have to have to hold their stock right. Like they can't sell the stock immediately. So, I mean, did did anybody make money off of audible going public?

Don Katz: Yeah, A bunch of venture capitalists certainly did. Because

Guy Raz: yeah,

Don Katz: because a couple of them and here's the term in the day was like, you know, yeah, I would never have sold. I mean, I thought, you know, I thought it was, you know, I was told it was immoral for a founder to sell a share of stock and I took that fairly seriously. But some of our vcs right after we went public began to as the term was puke out their shares in very public filings and uh, they were right. I mean they made a lot of money off audible. And because what happened next was not pretty, but you know, I should say for context, I've heard That there were 1500 public Internet companies at the beginning of 2000 And 140 at the beginning of 2003. So, uh there were combinations there, there were, you know, some take over. There were other things that went on but it was that kind of You know, of decimation and the stock price which was once $29 or something. It went down to four cents at the end of 2004 cents

Guy Raz: when we come back in just a moment. How Don was able to chart a new path for audible with help from one of the smartest and scariest people in Silicon Valley. Stay with us. I'm Guy raz. And you're listening to how I built this from NPR.

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Guy Raz: Support for this podcast and the following message come from living proof. Does your hair need a fall reset, reveal your hair's full healthy potential with living proof. Their award winning products are engineered to solve the toughest hair problems. Never conceal them designed to leave you with cleaner, healthier, more brilliant hair for longer living proof products never contain silicones. Parabens and sulfates unlock your hair's natural brilliance at living proof dot com slash built. Yeah. Hey, welcome back to how I built this. I'm Guy raz. So it's 2000 and one. The dot com bubble has burst audible.

Guy Raz: Stock prices plummeted and Don Katz is trying to stay calm.

Don Katz: I was incredibly anxious, but I just kind of had a attitude about it because we weren't out of capital yet, you know, and we had investors who had not given up hope and it felt like there was just always another reason to keep fighting

Guy Raz: but still don. I mean your stock was down, you guys weren't profitable yet. The market for what you were making hadn't really taken off. So how are you strategizing? How are you going to guide the company through such a tough time?

Don Katz: Well what happened during this period of time as we did hunker down and when you went public, you had to basically be trained to say one thing to all the fund investors, which was we are technology agnostic And what that was code for was that we will not build or you say the word platform because the word was in the 90s and life has changed a lot. Is that if if anyone said they were building a platform Microsoft would make it their business to destroy your company. And so, um, which you know, if you look at some of the suits against my stuff that there was good evidence it was true. So we decided to not be technology agnostic. And during this period when nobody was looking, we decided to take our pretty good science and call this the audible ready platform, which would be the de facto way that spoken word Was transmitted and played back in the new generation of MP three players that were coming up and we not only got all those deals done, we had Texas, instrument chips that were already audible ready. So when the dust started to clear a little bit in life, started to get a little bit better, we come out with all these MP three players, which people were buying at the time with our bits inside the device and our marketing collateral inside the box. So it kind of got hard to compete with us at that particular time because we were of all these different companies that wanted to be doing the same kind of thing in a pretty good position. So that was one of those, you know, I always think, you know, you get to where we got by having about 51% of the things you're doing, being smart. Uh Sina named us the number one entertainment app on the web and, you know, things that made us feel pretty good. But as you also point out, the financial stuff got really dark. Being a public company was not fun.

Guy Raz: Yeah, I mean, I mean it would still take a couple of years before MP three players would take off and of course that happened with the iPod, which we'll get to in a moment. But how were you getting rights for audio books? Because audio books were still books on cassette and books on cd. So how are you getting the rights to get digital versions?

Guy Raz: That? Was it hard? Or was it pretty easy?

Don Katz: No, it was definitely hard. And it was it was difficult to bridge a world that is very much not technology

Guy Raz: focus publishing,

Don Katz: no book publishing is is people who love books meaning that they're willing to get paid less or they have the wherewithal to not get paid a lot. And, you know, and they go into a world and usually they stand for the status quo and they usually resist, you know, technological change in particular and others. It's a, it's a longer story, but it's, it's been, it's been like this forever. So, so it was difficult, but eventually we did start to break through and be able to carry these audiobooks at a different cost. Um, and then the other thing that we did figure it out was was the subscription

Guy Raz: model. How did that? Because from what I understand it was up until this point, it was you by a player, which you were asking a lot of people, you're asking them to spend 200 bucks on an Mp three player and then 10 $5 in a book. That's a lot to ask people, Right? Yes.

Don Katz: And that was the challenge. So what if you just got an audio book a month and a player and you get a year's subscription? And that really helped. That helped a lot, particularly since at that point we had these audible ready devices That other people, you know, but, but we started giving away a little blue MP three player called the Otis, we got rid of the audible mobile player and let that become the artifact it needed to be.

Guy Raz: And the OTIS was free. If you got a subscription,

Don Katz: yep. And we just gave them away. And

Guy Raz: what was the, what was the commitment? You have to do, a year's subscription or it was a year,

Don Katz: it was a year commitment.

Guy Raz: And what was the price?

Don Katz: It was actually 9 95 for two audiobooks and we started a month a month and uh, it gained traction and frankly, the, you know, the phone call I got around this period from Cupertino California from uh, steve jobs was a, was a ray of hope that was really meaningful.

Guy Raz: Okay, so let's talk about this Steve jobs calls you in 2001 and he said, Hey, I like this thing you're making.

Don Katz: He did, he said more than that. He said, tell me about this round tripping, how you bookmark the content. I said, he said, I want to hear more about this. And then he asked all sorts of questions about the tech and very enthusiastically, which was kind of ironic because, you know, steve was kind of known for a not invented here view on tech

Guy Raz: stealing stuff.

Don Katz: Uh, so, uh, but he was very, very focused on this. And, and he went on actually to talk in ways that we began to have fairly rich conversations because we shared this historic view of the interplay of technology and invention and culture. Um, this whole idea that, you know, from chisels and caves department, you have this amazing creative unleashing. He understood, I was surprised for what I thought it would be a pure tech guy, the golden age of radio and how you know what that meant and how the music business exploded with creativity when it's shifted from sheet music. So we talked about this kind of stuff, and he told me that he would weep copiously when he listened to Edmund White read charlotte's web and he's, you know, he's so he just basically decided to tell me that he had this plan around this ipod And that I went home and I remember telling my wife that Steve said he's going to spend $15 million dollars marketing their audio player.

Don Katz: And I said, can you imagine if we had $15 million and the second generation iPod came out, it worked commercially with audible.

Guy Raz: So basically you would plug in, because you used to have to plug in your ipod to your computer, through that, you know, interface, and you would go to the audible website and that would download directly to the ipod,

Don Katz: yep. And that, that was it. And so you would, it would, it would load up and uh, and they were these, you know, sweet little devices, they were very cool. The only thing we didn't get to do is put our marketing collateral in the, in the

Guy Raz: boxes. So it didn't say audible anywhere.

Don Katz: It did say that it was audible ready. And that was the term that we've kind of coined at the time, and that it started to mean something at least in the world of people buying MP three players. So we were able to garner our cost structure to be for the stakeholders who were going to get this, you know, so we were able to target market to the people buying these newfangled, you know, players and we were basically compatible with all of them. And once we started giving away minis instead of, you know, our own player, it started to get better.

Guy Raz: All right. So just to be clear, instead of giving away your own devices as a way to get people to subscribe, you started to give away the Apple ipod. And I think you did that for several years. I mean, I mean steve jobs kind of gave you a lifeline there. And so I'm assuming that pretty soon, you know, after that you just kind of stopped being a hardware company because eventually it would have been sort of pointless right

Don Katz: now. That's absolutely right. And, you know, we were happy to get out of it and basically declare that, you know, hardware was a means to an end, there would be other transmission methodologies. Um, you know, we had partnerships with everybody, including the companies that were making cd burners at the time and the like, so I always wanted to be a means to an end.

Guy Raz: You had a, I think by 2005, so you're now completely out of the hardware business, you're focused mainly on licensing audio and really you pivot towards audio books. When did that happen? What was, what was the thinking around that?

Don Katz: I think it was just because it took off 2000 and seven we still had 20,000 audiobooks. Now. We have many, many hundreds of thousands, obviously 20,000 audiobooks in 2000 and seven and 45,000 other kinds of content including Robin's programs, Ricky Jarvis is programs the amazing Susie Bright erotica series which has had, which was

Guy Raz: these were pre podcast

Don Katz: before the yes, they were all short form programs. Yeah, they were just part of the repertoire.

Guy Raz: I mean you became the global supplier of audiobooks to itunes already in 2003. So by that point it was clear that audiobooks was where you were headed towards what what what do you remember what the pivot point was? Where you were like, okay, we've broken through the publishing industry is

Don Katz: is cooperating. Yeah. I think that the utility of the service, the idea of positioning this as a way to use your time now. It was also true that only about 15% of the book's coming out where an audio. So our crusade was always to get more audiobooks maid or to try to get the rights ourselves from the agent and the author to get them made because we literally would run out of mysteries and I would go at one point, I remember I would put my wallet on the desks of ceos in the publishing industry. I said I need more content. So at that point it wasn't coming. And we broke in to getting the rights ourselves and making a whole lot of audio books. We also figured out how to make an audio book for about 1/10 of the cost that they just using technology. Uh, so we just started making a lot of audio books and and it got better and better. And there was something called Project Hollywood in in 2011 and 2012 where we just said, let's just go find out what the greatest actors will do. And when I heard kate winslet, do Theresa rickon one of the darkest Zola novels of all the Zola novels, you know, and people heard what she could do, remember thinking we could take this whole thing to a new level and make this about acting as much as it's about writing,

Guy Raz: Don I think by 2005 this is like 10 years since you launched the business, you're you're 10 years, in it's the first year you actually turn a profit. Just reflecting that I shouldn't reflect on it for a moment because a lot of, I don't think enough people understand how long it can take, especially with a complex hardware slash content business, like the one you created, how long it takes to actually make a profit. Um, and and even up until that point, I think 2005, you were still basically a small business, right? I mean, you you only have you had fewer than 100 employees I think. Right?

Don Katz: Yeah, that's probably Probably

Guy Raz: about right. You took an 80% pay cut to start this business in 1995 until 2005. Did you ever get back to what you were paid 1990 five

Don Katz: in salary? Yeah, I definitely, I definitely did. If you, if you look at the, you know, the vesting and the equity pieces and all that.

Guy Raz: But did you have to like cut family expenses and things like that for a while?

Don Katz: Yeah, There must have been some hairy moments. But the truth of the matter is I said, I never really measured my ideas on money. I just, yeah, I always thought, you know the number of customers, the retention rate, the kinds of amazing content we could make, including tons of original thinking, I don't know that stuff turned me on more and uh, I still probably approach things that way.

Guy Raz: So it's interesting because we did a story about Lynda dot com which eventually sold the Lincoln and their rise and your rise really mirror each other because you began around the same time. And I think, I think a lot of that has to do with broadband access.

Don Katz: Yes, I mean were previously broadband access that download that system. They know the trust of, you know of, of everything about from the e commerce system to

Guy Raz: people and then

Don Katz: we just started to have, you know, which now we have this massive kind of brand momentum, brand equity and like, I mean things, people started discovering this, this thing called audible and we started to build up our teams, we started to expand internationally and uh, kind of where yeah, I admit it. I thought we'd be year three, which is why, you know those survival years, but I got to tell you the, the warrior spirit of those formative years, that is one of the reasons I still think we're so successful because the people who work at the company do try to see themselves as these kinds of people who want to invent and stay ahead as opposed to manage.

Guy Raz: You had this business plan, right? Which was audio delivered to people through the internet onto devices. Um, but when you, when you think about that right, do you almost wish that you would have and there's no way to know right, that businesses is, most businesses just evolved like there really is no master plan. Like Jeff Bezos kind of had a plan, but it unfolded in ways that he probably couldn't really have anticipated, although maybe he did. But when you, when you, when you look back to you often sort of kick yourself and say, God, I should have known from the beginning this was gonna be audiobooks and never have wasted my time on the devices on, on making the devices and just focused on the audio books.

Don Katz: No, because then, um, you're, you're not going to be the leader unless you take the big risks at the point that people don't believe and and you know, and then the question is how, how early is it? But you know, look, I am stunned by how quickly, you know, some of the companies formed after us did come together. But you know what? Most companies are based on productivity improvements. You, it's like Uber gets you from here to here like a taxi. But it's just, it's better. Most businesses, you know, have some level of productivity improvement like all software businesses and the like um that wasn't this idea, this was creating a media category. This was basically creating a spoken word category when it didn't exist in the country whose entire literary canon was based on how we talked and told stories. I wanted to basically say there would be a spoken word category in yeah, it called audible. If it had to be that sat next to all permutations of video and movies and tv it sat next to books and it sat next to music and we kind of pride this thing into the light. And uh, that's just a little different than um, a better way to use your computer.

Guy Raz: You know, we, we've told the story of Shopify which was founded and continues to exist in Ottawa and Lynda dot com was in Ojai California and then in ventura California. These were not in not near Sand Hill road in Silicon Valley or in Seattle and you were based in, in Wayne, New Jersey and then moved to Newark, which was not a place where companies were going, I mean it was still Big parts of that city in 2007 were still boarded up. Parts of it are still boarded.

Don Katz: I mean you could just go all the way Newark was thought to be a scary city. Newark was everything you heard about Newark was that this was a place that, you know, time had forgotten and that it was just crime ridden and had nothing good going for. That was the word. And frankly that's why I wanted to move us there when it came out growing this very ramshackle headquarters, which instantly was $12 a square foot with furniture and wiring. Talk about, you know, you know, cost effective, we needed to go somewhere and I said, let's move to downtown Newark. And um, besides we were becoming at that point, the largest employer of actors in the new york area, which we've been for a while. Um, and I said, the actors can jump on at penn station, they can get off at Broad Street station, the board guys and the, and they had a consultant said, You're out of your mind, you're gonna, you're gonna lose, we think 30% of your work for simply by moving that far and, and all the fear factor and you know, we moved in with 100 and 20 people and nobody left and we started to just try to create either models that other companies or other cities could use to just be part of a city's comeback.

Guy Raz: So what kinds of things were you doing?

Don Katz: So one of the first things we did was just said, you can't be a nepotistic intern anymore, You've got to be a kid from Newark and you'll be a paid intern in our little world. So then you get like this carpet culture which includes these incredible cutting edge technologists and all these english majors turned into business people like me and then all the best, some of the best actors in the world hanging out and these kids and uh, and you start to realize that this is an unusually rich company culture and you know, we, we started paying our employees $500 after taxes rent to frame and if they moved downtown Newark and to be part of the urban pioneers, I started Newark venture Partners, which has become an international level of success drawing companies from all over the world to Newark to an accelerator.

Don Katz: It's anyways, it's just applying the kind of entrepreneurial thinking that gets to create an audible to, you know, to, to social Purpose

Guy Raz: in 2007, your annual revenue at Audible was like $110 million January of 2008 amazon announced that they would acquire audible for $300 million in cash, which uh, in retrospect, they got a great deal for you, look back on it, especially given that your revenue was 110 year before. Obviously you didn't control the company, you are a shareholder. But at the time, did you think it was the right move for audible?

Don Katz: At the time? I was the only one who thought it was the right move. So this was me. It was a blast to be a NASDAQ Ceo. Even all the trials and tribulations, there were things about it that I love because it was just another adventure into a new world. But By the time 2017 the snake came along, um, I was really in a moral crossroads because you know, if you read everything from the law to Milton Friedman, the only purpose of a Ceo and a chair and Ceo as I was, is to enrich their shareholders. I mean that

Guy Raz: maximize shareholder profit,

Don Katz: that's what it is. And so I was basically working for people that I stopped feeling like I was honestly waking up in the morning, I was caring about them and it was very hard to, because a lot of them were freaking computer programs that were whipping our stock around after hours in various complex high velocity models And others were 100% speculators who could have cared less about being real investors and I just wasn't into it at the top of that, I knew that if I could hook back in with Jeff and with amazon, we could have access to several 100 million people with credit cards who were likely to be our customers. We would go even faster and we'd have that many more millions of people, the freedom to even do the things doing in Newark that was meaningful to me. And uh, it's, it's, you know, it's somewhat rare. A lot of founders don't, you know, they go away as soon as a transaction happens, but, but in this case it's an independent subsidiary that works.

Guy Raz: You know, it's interesting, a lot of Amazon has a lot of haters because it's £800 gorilla on the block and it's just going to happen. It's going to be that way. But if you look at Amazon compared to other giants that acquire their companies, they really do. They have a great track record of allowing their, their acquisition companies to remain independent. I mean, look at Zappos, we had Tony the late Tony shea was a guest on our show, an amazing entrepreneur. I mean, that company wasn't is totally independent, audible is an amazon company, but it means you stayed on, I think I was thinking about this, you stayed on as ceo of audible after amazon acquired you for as long as you were the head of the company when it was independent when, when it was. So that alone suggests that it was a pretty good marriage?

Don Katz: Yeah, it's a pretty unusual story and I frankly can't believe that it is now longer than my, my writing career. And also, you know, come on, let's face it, most people know that, You know, senior people at Amazon get paid in Amazon stock. We did the transaction, the stuck was like $50 a share. You might want to check out what it is now.

Don Katz: So one way or another, whatever happens from here, I'm it's been an amazing adventure. And uh, not many people, I know who had two careers where you get to turn ideas into reality. It's, it's uh, I've been pretty, pretty lucky.

Guy Raz: A lot of things happen. A lot of people that are lucky. I know you've mentioned meeting your wife for example is there's a lucky moment and I would say the same about mine. I'm gonna have, um, or the fact that john winter said, go to go to spain and cover this thing and you met all these, like these guys who covered the, you know, the spanish civil war, like, hey, yeah, we'll show you the ropes here. You know, somebody who gave you a lucky break or this guy Mott, who thought your idea was great when everyone else thought it was cookie. So there were a lot of lucky moments, but you also grinded and grinded and worked really hard. Um, but when you think about this story that you've told me and you reflect on it, how much of it do you think has to do with luck and and how much do you think has to do with the work you put in?

Don Katz: I think it's something on the order of 55.5 to 51% uh purposeful, good calls and brave moments and, and times when you just didn't give up the rest of it is definitely luck because otherwise how could I have made so many stupid, boneheaded decisions along the way that didn't didn't kill us? So uh, I think there's a fine line, you're making calls all the time and particularly if you're a leader, you kind of got to do it. But I don't know, I think about it, you know about it all the time, but I feel I was out there playing ice hockey last night and you know, not many people my age get to play ice hockey. Is that luck? I think it's luck. And I think it's also that I just made it my business to try to elongate my hockey career and I do a lot of stuff to make that real,

spk_2: that's Don

Guy Raz: katz, founder and executive chairman of audible by the way, a few years back, the company put together a list of some of its most popular audiobooks over the past 20 years, The best selling memoir was bossy pants by Tina fey, The best selling business book the seven habits of highly effective people. The most repeated listen was harry potter and the sorcerer's stone, which makes a lot of sense. And here's one that all of you can probably guess in advance. The most searched for author on audible over the past 20 years was of course Stephen King, Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. If you don't follow our show, please do follow wherever you listen to podcasts. If you want to write to us, our email address is H I V T at NPR dot org. If you want to follow the show on twitter, it's at how I built this or my personal account at Guy raz. Our instagram is at how I built this NPR and mine at guy dot ross. This episode was produced by James Dalhousie with music composed by Rammstein. Arab Louis. It was edited by neva Grant with research help from Claremore Oshima. Our production staff also includes Casey Herman Liz Metzger, Farrah Safari JC Howard of Julia kearney and Elaine coats. Our intern is Katherine cipher Geoff Rogers is our executive producer. I'm Guy raz and you've been listening to how I built this. This is NPR Support for how I built this comes from three helping to protect those on the front lines every day. As the father of a health care worker. Three employee Chris understood how important it was for his daughter and nurses like her to be protected during COVID-19 at the height of the pandemic, he worked hard to direct high performing personal protective equipment to hospitals and hotspots. Hear his story at three a.m. Dot com slash improving lives three m. Science applied to life.