Solo Stove: Spencer and Jeff Jan

27:22Your place with your cool art collection and your handy kitchen gadgets. It might just be what someone else needs to feel right at home on their next trip. Plus, your earnings from hosting provide you with another income stream and could even help offset the cost of your next trip. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.com slash host. This show is brought to you by American Express. Running a business means making countless choices every day, some small and some that can change everything. The business owners who thrive are the ones who are ready for whatever comes next.

28:02And having the right support behind those decisions can make all the difference. That's why so many business owners I talk to choose the American Express Business Platinum Card. It's built to help them move quickly and take their business further. And with five times membership rewards points on flights and prepaid hotels booked through Amextravel.com, you can turn any business trip into a chance to earn more and invest in your business's future. Plus, you get a flexible spending limit that changes as your business does, adapting to where you are and where you're headed next. Because when it comes to growing your business, there's truly nothing like business platinum.

28:45Not all purchases will be approved. Terms apply. Learn more at go.amex.com. You know, one of the most surprising things about how I built this is just how many pitches we get every year. Tens of thousands of businesses reach out hoping to tell their story. Now, while we do try to read most of those pitches, we can't possibly read all, but we choose most of our guests through our own deep research. And that means my team and I spend hundreds of hours digging into companies, what they make, who's behind them, and whether their journey can inspire you. And that's exactly where Claude has become such an incredible thinking partner in my creative process.

29:27Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop at good enough, the thinking partner that works with you to explore the things that fascinate you. Whether you're researching late-night curiosity spirals or working through complex creative challenges, Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems together. For example, imagine I'm about to sit down with the founder of a snack company. I'll want to know what products they've released, how they've evolved, and which competitors they're up against. In the past, it could take hours to track down reliable details. We'd search articles, databases, reports.

30:03Now, Claude can give me a clear answer in seconds, and then I can decide what to dig into further. It doesn't replace my process, but it sharpens it. And that means I can spend more time doing what I love most, focusing on the human stories, the lessons, the decisions. and the struggles behind the businesses you hear on this show. Experience what collaborative thinking feels like at claude.ai.hibt and see why the world's best problem solvers choose Claude as their thinking partner. As a business-to-business marketer, your needs are unique. B2B buying cycles are long and your customers face incredibly complex decisions.

30:46So isn't it time?

30:57Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2010, and Jeff and Spencer are learning that finding a Chinese manufacturer to make a camping stove is complicated. It's like finding a dance partner, is you really need somebody to match your level, match your size, match your stride, match your ambition. and so finding that was really just an exercise of of meeting a lot of different factories talking with them understanding the machinery getting my dumb questions out at the front so that when i met the next guy i was a little bit more um able to speak the lingo of of different machinery needed and different welding techniques and all these different things that um were needed to find that right partner, but I found a guy who was making coffee percolators for Europe.

31:49He was an engineer by trade and was very curious about what we were trying to do. And it was a puzzle for him that he became pretty obsessed on how do I make this thing if I have to make this from scratch, right? How do I bend the metal this way? Can you bend it this way? And perhaps, I don't know what else he saw on us, but he was willing to say, hey, let's try this. And when you got that prototype, did it do the job? Yeah, it performed and was beautiful. I mean, a flame when it burns using the double wall design that we had in the stove, it's mesmerizing. It looks like there's jets shooting out the side of the stove.

32:35And for anybody who uses it for the first time or sees it is just kind of taken back and it's like, what is going on right now? I've never seen a flame burn like that. And that's the feeling that we got when we burned this. And we thought this is going to be awesome. People are going to love this. All right. So you got this prototype and you want to start to mass produce it and then create a direct to consumer company around it. First question is, how much money did you need to get this off the ground? I mean, Because you guys didn't have a lot. Yeah, we didn't have a lot. I remember it's$15 ,000 we put in.

33:12And that was to do what? That was to get the tooling paid for. Yeah. It was all we were willing to put at it because we didn't know, Guy, if this was going to work or not. Wow. All right. So first of all, you guys, you made the decision to try to make a go at this. And you decided to call it the Solo Stove. Where did the name come from? Yeah, I mean, we literally just sat around thinking of names and really just at the same time searching for what domains were available that we could get. And we had gotten to the point of realizing that a long name, a long drawn out name like ChinaBusinessTraveler.com is very hard to remember and to type in.

33:55And so we always wanted something really short and something that spoke to what we were doing. and we really thought it's the only stove you need if you're backpacking or camping and it's great for one person. It's kind of a single person size and so Solo kind of clicked on all corners for us. Okay, so you've got the name and by the way, did you apply for patents for this product? Yeah, we did. And you create a website presumably called solostove.com. That's it. Yep. Right. And the same playbook, the same playbook that you had used for the gardening business and the mattresses. You do AdSense, you buy, you do search engine optimization, the same playbook.

34:42Right. Yeah. Combination of creating content that people would search up and stumble upon our website. And what was the content? Like what were you writing? I don't know if we did a lot of blogging in the early days for it. We actually spent a lot of time on making the site look beautiful and evoking emotions. Being in the outdoors and camping is a very emotional exercise, and we really wanted to lean into that. We eventually got to the point of buying banners, ads on different sites that we thought were useful. So eventually then putting it on Amazon, which was another source of traffic and revenue.

35:22everything we could think of to bring people to our website. And I mean, you flip the switch, right? The proverbial switch and the website launches. And I mean, is it an instant hit or are people discovering it? What's the response from anywhere? Yeah, it was quick and fast. It was more than we expected. The first year was about half a million dollars. Wow. In the first year of putting it out there. And how much did the stoves cost you to make? Yeah, the margins were really high. We were in the 80 % margins. Wow. And you also sold them on Amazon, right? That's right. Yeah. And that's where a lot of the sales really did come from is Amazon.

36:10All right. So you've got this product that seems to be taking off, but both of you guys kept your jobs, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, at what point, you know, if you're doing the first year half a million in sales, at what point did you, I mean, did the two of you start to say, well, maybe we need to think about this in a bigger way? Like, what was what happened to get you there? Yeah, I think for me, it was, you know, it's just being overwhelmed with everything is just, you know, we had this, I had this idea of this four hour work week, that's why we set out to do this. And as things became too much, you know, performance in my day job kind of slipped.

36:56It was a situation where I had a tough conversation with my boss, I called him my business partner, I gained some equity in that company I was working for. And, and that was a tough conversation. I mean, even now, it's hard to articulate all the, all the feelings that went into figuring that out and the misunderstandings and what I should have done maybe. But I never thought any of this would really amount to much. I thought it would be a great side hustle and why talk about it if it's not going to be a big issue. And the problem was, is the bigger it got, the more I was afraid to bring it up to the guy I was working for, because now it is an issue.

37:37Was he disappointed in you? I mean, did he understand or what? He was upset. He felt like I had talents that maybe I didn't share with him. which I think is understandable. But then, you know, after a night's night of sleep, you know, the next day was a different tone and it was, um, you know, a more tone of, uh, you know, you betrayed me. Um, and, uh, this was, you know, this, we were supposed to build this together. Um, uh, and in my mind, I was like, this is what I was building with my brother. This was never going to be something that, you know, we were going to create and then bring him on board.

38:15It was just me and Jeff's side gig that ended up blowing up. Wow. All right. So you've got this product, you've got this company, and I guess you guys decide in 2014 to turn to Kickstarter for the next iteration, a larger version of the stove. And was the idea to go to Kickstarter to generate attention? Because I think you guys, I mean, I'm assuming the cashflow was, was pretty good. I mean, you guys were probably all of a sudden, both of you guys were making pretty good money. Yeah. Yeah. No cashflow was good. It was profitable. Um, you know, we didn't pay ourselves anything in those first years because all the money went back into buying more inventory.

38:58Um, yeah, we, we did Kickstarter in Jeff's backyard with our kids, their feats, you can see kicking around in that video. Yeah. But yeah, that was our first foray into Kickstarter. And we did all right. And we were pleased with the results. But once Kickstarter is over, it's back to back to building, you know, our website and selling on Amazon. So all right. Meanwhile, I think this is around 2013. Spencer, you make a major move, you decide to come back to, to the US and you settle in Dallas where your brother is. And I I guess you're still working your day job for that same company in China. But Jeff, around that same time, you actually decided to leave your day job, right?

39:45Yeah, that's right. Like I guess you became confident enough at this point that this thing was going to be or was already successful and that you needed to put all of your attention into it. And by this point, it was still just the two of you. Like, help me understand how you were running a business doing, you know, close to a million dollars in revenue. Well, I mean, it's possible to do it, but you had to fulfill the orders. You had to deal with customer service. I mean, you were building a brand and it was just the two of you? Yeah. I think I knew before 2014 that this was on its way to be more successful than any of the other businesses.

40:27But I don't think my wife had the same confidence. And so I kind of had this plan of, well, if we can get rid of all of our debt, it was basically three things. If I could bring in enough income to allow her to be a stay-at-home mom. And we had, I think, two kids at the time with a third on the way. and we could pay off our mortgage and then pay off our cars. If I could do those three things, then I had permission to quit my job. And so I eventually met those goals. Guy, just to add more flavor into this, we had started yet another brand as we were doing solo called Fox Outfitters. And Fox Outfitters was a lot of products, but they were in the camping space.

41:22So like camping mats, hammocks, stainless steel drinking cups and microfiber towels. All branded Fox outfitters. And it was, again, you can go to Alibaba or one of these sites and you can pick the products you want and put your logo on it. That's right. Yeah. And we would do as much customization as we could to make our own unique styles or bags or sizes or whatever it was. But I mean, they were very commodity products. And we sold more of that than Solo did all the way. I mean, I don't want to say, I mean, I don't remember when we stopped selling Fox, but probably about 2016, we were selling more on Fox than we were for Solo.

42:05Millions and millions of dollars of Fox stuff. I mean we probably – altogether, by the time we got to about 2016, I mean just with those two brands, we were probably doing like$3,$4 million with. Wow. I mean so you had – and they were, again, all being handled by third-party logistics. But did that enable the two of you to have a lifestyle job? I mean, given that, you know, you had these manufacturers of China making it, being shipped to the third-party logistics center, I mean, did that mean you could just kind of watch the money come into your bank account? Some days it felt like that. There were days of Mondays that we would, you know, go fishing and realize that everybody else is going to work and we're going to the lake.

42:58And that felt great. But those days became very few and far between as the business continued to grow. And that, that quote unquote lifestyle business, um, was fading quickly. Um, everything between supply chain of fulfillment and customer service, we were doing every customer service email. It was just a lot. So most of your day was probably taken up by just dealing with customer service emails. Yep. Yeah. Guys on solo stove would, they love the product so much. We would, I mean, we didn't take phone calls early on because we tried it once and people would just call in wanting to talk about camping and hiking.

43:35I was like, you know, old timers that had nothing better to do and they were great, but you'd get on these calls for 30 minutes and realize like, this can't, this can't happen. We got to just switch customer service to an email only. Yeah. And for me, it was, it became way too much and I just didn't want it anymore. I mean, there were times where I was like, the money's good, but you know, this isn't worth it. And now we were approaching that point, you know, this is probably about 2016 where we have to say, if we want to keep growing, we have to hire people. And we never wanted to do that. Why didn't you want to hire people?

44:09I personally just had a bad experience with managing teams. I just, I felt like I went through 2008 having to lay off my entire team in a very short period of time. And going through that, I felt like I wasn't a great leader. I felt like I wasn't the type of person that was skilled at building teams. And I don't know if that's a narrative I just told myself. I think about this time as well, it was becoming more and more competitive on Amazon. And so we were realizing there was a lot more competition and we noticed that in our sales. And so we had to start making hard decisions as to what direction we were going to go.

44:57And I guess the direction you guys kind of landed on in 2016 was maybe, let's see if we can sell our company, our business. Yeah. I mean, there's two decisions, right? It's either let's get rid of this thing and maybe start again and keep it small and manageable. We had learned a lot of things, so it's not like we were starting from zero. We would just start another company and make it even better and more efficient, or we hire people and get an office. And I remember really just talking about it with Jeff. And I remember him saying that, you know, if we're gonna, if we're gonna sell this thing, then we should maximize the outcome.

45:36But that's what we decided to do is sell the company. So we found some brokers. We had a friend in this area, in the DFW area who had sold a company before. And he introduced us to an investment banker. And we found some other investment bankers through some other friends. And we just started talking to them saying, this is our business. And what was your revenue at the time? Revenue at that time, I think, I think was, I mean, between Fox and Solo, I was probably close to about, I want to say like seven-ish million bucks, Jeff. Is that, do you think that's about right? Yeah, probably. Yeah. Seven to 10 or somewhere around there.

46:15And it was just the two of you. Just the two of us. And it was really profitable. And so that's a super efficient business. Yeah. I mean, profits, I remember between everything we were selling, I think it was a few million bucks of profits every year. So we started talking with people and said, here's our numbers, here's what we're doing, and here's how profitable it is. Isn't it a great business? Like, are there buyers out there for this? And really the feedback was, is like, yeah, we could find one. They're not going to be, it's not going to be a great outcome. And really your business isn't a business because it's just you two working out of your homes.

46:49But you had a, you had a brand, you had solo. That's what we thought, right? Is like, here's a brand, here's a great product. Here's websites that we thought were amazing. And we could tell the next person exactly what we're doing, what buttons to push and how to drive traffic and what to, and we thought that was a very sellable, um, asset. And by the way, what would you, what would you sold it for? Well, I think at the time, one of the bankers told us that we could probably get about$7 or$8 million from Solo. I think that was the number in my head, my recollection of carving out just Solo on its own, that it was if you can build that out to be a real company, then that would be a really attractive company for someone to buy.

47:39Okay. So, all right. So you basically, everyone, the feedback you're getting is, listen, you know, it's, you don't really have an infrastructure. You don't really have a company or you've got a brand, you can make a little bit of money on it, but it's not really, you're not going to have a lot of people like banging down your door to buy this thing. Right. Which was hard for me to understand. I thought businesses were all about making money. I thought businesses were all about being profitable. And what we had was something that made a lot of money and was really profitable. And I couldn't understand why this wasn't something that everybody was pounding down the door and wanting to buy.

48:13And I have a liberal arts degree, so I never understood how M &A works. I didn't even understand the term until we started selling our company that that was the term you used. And I remember that one of the investment bankers we met, we had to borrow an office to even have the meeting because we didn't even at the logistics office. Because we were like, well, they either come to me and Jeff's dinner table or we actually find some place to look presentable. and that's how far off we were from having a company that was sellable. When we come back in just a moment, Spencer and Jeff start to hire a team out of a new open floor office, a metal table and chairs outside Starbucks.

48:56Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This.

49:08I know how tedious and disjointed a project can feel when you're always having to switch between different tools. And that's why I'm so excited to share that Grammarly has become a part of something bigger that levels up your productivity. Say hello to Superhuman, the AI productivity suite that gives you superpowers everywhere you work. With the intelligence of Grammarly, Mail, and Coda built in, you can get things done faster and collaborate seamlessly. One of the things I love about Superhuman is that it helps you accomplish multiple tasks wherever you need to work. No more copy-pasting, context-switching, and managing multiple AI tools across different places while you work.

49:53Superhuman is the AI that gets you from day one. No learning curve, just simple and easy to use. It knows what you need and proactively offers suggestions when drafting emails, creating documents, and so much more. Unleash your superhuman potential with AI that meets you where you work. Learn more at superhuman.com slash podcast. That's superhuman.com slash podcast. If you run a small business, you know there's nothing small about it. Every day there's a new decision to make, and even the smallest decisions feel massive. When all of these decisions feel daunting, it helps to have the right platform with all of the tools you need to be successful.

50:40Shopify. Shopify. Shopify's point of sale system is a unified command center for your retail business. It brings together in-store and online operations across up to 1 ,000 locations. Get all the big stuff for your small business right with Shopify. Sign up for your$1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash built. Go to shopify.com slash built. Shopify.com slash built.

51:22Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. So it's 2014. And at this point, Jeff and Spencer want to sell Solo Stove. But nobody wants to buy it, at least not until they can build it out more. So in order to do that, they decide to get rid of their other company. When we realized what we needed to do was build Solo, we focused in and we said, let's just focus on Solo and let's just forget about Fox. So you sold Fox for like pennies on the dollar. Pennies on the dollar is what we did. We really just said, here's the inventory. We'll give it to you for pennies on the dollar. We got introduced to some good guys in Houston who wanted to have a stab at e-commerce.

52:00And we said, hey, this is an opportunity you can go with and run with and kind of get your feet wet. Here's take it for pennies on the dollar and let's just clean up our books. All right, so you realize now you've got to do the thing that you don't want to do, which is to hire people and build an infrastructure. Meantime, I think you go back to Kickstarter to launch a new backyard fire pit. And this one does amazing. I mean, it raised over a million dollars on Kickstarter. I'm curious about, I know they were all patented and you filed, you know, you got your patents and it was trademarked and everything.

52:41But I'm surprised that there weren't copycats or were there copycats popping up on Amazon? So in the early days, no. And I think, you know, a big part of that was one, the Amazon rush was starting, but it wasn't in full force. And then two, you know, we were really quiet about things. You know, we did Kickstarter. And that was one of the concerns we had is if people see how much we sell, then there's more likelihood that people will want to copy. but at that point product development needed to get going and we said well what's next and that led us to creating bonfire which was our first backyard fire pit and the other point of it was if we could show demand for the product perhaps we could get interest from retailers well-known retailers who we know are always looking for new product we thought this would be a great resume builder for us to approach a potential retailer like an REI who, if we could get in, that's yet another checkmark on the box of what we need to build in terms of our resume.

53:45You thought, okay, you thought we, in order, because now you're focused on how do we sell this company? This was the goal. And so one of the ways was Kickstarter. The other one was now we've got to get into brick and mortar. We can't just be DTC. Sure. A little bit. We just wanted to show a glimmer of hope that retail was an option because when you sell a company, you're selling hope and future and future growth. Yeah. And so I guess the Kickstarter was really what attracted REI's attention, right? I like to think so. I don't know. In the past, we thought about reaching out to REI and talked to some guys who had sold into REI and they had explained how difficult it is and how hard it is to pitch them.

54:26And then you got to fly to Seattle and all of this. And after hearing it all, I said, you're right, that sounds horrible. I said, I don't want to do that. We're going to stick to selling online. But during Kickstarter, when we were doing that, we were in our first little office, which was no bigger than a shoebox. And I remember Jeff, we saw that email come through from the REI buyer and he said he wanted to carry all of our products and we couldn't believe it. But that was the one thing that I remember getting really excited over. It just felt like validation for all the years of grinding, trying to build a brand, trying to create something unique.

55:01I felt like getting into REI was a badge of honor. And it was such an easy experience. It was just one email, very brief email saying that he wanted to carry all of our products. And we just replied back. There was no meeting. There was no testing. Wow. It just went straight into their stores. Yeah. And again, in terms of protecting the brand, I mean, you briefly mentioned there were copycats coming onto the market, but it never seemed to sort of threaten you guys. How did you avoid that? It never felt like there were big copycats we were afraid of all the way through when we sold the company.

55:39And even through those early years, I think the key to it was nobody really understood how much we were selling. It was hard to gauge. And then the second part of it, it's a very difficult product to create because we had invested a lot into custom machinery with our manufacturers. And so the barrier to entry was much higher than any other Me Too product that somebody could go get. So essentially, when you made this decision that you have to figure out how to turn this into a sellable company, one of the things you had to do was to hire employees, right? Right. And so, and this was something you both resisted doing.

56:16So how did you start? I mean, it's just that. We started putting out job postings. And one of the first girls we interviewed, we told her to meet us at the Starbucks. And we didn't even order anything. That's how cheap we were. We just sat outside at the little metal tables and met this young girl who was interviewing for a customer service position. And we would promise that we will have an office when this position is filled. And that's how rough the start was. And we realized from when we tried to sell it the first time that we needed a leadership team. We needed managers in place. And so we could explain to any potential buyers, hey, if we step back and aren't involved in the daily operations, there's a team here that can run the business without us being involved.

57:12How was that for you guys to start to train people and essentially become leaders and managers? How did it go? It was an exercise of trial and error. And there was a lot more error happening in those early days. And I feel really bad to those early employees. We gave it our best effort. and I openly apologize to those that had to suffer through my inexperience in being a leader. I wish I was the one that could rally the troops and care about every aspect of their personal lives and work wholeheartedly to make them a better person, but it just wasn't me. I was about doing and getting things done.

57:58The problem was I wasn't excited to get better at this. I was excited about the stuff that we used to do, product dealing with marketing strategies and grow the brand and what the brand means. Those were the things that were fun and exciting. We just didn't get to do them a lot in the latter times. And so, but meantime, in the back of your minds, you're always thinking, we got to find somebody to lead this team. Yeah. And Jeff was the one, I remember him saying that the root problem isn't our people, it's us. And we need to find somebody to replace us. And so we did. We just started talking with everybody we knew.

58:34Yeah. And I guess eventually you landed on this guy, John Maris, but he was not – I don't know. Initially, you guys approached him to talk about something else, like for advice. But I have to assume that secretly you were thinking maybe this guy will come work with us. Yeah. John was a guy who was working at a local company called Claris Glassboards. And so I knew of this company, obviously, and I knew that there were some really capable guys over there. Yeah, we reached out to John over LinkedIn, really, and honestly, just to ask about how to build a sales team. And chatting with him, it just felt like when he left, I kind of looked at Jeff and said, this is a guy that I think could run this thing.

59:19He's very sales oriented. And he was a very energetic guy, really likable guy. and I think it was a matter of weeks and he was in there taking the bull by the horns. If anything, I felt like we probably let go too fast. We really just, we didn't just hand over the reins. We balled him up into a tight ball and threw it at his face. So what, you just introduced John to the company one day and said, hey everyone, this is your new boss. Pretty much, that's how it went. But time freedom and financial freedom was all we had our sights on. And anything, any means to that end was acceptable by me. And if that meant, you know, quote unquote, handing my baby over to somebody else, I was ready.

1:00:06So the idea was, once you brought him on, John, to build a company 2018, 2019, and then explore a sale in 2020. But it didn't, it turns out that in 2019, you already started to get some interest from people who started to approach you. Clearly, they were people who had been following your growth. And now there was interest. Yeah, most of it came unsolicited. But yeah, it started to come in and they started to get really attractive. But I remember Jeff and I explicitly telling John, stop entertaining all these inquiries because we'll get them when we're ready to get them. And they'll be there when we run a process and put it on the market and have that competitive bidding process.

1:00:54Just grow the business. Don't worry about selling. But as those inquiries came in, they started to throw numbers at us that we didn't ask for. And those numbers started really big and just got bigger to a point where we couldn't turn it down and we couldn't say no. It got to a point where you were being offered in the low nine figures, a valuation in the low nine figures for the business. And some of these private equity groups were like, listen, you know, and I guess you couldn't ignore it. It was a lot of money. Yeah. I mean, those offers came in and John said, here's what one company said. And I remember us just saying, we've got to entertain this.

1:01:32So I think the first – because you would go on to have essentially three exits from your company in a sense. The first one was when this private equity group bought a majority stake and you and your brother retained a minority stake. And at that point, this is 2019, what did you guys do? Did you fully disengage from Solo Stove? Yeah, we were ready to be out and to kind of move to a board seat as board advisors. We were, man, I was so stoked to get out and to get to a point where I don't have to go into the office. I mean, all of that stress, I could now shut off and spend time the way I wanted to spend it.

1:02:20So we've moved to board seats. And then the timing is both great and also would get even better because it turns out COVID would be an incredible engine for growing this brand even further. And I think about a year later, a year after the private equity group made that investment, another private equity firm came in with another offer to buy – essentially to buy out a huge part or most of your remaining stake. Yeah, that's right. There was this new group that wanted to come in and buy a majority stake at a much higher valuation, well north of what we had just exited for a year ago. So they were going to make money and you guys were going to make more money.

1:03:13Yeah, really. That's right. I mean, it was mind blowing to me that, you know, from from being in the low nine figures, just over 100 million dollars to now being well into the mid nine figures on this next. Yeah. Private equity exit. You know, we would sell less shares than we did the first time, but the rewards were much greater the second time. And I think one of the things that made it much easier the second time was that we weren't involved in the whole process of selling it. Yeah. Which was nice to step back and let other people deal with that part of the business. The company eventually went public in 2021 and you guys had shares.

1:03:56I think you still retain those shares, right? You hold stock? Yeah. That's correct. We didn't sell any stock at the IPO. That IPO was truly an IPO where new stock was issued. So it wasn't a liquidity event for us. And you guys today are completely not involved with the company at all. You have no connection to it. Yeah. Other than we own an equity stake. Yeah. And we own shares of the public company. From an operations standpoint, we're totally out. It feels great to say it. We don't do anything with the company and hardly hear from them these days. What do you think, Spencer? What do you think?

1:04:35I mean, you've got a long life to live. Do you see yourself starting another business? I mean, what do you see yourself doing with the rest of your life? And how will you keep yourself occupied? I know that some people are going to hear this question like, what do you mean, guy? He's going to go running every day and go to the gym and do yoga classes and be involved in this church and go on vacation. But I don't know. There are a lot of people who I've interviewed on the show, hundreds, who are multimillionaires, billionaires, who don't stop working until the day they die because it gives their lives meaning.

1:05:09And I understand that. But work can also be incredibly fulfilling and meaningful. And I wonder if you see that in your future. Yeah, I think fulfillment is the right word. And if that takes me down a road of starting something for whatever reason, then I'll never say never. and at this current stage in my life, the most impact I can make, I think, is with my family, is with my kids and making sure that they grow up with a father at home, with the support of parents. And until I finish that task, I don't think I'm super hungry right now to start something that would take me away from doing that.

1:05:58What about you, Jeff? Well, I think one of the important things in life is to know when you have enough. I don't necessarily look at work as working at a job to make money or get a paycheck, but there's all sorts of different types of work. There's work at home that parents do all the time, and I'm trying going to be better at that. There's work inside your community that you can do, work at our church. And I don't see starting a new company right now, but I'm not going to say I won't later on. Do you, when you guys think about your journey and, you know, where you've been and what happened, how much of what happened do you do attribute to luck and how much do you think has to do with the hard work and the skill that you have?

1:06:52For me, I think luck is definitely a huge part of our outcome. And the paradox is, as I think about luck, it's something you can't control. You have to realize that it's a part while at the same time working as if it doesn't matter. I think it helps you not pat yourself on the back too hard when things go right, while at the same time not getting too hard on yourself when things don't go right. Some things are just out of your control and luck is definitely one of them. Jeff? I think the older I get, I'm not sure if I believe in luck as much, but I definitely believe that there's something out of your control, some sort of divine help.

1:07:43All of the important things that have happened in my life, including starting this business with Spencer and meeting my wife and having kids and all of those other important things I don't really consider as luck, but as things that I was blessed with. I certainly think Spencer and I both worked very hard at it, but I think we both acknowledge that there's something that was beyond our control that definitely helped with this. That's Jeff and Spencer Jan, co-founders of Solo Stove. By the way, remember how years ago they sold garden cloches, those little tent-like things that protect plants from frost?

1:08:25Well, it turns out that business is still a wide-open frontier. In fact, the domain name cloche.com is currently on sale for$120 ,000. Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show. And as always, it's totally free. This episode was produced by Carla Estevez with music composed by Ramtin Arablui. It was edited by Neva Grant with research help from Casey Herman. Our audio engineer was Ko Takasugi Chernovan. Our production staff also includes J.C. Howard, Sam Paulson, Liz Metzger, Alex Chung, Elaine Coates, John Isabella, and Chris Messini.

1:09:11I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.

1:09:24if you like how i built this you can listen early and ad free right now by joining wondery plus in the wondery app or on apple podcasts prime members can listen ad free on amazon music before you go tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com slash survey holiday.