Live From The HIBT Summit: Sara Blakely Of Spanx

How I Built This with Guy Raz

Guy Raz | Wondery

Business

4.8 • 31.1K Ratings

🗓️ 5 December 2019

⏱️ 21 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Our first episode from the 2019 How I Built This Summit features Sara Blakely, founder of Spanx. In front of a live audience, she tells Guy how she stayed confident in the earliest days of building the business, and why one day she still wound up sobbing on the floor of Office Depot. Every Thursday through the new year, we'll release new episodes from the HIBT Summit, so keep checking your podcast feed!

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, Prime Members, you can listen to how I built this early and ad-free on Amazon Music.
0:07.0	Download the app today.
0:09.0	New Year's is here, and with it brings the possibility of change.
0:13.0	As one behavioral scientist put it, first starts are really powerful.
0:17.0	So as you head into 2023, LifeKit is a great resource to help you plan your life and tackle changes, both big and small.
0:24.0	Listen to the LifeKit podcast from NPR.
0:30.0	Today we're releasing the very first interview from the 2019 How I Built This Summit, which happened in October in San Francisco.
0:38.0	And I just want to say it was super, super inspiring to have so many how I built this Founders Gather together in these same place at the same time for two days.
0:48.0	People like Mike Krieger and Kevin's System of Instagram, Jen Rubio of a way, Stuart Butterfield of Slack, and many many others.
0:56.0	And they all sat down with me in front of a live audience and just talked really honestly and openly about the excitement and terror and challenges of starting a business, sharing lots of new ideas and stories along the way.
1:10.0	And today's episode is with Sarah Blakely, Founder of Spanks. If you haven't heard the original episode, you may want to go back and give it a listen.
1:19.0	It was our very first and still one of our favorites, because really it is such a crazy success story with absolutely no experience in fashion or design.
1:29.0	Sarah set out to create this new kind of undergarment, one that sort of smooths out the lumps and bumps under your clothes.
1:36.0	Today of course Spanks is an international brand and Sarah is a billionaire. And what you'll discover here is that she's also super open about the strategies used to stay confident and optimistic when she was just getting started.
1:51.0	I want to go back to 1998 when you first were experimenting, when you cut the feet and the legs off pantyhose.
1:57.0	Yes.
1:58.0	And began to design what would become eventually spanks. And on the podcast you said something to me that I've never forgotten. And I'm going to quote here.
2:06.0	You said ideas are at their most vulnerable when they're brand new.
2:09.0	Yes.
2:10.0	In other words, that's when people say, oh, it's not going to work. It sucks. It's stupid. Forget it. If it's so great, why didn't other people do it?
2:16.0	You decided not to pretty much not to tell anybody to keep it a secret. And it was for that reason because you knew that you would be discouraged.
2:24.0	Yes. Now I shared my idea with people who could help me move it forward, like a patent attorney, the people in the manufacturing plants.
	...

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