PODS & Red Rover: Pete Warhurst

How I Built This with Guy Raz

Guy Raz | Wondery

Business

4.8 • 31.1K Ratings

🗓️ 9 May 2022

⏱️ 83 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Pete Warhurst probably would not have picked “entrepreneur” as a career when he was growing up. He loved his job as a firefighter and paramedic and might have done it for life, had a colleague not recruited him to help launch a company to build 911 call systems. After that business sold, Pete began to think about new problems to solve – like a better way to move and store our stuff. In 1998, he began disrupting the self-storage industry with PODS, a system that brings storage containers to the consumer, then transfers them to a warehouse. The business quickly spread from Clearwater, Florida to franchises across the country, eventually selling for about $450 million. But Pete still thought there was a better way to schlep your stuff to a storage facility, so he launched yet another business—Red Rover—that now competes with PODS.

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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	A truck pulls up your house, and on the truck is this like a giant bed frame.
0:16.0	And then this hydraulic thing just like lifts the entire box and then essentially pushes
0:23.5	the wheels forward and then over the flat bed of the truck.
0:27.0	It doesn't look like anything you've ever seen anywhere before except in the Star Wars
0:31.0	film.
0:32.0	And like the scene where there didn't a tundra or something.
0:34.0	Am I describing that correctly?
0:36.0	Yeah, yeah, I think they're hiring.
0:49.0	Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories
0:55.0	behind the movements they built.
1:00.0	I'm Guy Raaz, and on the show today help Pete Warhurst want it to simplify how we store
1:06.0	our stuff so he built an entirely new system called Pods that launched another moving in
1:12.2	storage business to compete with the first one.
1:16.0	The United States is a nation of hoarders.
1:22.3	The average house contains 300,000 items and it's estimated that one out of 10 Americans
1:29.8	pays to rent storage space.
1:32.6	Stuff that lets face it is probably not worth paying to store.
1:37.9	And that's you I'm talking about.
1:39.3	I'm not trying to shame you.
1:41.8	I also pay for storage, boxes and crates filled with my kids first grade dioramas and craft
	...

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