HeyJaredGuy Raz Newsletter
Insights and advice from my interviews with over 700 of the world’s most accomplished entrepreneurs and leaders, along with cool things I'm reading, products that make my life better, and recipes I'm cooking. Host of the How I Built This podcast.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 9
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- Sep 11, 2026
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- Jul 9, 2026
Latest issues
Five Things I Learned From the High School Dropout Who Built a $100 Million Bag Company (opens the original)
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Kim Vaccarella dropped out of high school. Her guidance counselor told her she’d be dead in a gutter before college ever came up. She spent her twenties waitressing and bartending, then found a stable career in commercial real estate lending, the kind of job that pays fine and never quite scratches the itch. She always had a side hustle running: reselling clothes on eBay, buying up Target launches to flip. Then one day at the Jersey Shore, she noticed something about the material in her kids’ Cr
The Hail Mary That Saved Snack Brand Late July (opens the original)
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Nicole Bernard Dawes grew up watching her father accidentally launch a potato chip empire after a car crashed through the storefront window and got Cape Cod Potato Chips onto the front page of the newspaper. She thought she understood how unpredictable this business could be. Then she built her own company, Late July, and found out how much harder it actually is: a devastating launch collapse, a father’s death that triggered a loan default with a thirty-day clock, and a Hail Mary pivot born out
Two Brothers Built a Cooler Nobody Asked For. It Became a $2 Billion Status Symbol. (opens the original)
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Roy and Ryan Seiders spent most of our conversation laughing about things that weren’t funny at the time. Landing in Manila and not knowing if they’d end up in jail. Flying to Thailand and Bangkok on a shoestring budget, second-guessing whether the plane ticket to the next factory was worth it. And then, in the middle of their best year yet, getting a phone call that their manufacturing partner and friend had been killed, and realizing overnight that the business they’d built might be over. They
Millions of Mothers Were Hiding Their Baby Formula When Guests Came Over. She Built a Brand That Changed That. (opens the original)
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Laura Modi walked into our conversation ready to tell the whole story, including the parts some founders would happily skip over:The voluntary recall after the FDA sent a warning about their labels.The (male and female) investors who told her women shouldn’t use formula for babies. The night she stood in a pharmacy, sick with fever five days after giving birth, ringing a bell to get someone to unlock the formula aisle, hoping they'd put it in a bag that wasn't see-through. She left a good job at
They Showed Up to Work One Morning and Lost Everything. What They Did Next Built a $100 Million Brand. (opens the original)
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There's a version of the MadeGood story that sounds like a straightforward immigrant success story: family arrives from Iran with nothing, builds a food business from scratch, children grow up in the factory, brand eventually finds its way into forty thousand stores across North America. But the part that actually makes this story interesting is the twelve years of experience that got stripped away in a single morning in 2012, when the siblings showed up to a job they'd dedicated their lives to
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