Overview

In this special "Advice Line" episode of *How I Built This*, host Guy Raz is joined by BuzzFeed founder and CEO Jonah Peretti to field questions from three early-stage founders grappling with scaling, competition, and messaging. The conversation is framed by Peretti's own candid assessment of BuzzFeed's precarious position—the company disclosed a "going concern" warning about its cash runway—and his philosophy of reinvention. The episode balances tactical business advice with a broader meditation on what it means to build something durable in a fragmented, AI-saturated internet era, all delivered with the warmth and directness that characterizes the show's advice segments.

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2:49BuzzFeed's Existential Challenge and Peretti's Founder Mode

Jonah Peretti opens by acknowledging that BuzzFeed, now 20 years old, is navigating its most difficult period. The company disclosed a "going concern"—an accounting term meaning it has liabilities within the next year that exceed its current cash balance. Peretti is direct about the causes: legacy real estate leases signed before COVID, debt payments, restructuring costs, and a fundamental shift in how content spreads online. "Content from publishers used to go viral on Facebook all the time," he explains. "Now the social web is really fragmented." People are on different platforms or quitting apps entirely, so the old model of free distribution through social media has collapsed.

Peretti's response is to return to what he calls "founder mode"—reinventing the company for the near future rather than trying to preserve what it was. He points to new initiatives: an incubator called Branch Office, new AI-powered apps, and a renewed focus on community and membership. One example is Conjure Camera, an app that gives users one daily challenge from a "mysterious spirit" and uses the camera to reveal hidden things in the world around them. Peretti describes it as "Pokémon Go meets Instagram meets a new thing that couldn't have existed until a year or two ago." His argument is that the company's survival depends not on cutting costs alone but on creating genuinely new products that fit how people actually use the internet today.

Guy Raz presses Peretti on the tension between optimism and the reality of a potential cash crisis. Peretti acknowledges the risk but insists that the going concern disclosure was a technical accounting requirement, not a prediction of failure. He notes that the company resolved a similar warning a couple of years ago and that management has a plan. The deeper point he makes is about the nature of entrepreneurial survival: "The way entrepreneurs have to continually reinvent their businesses and change what they're doing" is not a weakness but the core skill. BuzzFeed's story, he suggests, is not over—it's entering a new chapter.

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9:40Anthony's MotionFlix: Scaling a Pop-Up Outdoor Cinema

The first caller is Anthony Cortez from Miami, founder of MotionFlix, a company that creates "five-star cinema under the stars" with plush seating, personal headphones, and elevated concession service. The business operates as a pop-up model, bringing everything—screen, chairs, headphones, popcorn attendants—to beaches, rooftops, backyards, and other locations. Their clients include property management companies (who use the service for resident events), streaming platforms like Netflix and Prime (who lack traditional theatrical presence for their original films), and cities that want community events in parks.

Anthony's business did just over $1 million in sales last year and has expanded to Los Angeles, San Diego, Orlando, Tampa, and Miami. His core challenge is seasonal cash flow and how to scale into new markets. He is considering a model where aspiring entrepreneurs in each city invest to operate and own a share of their local market, rather than the company hiring employees directly. He asks whether this is the right approach to scale efficiently.

Peretti and Raz probe the model. Peretti asks about the advance notice required for screenings and whether there's an opportunity to make the business more spontaneous—spinning up events on short notice when good weather is forecast, using a platform-like approach similar to Airbnb. Raz draws on a previous episode about Wingstop to outline the classic franchise criteria: a simple idea, a replicable system, and eventually a brand. He notes that Wingstop succeeded because it had all three, and that Anthony needs to decide whether he wants to build a company-owned hub model (with trained employees in each city) or a licensing/franchise model where others invest and operate under his brand and systems.

The conversation surfaces a tension in Anthony's own motivation. He says he wants to give others the same opportunity he was given when someone invested in his first business—he would put up the upfront cost for partners because the startup cost for MotionFlix is low. Raz and Peretti both caution that while this is admirable, it may not be the most scalable path. Peretti suggests a marketplace model where real estate owners list available spaces, freelance labor is coordinated, and the brand provides standards and relationships with streamers. This could scale massively but requires solving the "chicken-and-egg" problem of getting all sides of the marketplace active. Raz adds that in-person events are a growing sector precisely because they are scarce and real in an era of infinite digital content—a theme Peretti returns to later.

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25:40Andrew's CATSUMO: Owning a New Product Category Against Knockoffs

The second caller is Andrew Bruce from San Francisco, founder of CATSUMO, a pet company whose first product is an interactive cat wrestling glove. The glove looks like a sumo wrestler, is loaded with replaceable catnip bags in seven locations, and has crinkle material in the ears and movable legs and mouth. Andrew's origin story is personal: his parents, lifelong dog people, rescued a feral kitten in Greece in 2023 and asked him to take her. He realized she wanted to roughhouse like the Australian shepherd puppies he grew up with, but needed protection from claws. The product launched in November 2023, a viral video hit on December 31, and by April 2024 he had left his mechanical engineering job. The company did $1.2 million in sales last year, mostly through Amazon.

Andrew's question is pointed: when you create a new product category and competitors quickly follow, what matters most for owning that category long term? He is already seeing knockoffs on Amazon.

Peretti identifies the core dynamic: with physical products, competitors can find the same factory and undercut on price, making it hard to maintain margins. He outlines several defensive strategies: building a strong brand, creating community where customers subscribe or connect with each other, hacking the attention economy with constant viral marketing, and introducing subscription or membership models—for example, a catnip delivery subscription or a monthly box of new cat toys. He warns of a "weird dynamic" in the viral internet era: "Oftentimes people have their best year of sales the first year because there's novelty and it goes viral. And then it's like what do you do the second year and the third year?" The old model of slow, predictable growth had its own advantages.

Raz emphasizes speed over perfection. "In this business, speed matters sometimes. Actually all the time. More than perfection." He advises Andrew to hit the gas on new versions—bigger or smaller sizes, products for dogs, limited drops with different colors or themes. Andrew confirms he just returned from China designing accessories and plans to build out product variations.

Andrew then asks about community: can he build a media experience around CATSUMO where owners share wrestling footage and feel part of something bigger? Peretti loves the idea, noting that if customers feel they'll be featured on the CATSUMO page, that creates loyalty that a knockoff can't replicate. He suggests a "CATSUMO cam"—a GoPro inside the glove that broadcasts video of the fights, feeding into an endless feed on a web page. Andrew reveals he has already cut a hole in one glove and mounted an Insta360 Go camera, with promising results. The conversation lands on a clear strategy: the product is the entry point, but the enduring moat is the community and media network around it.

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36:17Melissa's Unrefined Foods: Cutting Through the Noise with Healthy Frozen Muffins

The third caller is Melissa Bermudez from Newburyport, Massachusetts, co-founder and CEO of Unrefined Foods. Her company makes frozen muffins that are "just like homemade but better"—using 100% organic stone-milled grains, real fruits and vegetables, olive oil, maple syrup, whole milk, and eggs. The key differentiator is that they mill whole wheat berries themselves, preserving the nutrition and flavor of the entire grain. The company launched just over a year ago, did about $30,000 in sales in 2025 (mostly direct-to-consumer), and has been in wholesale for about eight months, selling to small local co-ops and home delivery services near Boston.

Melissa's question is about messaging: at a time when so many companies compete for the attention of busy parents, how should she craft a message that stands out and gets people talking?

Peretti immediately identifies the core challenge: "It is really hard to get people to talk about muffins." He contrasts her product with what he calls "snarf"—content that provokes anger, fear, and novelty, which is what gets organic distribution on social media. To make muffins surprising and polarizing, she needs to find something genuinely novel or shocking about them.

Raz argues that she is in the education business. "Healthy is a really jammed category," he says. "Just calling them healthy or clean is not going to be enough." He advises her to lead with her personal story as a parent who couldn't find anything she trusted to feed her kids, and then educate consumers about what makes her muffins different—specifically, the stone-milling process that preserves nutrients. He suggests making videos that show the inside of the muffin and explain why it delivers more nutrition than a typical sugar bomb.

Peretti offers a provocative counterpoint: he jokingly suggests slowly increasing the sugar content over time to build a reputation for healthiness before gradually compromising—a trend he says happens "again and again and again in the food space." Raz immediately rejects this, saying there is enough of a market for genuinely healthy products. He points to the brand Chomps (grass-fed meat sticks) as a parallel: the founders targeted gym-going men, but the majority of their customers turned out to be moms on the go. Melissa should lean into what appeals to that demographic: fiber and protein. Her muffins already have over 30% of daily recommended fiber (9 grams), but the packaging doesn't emphasize this. Raz suggests putting fiber and protein front and center, along with a personal story on the back.

Peretti adds a creative idea: could the muffins have messages or poems on the bottom of the wrapper, like fortune cookies, so kids get a different message each day in their lunchbox? Or could customers personalize the messages using print-on-demand technology? These small touches could create the novelty and shareability that the product currently lacks.

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46:01Peretti's Advice to His Younger Self: Obsession Over Analysis

At the end of the episode, Raz asks Peretti the question he poses to every advice line guest: with 20 years of experience, what advice would he give his younger self in 2006, when he was just starting BuzzFeed?

Peretti's answer is surprising and somewhat contrarian. "Advice is somewhat overrated," he says. He argues that there are rare moments in time when the world opens up and creates possibilities for new things, and you have to be in the right place to seize them. The danger, he suggests, is over-analysis: reading everything about founders and knowing every framework can lead to paralysis. What matters more is finding something you are truly obsessed with—something you "can't help yourself doing"—and throwing yourself into it because you can't do otherwise.

He then offers a concrete tactical regret: "If I had a time machine, I could not do a SPAC acquisition where we take on a bunch of debt and go public without raising capital. I would tell my younger self not to do that." BuzzFeed went public via a SPAC (Special Purpose Acquisition Company) merger in 2021, taking on significant debt, and Peretti acknowledges the company is still "digging our way out of that particular predicament." But even with that mistake, his core message is about the primacy of obsession over calculation. The best path, he says, is not the one you choose after weighing every option—it's the one you can't help but follow.

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Conclusion

This episode matters because it captures a founder at a moment of genuine uncertainty—not the polished retrospective of a success story, but the messy reality of a 20-year-old company fighting for its next chapter. Peretti's willingness to discuss BuzzFeed's going concern warning, his tactical regrets about the SPAC, and his philosophy of reinvention gives the advice he offers to early-stage founders unusual weight. The three callers each face a different version of the same fundamental challenge: how to build something durable in a world where competitors can copy your product, attention is fragmented, and the old rules of distribution no longer apply. The answers—community over product, speed over perfection, education over claims, and obsession over analysis—are not revolutionary, but they are earned. And Peretti's closing reflection, that the best entrepreneurial paths are the ones you can't help but take, lingers as both a warning and an invitation.

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Key takeaways

• BuzzFeed disclosed a "going concern" warning about its cash runway, but Peretti argues this is a technical accounting issue that management plans to resolve by returning to "founder mode" and building new AI-powered apps and community features.
• For physical product businesses like CATSUMO, the first year of viral sales can be the best; long-term defensibility comes from building community, subscription models, and media networks around the product, not just from the product itself.
• Speed and iteration matter more than perfection when competitors can quickly copy your product; launching new versions, variations, and limited drops is a better strategy than trying to fight knockoffs legally.
• In crowded food categories like "healthy," messaging must educate consumers about specific, tangible differences (like stone-milling grains) rather than relying on generic claims like "clean" or "natural."
• In-person events and real-world experiences are a growing opportunity because they are scarce and authentic in an era of infinite digital content and AI-generated media.
• Peretti's biggest tactical regret was taking BuzzFeed public via a SPAC with significant debt; his broader advice is to pursue what you're obsessed with rather than over-analyzing every option.
• The "going concern" disclosure is a common accounting term that many companies have resolved; it does not necessarily mean a company will fail, but it signals serious near-term financial risk that requires a credible turnaround plan.