YouSaid · the spoken record

Matt O'Hayer

lines on the record: 106
first: 2026-03-23
most recent: 2026-03-23
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I found out pretty quickly through trial and error is that if they don't get four ounces of 18% protein every single day, they will stop laying eggs within 48 hours.”
2026-03-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vital Farms: Matt O’Hayer. How a serial entrepreneur re-branded the egg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, but it wasn't made for crops. I wasn't going to do crops. I knew I was going to do chickens. And so I started with 20, and they all had names. And then I bought a thousand baby chicks. They started raising them up. And I built these pens made of this electroplastic netting to keep the predators out. And we'd move the pens and these little trailers around the property. I bought some old trailers on Craigslist, house trailers, and outfitted them with nesting boxes. Every week we'd move them into a new plot.”
2026-03-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vital Farms: Matt O’Hayer. How a serial entrepreneur re-branded the egg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, it's whatever weeds would grow on it. And there was a lot of these little tiny trees, and I got a big shredder, and I got knocked over almost unconscious with a tree brow on my head. And it was quite a fun start. But I was having fun. We're cleaning up the property, put it in a vegetable garden, bought 20 laying hens.”
2026-03-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vital Farms: Matt O’Hayer. How a serial entrepreneur re-branded the egg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I flew back to Austin and looked at it. And it was, you couldn't even, it was covered in brush. I had to hack my way through the brush just to find my way to the water. It was beautiful, okay. And I offered him half the price off from a quarter million. And so I got under financing and bought the farm.”
2026-03-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vital Farms: Matt O’Hayer. How a serial entrepreneur re-branded the egg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Had a real estate agent in Austin. I said, send me anytime you see over 10 acres available for sale. And he sends me 27 acres South Austin for sale and for half a million dollars. It wasn't developed. It was just kind of scrubbly and it was a flood zone.”
2026-03-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vital Farms: Matt O’Hayer. How a serial entrepreneur re-branded the egg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Recruit farmers to follow our system exactly. Put them on a contract and I would buy all their eggs under that contract, but they'd have to follow the rules that we set for them. And then I would pack all their eggs into a single brand and sell them under that one brand. And I would make sure the farmers did their job right like you would have, like a franchise would. Said, oh, that'll never work.”
2026-03-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vital Farms: Matt O’Hayer. How a serial entrepreneur re-branded the egg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Unable to stand up, unable to turn around, unable to stretch their wings their entire lives. What I'd classified as a most torture farm animal in the world. So John tells me the story about what he wanted to do. And I said, that won't work. I said, what do you mean it won't work? I said, well, farmers aren't going to give you the consistency you want. Need to have consistent rules and you need to create what I would call a franchise model, an upside-down franchise. And I hit the experience franchise, like, how would you do it? And I said, well, I would.”
2026-03-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vital Farms: Matt O’Hayer. How a serial entrepreneur re-branded the egg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Past year because we want to sell those types of eggs from chickens that are well maintained, plus the eggs taste better. And I was like, holy shit, that's exactly what I had my farm. I saw this huge difference in those eggs. And I've been looking for those eggs. I look for them all the time. I stop at farm stands all the time, hoping that that farmer has let their chickens out. Because what I found when I had my farm is when chickens wandered around in pasture and they ate something besides corn every day, which is what most chickens just get, primarily corn, a little bit of soybean meal, that the yolks get this beautiful orange color and they're thicker and they taste much different, much better. And they're delicious. I don't really like the ones with the pale yellow yolks. And what I found is that the 300 million chickens are out there, 330 million chickens even at that time, 95, 98% of them were living in cages. Four, five, six, seven, eight birds to a cage.”
2026-03-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vital Farms: Matt O’Hayer. How a serial entrepreneur re-branded the egg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, we gotten a lot closer since like 2004. So we were on this trip, and I was asking what's next for Whole Foods. And he said, you know, this, this thing we're doing, you know, right now I'm funding this guy to do pasture racing of eggs. But he's decided instead, he took the money and wanted to build a feed bill. So instead of doing what I want him to do, so what did you want him to do? And I said, well, I wanted him to train farmers around the country to pasture raise chickens, meaning whether they're out in pasture eating.”
2026-03-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vital Farms: Matt O’Hayer. How a serial entrepreneur re-branded the egg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I knew I wanted to move back to Austin. And so Tom Mack and I had gone with him and some friends on a long scuba diving trip.”
2026-03-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vital Farms: Matt O’Hayer. How a serial entrepreneur re-branded the egg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They're jumping your shoulders, and I saw their, you know, I had little baby chicks that I raised up hands up to full-laying hands. And, you know, they know you that. Sentient beings. You can see, you know, meaning they feel happiness, they feel sadness, they feel anger, they feel hurt, all kinds of, they have personalities.”
2026-03-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vital Farms: Matt O’Hayer. How a serial entrepreneur re-branded the egg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So yeah, animal welfare is, especially having chickens on a farm. I mean, my chickens, they all had names. They're all named after, you know.”
2026-03-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vital Farms: Matt O’Hayer. How a serial entrepreneur re-branded the egg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, my friend John McKey, angry if he heard me calling me a vegetarian, he says, You're not a vegetarian, Matt, you eat fish. So I call myself a Pescovegan”
2026-03-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vital Farms: Matt O’Hayer. How a serial entrepreneur re-branded the egg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The time was a four page essay and it described that businesses need to have a deeper purpose besides just making money. Well, that's interesting. It was always for me how could I quick can I get in and quick can I get out with a lot of money? And like that's very interesting. I liked that concept. And then he went on to talk about stakeholders. And I never even thought of a business as having more than one stakeholder, me, you know, they're equal in a way and describe what Whole Foods did is for their five stakeholders, which is a customers, the employees, the shareholders, the vendors, which I thought was interesting. Treating them as an equal. And then the last one was a communitieslash environment where they operate. So I was inspired by that. I knew that whatever I did going forward, I wanted it to be part of that kind of model.”
2026-03-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vital Farms: Matt O’Hayer. How a serial entrepreneur re-branded the egg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I had a thousand ideas. Poor Catherine at the time, you know, I felt because every time I'd come up with another idea and her eyes would go, oh my God, here comes another one. One thing that had happened is I'd read this essay that had been written by John Mackey called Conscious Capitalism.”
2026-03-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vital Farms: Matt O’Hayer. How a serial entrepreneur re-branded the egg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The average life of a chartered captain is four and a half years, and after that you're done. And I was like two years, I'm like, I'm going to do this the rest of my life. Right around four and a half years, I was done. I was like, okay, what happened?”
2026-03-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vital Farms: Matt O’Hayer. How a serial entrepreneur re-branded the egg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, but I was still doing charters and I thought I was going to do it the rest of my life. I really did. Really? Yeah. I remember somebody, a mentor of mine early days, she told me.”
2026-03-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vital Farms: Matt O’Hayer. How a serial entrepreneur re-branded the egg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I wouldn't say it was saving a lot of money, but we were getting, I think, $15,000 a week. And after you cover all your expenses, you got a little bit left over. And there were tips. Catherine kept all the tips. That was her deal, which was sizable. I think we had $40,000, $50,000 a year in tips. But also I saw an opportunity while I was doing this because I'm an entrepreneur at heart and I had a million ideas that I couldn't execute there. But what I could was become a charter broker who would book on other boats because we were oftentimes booked and I get inquiries from. Client base, and they say, We need you for New Year's, I'm not available, but I can get you another boat. And that was 15% off the top. So I started booking charters. I started a company. It was called Vital Vacations. And the first Vital Company.”
2026-03-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vital Farms: Matt O’Hayer. How a serial entrepreneur re-branded the egg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was taking care of people. I was a nursemaid. I was a diplomat. I was solving marriage problems when I could. And I was teaching people to do a lot of interesting things and I had a lot of kids on board. It was really busy.”
2026-03-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vital Farms: Matt O’Hayer. How a serial entrepreneur re-branded the egg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That sounds glorious compared to what the reality was, which is I'm taking apart their toilet that they dropped the wrong stuff in and fixing it and I'm down in the engine room covered in grease, fixing an engine and all this without, you know, I had a generator, I had two big engines down there. Plus you have the sails and you're cooking. You're also taking them to three, four islands a day and your tour guide and your teaching them to scuba dive and wakeboard and all the stuff.”
2026-03-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vital Farms: Matt O’Hayer. How a serial entrepreneur re-branded the egg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was. I had gotten to be over the years. I had worked in the cooking business in Block Island in the summertime and worked my way up to, I would call it lion cook.”
2026-03-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vital Farms: Matt O’Hayer. How a serial entrepreneur re-branded the egg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Correct. Three day long. Usually families. And I also was doing charters in the Caribbean all winter and spring and fall, but I would move up to New England and Charter all summer in New England from Maine to New York.”
2026-03-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vital Farms: Matt O’Hayer. How a serial entrepreneur re-branded the egg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I decided it was going to be a charter captain. And I found a boat in the British Virgin Islands. It was a charter boat. It was about. Five, six years old, four cabin. And my new girlfriend and I, she was game to jump on board with me.”
2026-03-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vital Farms: Matt O’Hayer. How a serial entrepreneur re-branded the egg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oops, there's that one little problem. But I had a little bit of equity in my house. I had enough to borrow $300,000, $330,000. I think I borrowed against you.”
2026-03-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vital Farms: Matt O’Hayer. How a serial entrepreneur re-branded the egg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, when I was a kid, I had a paper out when I was eight years old from age to 12. And it was, you know, I saved my money and I bought a selling lesson at Rhode Island Yacht Club when I was 11. And I really learned to sail and I loved it.”
2026-03-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vital Farms: Matt O’Hayer. How a serial entrepreneur re-branded the egg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I had always wanted to Sell my company and then sale around the world. I was always looking for the exit back then. But sell my company, buy a big sailboat and sell it around the world.”
2026-03-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vital Farms: Matt O’Hayer. How a serial entrepreneur re-branded the egg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No. But when 9-11 happened, I was like, okay, now we got. Nothing, you know, and I quickly got it like consulting gigs. I came in and helped a little bit of that, but it was just nickel and dime.”
2026-03-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vital Farms: Matt O’Hayer. How a serial entrepreneur re-branded the egg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I got down to World Trade Center, wasn't able to do anything because there's nobody help and that was my and I walked back to midtown with the whole gang of us together and came back to Austin a few days later I ended up basically selling the company what I saw happen that day is my my net worth which I calculated somewhere beforehand was still in the tens of millions of dollars because you know”
2026-03-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vital Farms: Matt O’Hayer. How a serial entrepreneur re-branded the egg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, well, I wasn't sure, but I knew that we couldn't afford even a small bump on the road at this point. We were hand-to-mouth, cash flow-wise. It was too tight. So I knew I had to make some immediate decisions. But I was really more concerned with lifes at that point. I'm pretty good at triaged, and I thought, well, maybe I can help. And so I got back and started running downtown.”
2026-03-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vital Farms: Matt O’Hayer. How a serial entrepreneur re-branded the egg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I got on the phone right before the second tower came down, got on phone with London and Austin, and laid off 140 people.”
2026-03-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vital Farms: Matt O’Hayer. How a serial entrepreneur re-branded the egg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Got up early in the morning and went for my morning run and came back and was taken off my shoes in my hotel room in Midtown. And I see an airplane. I see one of the World Trade Center tower is burning. What is that? Turn up the volume and set a small plane. It crashed. And while I'm watching it, the second plane hit. I quickly laced up my shoes and decided I'm going to run down, see if I can help at the World Trade Center. So I ran down the Westside Highway. By the time it got to Chelsea, the first tower came down and I was surrounded by people that had come out of the towers covered in dust. And I realized that my sales were going to go to zero for at least a period of time. And we couldn't afford it. We were still hand-to-mouth. We were tight, you know, but we were okay.”
2026-03-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vital Farms: Matt O’Hayer. How a serial entrepreneur re-branded the egg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Maybe not ostensibly, but I'm probably. Was more than certainly not more than him today, that's for sure. I certainly lacked humility, which I think is such an important aspect of being in business. And I didn't do a good job making sure that I had the right people and the right seats on the bus. And that's such an important lesson.”
2026-03-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vital Farms: Matt O’Hayer. How a serial entrepreneur re-branded the egg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I hadn't really learned lessons that I learned later in life, which is always hire people that are 10 times smarter than you and 10 times better than you to run every aspect of the business. And I was still thought I was the smartest guy on the room. And I wasn't a lot to learn.”
2026-03-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vital Farms: Matt O’Hayer. How a serial entrepreneur re-branded the egg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“out I've learned since then I'm really good at growing companies but I get really bored at the blocking and tackling part which is really important part of it it's really the important”
2026-03-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vital Farms: Matt O’Hayer. How a serial entrepreneur re-branded the egg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Roughly 50 million. We had a good group of people working at headquarters. We had a first class magazine, but we were still struggling new company. All businesses are challenged, especially when you're a mediocre operator like I was. I have to think, you know, I mean, we had a couple of instances that set us back on our heels.”
2026-03-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vital Farms: Matt O’Hayer. How a serial entrepreneur re-branded the egg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I'd pay him, you know, they may get a small amount of money. I really don't remember the amounts, but probably maybe a 20,000, $30,000 might be enough to get them on board. And then we'd do an earnout, and they were happy with that earnout.”
2026-03-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vital Farms: Matt O’Hayer. How a serial entrepreneur re-branded the egg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There were dozens of these little companies that former airline employees would start and they would place or even existing airline employees and they would get a deal with a hotel and a resort somewhere and say airline employees, we'll let you come for 50% off because they wanted to because the airline employees Key is they fly at the last minute standby and hotels like to fill excess capacity and I had really good contacts in the resort travel business my previous Business at barter exchange. General managers and sales managers from all the major hotels and the resorts in Mexico throughout the Caribbean. So we started growing the business and it was easy to grow. There was a travel magazine that was out there at the time called Air Fair magazine, I believe it was called. I bought that magazine for cheap.”
2026-03-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vital Farms: Matt O’Hayer. How a serial entrepreneur re-branded the egg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I learned about so many different companies because they bring me in to cut clients would come and say, I've got this excess inventory. And I can't move it. And what can I do? And how can I turn this into something I need? I did business with some big corporations. We did big deals with airlines for a lot of deals between travel-related assets and media related assets. We did a lot of that. We really made a lot of money in arbitrage. We could buy something, move quickly because we were the Fed. We could loan ourselves some money or take it out of our trade dollar bank account and buy something and then flip it. But it was always a struggle and can wear on you after a while.”
2026-03-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vital Farms: Matt O’Hayer. How a serial entrepreneur re-branded the egg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was a pain in the ass. I'll tell you what. And it's funny because you just named all the issues, right? It was always something struggling with cash flow. It was a really knockdown drag out. It was a really good education, though. Because one thing it taught me.”
2026-03-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vital Farms: Matt O’Hayer. How a serial entrepreneur re-branded the egg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They come in thinking it's going to save their company and it can help them, right? Or their expectations are that I'm going to be able to No matter what you tell them, they're going to be able to use their trade dollars right away for everything. And sometimes it's difficult to find something they wanted right away. So sometimes as people weren't getting enough business and they weren't happy and other people. And I mean, I always said, I hate wasting my time being CEO of a company because it really takes a lot of work. That was 13 years of my life in that business”
2026-03-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vital Farms: Matt O’Hayer. How a serial entrepreneur re-branded the egg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There being invoicing a statement at the end of the month, it would also tell people this should not be how you operate 100% of your business. This is a way to utilize excess capacity because there's nothing more perishable you think about it than an empty hotel room that didn't get sold last night or a 30-second spot on a radio station yesterday that never got sold. They get nothing for that.”
2026-03-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vital Farms: Matt O’Hayer. How a serial entrepreneur re-branded the egg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, but there were thousands and thousands of members. At some point, at one point, we were doing 100,000 processing, over 100,000 transactions a month.”
2026-03-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vital Farms: Matt O’Hayer. How a serial entrepreneur re-branded the egg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In essence, yes. But unfortunately, that restaurant owner probably can't find a driveway guy who wants to eat $10,000 for the meals at his restaurant, right? And so what this does is basically the reason why barter is always the first form of trade, right? It was barter. That's why they call it trade because it was trade early on.”
2026-03-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vital Farms: Matt O’Hayer. How a serial entrepreneur re-branded the egg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Going to fill up some of those empty tables with customers, you wouldn't have had otherwise. We're going to send them in. They're going to use their trade dollars to eat in your restaurant. And basically, you're going to buy that driveway with incremental business.”
2026-03-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vital Farms: Matt O’Hayer. How a serial entrepreneur re-branded the egg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'll give you a simple example. Let's say you have a restaurant in your restaurant is operating around 60% capacity. Every lunch, every day at lunch, you have 40% of your tables empty. You have plenty more capacity. Your food cost in a restaurant typically 25%, roughly, but your big cost in a restaurant is your fixed overhead. So you have this perishable commodity called the seat that's not worth anything if you can't fill it, right? You got to have to have a new driveway put in, parking lot put in. The asphalt company came to you and said, it's going to cost you $10,000. If you join Barter Exchange,”
2026-03-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vital Farms: Matt O’Hayer. How a serial entrepreneur re-branded the egg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One And then you get a credit card, the Barter Exchange card. And that credit card enabled you to go and shop at any of the other businesses in that community or nationwide, because this is a national company I was starting. I decided right on the bat I was going to build a national company, it was going to franchise it all over the United States.”
2026-03-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vital Farms: Matt O’Hayer. How a serial entrepreneur re-branded the egg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I mean, of these companies where you stop doing a quid pro quo trading, this or that. But instead you were doing, we have a currency. And so the currency was called a trade dollar. And so just to give you how the business ran, only companies could join and they would pay us $500 to join a membership.”
2026-03-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vital Farms: Matt O’Hayer. How a serial entrepreneur re-branded the egg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. What we had in common, we were both entrepreneurs and young entrepreneurs. I was 26 or 27, I believe. And John was a year and a half older than me. But John had, you know, Whole Foods was a great company. But when I met John, you'd see him in the produce department packing produce at the first real good size store that he had, which is 10,000 square feet. And I was starting my company, which is Barter Exchange.”
2026-03-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vital Farms: Matt O’Hayer. How a serial entrepreneur re-branded the egg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I had dairy goats and I had chickens laying eggs. So, you know, that's when I first learned it when their chickens were running around on pasture. They made these beautiful, delicious eggs. And I couldn't find them anywhere after that. I saw them opportunities to at least do that for fun while I decided what my next big move was going to be. And I didn't know what I wanted to do, but I know I wanted to ultimately move to Austin and I wanted to start a company there, but I didn't know what yet.”
2026-03-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vital Farms: Matt O’Hayer. How a serial entrepreneur re-branded the egg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Clean jeans. Yeah, I think at the end, by 1980, we were a million dollars a year probably in sales. Wow. And I sold the carpet cleaning portion and shut down the equipment portion”
2026-03-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vital Farms: Matt O’Hayer. How a serial entrepreneur re-branded the egg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT