699: A Pizza Oven Saved My Life - Then It Built a $100M Company

Tom Gozney hit rock bottom with addiction at 21 and spent nearly a year

in a South African rehab facility. What saved him back home wasn't a

business plan - it was a brick oven he dug into his garden, because

cooking pizza for his friends was the only way he could socialise

without alcohol at the centre of it. He noticed something: after a few

weeks, people stopped bringing beer and started bringing toppings. That

shift in behaviour became the entire thesis of the brand. Fifteen years

later, Gozney is valued at over $100 million, did $8.5 million in the

first four hours of its Dome launch, and forged the portable pizza oven

category from scratch.

In this interview, Tom breaks down why he redesigned a fully tooled

product weeks before shipping after watching a Steve Jobs documentary,