Kodiak Cakes: Joel Clark (2020)

When he was 8 years old, Joel Clark loaded bags of his mom's whole grain pancake mix into a red wagon to sell door-to-door. By the mid-90s, he and his older brother had upgraded to selling the mix out of a Mazda sedan and calling it Kodiak Cakes. As he tried to scale the business, Joel made some risky business decisions and almost went bankrupt, but eventually got the brand into Target—a major turning point. Today, Kodiak Cakes is one of the best-selling pancake mixes in America. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Guy Raz?

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• 1:32Guy Raz?

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• 4:23Guy Raz?

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• 5:07Guy Raz?

  Visit mobili fuels.com for details. Hey there, it's Guy here, and I want to wish all of you a very happy new year. And if you happen to be spending a bit of extra time with family and friends this holiday season, you will definitely relate to this episode from the archives. It's the story of Joel Clark and Kodiak Cakes. And almost every member of Joel's immediate family had something to do with the brand. His mom came up with the recipe, his brother started the company, even his dad worked for him for a while. Anyway, it's a great story about family and food with a fair amount of failure and recovery baked in. It first ran about two years ago, and I think you'll love this one.

• 5:52Speaker 01

  So I put together a promotion at Safeway. We were going to offer a dollar off, right? And suddenly, I got a call one day from my distributor rep. And he's like, Joel, he's like, look, some mistake happened, and your promotion got doubled in the system. And it showed $2 off on the shelf. Well, that's a huge discount. That was a deep, deep discount. So he's like, so I turned it off before it got worse. And I was like, oh, man, you gotta be kidding me. This is another near-death experience that we're going to be going through. And when I found out, you know, the bill was 50 grand. Man, I was like, what am I going to do?

• 6:37Guy Raz?

  Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

• 6:49Guy Raz?

  I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how Joel Clark ran into every roadblock you can think of on his way to building Kodiak Cakes, a pancake mix based on his mom's recipe that he grew into a $200 million brand.

• 7:14Guy Raz?

  There are crucial moments in the lifespan of a business that almost every entrepreneur encounters, moments when you face a hard decision. When does your side hustle become your main hustle? What's the right moment to make a pivot in your business model? Or when is it time to give up, learn from your mistakes, and start over? This last question is probably the hardest, because in many cases, it makes sense to cut your losses and move on. If Mark Constantine hadn't shut down his failing mail-order cosmetics company, he probably wouldn't have started Lush.

• 7:54Guy Raz?

  If Topo Otana didn't give up on his failing e-commerce site selling backyard grills, he might never have built Calendly, which got valued at over $1 billion. And if Stuart Butterfield had stuck with his money-losing video game concept Glitch, Slack may never have become a business. But then, there is Joel Clark, co-founder of Kodiak Cakes. The brand is best known for its pancake mix. And for more than 15 years, Joel struggled to make his business sustainable, sometimes, as you will hear, to the point of folly. At one critical juncture, he launched a second business selling cookies just to keep Kodiak

• 8:38Guy Raz?

  Cakes alive. But when the cookie store failed, it almost took Kodiak Cakes down with it. In 2007, Joel thought he could fund the business by investing in a piece of real estate. But months later, the real estate market collapsed. He tried to kickstart sales by launching a product promotion, but it ended up costing him thousands of dollars. And to help pay the bills, he even took a job running a home healthcare company for a while. To be perfectly blunt, Joel had every reason to give up during a 15-year-long streak of failures and struggle. And yet, something kept pulling him back. He really

• 9:20Guy Raz?

  believed that his whole-grain pancake mix could really take off. And the thing is, his hunch was correct. Because today, Kodiak Cakes is one of the best-selling pancake mixes in America, and the company is approaching $200 million in annual revenue. And the thing that got him there? Yes, perseverance, and yes, luck. But also, protein. Specifically, Kodiak's Protein Power Cakes that happened to enter the scene just as a high-protein diet craze was sweeping the country. And it all started as a simple pancake mix created by Joel's mom. Joel grew up in Salt Lake City in the 1970s. He was the youngest of

• 10:05Guy Raz?

  five kids. His dad taught religious classes for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, better known as the Mormon Church. And his mom took care of the house, where she made sure there was never any junk food lying around.

• 10:20Speaker 01

  I remember my friends would come over to our house, and it was always like, "Let's look for food." You know, you're always, that's what you do when you're growing up. Well, you go to my house, and you open up the fridge, and it's full of lettuce and vegetables. And my sister used to say, "Everything we eat is green and brown." So I always loved going to my friends' houses, because they always had all that stuff.

• 10:42Guy Raz?

  You could open up their pantry, and they had, like, gummy bears and jelly things and...

• 10:47Speaker 01

  Doritos.

• 10:47Guy Raz?

  Doritos. I was there. Oreos. I go to my friends' houses, they had, like, pantries full of junk. I'd go back to my house, and we had, like, wheat germ. I was there. Same house.

• 10:56Speaker 01

  Yes. Oh, that's funny, man.

• 10:58Guy Raz?

  So what kind of things would your mom make you eat?

• 11:02Speaker 01

  Every night, we had a salad, every night. And I remember her saying, you know, you should eat a yellow vegetable every day. So we had a lot of carrots or squash and things like that. And then she baked a lot of bread, like whole wheat bread. We had a wheat grinder in the garage. We didn't have a lot of white flour and white sugar. So, you know, everything we ate was clean and whole and real. And I remember her kind of saying that, like, it's about eating real food.

• 11:25Guy Raz?

  Hmm. I guess her whole wheat pancakes were like a family kind of favorite. And then so good that what other people would ask for them when they would come over?

• 11:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, we, well, we loved the whole wheat pancake recipe. So, you know, I have fond memories of waking up to the smell of that. Like, that was an exciting morning. It's like, oh, yes, mom's making pancakes. And they were really good. She'd beat the egg whites, like, you know, separate those, beat them up so they're nice and fluffy white. Fold those into the batter. And it really was a great breakfast. I mean, that was an awesome meal, all whole wheat, freshly ground.

• 12:03Guy Raz?

  She would grind the wheat for her pancake mix?

• 12:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, we had a wheat grinder in the garage and that thing was turned on a lot. It was pretty loud, you could hear it, you know?

• 12:12Guy Raz?

  You just buy like unmilled grains of wheat and then make flour?

• 12:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, you just, yep, the, the whole wheat, throw it in the grinder and it would churn out this freshly ground flour. It was awesome. And so, yeah, our friends would come over once in a while and have those. I remember like my brother's friend having breakfast with us a couple of times. And, I mean, I think it was, some of the neighbors probably asked. I also think it was my mom kind of feeling like, there's a need out there for more real food products made with whole grains. And there's probably an opportunity to sell this, this recipe as a mix.

• 12:47Guy Raz?

  So she was making this pancake mix and decided, hey, I, maybe I'll like package this up and try to sell it door to door?

• 12:54Speaker 01

  Right. She would shop at natural food stores, looking for real ingredients, real food, you know, raw sugar, things like that. And the mainstream supermarkets really just didn't have a lot of options, you know? The whole grains were, they were out there, but they just weren't that common. And so, you know, I think that's how she, why she thought of that this would be a good niche. But I think she also thought there's probably, and maybe she could make some extra money doing it. Because money was tight for us growing up. It was very tight.

• 13:23Guy Raz?

  So she basically said, look, I'll package this up. And how would she sell it?

• 13:28Speaker 01

  So she started packaging these things up and I think the initial plan was, hey, let's try selling these to neighbors and see how it works, see if people like it.

• 13:37Guy Raz?

  And what'd she call it, by the way?

• 13:39Speaker 01

  That's a good question. I don't know if we even had a name for it.

• 13:42Guy Raz?

  What's your mom's name?

• 13:43Speaker 01

  Her name's Penny.

• 13:44Guy Raz?

  Her name's Penny? She didn't call them Penny cakes?

• 13:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:48Guy Raz?

  What?

• 13:49Speaker 01

  She should have.

• 13:50Guy Raz?

  She was blessed with a name like Penny to be used in marketing and advertising and she didn't use her own name?

• 13:56Speaker 01

  Seriously. Yeah, Penny cakes, man. We should have done that.

• 14:00Guy Raz?

  So she's going, she's putting them on like brown paper bags, like lunch bags?

• 14:05Speaker 01

  Totally. So she packed all these brown paper lunch sacks on the counter with the freshly ground wheat, dried milk, and you know, the other ingredients, salt, baking powder, stuff like that. And then she hand wrote on these bags, like my mom has the most incredible handwriting and she literally hand wrote on every bag, how to make it.

• 14:24Guy Raz?

  She hand wrote every single bag on the instruction? Wow.

• 14:28Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 14:28Guy Raz?

  Alright, so you got all these bags?

• 14:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, so she came to me and she said, hey, and I remember her kind of, you know, doing this project and I don't remember how it, how it sort of came about that I was going to do it. I just remember like we were having this conversation. It's like, hey, you know, do you want to go sell these? So we, we loaded up this, I had this old red wagon. We put all these bags in there and I went out and started knocking doors in the neighborhood and asking people if they wanted to buy, buy the pancake mix.

• 14:59Guy Raz?

  And by the way, how much, do you remember how much she sold these bags for?

• 15:02Speaker 01

  You know, I want to say five dollars, but that sounds a little expensive for 1982, you know?

• 15:09Guy Raz?

  But for hand milled wheat, that's pretty great.

• 15:12Speaker 01

  True.

• 15:12Guy Raz?

  And so this is 1982, how old were you at the time?

• 15:15Speaker 01

  I was eight.

• 15:16Guy Raz?

  You're right. Alright, so and so I'm imagining you pulling a red wagon full of pancake mix and did the neighbors buy them?

• 15:25Speaker 01

  They totally did. I remember, I knocked on it. So we lived in a cul-de-sac and I went around to all the neighbors in the cul-de-sac and I, and I think everybody bought one, you know? I mean, I'm this eight-year-old kid, right? And I was actually pretty outgoing as a kid, like that didn't bother me at all. And so, you know, I remember doing that and then going around to some of the other neighbors outside of our street and I ended up selling all the bags that we had.

• 15:46Guy Raz?

  All right, so now there's a viable business. And so, does this become like a family affair at this point?

• 15:53Speaker 01

  No, so you know what happened was, so we, you know, we sold all the mixes in the wagon.

• 15:58Guy Raz?

  Yep.

• 15:59Speaker 01

  But then, we didn't keep going with it. You know, we kind of just let it die out and didn't keep pursuing it at that time.

• 16:05Guy Raz?

  And that was it? That was the end?

• 16:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was it.

• 16:07Guy Raz?

  All right, so you go on, start your life, get through school, and did you do a mission when you were 18?

• 16:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I did. I left when I was 19, just like a month after my birthday.

• 16:19Guy Raz?

  Yep.

• 16:20Speaker 01

  And, uh, yeah, I did, I went to Australia.

• 16:22Guy Raz?

  Wow, that's pretty great.

• 16:24Speaker 01

  I was stoked about that. That was, I was like, perfect, right? Go foreign, didn't have to learn a language.

• 16:29Guy Raz?

  And, you know, we've talked about this on the show a little bit, and I love this example. People who listen to the show know about this. Young Mormons who go on missions, I think, are very well-prepared to become entrepreneurs, because you're knocking on a thousand doors a week and 900 of them are just like slamming in your face. And you still have to be polite, right?

• 16:47Speaker 01

  You do. It's so hard. It's one of the hardest things I've ever done in my life. You know? I mean, yeah, you're just doing that over and over and trying to talk to people, trying to get somebody to listen to you. And you get all this rejection.

• 17:01Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 17:02Speaker 01

  Sometimes people are nice, but, and most of the time, people are nice. But, you know, every now and then, you get someone who is, who's just upset. And they're just like, "Man, get out of here." And, you know, it's, that happens.

• 17:13Guy Raz?

  And how long did you spend in Australia? Was it a two-year mission?

• 17:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was two years.

• 17:17Guy Raz?

  All right, so you, you come back from your mission. You go to college at the University of Utah.

• 17:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:23Guy Raz?

  And then, I guess while you're in college, um, your, your older brother John is like, "Hey, I'm gonna, I'm gonna start a business selling pancake mix based on mom's pancake recipe?"

• 17:34Speaker 01

  That's exactly what happened. It was, is actually, he started thinking about this while I was still on my mission. And so, he started talking to my mom about how he wanted to start a business. And, uh, my mom was the one who kind of planted the idea of, you know, "Hey, John, why don't you take the pancake recipe and make a real product and start a business on that?"

• 17:53Guy Raz?

  And just out of curiosity, what was the value proposition here? Was there, I mean, there was Aunt Jemima and there's plenty of pancake mix, Bisquick and whatever, you know, out there. What was this? This was different because it was whole grain pancake mix and that that wasn't really out there?

• 18:08Speaker 01

  Well, yeah. So the way John thought about it was he thought, he didn't think there were enough really great whole grain options out there, which is true. The pancake category really didn't have much in it in the way of healthy items. But he also thought, look, if I can get a product that tastes awesome, that's number one, that is healthier, number two, and then convenience was the other thing he was really going for. So he wanted a product that was just add water. And he felt like if he could get all three in one, then then he really accomplished something.

• 18:39Guy Raz?

  And did you say, did you kind of reach out to him and say, hey, I want to, I want to join you?

• 18:44Speaker 01

  Well, the, the timing of this was so perfect because I was getting off of my mission in October of 1995. And so I, I went and stayed with, with John and his wife temporarily until I could figure out what I was going to do. And so right then, that's when John was about ready to go out and start selling this pancake mix that he had been working on, you know, while I was gone. And so timing, that was great. And John said, hey, Joel, do you want to, do you want to help me? And he wanted to kind of, you know, obviously evolve it from where we did it out of the red wagon. Make a real product, create a brand, and then go start selling this in stores.

• 19:18Guy Raz?

  And how, how did he have any capital to do this? I mean, he, I guess he was a bit older than you at that point. He was probably in his late twenties.

• 19:26Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 19:27Guy Raz?

  How did he have any cash to even start this up?

• 19:29Speaker 01

  It was incredibly tight. So John was about 28 when he started this. And as he got ready to, to really start putting money into it, I helped him find a truck that he was able to flip. So I used to flip old trucks and make money on them. And I still do it, actually. It's pretty fun.

• 19:45Guy Raz?

  You just buy a truck and fix it up?

• 19:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, buy an old truck, fix it up, sell it and make money on it. And I did that all, I mean, I did that all through college and, and, you know, I paid for my mission that way, most of my mission that way. And what I would do is, look, this is really funny. I would go around, I'd drive around neighborhoods. I'd see an old truck on the side of the house and I'd, I'd walk up to the door and go, hey, do you want to sell your truck? And man, I had so many people say, yeah, actually, we're not driving that truck anymore. And often you'd find them in really good condition. So they would just need like, you know, a detail being cleaned up, maybe a little bit of paint touch up or, you know. So usually minor things.

• 20:23Speaker 01

  So, you know, I found this truck for John and John drove it around for a while and then he, um, he sold it and he made 1,400 bucks. And so he was kind of like, look, I think I can actually start my business on this.

• 20:36Guy Raz?

  On 1,400 dollars?

• 20:37Speaker 01

  On 1,400 bucks, yeah.

• 20:39Guy Raz?

  Wow. So you're in college, he's starting this thing up and you want to be involved with it. What do you do?

• 20:48Speaker 01

  So I had time and so John was ready to go. He was ready to, he had found a little producer in Salt Lake City to produce the first kind of run of, of Kodiak cakes.

• 20:59Guy Raz?

  And by the way, was he calling them that by that point?

• 21:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, actually by then he had, he had created the brand, created the first product.

• 21:07Guy Raz?

  And how did he come up with that name?

• 21:09Speaker 01

  Well, the way John approached it was, what he really wanted something that was rustic, that was, you know, wholesome, that had a bit of a Western rugged feel to it. And so, you know, he, he and my older brother, Tim, my oldest brother, Tim, they were talking about it one day and kind of just brainstorming ideas. And Tim said to John, he's like, hey, John, what about bear cakes? And we grew up kind of hearing stories from our dad who lived in Alaska when he was in his early twenties on a survey crew. And he tells these stories about Kodiak bears and that evolved into Kodiak cakes.

• 21:43Guy Raz?

  What did the package look like?

• 21:45Speaker 01

  So it looked pretty similar to what it looks like today. The logo hasn't changed a lot. It has a big bear on the front, brown craft look, you know? But what was different about it then is it was in a paper bag, like a printed craft paper bag. And it was like sewn across the top, you know, to, to seal it off.

• 22:04Guy Raz?

  Oh yeah, the bag was sewn, right? So you had to like, uh, cut it off or take the string out.

• 22:10Speaker 01

  Exactly. Take the string out.

• 22:11Guy Raz?

  By the way, that logo, if, if anyone listening can picture it, right? There's that bear growling and it says Kodiak cakes. It's got like a, it's sort of a maroon rust colored circle around it with wheat. And basically what it looks like today was what it, what he made in 1995?

• 22:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, it's, we've, we have been just some subtle changes over time, but I mean, the bear hasn't changed at all, for example.

• 22:34Guy Raz?

  So tell me, how did you guys, as you kind of started up this business? Where did you go to, would you just go door to door to little shops?

• 22:45Speaker 01

  That's it.

• 22:45Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 22:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's basically exactly what I did. So John, John had a full-time job still. So we had this product ready to go, which we stored in his basement. We made this little makeshift warehouse down there.

• 22:56Guy Raz?

  Right, so this was his side hustle. You were a student.

• 22:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:59Guy Raz?

  And where were you going to try and get people to carry your pancake mix?

• 23:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I remember the first day, John went to work and I was gonna go out by myself. So I started downtown Salt Lake and I started going into hotel gift shops. And I remember thinking, man, I have, we have no idea how to sell a product. I'm just gonna walk in and start talking to people, right?

• 23:20Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 23:20Speaker 01

  And so I started going to these hotel gift shops and people were like, hey, that's actually really cool. You know, leave me a sample here and I'll talk to my manager about it, right? And so we'd, you know, we'd get a business card so we could follow up or whatever. So I started there and then just a few, like I remember I went into a flower shop in Salt Lake that had gifts and a furniture store that had gifts. And so that was kind of my first day out was right in Salt Lake.

• 23:44Guy Raz?

  Huh. You know, this is just, this is like just going back to your mission. You're, right?

• 23:50Speaker 01

  Yes, that's so true. That's really funny, cuz man, I, yeah, I was fresh home. I mean, I had been home a month. I was ready to go, like that, that did not faze me at all, right? Walking into these stores, yeah.

• 24:02Guy Raz?

  And so you start with just like hotel gift shops and small gift shops here and there and, and mainly in Salt Lake? Or did you, did you venture out of Salt Lake?

• 24:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the first day or, you know, maybe a couple of days I was in Salt Lake. And then on December 1st, 1995, John and I took a trip to Jackson, Wyoming. We left at like 4 a.m., 4 or 5 a.m. We got in his car and I remember he had this, he had this Mazda 626 and, and it would hold exactly 19 cases of Kodiak cakes.

• 24:35Speaker 01

  And the cases were big. I mean, they were 30 pound cases back then.

• 24:38Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 24:38Speaker 01

  And so, you know, we're putting like almost 600 pounds of product in his car.

• 24:42Guy Raz?

  By the way, a Mazda 626 was a sedan.

• 24:45Speaker 01

  It was a sedan, yeah.

• 24:46Guy Raz?

  A mid, it's not a truck, okay.

• 24:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, so load that thing up with all this, all this pancake mix. And you know, so John and I, we get up there and we both just kind of went out and started walking into all these gift shops in Jackson, Wyoming, selling pancake mix. So by the end of the day, we sold all 19 cases of product into all, into these gift shops. And so, you know, we were like, yeah, that was a, that was a successful day.

• 25:10Guy Raz?

  So you would go in with a bag of pancake mix because normally you'd go, like, you would think that, you know, you have a sample, right? Like if you were selling soap or cosmetics, but you've got a bag of pancake mix, but you didn't have like prepared pancakes. You, you weren't able to say like, hey, try this pancake.

• 25:26Speaker 01

  Right.

• 25:26Guy Raz?

  It was a bag of mix.

• 25:28Speaker 01

  That's exactly, yeah. We, we couldn't make it right then. And, but what happened is these people looked at it and they're like, this is the coolest packaging. Oh man, this will work great in here.

• 25:37Guy Raz?

  But even then, I mean, for every 30 customers or 50 customers in a gift shop, 40 of them are really there to buy breath mints or cigarettes or, you know, whatever they might buy.

• 25:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:49Guy Raz?

  Maybe one out of 50 would buy the Kodiak cakes. So, so I mean, how were you gonna get any attention for it?

• 25:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, honestly, that was tough. I mean, we, you know, we, we did, we picked up a few more. We went to Sun Valley, Idaho the next weekend and did the same thing. And I think we ended up picking up about maybe 50 gift shops in the first, you know, few weeks. So we're kind of like, okay, cool. We got 50 gift shops. And, and then I think that was really one of the hardest things was gift shops, you don't sell a lot. I mean, just what you were saying, you, you don't sell a lot in a gift shop.

• 26:19Guy Raz?

  Yeah. And, and by the way, when, when they were placed in gift shops, how did it work? Would, would the gift shops just pay you when they sold the bag?

• 26:27Speaker 01

  No, they would, they would buy the case. So they would luckily pay us. So they'd, you know, they'd say, hey, I'll take a case or two. And then they, you know, we'd give them 30 day terms or whatever. And then they'd, they'd pay us.

• 26:36Guy Raz?

  Right. And they were selling, do you remember how much they were trying to sell or they would sell the bag for? They retail it for?

• 26:42Speaker 01

  I think that we sold those bags into the stores for $2.99. And then they would sell, they'd double it. They'd basically try to put a 50% margin on there and try to get $5.99 out of it.

• 26:53Guy Raz?

  Right. And, and in general, did you have any feedback from those stores about how sales were doing?

• 26:59Speaker 01

  Actually, yes. People loved it. I mean, people loved the product and for a gift shop, it was doing well. And I think that the best feedback we started to get were that people started to write letters in and that was just incredible. I mean, we started getting the letters in. One day, John got this letter from Tom Bodett, the guy that does, he's a spokesman for Motel Six and he, he lived in Alaska and he wrote the coolest letter and you know, he had sent a picture of him and his girlfriend in their cabin up in Alaska making pancakes on this cast iron griddle. It was so cool, but, but these letters started to come in and people would say, hey, this is the best pancake mix I've ever had.

• 27:35Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 27:36Speaker 01

  You know, how do I get more?

• 27:37Guy Raz?

  But I mean, clearly, you know, you guys are not becoming millionaires.

• 27:43Speaker 01

  Right.

• 27:44Guy Raz?

  Through the occasional gift shops and ski towns and, and I guess after a certain amount of time, I mean, the stress of running the business becomes kind of overwhelming for your brother.

• 27:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, I mean, after a couple of years, it was just, it was becoming, yeah, he was spending so much time at it and he was working full time and he had a little baby and he wanted to go back to graduate school to pursue an MBA and just to, you know, keep building his career. And this was taking so long. And one day he was, you know, he was in his basement, just kind of thinking about how much he had put into this. And, you know, we talked about 1,400 bucks from a truck he flipped and then he took, he scraped together everything else that he had from some retirement and some savings and some, you know, smaller contributions from family members. And, and it ended up in the 20,000s. I can't remember

• 28:37Speaker 01

  exactly how much he had spent, but you know, it was everything he had. And for a 28, 29 year old person is like, so one day he's down there and he just had a breakdown and he just was in tears, you know, and he's just sitting there going, man. What did I do? Why did I waste so much time doing this? And he, he had all these boxes of pancake mix still down there in that little makeshift warehouse in his basement. And he picked up a bunch of boxes and he just threw them against the wall, you know, and they just exploded. And he, he really did. He just had a breakdown. It was just hard. Because he started, you know, the culmination of that, just realizing that, you know, I can't keep going with this. I've put so much time and so much, everything I had and, and, and he worked on it

• 29:17Speaker 01

  almost every night for years, you know, three plus years on this thing. And so, you know, that, that's when he kind of realized I've, I've got to just shut it down or, you know, find another path for it. He actually tried to sell it. That didn't work. And so, you know, that's when he came to me and said, hey Joel, do you wanna, do you wanna keep going with this thing?

• 29:36Guy Raz?

  Did you immediately say, yes, I want, I wanna take it over. Yeah, I'll, I'll, I'll run it.

• 29:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was immediate for me. And it's probably, it's funny, when you're that age, you don't always think through the long-term implications as well as you should. And sometimes that's good, right? Because if you do, then maybe you don't take risks.

• 29:54Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 29:54Speaker 01

  As much as, as you would. But yeah, I mean, when he, when he talked to me about it, I was like, absolutely, I'd love to do it. And I had a real entrepreneurial mindset. I mean, I really did want to do something. Start a business someday. I, I just, I didn't know what it was going to be then. I kind of thought, you know, I'm gonna go to school, I'll, maybe I'll probably take a job for a while. And then maybe I'll look at what to do. And little did I know that it was gonna be pancakes at, you know, 23 years old.

• 30:22Guy Raz?

  And do you remember what kind of revenue you guys did in that first year?

• 30:26Speaker 01

  Uh, you know, in the first year, I don't recall. It was, because it was November and December, but the one, what I do remember is, so, you know, when I took it over later in two, in 1997, the revenue that year was $29,000 total revenue.

• 30:41Guy Raz?

  For the year.

• 30:42Speaker 01

  For the year, yep. And so we were selling just these, you know, this limited number of stores that aren't moving a whole lot of units per week. Cause people would, they would get it on vacation, right? And then they'd go home and they couldn't get it. But yet, we, we could see that people really loved the product. And so it was like, man, if we could just figure out how to hang in here on this long enough and how to get some distribution going, this could work.

• 31:08Guy Raz?

  So how did that, I mean, it's your brother, right? So it's in the family. But did, you know, I've talked to co-founders. Did you guys sit down and kind of formally divide it up? Do you say, well, look, you know, I started it. So I still own 70% and you know, you're going to get 30%. Or was it just kind of like, here you go. And it was very informal.

• 31:26Speaker 01

  It was actually informal, but well, it was, it was informal that way. But you know what we did? What we did to actually formalize it? We actually made a little contract and John literally sold me the business for a dollar. So, so he basically gave it to me. And I think, you know, I think in his mind, it was like, I'm going to shut this thing down.

• 31:48Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 31:48Speaker 01

  So what the heck? Give it to Joel. See if he can do anything with it. And at the time it was, it was, I was running it as a sole proprietorship, which means we hadn't even incorporated the business. And so, you know, it was in, not until about 1999 that I actually incorporated the business. And then I went back to John and I gave him half the shares back.

• 32:10Guy Raz?

  All right. So you, you become sole proprietorship. And by the way, you're making the pancake mix yourself or do you have somebody make it for you?

• 32:17Speaker 01

  We actually, no, we did have somebody making it for us in Salt Lake City.

• 32:21Guy Raz?

  To, they had the recipe, your recipe, and they would make it for you.

• 32:24Speaker 01

  Right.

• 32:24Guy Raz?

  And the same thing, were you like hustling on weekends and, and, because you were a student, right?

• 32:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was going to school. I was working a part-time job and I mean, for me, I wasn't, you know, I wasn't married. I, I had a pretty, I had time, you know, I didn't have as many obligations. And so I started to drum up more gift shops and, and just, you know, try to get as many accounts as I could. And, and then started to think about, okay, how do we, you know, how do we get this into grocery stores?

• 32:54Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 32:55Speaker 01

  So yeah, I would work, I was working nights on this thing every day.

• 32:58Guy Raz?

  This is the late 90s. Did you think that this had legs? That this could be something really huge? Or did you think, did you think, well, it's my side hustle, but I'm going to probably pursue something a little bit more stable?

• 33:12Speaker 01

  So yeah, do you know what's interesting is when I first took it over, I thought, I mean, seriously, I was like, I'm going to make this thing go now. You know, but what happened was like, it was, it became, the reality check hit pretty hard, pretty fast as I got into it. And I started to realize that. Holy cow, this is actually gonna be a while. This is going to be hard.

• 33:36Guy Raz?

  And what were your, I mean, besides, obviously, money, what were the other limitations that you were facing at that point?

• 33:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, right. Money was huge. We had no capital to put into this thing. But you know, I think the other real limitation was, I was 23 years old with no experience. Like, I had zero experience. The only thing I really had was a lot of enthusiasm, you know, and some confidence, which is, which is good. But, man, I knew nothing about how to get a food product off the ground, you know, nothing.

• 34:05Guy Raz?

  While you were, I mean, running this as a sole proprietorship and then as a small business, and still just you in the early 2000s, right?

• 34:13Speaker 01

  Right.

• 34:14Guy Raz?

  Um, how were you actually earning a living if, if your revenue was still fairly low?

• 34:20Speaker 01

  So I, right out, well, during my senior year at the University of Utah, I took a job working for a management consulting firm. It was right downtown Salt Lake. And after I graduated, they wanted me to take a full-time job there. And I told them, I said, look, how about if I work 30 hours a week and then that way I'll still have time for my little, my little side hustle, the pancake business. And so they were good with it. So I worked there to make money. And then, you know, on the side, I was flipping cars to try to make extra money.

• 34:49Guy Raz?

  Buying cars, detailing them, fixing them up, and that's how you'd make money?

• 34:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, that saved our bacon, man. Because I was married at the time. I got married fairly young. Utah standards is probably average. I got married just before I turned 24.

• 35:04Guy Raz?

  And, and did you, were you telling people, like, would you talk about this to people? You would say, yeah, I got this pancake mix business going, like, at the, at your job and with friends? Were you talking to everybody about it or were you kind of quiet about it?

• 35:19Speaker 01

  You know, I was never, like, I would talk about it, just if people would ask. But yeah, I talked about it. It was, it was fun. And I'd bring it up. You know, and I wasn't shy about trying to go and get publicity either. I mean, I really did try hard to go and get publicity.

• 35:31Guy Raz?

  And you just couldn't?

• 35:33Speaker 01

  No, I actually did. I actually had some pretty good success with it. I remember somebody one day said, hey, Joel, you could probably go get a newspaper article on this. And this is like 1998, right? 1998, 1999. The internet's out there, but, but not a lot. So I'm, I'm like, okay, I'll see if I can get a newspaper article. So I remember I called up the Deseret News one day and I got this.

• 35:54Guy Raz?

  It's the main paper in Salt Lake, right?

• 35:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like the, the, exactly. Yeah. Deseret News, big newspaper. I call, I got the, the food editor on the phone. And I just started telling her my, my story and, and our story about this pancake mix. And she said, oh, that sounds really cool. I, I may want to do a story on you. Can you send me a press release? And I go, I'm like, what's a press release?

• 36:15Speaker 01

  I literally said that to her and she goes, just type it up. Just type up the story, you know, kind of what you talked about and send it to me. So I did. And then, you know, she called me up and she's like, hey, we're going to run a story on you. We're going to send a photographer out and, um, they, you know, I was at work this one morning that the story hit. She told me it was going to hit and I, I can't remember what day of the week it was, but she told me in advance, hey, we're going to run the story. It's going to hit, you know, Tuesday or whatever. And so I'm sitting there at work and all of a sudden I get this phone call from Dan's Grocery Store on Foothill Drive in Salt Lake and, and, and the, the grocery manager calls me. She's like, Joel, you gotta get over here. We sold out of your pancake mix by, by 10 a.m.

• 36:57Speaker 01

  And we need more. And I'm like, oh my gosh, you gotta be kidding me. I didn't even think about like getting more product in the store. I had no idea what this newspaper article would do. And so I told my boss, I'm like, um, I gotta go, you know, so I left work and I, I went home and I grabbed, because I was delivering the pancake mix into these five grocery stores, these five Dan's Grocery Stores, among everything else I was doing, but that was, so they called me up and I, I went in and I, I reloaded the shelf. And I, and she's like, I'll take like 10 cases. And I'm like, oh, okay. You know, usually I'd go in and take one case a week or last, you know, every other week.

• 37:30Guy Raz?

  And Dan's was your biggest distributor at that point?

• 37:33Speaker 01

  In Salt Lake it was. We, we had, my brother John had gotten the product into QFC Grocery Stores up in Seattle prior to me taking it over. So they were our biggest.

• 37:43Guy Raz?

  All right. So it is 2000.

• 37:47Guy Raz?

  And because you had not taken any outside investment at this point. I mean, maybe we're not able to attract outside investment at this point because you were so small.

• 37:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 37:57Guy Raz?

  But I guess a friend of the family gave you like a check for $13,000. What's the story about that?

• 38:05Speaker 01

  So yeah, this guy, his name's Gary Beener. A neighbor of my parents loved Kodiak cakes. He'd buy it at Dan's down the road. And he would, he started talking to us and he's like, hey, I love this pancake mix. This is awesome. You need investment money. And, you know, John and I, we would talk, I was running it, but we would talk all the time. And, and I remember thinking, yeah, it would be really nice to get a little bit of capital to, you know, try to do some, do some advertising, try to do some marketing and just try to help kind of kickstart this little business. And so Gary, John, and I, we all started talking and Gary said, all right, guys, I'll put 35,000 bucks in for, I can't remember, it was like 18% of the business or something like that.

• 38:47Speaker 01

  He's like, look, let's start with 13,000 and then when you need more, you know, we can, we can give you the rest of the money. So I went to Gary's house one night to pick up a check, you know? So I knocked on his door, we chatted for a little bit, and he wrote me a check for $13,000. And man, I walked, I had never seen that much money. Like I walked out of there, I'm like, I was probably, what was I, 24, something like that, 25. I walked out of his house just going scared, like, oh man, I've got to get this guy's money back. I've got to do it.

• 39:21Guy Raz?

  When we come back in just a moment, Joel starts making cookies to sell more pancakes and nearly loses everything after a failed promotion put some $50,000 in the hole. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This.

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• 43:27Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's the early 2000s and Joel Clark has brought in his very first investment in Kodiak Cakes, a check for $13,000. And he's starting to gain some traction, getting his pancake mix into stores in and around Salt Lake City.

• 43:47Speaker 01

  I managed to get it into Smith's grocery stores around here. That was 70 stores. And then the distributor for these Dan's stores took it in. And then we got some Albertson's stores. So I think I was able to get it into maybe around 150 grocery stores during that year. The revenue was around, I got it up to about $150,000 in total revenue.

• 44:09Guy Raz?

  And it was one product. It was pancake mix. That was it.

• 44:12Speaker 01

  Correct. One SKU, like one product.

• 44:15Guy Raz?

  And I read that around this time, you actually like decided to go attend business school in the UK at Oxford. And you got someone to keep the business going in Salt Lake while you were gone.

• 44:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:28Guy Raz?

  And then what? Like you just came back to Utah and picked up where you left off?

• 44:33Speaker 01

  I did, yeah. I came back to Salt Lake and I actually went back to, I went back to the consulting company.

• 44:39Guy Raz?

  Oh, wow. So you went back to doing consulting because it was a steady income?

• 44:43Speaker 01

  Right.

• 44:44Guy Raz?

  But still working on Kodiak?

• 44:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was.

• 44:48Guy Raz?

  I guess around this time, it's like 2003, you start to think about jumping into Kodiak full-time? And just doing, just focusing on that business?

• 44:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I really wanted to. And so like after I got back from school, so I got home in the fall of 2002. And I went back to the consulting firm for about, almost two years, just over a year and a half. And while I did that, my brother-in-law ran it part-time out of my in-law's basement. So I'd help him and we'd work on it at night together and he kept it going during the day. So in 2004, I had been working on sales, you know, kind of part-time and I'd been working with Safeway. And I sent some samples out to this buyer. Her name was Donna Sullivan. She called me and she's like, hey, Joel, we're going to bring your pancake mix in to 1,200 stores. I was about to like fall out of my chair.

• 45:39Guy Raz?

  Wait, let me just get this straight. How did you, how did you pitch your product to Safeway? Did you just kind of blind cold call them?

• 45:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's exactly right. So I would cold call buyers. I'd just get on the phone. I'd call the headquarters office and say, hey, who's the buyer for pancake mixes or whatever? And I just sent her samples. I don't even know if I spoke to her initially, or if I just left a voicemail and sent samples. Then when she called me and told me she wanted to bring it in, I had never even met with her. And usually you need to meet with these people.

• 46:10Guy Raz?

  Yeah, and I'm just curious. I mean, when you send something, like we've done lots of products, like Tate's Cookies, or Angie's Boom Chicka Pop. When you send a sample of that, all the person has to do is open the bag and eat it.

• 46:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:23Guy Raz?

  With you, with your product, like, somebody has to take that to a kitchen, add water, and make pancakes. Like, that's not... And they must get hundreds of pitches every week, people sending them all kinds of things. I'm just surprised that they actually made them and tried them.

• 46:40Speaker 01

  Totally. The odds are kind of piled up against you, right? When you have, no one knows who you are, you have no track record. What we had going for us was great packaging that was so unique. And, you know, finally Donna calls me and says, hey Joel, we're gonna bring this into 1,200 stores. And I'm like, but we've never met. Do you want me to come down and, and meet you? She's like, no, we're beyond that. We're good. We're gonna, and we're gonna move ahead.

• 47:05Guy Raz?

  So that, right then, I mean, you're gonna be in 1,200 Safeway stores. This is real.

• 47:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:09Guy Raz?

  So I'm assuming this is when you decide, okay, I gotta, I gotta focus on this full time?

• 47:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. So when that happened, I'm like, okay, I think I can live on this. So, you know, but, but, you know, keep in mind, it's one SKU, right? And so it sounded like awesome. But I really didn't know. I didn't have a great feel for how much I was gonna sell.

• 47:28Guy Raz?

  And what kind of order? Well, how much, what was the amount of money that they were gonna spend on this?

• 47:33Speaker 01

  It was probably in the realm of 20, 25,000 bucks, you know, something like that.

• 47:37Guy Raz?

  You're thinking 1,200 Safeway stores. You're a millionaire. No, no. This is like a 20, 30,000 dollar order.

• 47:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:43Guy Raz?

  Cause you're still, I mean, even, I mean, you're not sure that this business is gonna make it at this point, right? Like, like at this time, you were still like flipping cars and you started to flip houses. And then I read like, around this time, you actually started like a whole new business, like a, a cookie company? What was the cookie company?

• 48:05Speaker 01

  So it was called Ben's Cookies and it was a, it's a, it's a company that exists in England. It's a great business, great product. And my wife and I were regular customers when we were in graduate school over there. And so one day I sat at a coffee shop with the owner before I was leaving grad school to come home. And I said, Hey, I'd love to start one of these in Utah.

• 48:26Guy Raz?

  So you started a branch, like a brick and mortar Ben's Cookies shop in Utah?

• 48:31Speaker 01

  I did. We opened up two of them.

• 48:33Guy Raz?

  And you put all the money behind it?

• 48:35Speaker 01

  No, I put some, I didn't have a lot. So I borrowed the rest. I had a little bit left on my student loan to go. And so I took the rest of my student loan and put it towards it. And then my partner put the rest, he lent the business, the rest of the capital to get started.

• 48:50Guy Raz?

  Ben, your partner?

• 48:52Speaker 01

  His name's Chris.

• 48:53Guy Raz?

  Oh, Chris. Why was it called Ben's Cookies?

• 48:55Speaker 01

  It was the original founder who started it. Her son's name was Ben, so she named it after him.

• 49:00Guy Raz?

  I'm looking at their website now. Yum. Ginger, dark chocolate, lemon, orange and milk chocolate cookies. Wow. It looks so good.

• 49:08Speaker 01

  They are awesome, awesome cookies.

• 49:10Guy Raz?

  And how does it do? How'd it do?

• 49:13Speaker 01

  So yeah, we ended up opening one in Orem, which is about 45 minutes south of Salt Lake. And then one in Salt Lake. And the one in Orem, it just didn't do well. We had to shut it after a year and a half. And then the one in Salt Lake did better. I mean, we, we, we kept that going for about 10 years. But, but it was hard. I mean, it was, that was another side hustle that I had added. I was spread thin and I was trying to do Kodiak cakes. And when I first opened that store, I was still working in the consulting world. So that was just, I bit off a ton just trying to do too much.

• 49:45Guy Raz?

  Wow. I have to imagine you lost some money from that venture.

• 49:50Speaker 01

  I did. It was super painful.

• 49:53Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 49:53Speaker 01

  And my partner lost a lot more than I did. So it was, it was painful for, for both of us.

• 49:59Guy Raz?

  And this plan was to bring you more income for your family, but it wasn't working.

• 50:06Guy Raz?

  I read that at one point you went to a bankruptcy lawyer to exploit your option.

• 50:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, I did. So what happened in 2007, let me back up just a bit. So in 2004, my dad joined me out of retirement. He was 65 years old and he's like, hey, Joel, I'll help you. Let's do this together.

• 50:23Guy Raz?

  And this is your dad with a PhD in education and had been teaching religious studies for the church. So not a whole lot of business experience.

• 50:31Speaker 01

  Not a lot. I mean, what's cool about my dad, though, is he always had a little, he had a side hustle all those years because he just, he didn't make a lot of money from teaching. So that, my dad and I had managed to build revenue up to around 800,000. So we had some pretty good success over those years, right? And 800,000 is still pretty small, but 2007 was a hard year. I mean, I think what happened was I actually tried to sell the business in early 2007. It didn't work. Gas prices went through the roof in 2007. Egg white prices went crazy. Wheat prices went up. So I was just, we were getting squeezed and our margins were getting, you know, just getting hurt. And so when we were getting squeezed, I remember this phone call on Valentine's Day from our producer and he goes,

• 51:17Speaker 01

  the guys that were manufacturing Kodiak cakes, and he's like, Joel, are you sitting down? I've got some bad news. He's like, we have to raise your price by 11 and a half percent today. And I was just floored. I was like, you gotta be kidding me. It's another, I don't know how I'm gonna make it. And, and so, you know, it was Valentine's Day, so I didn't tell my wife. We went to dinner that night and I didn't want to tell her because I didn't want to like wreck the night because I was so stirred up and just concerned about it. And I, I, I decided that I had to quit Kodiak cakes. And in early 2008, I took a job and left Kodiak cakes and I licensed the brand over to another

• 52:00Speaker 01

  small business to kind of manage for me and to pay me a royalty.

• 52:04Guy Raz?

  Because you couldn't find a buyer, somebody to buy you out?

• 52:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I couldn't find anybody to buy it. And so this, this royalty deal looked great on paper. It was like, okay, I don't have to sell it and somebody else can manage it, pay a royalty, and I can go get a job and make more money. I just wasn't making it. I wasn't making enough money.

• 52:19Guy Raz?

  You were like 33, 34 at this point? Had kids already?

• 52:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, three kids by then in 2008.

• 52:26Guy Raz?

  And probably not a whole lot of savings?

• 52:28Speaker 01

  Like nothing, you know, just kind of squeaking by trying to make it.

• 52:33Speaker 01

  It was hard. So, you know, I took, I took that job.

• 52:35Guy Raz?

  What was the job you took?

• 52:37Speaker 01

  So I went and ran a home healthcare agency in Salt Lake and I had found this company. They were looking for somebody to come in and help, you know, run the business and so I took it.

• 52:47Guy Raz?

  And meantime, you licensed the, the brand Kodiak Cakes to some other manufacturer.

• 52:52Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 52:53Guy Raz?

  And did you make any money off that?

• 52:56Speaker 01

  A little bit, you know, I was making like five, it was, I think we did like a 5% royalty. And so, yeah, there was a little bit of extra income there, which really helped. And so, cause the thing that I did, the other thing that really contributed to this whole thing in 2007 was I was being the distracted entrepreneur a little bit. I bought and sold a couple of homes, made some money, and then we put all the money we made onto a lot. We bought a lot, like a building lot.

• 53:19Guy Raz?

  Oh, in 2007?

• 53:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, near the end of 2007.

• 53:23Guy Raz?

  Bad time.

• 53:24Speaker 01

  Oh, you could not have picked a worse time. And we thought we got a great deal in this lot that we could maybe flip it. Well, not long after that, the market just tanked and we were stuck with this lot.

• 53:36Guy Raz?

  Oh.

• 53:36Speaker 01

  That over, you know, over the next couple of years, I just started to get eaten alive, you know, financially from that. But then what happened was the, it just, this licensing agreement that we had put together, it just wasn't working. The company that we were, you know, that was managing the brand Kodiak Cakes, they had other things to do and, you know, it wasn't a massive focus and, you know, a couple of mistakes were made and the revenue started to really dip. Pricing mistakes went through, we lost some accounts. And it wasn't just, it wasn't completely their fault. I mean, there were some, you know, innocent mistakes that happened, but it did create kind of a, we lost some, we lost significant revenue. I think we lost about 25% of the revenue.

• 54:18Guy Raz?

  So you, you felt like they were mismanaging the, the brand?

• 54:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, there was some mismanagement.

• 54:23Guy Raz?

  And, and so you had the right to withdraw the contract, the licensing deal and take it back over?

• 54:29Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 54:31Guy Raz?

  But here's my question. I mean, you, you had financial problems. I mean, you had this lot that you were settled with, you had this, the cookie business that wasn't really working. You were, you know, in debt. I mean, you had no savings. Finally get this job paying you pretty well as a CEO of a healthcare agency.

• 54:51Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 54:52Guy Raz?

  And you decide to leave that and go back to Kodiak Cakes. I mean, that's pretty risky. What, I mean, weren't you worried about your financial situation?

• 55:03Speaker 01

  I was so worried. I was incredibly worried. But what, you know, what happened is I just, you know, I talked to my wife and I just thought, you know, I've already spent 11 years on this thing. Like, you know, what's the worst thing that can happen? And I started to go there and I started to think, well, maybe I go bankrupt. Well, if that's the worst, I'm not going to die. And here's the other thing, Guy, that was really weighing on my mind was I was 34 years old. Like, those are really prime career building years. And not only was I walking into more financial risk, but I was walking away a big opportunity cost to really building my career. And that was a fear for me, because I remember thinking, man, if I go into this

• 55:47Speaker 01

  pancake gig and it doesn't work, what do I have to show for myself? You know, I didn't, I wasn't in consulting long enough to, to really gain a skill that could command a great income. And I wasn't CEO of this home healthcare business long enough to become a great CEO. And so I was worried about that. That was, that was hard.

• 56:08Guy Raz?

  So you come back to the company and this is what, 2008, 2009?

• 56:16Speaker 01

  2008, yeah, end of 2008.

• 56:18Guy Raz?

  So financial crisis, like, you know, the economy's tanking. And I guess, pretty soon after you rejoined, you, you actually made a decision that cost the business 50,000 bucks? Is that true?

• 56:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. Man, you dug deep, Guy.

• 56:37Guy Raz?

  What did you do?

• 56:38Speaker 01

  Seriously. I made a, I made, it was kind of an innocent mistake. But what happened was, so I decided to exercise my right and take it back. And I put together a promotion at Safeway. It was going to be a dollar off. It was like a, they had a Christmas display and they put these unique products on these tables out in front of the store. And so Kodiak Cakes was going to be on there and we were going to offer a dollar off, right? So, but what happened was somehow that promotion got doubled in the system and it was, it showed $2 off on the shelf. Well, that's a huge discount. That was a deep, deep discount. And so consumers were, people were buying it like crazy. And suddenly I got a call one day

• 57:20Speaker 01

  from my distributor rep and he's like, Joel, he's like, look, some mistake happened and your promotion got doubled in the system. And it's been $2 and we're selling. So he's like, so I, I turned it off before it got worse. And I was like, oh, man, you gotta be kidding me. You know, I'm like, oh, crap, this is another near death experience that we're going to be going through. And I, when I found out, you know, the bill was 50 grand. Man, I was like, what am I gonna do?

• 57:48Guy Raz?

  You did sell a lot of pancake mix, probably, though.

• 57:51Speaker 01

  We did. We sold a ton. So yeah, so the silver lining.

• 57:54Guy Raz?

  You gave away a ton, I should say.

• 57:56Speaker 01

  We did. So I, so my dad came down, he was, he would, I had gotten a teeny tiny one room office downtown Salt Lake. And I just said to my dad, I said, Dad, I told him what happened. And I said, look, I've got this $50,000 problem. Man, I, I sobbed in that office, man. My dad is in there. God, I'm getting teary now, just thinking about it. But, but it was just, God, it was just, I thought about just all the years I'd put into this thing. And, and still it was just barely getting by, you know, I had just quit my job. Man, I'm sorry, guy. I'm just like,

• 58:33Guy Raz?

  No, it's all right.

• 58:34Speaker 01

  You know, my dad's in there and I just gave him a, he gave me a huge hug. And, you know, we just, we sat there for a couple of minutes. And, and it was hard because I thought, am I gonna, I guess I'm done, you know, for, you know, I, I, I thought that was a possibility. And, you know, my dad and I talked and, um, he, you know, we were talking about, he's like, look, Joel, it's just, I've got a, I've got a home equity line on my house. And, you know, I'll go get you 50 grand. And my dad was not a rich guy, you know, he, he had been careful, my parents were really careful with their money for all those years. And so, you know, they, their house was paid off. And so he's like, he's like, look, let's just, let's do

• 59:16Speaker 01

  it. I'm gonna, I'm gonna go to the bank, I'll get you a check. And let's make it work. Let's work through it. And so he did. He wrote me a check for 50 grand. And we made it, you know, I put it in the bank, I kept going. I paid him back, you know, six months later, whatever. And yeah, we kept working it through. And I think, you know, it was, you know, a lot of near death experiences over these years, you know, and that was, that was a big one.

• 59:40Guy Raz?

  Joel, did your wife ever say to you?

• 59:45Guy Raz?

  Maybe we should just like pack this in. It's too risky.

• 59:49Speaker 01

  She should have.

• 59:52Speaker 01

  But you know what's funny? She never did. I mean, to her credit, man, I mean, she was great. So she was always just steady, consistent cheerleader. And I think, man, that made all the difference because I think, no, it's really funny. It's like, you know, I was listening to one of your other episodes and Andy Dunn from Bonobos said it, man, he said it better than I could have. He said, companies don't die because the companies fail. They die because the entrepreneur gives up. And I remember thinking that. I remember thinking, if I can just figure out how to give this business enough time, I think it'll work. But it's, but it's the practical element of can you give it enough time?

• 1:00:37Guy Raz?

  When we come back in just a moment, Joel puts in the time, makes his first hire, gets a big order from Target and suddenly has to scramble to fulfill it. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This.

• 1:01:07Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2009 and Kodiak Cakes has launched three more products, a brownie mix, a cookie mix, and a second pancake mix. But then Joel loses his best and only employee.

• 1:01:26Speaker 01

  My dad was by this time about 70 and he's like, look, I need to, I need to retire, Joel. And I'm like, yeah, you should, Dad. And so I needed somebody to help me. And, you know, I didn't have the money to pay for some super experienced person. So I went up to the University of Utah Career Services Department where you could like, put, you could post job postings there. And so I posted a job up there and I think I called it like Marketing Manager or something like that. I talked about, hey, come join a small entrepreneurial business and have an entrepreneurial experience, something like that, and help me build the business.

• 1:02:01Guy Raz?

  All right. So you put this ad up and this guy Cameron Smith responds. And what did you hire him to do?

• 1:02:08Speaker 01

  So when I taught, he came into our little one room office and he was wearing a suit and a tie.

• 1:02:16Speaker 01

  I was probably wearing jeans and I just thought, man, this kid sharp. We just, I mean, we just connected. I really liked him. I thought, man, he's a good person. He seemed to have a ton of energy and drive. And I thought, he seems like the perfect fit. So I immediately kind of put him in charge of some sales. And I gave him this list of small gift shops that we had sold to in the past. And I'm like, hey, call these guys. And see if he can sell some product by the case to these little gift shops. Well, Cameron, he thinks ahead and he, by the way, is exactly what I needed because I needed that. I needed somebody to come in and bring a spark of new energy.

• 1:02:57Speaker 01

  So he started really thinking about, look, you know, I can do more. Can I start calling grocery stores? And I'm like, yeah. So he started putting together this list of like the top grocery stores in America. And he started thinking really strategically about it, like at a really young age. And I started going, man, this guy's great.

• 1:03:15Guy Raz?

  He was like you when you just got back from your mission, fearless.

• 1:03:19Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 1:03:20Guy Raz?

  Right?

• 1:03:20Speaker 01

  Fearless and blinders. He didn't see the obstacles.

• 1:03:24Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:24Speaker 01

  If he saw him, he didn't care.

• 1:03:26Guy Raz?

  So did he have any success getting into bigger grocery stores?

• 1:03:30Speaker 01

  Oh, he really did. So one day we had a, we were at a trade show and I got the buyer's name for Target. And Cameron reached out and got an appointment. And he's like, hey, it's going to be this day in November. I think this was around 2011, something like that. 2011, 2012.

• 1:03:48Guy Raz?

  An appointment for Target in Minneapolis?

• 1:03:50Speaker 01

  Yes, headquarter appointment. And we're like, oh, man, way to go. I mean, this was a big deal.

• 1:03:56Guy Raz?

  To go pitch Kodiak cakes to their buyers?

• 1:03:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:59Guy Raz?

  And did you guys go hop on a plane together?

• 1:04:02Speaker 01

  Well, I couldn't go. And so, you know, he set the time and I'm like, man, I can't go. I can't remember what I had. I had, usually I would have dropped everything to go, but there was, I cannot remember what I had, but I couldn't make it. So I'm like, just, you just, just go on your own. You'll be fine, you know? So, so he went into the meeting. Her name was Ann Playstead. And the way Cameron describes it, he's walked in there and he actually made pancakes for her. And he said, you know, he was pretty nervous and he's like, you know, he's like, man, the spatula was kinda shaking as I cooked pancakes for her. And so he, so he let her, you know, he gave her some pancakes to try and, and she liked it. And so she decided to bring it in to, you know, test it out into 40 stores. He locked up a tester on at Target. That was a, we were, we were stoked.

• 1:04:48Guy Raz?

  And so what, how long before they put in an order, like a real order?

• 1:04:52Speaker 01

  So, okay, so after the 40 store test, it was probably within a few months. We got a new buyer named Tommy Greenberg. Tommy called us up and he's like, guys, I'm gonna take your two product. We had two pancake mixes in the stores. He's like, I'm gonna take them in chain wide, nationwide. We're like, you gotta be kidding me. He's like, yep, let's go. He's like, just remember, you know, just remember I was on the desk when this happened. And so, so we're like, so we're like, all right, let's go. And so I remember we were, they started ordering by the case and a lot of this was even UPS. We weren't even shipping pallets out. So Cameron and I would go into the warehouse of our, we had a contract manufacturer, but they, you know, they, they were busy. So we would go in

• 1:05:34Speaker 01

  often and pack up cases together and get them all ready to ship. We did a ton of that. And it started to work. It actually started to really work.

• 1:05:43Guy Raz?

  How were you financing that? I mean, when, when big companies like Target put in orders, it can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and they won't pay you for another 60 days. You need that cash to make the product. How were you able to have that? How'd you have that money?

• 1:05:58Speaker 01

  I was scared. So we got this PO. It was $260,000 PO.

• 1:06:03Guy Raz?

  That's a big purchase order. Yeah.

• 1:06:05Speaker 01

  Massive. I mean, we'd never seen anything like it. And, and at the time, we had to prepay for our inventory. So it was really, I didn't have the money. We did not have the money to do it. So, so what I did is I called my dad and I said, hey dad, uh, I need to borrow money again, you know? And, and I said, but I, I think, I think we're gonna be really good for this. This is a lot of money. So, you know, we talked about it. My dad was like, you know, I think this is good because this is going against a purchase order from Target. So I'm gonna do it, Joel. So he went down to the bank. He got a check on his home equity line. So he had to borrow the money. And he showed back up to my office with a check for 260,000 bucks.

• 1:06:47Guy Raz?

  That was the turning point?

• 1:06:48Speaker 01

  That was a huge, huge turning point.

• 1:06:51Guy Raz?

  And were you still manufacturing at that small plant in Salt Lake?

• 1:06:56Speaker 01

  It wasn't the small, small plant from the very beginning. It was a different plant by now. It was bigger. So they had, they had a lot more capacity by now.

• 1:07:06Guy Raz?

  And by the way, around this time, do you remember what your annual sales were at that point?

• 1:07:11Speaker 01

  So we were doing, 2012, we were doing around three and a half.

• 1:07:17Guy Raz?

  So that Target order really was transformational.

• 1:07:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was a huge order.

• 1:07:21Guy Raz?

  Three and a half million dollars. I mean, but three and a half million dollars, most of that, it's revenue. You're, you're not, that's not going in your pocket.

• 1:07:28Speaker 01

  Right. And we were talking about this very thing. We were like, okay, we, we need a bump. We have got to get some real marketing. And so Cameron comes to me one day. He's like, look, he's like, I'm gonna try to get us on Shark Tank. I'm like, all right, go to town, man. I've never even seen the show.

• 1:07:45Guy Raz?

  He thought, he thought, let's go on Shark Tank because presumably he liked the show, but also maybe to get some, some outside investment.

• 1:07:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. We had been talking on and off about, God, when are we gonna raise capital? At some point, we're going to need some, some money to, to help us to grow. So we, you know, we were talking about that. So all he did was, he went to the website one day. This is January of 2013. He goes to the website, sends an email. Literally, I have still never seen the email. I don't even know what he said. Like, it wasn't even a casting call or anything. It was just like, he goes to the website, sends an email. And I forgot it. We forgot about it. We didn't even talk about it again, you know, until they actually reached back out to him in March and said, hey, we, we think your story's interesting.

• 1:08:32Guy Raz?

  This is of 2013?

• 1:08:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, March 2013. So they, we started working with producers.

• 1:08:39Speaker 01

  And then it was about June of 2013 where we went out and filmed the episode.

• 1:08:44Guy Raz?

  And so you film in June of 2013. And when, by the way, when was it? When did it air?

• 1:08:49Speaker 01

  It didn't air until April of 2014.

• 1:08:52Guy Raz?

  So almost a year later, it airs.

• 1:08:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:55Guy Raz?

  It's Mr. Wonderful and Mark Cuban and Barbara and all, they're all there, right?

• 1:09:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. And right after we did kind of our opening one-minute spiel or 30-second spiel or whatever, then Cameron went over and cooked, actually cooked pancakes for them. And then we passed them out.

• 1:09:13Guy Raz?

  And what were you looking for? What was, what were you hoping for in terms of investment?

• 1:09:17Speaker 01

  So we went on the show trying to get, we were pitching for $500,000 for 10% of the business.

• 1:09:26Guy Raz?

  Pretty good deal.

• 1:09:27Speaker 01

  We thought it was.

• 1:09:28Guy Raz?

  And any of them bite?

• 1:09:31Speaker 01

  So the first offer was Kevin. So Kevin says, I'll give you, I'll give you that 500 grand, but I want half the business.

• 1:09:40Guy Raz?

  Unbelievable.

• 1:09:42Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:09:43Guy Raz?

  Insane, okay?

• 1:09:45Speaker 01

  So let me think about that. Like, we're valuing the business at 5 million bucks, right? You know, then, uh, he wanted to value it at a million bucks.

• 1:09:53Guy Raz?

  My God.

• 1:09:54Speaker 01

  So then Robert goes, well, you know, I'll do it. I'll do the 500 grand, but I'll do it for 35% of the business. And so, so what's funny is like immediately I had this like, we're done. Let's get out of here, right? Hopefully we'll still get the publicity.

• 1:10:09Guy Raz?

  Yep.

• 1:10:09Speaker 01

  So I'm kind of like starting to wrap it up. I'm like, yeah, well, you know, it's not going to work. Thanks, guys, whatever. Cameron goes, should we counter? I'm like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Good, good point, you know? So he's like got more presence of mind than I have. And I'm like, oh, that's a great point. So we should do that. So, you know, we countered at, I think we went up to 15% that we would give them for, you know, for the money.

• 1:10:32Guy Raz?

  Yep.

• 1:10:32Speaker 01

  And we just weren't close. So we ended up just walking off.

• 1:10:36Guy Raz?

  Were you sad about that? Did you feel like, like this is a failure?

• 1:10:40Speaker 01

  No, it's funny. I actually, I actually felt fine about it. I mean, I think if they would have gotten really close to where we wanted to be, I, I, I would have taken the deal.

• 1:10:50Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:51Speaker 01

  And also I think it helped that we didn't have to have the capital, right? I mean, we were growing pretty well. I think we were like, look, if we can get the right partner for a pretty decent valuation, let's take it. But since they were so far, it's like, well, we don't have to have it today. Let's move on and we'll look again with, with somebody else.

• 1:11:08Guy Raz?

  So what, did you have any plan at that point? I mean, you don't have the Shark Tank money. So what do you, what, what do you do? Do you go looking for money elsewhere? Or do you just kind of put it on ice for a while?

• 1:11:20Speaker 01

  We put it on ice for a while, but right after the show, our demand went crazy.

• 1:11:28Guy Raz?

  Oh, really? Because of the publicity?

• 1:11:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:31Guy Raz?

  Yeah. What happened?

• 1:11:32Speaker 01

  I mean, it just cranked it. So like people, particularly at Target, and I think it's because Target was mentioned on the show. And so people went to Target and they just cleared the shelves. And so we struggled, we struggled for a couple of months just to keep up with it.

• 1:11:46Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 1:11:47Speaker 01

  And so we were like, well, look, let's, let's let this settle out. Like let's wait. We're, we're selling a lot right now. Let's just kind of get ahead of this. Let's not worry about trying to raise money right now. We'll get back to it later.

• 1:11:59Guy Raz?

  So 2014, presumably that was a banner year for you.

• 1:12:05Speaker 01

  Oh, man. It was, that was an inflection year. It really was. There was one more thing we did that really just contributed to this. So the Shark Tank thing hit. But then two months later, so Shark Tank hits April 2014. In June of 2014, we launched Power Cakes. Power Cakes is our high protein pancake mix. So the first time we'd ever put protein in a product. And that hits the shelves at Target and just takes off.

• 1:12:31Guy Raz?

  And, and this is basically just you're adding whey protein powder to your mix or less?

• 1:12:36Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:12:36Guy Raz?

  First of all, it seems like a no brainer now. You're like, oh, no brainer. Add protein to, to breakfast pancakes. But that was a really innovative concept. Where did that come from?

• 1:12:49Speaker 01

  So I remember one day, I mean, really, it was just, I was home one morning and I was looking at this vanilla protein powder that we had and we, I was trying to incorporate more protein into my diet and we were making, we were adding protein to our smoothies in the morning at home and stuff like that. And one day I'm just looking at this vanilla protein powder going, I wonder how that is in a pancake. I wonder if it's good. So I made it right there. And, and I was like, it was great. I was like, this is awesome. I think this could actually be a product.

• 1:13:16Guy Raz?

  It was that simple?

• 1:13:18Speaker 01

  It really was, but in terms of the concept, it was totally that simple. But, but after we, and so what we did is we came up with the name Power Cakes. And then we went ahead and trademarked that and it did great. I mean, it real, right out of the gate, it started selling really, really well.

• 1:13:34Guy Raz?

  And did you, did you know you were kind of riding this wave, this like CrossFit, you know, high protein diet wave that, did you know that you were kind of riding that wave yet?

• 1:13:43Speaker 01

  No, I'll be honest, we didn't know that it was going to be this big. I mean, we were watching, a camera was watching protein trends on Google, like Google search trends and just kind of seeing, you know, seeing the searches go up and up and more people interested in protein. But we weren't really sure how big it could be. And we were also kind of living in the dark. We didn't have a lot of data, like, you know, we didn't have a lot of store level data to really watch trends. And so we were kind of just making some assumptions. But yeah, at the time, we didn't know how big it would be.

• 1:14:12Guy Raz?

  All right. So you're growing and presumably you, and I think you even start to expand out, right? Beyond, beyond these powders. Like I think you started to do frozen waffles and muffin mixes and more products, right?

• 1:14:26Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah, we started, we really started to go into more categories and, and where we felt like our brand could do well.

• 1:14:33Guy Raz?

  Hmm. I have to assume at this point, after Shark Tank, after the Protein Power Cakes, after the, you know, the other products in the other categories, you start to get investment firms, private equity firms knocking on your door.

• 1:14:46Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Oh, totally. Yeah, we were a lot of people's friends all of a sudden.

• 1:14:50Guy Raz?

  You're, you're like knocking on doors and people are slamming on your face for 20 years and all of a sudden now everybody wants to be your friend.

• 1:14:58Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 1:14:58Guy Raz?

  So I'm assuming you started to look at some of these offers and you did eventually decide to take outside money in 2016 from a group. What was the thinking behind that? Did you feel like we need to take this money to really scale?

• 1:15:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, we were growing really, really fast. And so it's not like we were out of money. You know, we were actually making money, but we started to look at this business really growing and started to think, man, we need some resources. We need some, I kind of, even personally, I felt like I need somebody to share the risk. My house was still on the line, for example, for, you know, for a business loan.

• 1:15:34Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:34Speaker 01

  You know, like every little bump, you know, it kind of starts to rattle your cage.

• 1:15:38Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:38Speaker 01

  You know, you're feeling about, you're feeling like the business is so vulnerable for all these years and just my mind shifted. And man, I was just like, I've got to unload this so I can not be so worried about the business, but you know, start to become a better leader. And so, you know, we felt like, let's go find somebody that has some real experience in the space and let's get a partner. Honestly, that was incredibly healthy to do that.

• 1:16:07Guy Raz?

  I think by 2018, you were like the top pancake seller at Target. Like you were bigger than Aunt Jemima and Bisquick at Target. You were like the fourth biggest pancake mix brand in the country by 2018.

• 1:16:20Speaker 01

  Right. We were blown away. I mean, we were, our numbers at Target were incredible. And so we, you know, we took that story out to the rest of the market and we started to gain distribution and really started to make an impact into the category.

• 1:16:35Guy Raz?

  So 2019, for many companies, record year. I mean, for most companies, or on How I Built This.

• 1:16:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:16:42Guy Raz?

  And then 2020, for a lot of companies, especially non-food items, this has been a disastrous year.

• 1:16:49Speaker 01

  Oh, totally.

• 1:16:50Guy Raz?

  Right? And. What about for you? I mean, people are not going to Walmart and Target and Costco as much. There's more purchasing from Amazon. People aren't walking through the aisles of stores. They're not meandering. They're going in and out. Have you guys taken a hit?

• 1:17:07Speaker 01

  Well, you know, we've, we've actually been pretty fortunate now, you know, because as people eat away from home, like restaurants, less, right? People are at home more, eating at home more. So yeah, the grocery stores have, have been, you know, up. So the pancake mix category has grown a lot. I mean, we've seen a big boom in that space.

• 1:17:26Guy Raz?

  People making pancakes at home?

• 1:17:28Speaker 01

  Exactly. You know, you have more time. It's fun. Like usually it's a weekend thing, right? It's like a heavy user of pancake mixes in the past been maybe, you know, three, four times a month on average, you know, but now it's like, it can be a couple of times a week.

• 1:17:45Guy Raz?

  Not that long ago, like 10 years ago, you were teetering, really, nine years ago. I mean, your dad like bailed you out with that 50 grand, you know?

• 1:17:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:58Guy Raz?

  I think, you know, you're projected to do a hundred million dollars in revenue, or maybe you did last year. That's pretty crazy.

• 1:18:05Speaker 01

  It's insane.

• 1:18:06Guy Raz?

  And you're projecting $200 million in revenue this year, right?

• 1:18:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, we should go over that this year.

• 1:18:11Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 1:18:12Speaker 01

  It's incredible. Like, I mean, it really is incredible. And I think about, I think about that time, yeah, going from, I mean, it took us 16 years to hit a million dollars in revenue, right? It's like, come on, man. Like, I look at it like, what the heck? What the crap was I doing, man? Like, like, those were some really hard years. And it's like, man, you should have been able to grow quicker than that. Then you look at the context, it's like, no capital, no money to put in, no expertise, and it just like going to school, like the distractions and all that stuff. But it's like, We finally got there and then over the last 10 years ish, it's like that now we're gonna break, we should go past 200 million this year. I mean, it's, it's incredible. And I think it's like, as we've kind of talked about this journey, it's like, there's so many different phases. And

• 1:18:58Speaker 01

  I mean, even though it was hard, I almost gave up a lot. I tried to sell the business a couple of times and we almost, it almost just died a couple of times. I mean, I'm actually grateful for all that. Yeah, I am. I mean, those things are so hard to go through while you're going through them. But you get, you make it through and then you're stronger, you're smarter, and then you really, you're more cautious.

• 1:19:19Guy Raz?

  Yeah. I mean, it's, it's almost like the, the success is sweeter. It's a cliche, but it is because of the pain.

• 1:19:28Speaker 01

  You're not kidding. I mean, it totally is. Because I think if, you know, if it would have come easy, I just, I don't know. I mean, I wouldn't appreciate it quite as much, you know?

• 1:19:38Guy Raz?

  Yeah. When you think about this, this just unbelievable journey, right? I mean, close to bankrupt, a little more than 10 years ago, probably never really sure whether you'd be financially secure. And you are, I mean, this business has made you and presumably your family and Cameron financially secure for life, based on your mom's pancake recipe. Do you think that this happened because of, of your hard work? Or do you attribute more of it to luck?

• 1:20:11Speaker 01

  Man, you know what I say sometimes is, people always say that fish don't just jump in your boat. But you know what, I actually believe they do. But, but here's the thing, you gotta be out fishing for that to happen. Right? And so I think it's both. It's such a combination of both. It's like, we have had some lucky breaks. I have to attribute some of this to luck. Definitely.

• 1:20:36Guy Raz?

  Yeah. Well, you got really lucky that nobody wanted to buy you.

• 1:20:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally. It's funny you say that because it's like, you don't think about those. Close doors as luck sometimes, do you? I mean, you think about those as, oh crap.

• 1:20:50Guy Raz?

  As failures or disasters or yeah.

• 1:20:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, another failure. Like, oh, my gosh. And you go home and you're like, OK, what do I do now to keep going?

• 1:20:59Guy Raz?

  This business can, is going to continue, presumably continue to grow. You know, you're in your mid-40s. You can do a bunch of other things. You can sell your shares and walk away and start something new. You can stay on. I mean, what do you think? Do you think you want to be in, in the Kodiak Cakes business in 10, 15 years?

• 1:21:20Speaker 01

  That's a good, that's a great question. I mean, this has been, look, it's been my life, right? I mean, it's, I've put everything into this my whole career. But, you know, am I the guy that runs Kodiak Cakes at $500 million? A billion dollars? I don't know. I mean, I just, I don't know. How long do I ride this? I mean, it's, but I think, you know, I've got, I've got quite a bit of gas in the tank for a while, so.

• 1:21:43Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:43Speaker 01

  It's still really fun. I love the people I work with and I, I love this brand.

• 1:21:50Guy Raz?

  That's Joel Clark, co-founder of Kodiak Cakes. And I know we just heard Joel say he wasn't sure if he'd be running the company in 10 or 15 years. Well, as it happened, last year Kodiak Cakes was acquired by a private equity firm and Joel stepped down as CEO, but he and Cameron are still on the board of directors.

• 1:22:11Guy Raz?

  Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. If you enjoyed it, please spread the word. Tell someone about How I Built This or post about it on social media. And if you want to contact the team, our email address is [email protected]. You can follow us on Twitter. We're at How I Built This and I'm at Guy Raz. And on Instagram, we're at How I Built This and I'm at Guy dot Raz. This episode was produced by J.C. Howard with music composed by Rameed Tien Arabloue. It was edited by Neba Grant with research help from Derek Cakes. Our production staff also includes Casey Herman, Elaine Coats, John Isabella, Liz Metzger, Carrie Thompson, Alex Chung, Chris Messini, Carla Estevez, and Sam Paulson. Our intern is Susanna Brown. I'm Guy Raz and you've been listening to How I Built This.