Daniel Lubetzky: He Almost Quit After 10 Years, Then Built KIND Snacks Into a Multibillion-Dollar Business | Entrepreneurship | E421

Before KIND Snacks became a multibillion-dollar brand, Daniel Lubetzky spent a decade struggling to grow his business, PeaceWorks, despite believing deeply in its mission to foster peace through commerce. Inspired by his Holocaust-survivor father, he had chosen entrepreneurship over a legal career to pursue that mission. But his passion wasn't enough to sell products, and years of poor decisions and expanding too quickly nearly forced him to give up. In this episode, the Shark Tank judge shares how he turned 10 years of failure into the launch of KIND Snacks, and how entrepreneurs can create products customers actually want, invest wisely in growth, and build strong teams without compromising their values. In this episode, Hala and Daniel will discuss: (01:30) The Business Lesson Behind Daniel's Mission (10:52) How His Father's Legacy Inspired KIND Snacks (19:38) Business Failures That Led to Success (36:13) Turning Grief Into Purpose and Ambition (42:03) Resourcefulness vs. Frugality in Business Growth (47:51) Building KIND's Culture of Transparency (49:57) Kind Leadership vs. Nice Leadership (51:00) How Leadership Changes as Your Business Scales (58:39) Choosing Investors Who Share Your Values (1:03:43) The Difficult Decision to Sell KIND Snacks (1:09:09) Shark Tank Secrets and Investment Lessons (1:18:43) PeaceWorks 2.0 and the Builders Movement Daniel Lubetzky is a billionaire social entrepreneur, investor, philanthropist, and founder of KIND Snacks. He is also a full-time Shark on ABC’s Shark Tank and the New York Times bestselling author of Do the KIND Thing. Beyond KIND, he founded PeaceWorks, the OneVoice Movement, and the Builders Movement, initiatives dedicated to fostering cooperation, bridging divides, and creating positive social change. He also invests in businesses through Camino Partners and hosts the entrepreneurship podcast Build or Break. Sponsored By: Indeed - Get a $75 sponsored job credit to boost your job's visibility at Indeed.com/profiting Shopify - Start your $1/month trial at Shopify.com/profiting. Northwest Registered Agent - Get a complete business identity with Northwest. Visit northwestregisteredagent.com/YAPFree and start using free resources to build something amazing. HeyGen - Create AI avatar videos without constantly being behind the camera. Get your first three videos free at HeyGen.com/profiting. Life at the Speed of Play - Learn how to test ideas quickly and identify the ones worth pursuing with Mark Pincus’s book. Get two books for the price of one at getmarksbook.com/yap. Whatnot - Grow your business through live shopping, community, and real-time connections with buyers. Search Whatnot, W H A T N O T, in the App Store and start selling today. MOD - Connect with licensed medical providers for modafinil to support sustained energy, focus, and alertness. Visit MOD.com for a free consultation and get 10% off your first order plus free shipping with code PROFITING. See the website for important safety information. AG1 Next Gen - Support your nutritional foundation with vitamins, minerals, prebiotics, probiotics, and superfoods. Get a free Immune Support Bundle with your first subscription order at DrinkAG1.com/PROFITING. Resources Mentioned: Daniel's Website: https://daniellubetzky.com Daniel's Podcast, Build or Break: bit.ly/BOB-apple Danie's Builders Movement: https://buildersmovement.org Daniel’s Instagram: instagram.com/daniellubetzky Active Deals - youngandprofiting.com/deals Key YAP Links Reviews - ratethispodcast.com/yap YouTube - youtube.com/c/YoungandProfiting Newsletter - youngandprofiting.co/newsletter LinkedIn - linkedin.com/in/htaha Instagram - instagram.com/yapwithhala Social + Podcast Services: yapmedia.com Transcripts - youngandprofiting.com/episodes-new LinkedIn Creator Club - Skool.com/linkedin-creator-club Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneurship Podcast, Business, Business Podcast, Self Improvement, Self-Improvement, Personal Development, Starting a Business, Strategy, Investing, Sales, Selling, Psychology, Productivity, Entrepreneurs, AI, Artificial Intelligence, Technology, Marketing, Negotiation, Money, Finance, Side Hustle, Startup, Mental Health, Career, Leadership, Mindset, Health, Growth Mindset, Passive Income, Online Business, Solopreneur, Networking

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Today's episode is sponsored in part by HeyGen, Shopify, Life at the Speed of Play, and Indeed. HeyGen helps you create AI avatar videos without constantly being behind the camera. Get your first three videos free at heygen.com/profitting. Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you grow your business. Start your $1 per month trial at Shopify.com/profitting. Life at the Speed of Play by Mark Pincus helps entrepreneurs quickly test ideas and find the ones worth pursuing. Get two books for the price of one at GetMark'skool.com/yap. Indeed helps you attract, interview, and hire all in one place. Get a $75 sponsored job credit to boost your job's visibility at Indeed.com/podcast.

• 0:45Speaker 00

  As always, you can find all of our incredible deals in the show notes or at YoungandProfiting.com/deals.

• 0:52Speaker 01

  10 years of failures taught me enough to then turn Kind into $5 billion to $7 billion dollar company, depending how you calculate it. We had almost no investment and we had generated billions in sales, cash flow positively, profitably, because of all the lessons I learned from Peaceworks.

• 1:08Speaker 00

  Daniel Lubetsky spent nearly a decade struggling to make his first business work. Today, Daniel is here to share his hard-earned lessons from those early failures and how he turned them into the foundation for the massive success he had with Kind later on and all the ventures that followed.

• 1:23Speaker 01

  The mission was super powerful, helped keep me going through, but it is not enough, literally, because at the beginning in my Peaceworks journey, I didn't obsess about the quality of the products, which upon reflections, what a idiot, how did I not know that?

• 1:35Speaker 00

  You were selling premium Mediterranean spreads, but you tried to sell them everywhere.

• 1:40Speaker 01

  I had a Stanford Law degree and I was selling sundried tomato spreads in the streets of Manhattan, going door by door, opening a jar of sundried tomatoes. I thought that tenacity and resilience was everything. At that point, I thought persistence, persistence, persistence, persistence. And it took me a long time to learn that the objective is not to push product wherever you can. The objective is to...

• 2:02Speaker 00

  There was a period of time where you only spent $800 on samples.

• 2:07Speaker 01

  In the Peaceworks years, I had taught myself that any sampling was a cost center and I hadn't realized that it's also an investment for people to try your product. You know, in finance, they say cash is king, what I say in consumer product goods.

• 2:22Speaker 00

  Daniel, welcome to Young and Profiting Podcast.

• 2:25Speaker 01

  It's such a pleasure to be here, Hala.

• 2:26Speaker 00

  I'm so happy that you're here and you're so successful. I mean, you had a nearly $5 billion exit with Kind, you're full-time on Shark Tank now. But a lot of people don't realize, and I myself didn't realize, that you actually spent a decade of your early career trying to foster peace around the world. And you had this big mission.

• 2:46Speaker 01

  Well, my entire life, not just decade, before and after and still today. But yeah, a lot of people don't realize that prior to Kind, I had a decade of failures, trying to build a business that wasn't panning out. And thanks to those failures, I learned the lessons to eventually figure it out with Kind.

• 3:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, and you graduated from Stanford Law, you had really successful parents. And so you really could have taken the easy route. So, once you graduated from law school, what made you think, okay, I want to be an entrepreneur and I want to focus my mission around peace?

• 3:19Speaker 01

  Well, when you say really successful parents, definitely successful in the way that they're the most amazing parents in the world. But my mom only had a high school education and my dad only had a third grade education. And in spite of that, my dad built a really significant business. But believe me, when I graduate from college and law school and then I tell them, I'm not going to pursue a legal career, they're like, what? You're crazy.

• 3:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:45Speaker 01

  So I think it was just driven by my dream of... My father was a Holocaust survivor, he was in the Daho concentration camp. And I, early on, figured out that what was, what gave me the most meaning was building bridges to try to prevent what happened to him from happening again to other human beings. And I had this idea for, right after law school, there was a breakthrough in the Camp David negotiations and the Oslo peace process. And I had an idea for how to use business to bring people together. So I decided to try it out and see if I could build a business out of bringing Israelis,

• 4:28Speaker 01

  Palestinians, Jordanians, Egyptians, and Turks to trade with one another, to shatter stereotypes, to cement relationships, to discover each other's humanity while making money. And that was the goal.

• 4:38Speaker 00

  It was so cool to learn about Peaceworks. Like, I think it's just such an incredible mission. Talk to us about why the mission wasn't enough.

• 4:47Speaker 01

  Yes, it's very well framed the way you asked, Hala, because the mission was super powerful, helped keep me going through, but it is not enough, literally, because at the beginning in my Peaceworks journey, the mission was so overpowering that I didn't obsess about the quality of the products, which upon reflections, what a idiot, how did I not know that? But I thought the mission was going to carry through everything. And the mission is important, but it cannot be a crutch to being best in class on the other things you do. It's nice to have a mission. I think it gives you a lot of fuel to keep going, it attracts team members, it gives people loyalty to your mission. But the product and the service needs to stand on its own and you just need to get it right on so many fronts, which I didn't.

• 5:31Speaker 01

  The brand that we started with was called Moshe Kupik and Ali Mishmumkin's World Famous All Natural Gourmet Foods.

• 5:39Speaker 00

  That's a pretty complicated name.

• 5:42Speaker 01

  And I actually thought, I on purpose came up with a silly name because I thought it was going to be so silly that people would...

• 5:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, you thought it would be good marketing.

• 5:48Speaker 01

  Talk about it, but people were just like, what the hell? And they would just move on. And in terms of the mission not being enough, before I was on the stores, Hala, I started in trade first in Manhattan. I would put a little street fairs thing and I had my Peaceworks products on the shelves. And I would start talking about the mission and everybody was riveted. And I loved it, found it fascinating, and then they kept walking.

• 6:19Speaker 00

  It wasn't enough.

• 6:20Speaker 01

  It was not enough. And when I learned is when I started talking about the features of the products and letting them try, back then I had skincare products, like a hand-treated cream with avocado oil. And I would start talking about the features, then people would try them like, oh, the product's actually good. And eventually, the sundried tomato, let me try it and experience and focus on the product features. That's what actually gives people a reason to buy and buy again.

• 6:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's really interesting. I'd love for you to spend some more time on what the mission was with Peaceworks. Like, what were you really trying to do? And why did you think that commerce would be like the solution of actually bringing people together?

• 6:56Speaker 01

  Something very important to understand is that commerce is not sufficient, but it's necessary. It's a piece of the mosaic. When I was in college, I wrote my thesis on the influence of economics in resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict. And one of my professors found that the stupidest thing in the world, he gave me a B minus because he said, why do you think that economics is going to solve this issue? And I was like, no, it's not going to solve it. Read the thing, Professor Davos, I'm outing him.

• 7:29Speaker 01

  It took me a while to come to terms with the fact that he was really not very supportive. The other two professors wanted to give me a master's honorary thesis. It was a 268-page treatise. It actually became very popular in medical circles because if people are having problems with insomnia and they couldn't fall asleep, you'd give them this thick thing and they'd fall asleep right away because it was so therapeutic. But I really did work very hard on it. It was the first time that I became a nerd. Up until that period, I was just breezing by. And then I became so intellectually curious about the theory of the economics of peacemaking.

• 8:09Speaker 01

  How can you use market forces to channel market forces to bring people together? And I fell in love with the concept of channeling market forces in a way that does something good for the world, because then you're achieving sustainable, scalable growth.

• 8:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 8:29Speaker 01

  Like, I've also set up a number of nonprofits like you have. Every year you need to pass around the hat, it's not, it's, it doesn't sustain itself. But if you're able to make something that in the process of being made is bringing people together.

• 8:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 8:45Speaker 01

  And that every jar you sell, it's actually fostering more cooperation. And the more you grow, the more bring people you're bringing together, it's beautiful. And so for me, that's what made me fall in love with the model. And that's why I tried it out with a lot of mistakes and a lot of lessons, but...

• 9:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's super cool. So you get people from Israel, Palestine, Lebanon to actually create products together?

• 9:05Speaker 01

  Not Lebanon yet, one day Lebanon. But back then, there was no ability of mine to bring in Lebanese, Syrians, because there was no peace. But it was Israelis, Palestinians, Jordanians, Egyptians, and Turks.

• 9:16Speaker 00

  Really cool.

• 9:17Speaker 01

  I'll give you a very, bring it to life. The glass jars we used to buy from Egypt, instead of buying them from Italy or Portugal, the sundried tomatoes came from Turkey, the olives and olive oil and eggplants came from Palestinian farmers and Jordanian farmers. And it was manufactured in Israeli location in Aviuda. And the whole concept, we developed relationship between Palestinians, Israelis, Turks, Jordanians, and Egyptians that through generations, help people discover each other's humanity, break bread together. And also, as you gain a vested interest in making money together, then you have each other's backs.

• 10:00Speaker 01

  Because you need each other to grow. And that was a model, the theory of economics of peacemaking.

• 10:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:09Speaker 00

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• 10:54Speaker 00

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• 11:19Speaker 00

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• 12:17Speaker 00

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• 13:44Speaker 00

  and so many years of your life dedicated towards trying to foster peace. And like, I really, really respect you for that.

• 13:51Speaker 01

  Thank you. And sometimes people, I used to go on dates when I was living in Manhattan, and some of the dates were like wondering why I was so quote-unquote altruistic and doing things for the others. But it was not that at all. I was doing it for myself because I understood what my father went through. And even though he's not Israeli or Palestinian, he was Jewish, and he was in a concentration camp. And anytime you dehumanize any other human being, it comes back to bite you. And this is really important to understand, for all of us to understand, because we're living in an age of social media with so much dehumanization, with the other, it's so easy to dehumanize the other. And before you know it, that hate, it's you.

• 14:33Speaker 01

  I've seen it happen in so many countries where they allow hate to take hold of them. And first, you hate the significant other, then your neighbor, then you start hating yourself. Hate is all-consuming, and so is love. And what we need to do is find a way to discover each other's humanity and to build together, to find ways to build together rather than tear each other apart. So I don't do it for somebody else's sake. I do it so that my children will inherit a better future.

• 15:01Speaker 00

  Yeah. And how did you first start learning about Palestine and Israel? Like, and how would you feel that your father, who went through the Holocaust, how do you think he would think about the situation right now in Gaza, for example?

• 15:16Speaker 01

  Well, that's three very different questions. First of all, my father was very rare because in spite of all of the horrors that he went through, he was a human being with a lot of love. He loved being Jewish, but he loved being human.

• 15:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:28Speaker 01

  He treated every person with respect and kindness. He didn't... And Lonnie Ali, the widow of Muhammad Ali, and I are very, very good friends. And she told me that Muhammad Ali never knew a stranger. And when she first said that, I didn't understand what she meant. I was embarrassed to ask her. And then I processed it. He never knew a stranger, meaning every human being, when you first meet them, you're human with them, and you connect with their humanity. That was Muhammad Ali, that was my father. And so, he was very proud of me, even though he was like, "Why are you living the law?" He loved the fact that I was building bridges because he and my mom were bridge builders. And you and I were talking before we started the show about the values that unite us and how your parents taught you that, and they taught me that.

• 16:11Speaker 01

  And at its essence, how we teach our children to respect all humans stays with you probably for the rest of your life.

• 16:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:18Speaker 01

  So that was the first one. In terms of what's going on in Gaza, I think my dad would be heartbroken about what happened during October 7th, heartbroken about what happened after October 7th, and what heartbroken about what's happening now. Because what basically was happening is that people with an absolute vision, that they deny the humanity of the other side, hijack the process, and turned a lot of the world into us versus them rather than building together. And right now, I'm literally, I just came, I was in DC the last two days at a conference where we're trying to figure out how to put the pieces back together and help Palestinians in Gaza develop an entrepreneurial economy and help them build together,

• 17:02Speaker 01

  and help Israelis, Palestinians, Jordanians, Egyptians, Turks, Emiratis, who in my opinion, they're, United Arab Emirates are the most important leaders bringing people together, how to build together rather than tear each other apart. You asked about how my dad would react to that Gaza, and there was something else that you asked.

• 17:22Speaker 00

  No, that was it. It was basically like, how would your dad feel about everything? Which he explained.

• 17:27Speaker 01

  He was proud of me trying things out. He wishes I... At the beginning, he was worried. For many, many years, he was worried about me living the law, try these things. I had a Stanford Law degree, and I was selling sundried tomato sprits in the streets of Manhattan, going door by door, walking door by door, opening a jar of sundried tomatoes, paying myself a $24,000 salary. So for many years, my mom and dad were like, "Oh, my God, what is this guy doing?" Then I built with my friend Muhammad Daraushe a movement called One Voice. And I remember they came, two months before my dad passed away, they came to LA to an event where Muhammad and I spoke. My dad's eyes watered a little bit, and he got emotional.

• 18:11Speaker 01

  And I remember, he kind of saw where I was heading and why it was important. And he was proud, and my mom was proud. It was interesting because they were very proud of me, no matter what I did, all the crazy things, they supported me. And I think that gave me a lot of conviction to try things out.

• 18:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's incredible. And your dad was such a big influence on you. Even though he went through the Holocaust, he was never bitter about it. And you've got some really great stories about the humanity that he felt, even when he was being persecuted in the Holocaust.

• 18:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, there's many, but the ones that I gravitate to the most because one is very quick to tell, the other one's very, very painful and deep. But the one quick to tell is when he was in Dahaj, in the concentration camp, and he was very undernourished. When he was liberated by American soldiers, he weighed 70 pounds, and he was six feet tall. So he was almost less than alive. And a German soldier, when people were not watching, threw a potato by my dad's feet. And that was a very important moment in my dad's life, the way he told it to us, that that potato helped sustain him. And the way he constructed, it helped sustain him both because of the calories that he needed desperately, but I think also because that German soldier looked at him, and even though he was almost less than human,

• 19:27Speaker 01

  because he was so almost dead, the German soldier saw his humanity and helped my dad keep going.

• 19:36Speaker 00

  That's a beautiful story. And you've kind of taken this, like, that kindness and turned it into a brand, right? And your dad's kindness. So tell us about that, like, what you saw in your dad in terms of his kindness and how he didn't let everything turn him bitter.

• 19:53Speaker 01

  A lot of people don't know that Kind was named after my father. He passed away in 2003. And in 2003 was probably one of the hardest years of my life, and weirdly, probably one of the most successful years of my life. And so, for anybody that's struggling a lot, I assure you, I would have never been able to know that in 2003, I would launch what would became Kind and turn into a multi-billion dollar company after 10 years of barely, barely making ends meet, and that I would build the One Voice movement and meet some extraordinary people, build a movement of close to a million Israelis and Palestinians mobilizing against extremism, grow personally so much in a year where my business was suffering so much. Hala, we had a very big setback,

• 20:37Speaker 01

  and we almost threw in the towel after 10 years of Peaceworks work, which gave me a lot of meaning, but it was very, I was making so many mistakes. We had the idea for what would become Kind, and we went around the table and voted whether or not to close the door or try things out. And we voted to try things out one last time, and lo and behold, it became Kind.

• 20:59Speaker 00

  Wow, I didn't realize that Peaceworks kind of evolved into Kind. I didn't realize that.

• 21:04Speaker 01

  Peaceworks incubated. Peaceworks, only a handful of investors, my best friends, Gregorio and Jaime, had believed in me, and they had put in $75,000 in the company. And that investment had not gone well. So when we had the idea for Kind, we seeded Kind within Peaceworks. And that $75,000 became tens of millions of dollars. So ultimately, the loyalty of my friends paid off. But back when we were deciding whether to go or not and my dad passed away, and we're trying to come up with a name for the company, the idea for Kind came to my colleague Sasha and I were brainstorming. And it was really funny because all the other names were very explicit descriptive dumb names.

• 21:48Speaker 01

  It was like fruity and naughty, naughty and fruity, fruit delicious, not a loco, loca, la, paca, la, all these like very non-creative names. And then Kind was because it was in honor of my father, who in spite of all of what he suffered, just he saw it as his mission to, he didn't say that those, we just saw it, that he was just kind to everybody. He treated everybody with kindness. And so it was about being kind to your body, to your tastebuds and to your world. And in retrospect, it makes all the sense in the world. But back then it wasn't obvious. We almost didn't do it.

• 22:21Speaker 00

  It was a really original concept back then. When you're walking through the grocery store shelves, like what did you feel like was missing?

• 22:28Speaker 01

  So the idea for the product came because I was, as I told you earlier, walking up and down the streets, skipping lunch, skipping dinner, going, crisscrossing the country, selling to every store everywhere I could find. And very often I was hungry or working on the desk for very long hours. And I wanted a snack to fill me up that I didn't feel that was tasted like cardboard or that was all plastic or full of carbs. And so the idea came from what I felt was a need in the marketplace. When I was walking through the stores and there was, back then, there was no healthy snack segment. There was no set of healthy snacks.

• 23:04Speaker 00

  I remember when Kind came out, it was like the new, like the actual healthy snack available.

• 23:09Speaker 01

  Even at the beginning, Hala, they didn't know where to put it. Like the buyers said, this is, this looks good, but I don't know where to put it.

• 23:16Speaker 00

  Is it the nut section, is it the chip section?

• 23:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, and we got lucky because they didn't have a place to put it. So it was like, all right, give us an end cap, give us a shelf talker, give us a little spot to put the product. So we had what's called a POP display, point of purchase display, where it really stood out.

• 23:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was like premium.

• 23:38Speaker 01

  Had we had a space on the shelves, maybe we would have not grown as much.

• 23:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:42Speaker 01

  But people would see that little block of product and they would gravitate towards it.

• 23:47Speaker 00

  That's so cool.

• 23:51Speaker 00

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• 24:34Speaker 00

  and has been used in high-stakes situations where concentration and alertness are critical, including by soldiers, pilots, and astronauts. Visit mod.com, that's M-O-D dot com for a free consultation and get 10% off your first order plus free shipping with promo code PROFITING. That's promo code PROFITING at mod.com. See their website for important safety information and we thank MOD for sponsoring the pod.

• 25:01Speaker 00

  Hello, young improffeters. If you're running a business, getting website traffic is only half the battle. The real key to profiting is turning those visitors into paying customers. And I know checkout friction can quietly kill your sales. That's why I always say, serious entrepreneurs build on Shopify. Shopify is a commerce platform that helps you launch and run an online store without needing to be super technical. You can build your storefront, manage your business, and make it easy for people to buy. And here's the major advantage. Shopify Checkout with Shop Pay converts up to 36% higher than the competition. With Black Friday coming up, now's the time to get your store ready and simplify your checkout experience. If you're ready to launch your business before Black Friday,

• 25:45Speaker 00

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• 26:00Speaker 00

  What's up yap gang? I recently had Gary Vee on the podcast and he told me something that really stuck with me. If you've got sales DNA, you've got to be paying attention to live selling because it's one of the biggest opportunities right now online. And that really got me curious, so I checked out an app that he told me about called Whatnot. I jumped into a live show and I instantly got it. The seller was showing products in real time, answering questions in the chat, and building a real relationship with the buyers. It didn't feel like boring shopping. It felt like a community. Whatnot is the largest live shopping marketplace in the country. And for entrepreneurs, the results are really hard to ignore. Sellers on Whatnot can sell up to 10 times more than traditional marketplaces. And the number of sellers making over a million dollars a year on the platform has doubled.

• 26:44Speaker 00

  So if you've got products to sell and you're looking for a new way to reach customers, search Whatnot, W-H-A-T-N-O-T in the App Store. Download it and you can start selling right away. That's Whatnot in the App Store. So I want to spend a little bit of time before we go into the Kind story. Let's talk about the failures that really set you up for success for Kind. So we're going to play a little game called Failure File. And I'm going to give you a couple scenarios that I read about your failures. You tell me, you know, what was the big lesson that you learned? What happened there? And maybe even like how that helped you in the future with Kind.

• 27:19Speaker 01

  Sounds good. I love that you're playing this game because nobody's ever played it with me. So I like creativity, yeah.

• 27:24Speaker 00

  This is called Wrong Shelf. You were selling premium Mediterranean spreads, but you tried to sell them everywhere, even convenience stores where they didn't belong. What did that teach you about focus and distribution?

• 27:36Speaker 01

  It's crazy to think how little I knew. Like, I didn't understand the difference between a convenience store and Macy's and Bloomingdale's. It's stunning that I was so stupid if you look back. And it's fascinating, by the way, because anybody that's, well, I also don't know about that stuff. Guess what? That kept me going because had I known how little I know, maybe I wouldn't have had the guts to try it out. But I was trying to put these Mediterranean spreads everywhere. So I would go to Macy's and Bloomingdale's, try to put in their gift basket spread, to put in their fancy department stores. I would go to the natural stores, to the supermarkets, and I would go to the convenience stores where they only sold not specialty products. And I would try to get everywhere.

• 28:19Speaker 01

  And at the beginning, I thought that tenacity and resilience was everything. At that point, I thought persistence, persistence, persistence, persistence.

• 28:28Speaker 00

  If I just work harder and harder, I'll make it.

• 28:30Speaker 01

  Right. And, and so the best example of that was when I was walking on 84th and Broadway and I met Mr. Kim. And he was a shopkeeper that said, I'm sorry, but your product does not fit with my products. But people come here to this little Korean bodega to buy toilet paper, ketchup, milk, just essentials. Yours is a specialty sundried tomato spread. Back in 93, nobody knew what that was. And I'm like, Mr. Kim, try it out. He's like, no, thank you. I'm like, try it out. No, thank you. I force feed the poor guy. He says, no, thank you. I literally follow him, Hala, down the stairs. And it's kind of like, it's not like regular stairs. It's one of those makeshift that you go like that, like fireman stairs. I go down to the basement.

• 29:15Speaker 01

  I will not leave till the guy gives me an order. And he finally writes me an order for $36. And I leave and I'm like, Daniel, you're gonna win because you never give up. And I so promised, I swear, I remember walking taller and thinking, this is what I'm gonna win. But it was not the right answer because a week later, not one of those jars has been sold. I walk by, two weeks later, they start accumulating dust. A month later, not one jar sold. A year later, not one jar sold.

• 29:46Speaker 00

  Oh my God.

• 29:47Speaker 01

  And the product looked horrible because it gets too much dust and the sun messes the labels. And it starts looking bad and looks back for Mr. Kim. It's not fair to Mr. Kim. And it took me a long time to learn that the objective is not to push product wherever you can. The objective is to be strategic and understand where should your product live? And it's not just to push the product, it's to pull the product. In our industry, in the consumer product goods industry, a lot of young entrepreneurs focus on pushing the product onto the shelves. They weren't thinking about how the consumer is going to pull off the product. The first sale is interesting, the easiest sale. It's the second sale and the third sale that matters because the problem is to get off the shelves so they reorder.

• 30:33Speaker 01

  And so you need to develop the sophistication to understand where your product should be and where it shouldn't be and when. Because maybe it was meant to be in a convenience store 10 years later, but not when it's being discovered. You need to go into discovery places, Whole Foods, Trader Joe's, now Costco. Where can people discover your product that are going to try it and then tell others about it? That's one of many lessons.

• 30:57Speaker 00

  So good. So it's basically, don't just sell in. You need to make sure you're going to sell through, right?

• 31:02Speaker 01

  Sell through and don't just have grit, have wit. Think strategically, learn, study. What's my migration strategy? Where should I start? Where should I continue?

• 31:13Speaker 00

  Okay, the next one is mission creep. You expanded Peaceworks into places like Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Mexico before your core business was proven. What did that teach you about expanding too fast?

• 31:26Speaker 01

  So I was in love with the mission and so we started in the Middle East. And then we, like, also was a young guy traveling, going to Indonesia, running. I was training for a marathon. I remember I trained in. In the Sinai Run, in Yogyakarta Run, in Sri Lanka Run, I was running, having fun, starting ventures all over, running the business to the ground. Because I was so overextended, trying to start all sorts of ventures, so in love with my mission, that I wasn't focusing enough to make one of them win.

• 31:59Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 31:59Speaker 01

  Had I spent more time on Moshe and Ali's, maybe I would have had more chance for that business to take off. But instead, I was trying all sorts of new ventures. By the way, the whole business was a million dollar big company. At one point, we hit three million and went back down to one million. But it wasn't a big scale business. Each of these sub-lines had hundreds of thousands of dollars, which means you're spending way too much money in logistics, you're spending way too much money in the warehouses, you're spending way too much overhead. It's just, it's not scalable and you're not leveraging through enough and enough economies of scale. So focus on one venture, get it right, win, dominate,

• 32:44Speaker 01

  and only start the second line extension or venture once you're dominating in, you have to earn the right to expand.

• 32:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, you basically needed to, it was okay to experiment in the beginning, but at some point, you should have focused on a winner.

• 32:57Speaker 01

  The question of experience, a great question, Hala, because you're right, like, it's not like Moshe and Ali's was like setting the world on fire. So you do as an entrepreneur, one of the greatest strengths of an entrepreneur is that we're very creative, resourceful, and we pursue every opportunity. One of the greatest weaknesses of an entrepreneur is that we're very creative, resourceful, and we pursue every opportunity. You have to have the experimentation and the creativity, because otherwise, kind would have never been born. Otherwise, I would have not gone into Starbucks. There's so many things where you, you have to try things out, you have to break the rules and set level the playing field for your creativity. But at some point, that creativity and entrepreneurialism can also kill you if you're just trying every single thing that comes to your head.

• 33:43Speaker 01

  So there has to be a creative element and a discipline element, and they need to, like the little devils, like angel and devil fight in your head, you need to find the balance between the creativity and the discipline.

• 33:53Speaker 00

  Hmm. Okay, sprate. Is that how you say it, sprate?

• 33:57Speaker 01

  Sprate.

• 33:57Speaker 00

  Sprate. So you developed a whole new food category, sprate, which is spread plus pate. And then you had to teach consumers what that meant.

• 34:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, keep it simple, stupid. Don't, don't try to overcomplicate things. We had this sundried tomato spread that could be used as a spread, as a pate, as a sauce, as a dressing, you could use it. It was very versatile, and it was very versatile. So instead of just calling it spread that you can use in versatile ways, I came up with a new name. I thought I was so creative, I called it sprate, and I trademarked the word sprate. And the problem is, people walk on the shelves of sprate. I have no idea what sprate is, let me go to something else, and I do know what it is. So the, the word sprate got in the way. And it's very costly to educate consumers. You want to try to find consumers where they're at.

• 34:50Speaker 01

  What are their needs, what are they looking for, and then write those vectors, rather than create a whole new category called sprate.

• 34:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's, that's a really great lesson. I'm sure that really helped you with Kind later on, too. Just making sure that

• 35:04Speaker 01

  Think about it.

• 35:05Speaker 00

  all the descriptions were just clear and

• 35:08Speaker 01

  A hundred percent. Everything that we did right at Kind was thanks to the lessons of everything we did wrong at Peaceworks. We went from Moshe Pupik and Ali Mishmunkin's world famous all-natural gourmet foods to Kind.

• 35:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, Kind Bar.

• 35:21Speaker 01

  I mean, we went from tons of products, tons of categories, to only eight flavors. And the brokers and the stores would knock on us and say, this is great, give us more. And I'm like, no, we're going to stay disciplined. It took many, many, many years before we expanded Kind. We stayed to eight flavors, eight products for, I don't know, five or 10 years. We did not add something because I had learned the lesson of trying to trade too many products.

• 35:47Speaker 00

  Yeah. Okay, last one. It's called pesto blind spot. So you personally did not like pesto.

• 35:53Speaker 01

  I love your research, Hala, you did a hell of a good research.

• 35:56Speaker 00

  This is what I'm known for.

• 35:57Speaker 01

  Do they tell you that joke, Hala, you did a hell of a good research?

• 36:00Speaker 00

  Oh, hello, no, I never heard that one before.

• 36:02Speaker 01

  For real?

• 36:02Speaker 00

  No, no, yeah, you got it.

• 36:04Speaker 01

  This is a very interesting story, and I almost never have told it, so I'm glad you asked it. We had a, when I first was doing research, I graduated from Stanford Law School, and I was trying to come up with this Peaceworks thing, I didn't have a product. So I was doing research, and I went into a store in Tel Aviv, and I found this obscure-looking jar of sundried tomato spread. And I downed the whole thing, it was like delicious. I went back to the store, and there was no more product. And the company had gone out of business, so I'm like, okay. And eventually, I met the manufacturer, and I found out that part of why the reason he had gone out of business, he was buying his glass jars from Portugal,

• 36:49Speaker 01

  his sundried tomatoes from Italy, his olive from Italy, so. And I taught him and showed him how he could buy the glass jars from Egypt, the sundried tomatoes from Turkey, the olives from Palestine. And so we ended up doing this joint venture. The product was fresher, lower cost, and that's how it started. But I was obsessed with the sundried tomato spread. I just wanted to make the sundried tomato spread. And he said, well, try this other thing, it's called basil pesto. And I'm like, Yoel, that tastes like grass. I hate this basil pesto, I'm not buying any of it. He said, Daniel, please trust me, it's an important product. Like, Yoel, no, I'll do the sundried tomato. If you want, I'll do the green olive spread, it's tolerable. The sundried tomato is my favorite, the green olive is good.

• 37:34Speaker 01

  This basil pesto thing, I don't like it. Daniel, trust me, it's important in the marketplace of specialty food trade. I'm like, fine, Yoel. I ordered eight hundred cases of sundried tomato, four hundred cases of olive spread, one hundred cases of basil, just because Yoel was pushing me. First month, second month, three months, basil pesto's outselling the others, not one to one, ten to one. By the time that, like, it scaled, basil was eighty or ninety percent of our sales. And it tells you, listen to yourself, but not too much.

• 38:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, the market's going to tell you what they want.

• 38:15Speaker 01

  Listen to the market, also listen to others. Like, I, I'm a very instinctual entrepreneur, I listen to my god, I like Moshe and Ali's and sundried tomato, I like Kind, it's worked, right? It's helped me. But you have to be careful to check that with other consumer flavor profiles and with data, because your god alone is your god, and, yeah.

• 38:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. So, so many failures, and, and you were doing Peaceworks for a decade. You paid yourself twenty-four thousand dollars a year, which is a very low salary. And so you were really struggling for, for many, many years. And like you said, it, it was just like a million dollar business, which, like, you know, as me, an entrepreneur, it's like, a million dollar business is good, but

• 39:00Speaker 01

  But to create a million in revenues.

• 39:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, oh, so it was like even less profit.

• 39:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, the profit was, by the way, I was very proud that we eked out a profit always. It's very important for people that are starting up, don't get an overly fancy office, don't get an overly fancy desk, just tighten your belt so you can invest the money where it matters. So we're actually managed, even where our sales trajectory was thirty-three thousand dollars, two hundred and twenty-six thousand, four hundred and something, six hundred and sixty thousand, eight hundred and sixty thousand, then we hit a million, and then we got stuck around the million mark. And then one year or two, we got to two or three million, went back down to one million. But those are the top line, the revenues. The profit was often ten to fifteen percent, which for a small business is very impressive

• 39:49Speaker 01

  that I managed to eked out a profit.

• 39:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 39:51Speaker 01

  Because we were really, really resourceful, and I was paying myself a very small salary. But we had a profit, but the other problem is that when you're growing, what you don't realize is you need more inventory, you need more accounts receivable.

• 40:09Speaker 00

  Especially with a product business, yeah.

• 40:10Speaker 01

  Working capital. And so even if I had a fifty or a hundred thousand dollar profit, I had to put it, first I pay taxes from that profit, so now I only have half of that. And then I need to take that and put it in working. So even though I'm technically profitable, I barely could make ends meet, because every last cent that I had, I had to put it into inventory, into working capital.

• 40:31Speaker 00

  You would have made more money as a lawyer.

• 40:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure.

• 40:34Speaker 00

  You know? So I actually was interviewing Kevin O'Leary less than a year ago. He was right in that seat where you're sitting. And he told me, Hala, if somebody who's listening has a business, and in thirty-six months, they haven't grown, they have no profit, they haven't figured out customer acquisition, they should take their business idea and shoot it behind the barn. That's what he, that's what he told me.

• 40:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:58Speaker 00

  Now, you did your business for ten years.

• 41:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I think in general, Kevin is actually an incredibly important force in Shark Tank and in the world, because he tells it like it is, and it's very valuable for somebody to be ruthless and tell you what you need to hear. And I think as a rule of thumb, he's correct, but the problem is you never know.

• 41:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, you never know.

• 41:18Speaker 01

  Because to your point, those ten years of failures taught me enough to then turn Kind into a five to seven billion dollar company, depending how you calculate it. And it was a high, probably the most successful company in terms of investment in capital to growth. Like, we had almost no investment, and we had generated billions in sales, cash flow positively, profitably, so very well-run, partly because of all the lessons I learned from Peaceworks. And had I given up, forget about three years, ten years, nine years later, Kind would have never stood there. It's, it's impossible to answer. I think as a rule of thumb, If you're not gaining momentum after three to five years, you need to pivot.

• 42:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 42:04Speaker 01

  But more than that, I think you need to really listen to what the market is telling you. And it's so hard, it's so hard to know when to throw in the towel, when to just pivot, or when to just keep going and be patient.

• 42:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, but to your point, something that I think is so important is that your experiences actually give you profit and not just financial profit. Like your experiences are allowing you to get the knowledge, to get the experience, the leadership skills, the, and you are kind of in the same industry. So it really helped you in terms of like how to do distribution correct and all that.

• 42:37Speaker 01

  And Hala, there's data, it's fascinating. I'm trying to remember where I came by this data because it was just within the last year or so, but it's fascinating. The likelihood of first time entrepreneur in any venture succeeding is close to none. But by the time that they've tried it twice, it doubles from 10% to 20%. By the time they're the third time entrepreneur, it triples from 10% to 30%. There's still 70% chance that things are not going to pan out, but you're 3X more likely to figure out. So the more you put in those reps and, you know, on Build or Break, the podcast we just launched, the common theme of all these fascinating, incredible people, they put in the work, they try things out and things don't work out, they try again, they try again, you

• 43:22Speaker 01

  just keep trying, you just keep never giving up because eventually, and you only need one to win.

• 43:29Speaker 00

  Yep, so true. Something that we didn't get to talk about offline before this interview is that I actually also started my company the year my father passed away from COVID. And when he passed away, it was in 2020, I had my podcast, my podcast was already getting really big and he saw that, but I didn't have my company yet. And when he was in the hospital battling COVID and I couldn't see him and stuff, that's actually when I first started Yap Media, which is now, you know, almost a $10 million company. And I have a podcast network and a social agency and all these things. And I remember when he passed away, it felt like I had this like resurgence of like, okay, like I'm doing cool things, I've got a great corporate job, I've got this cool podcast,

• 44:12Speaker 00

  but like I could be doing so much more. My dad overcame so much growing up in such extreme poverty in Palestine, moved us to America, became a surgeon, became chief of surgery in many hospitals and built a medical center and did all these amazing things that it made me feel like I needed, I had so much like privilege that I needed to do it 100 times bigger, like for him. And I heard you say something on a podcast that like, I was like, oh my gosh, I feel that way, is that you felt like when your father died, like a piece of him like lived in you basically, or like burned a deeper fire in you, and I feel the same way. So I'd love for you to tell us about like, when your father passed away, how did that

• 44:54Speaker 00

  give you the drive to like, give it another try and really start kind?

• 44:59Speaker 01

  Well, first of all, it was very beautiful to listen to you talk about your dad. And I just, I'm 100% certain that your dad loved you so much because you see it in who you are, right? Like you have all this love inside you and all this self-confidence and that came from your parents. And I'm sure he was so proud of you and that gave you that. And yeah, I think that when we're blessed to have parents that we love and that love us, that is one of the greatest sources of strength for an entrepreneur. And when you need to do stuff in their memory, in their honor, and you can feel them inside you, like in the Jewish tradition, when somebody passes away, you do something for a year called

• 45:44Speaker 01

  Kaddish, where you do these prayers. And you're supposed to do it three times a day, these prayers. And what it does is it focuses your pain on that moment and helps you meditate and grow. And I'm not a very religious person, I don't pray that much. It was very difficult for me to connect with, what would God want me to be praying to God? And once I connected to that bigger picture, but what I did very frequently is I connected inside myself, I felt my father inside me. And I do believe that we have souls, spirits, some energy, something that connects us. And I think when my dad passed away, I felt carrying him inside me.

• 46:28Speaker 01

  And it's not just his lessons and his memories and the memories of him, it's also his energy. I felt like I had him inside me. And I asked myself, particularly that year, but also multiple times a year still today, when I go to temple, which is not very frequently, but when I go, I close my eyes and I think, what would my dad want from me? What would he expect me to do and to give to the world? How can I be a better husband to Michelle? How can I be a better father to each of my four kids? And I go through each of them and I think, oh, I need to be more patient here, I need to be more supportive here, I need to be more loving here with my team, how can I,

• 47:09Speaker 01

  because I'm a very driven, impulsive, impatient person, ADHD, how can I be more grateful? How can I express more gratitude? Because it's just not in my nature. I'm not a bad person, but I'm not a, I'm a normal human being. I make mistakes like everybody else and I'm, a lot of people that are very driven, we have the mistake of not, like my grandmother used to tell me, take the, take a minute to smell the flowers, to just pause and just appreciate, laugh and appreciate one another. So I, I try to reflect about, and it helps me a lot. It helps me remind myself why we're here. Because I, like every human being, have an ego and I have a big ego. And that ego, before you know it, like my friend Eddie Margane from here says, ego is not your amigo.

• 47:55Speaker 01

  And it's very true, like, like there's something about self-confidence that's good for you and about needing to prove yourself that I think is healthy, but it can very quickly turn into chasing fame, chasing

• 48:12Speaker 01

  metrics that are superficial and it can really catch up with you and jealousies and this and that. All of us need to constantly keep it in check and expunge the bad stuff. It, it's not something, at least to me, at least to me, trying, aspiring to be kind, aspiring to not dehumanize is a work in progress. Like something that's very important for all of us to understand, you're not a bad person if you stereotype. Every one of us stereotypes, it's just part of our brain, our heuristics, our brain taught us pattern recognition, generalizations, we all generalize. But what you need to do is fear which generalizations are valid and which are not. And stereotyping a human being wherever they come from is not healthy.

• 48:55Speaker 01

  It's going to make you not be fulfilled in life and not successful in life. So you need to expunge some of these things and it's an active work because with social media, we're all being told us versus them, us versus them.

• 49:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 49:06Speaker 01

  It's, it's work to try to, to try to really actively expunge the bad stuff and remind yourself why we're here.

• 49:16Speaker 00

  Yeah. You brought up ego, so there's one story that you tell that I just absolutely love that I want my listeners to hear about your grandfather and a penny. Can you share that story with us?

• 49:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, my grandfather from my mom's side was a cattle rancher. He was a cattle man and he was very tiny, but he was like, like as a little kid, he passed away when I was seven or eight years old, but I remember with his two fingers, he, he could like, he was very strong. And he had a proverb that a man that's too arrogant to bend over to pick up a penny is not worth a penny. In Spanish, it's a quinto, a nickel, but un hombre demasiado digno para agacharse y levantar un quinto, no vale un quinto. And the whole point is, if you think you're so special that you don't need to

• 50:13Speaker 01

  worry about not wasting that piece of bread or whatever, who are you? Who do you think you are? But also for business is a really good tool because if you stay scrappy and not waste, then you can invest in the right places and grow. So I think resourcefulness and scrappiness are a very good tool for growth and it's not the same as stinginess. Like I give more than $25 million a year in charity. And by the way, I think this is the first time I share that, so now you have news. I spend on myself less, a fraction of that, but I will not waste that last piece of cheese or cottage cheese or yogurt.

• 50:58Speaker 01

  I'm like, guys, why are you throwing, I, I don't know, I'm very proud to not waste. I, I don't see why that should be something like, oh my God, who's this person? I admire people that don't, that don't waste. I'm sure your parents were like that.

• 51:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, very, very similar. I think it's like the way that we were growing up. Yeah, yeah.

• 51:18Speaker 01

  But I think all of us should aspire to live by that proverb from my grandfather, to, to not feel that we're so above it, to have the humility to pick up that penny. And another proverb that he had is like, mind the pennies and the dollars will mind themselves. As a business person, don't be penny wise and dollar foolish, that's also true. But if you worry about the specifics.

• 51:44Speaker 01

  The big picture is gonna work itself out.

• 51:45Speaker 00

  Hmm. I love that advice. And I think being resourceful is very important, especially when you're first starting out as an entrepreneur and you don't have a lot of capital or sales coming in. Um, but in Kind, I know that there was a period of time where you only spent eight hundred dollars on samples.

• 52:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:05Speaker 00

  And I think you were already making like eight hundred thousand dollars. You're in sales or something like that.

• 52:11Speaker 01

  I love, you did amazing research. Whoever's on this, you should know. Hala does her work and it's, it's very valuable.

• 52:19Speaker 00

  Thanks.

• 52:20Speaker 01

  You know, the stories like this. At Peaceworks, we developed a lot of good habits and some bad habits. We were not wasting, but we also had what I would call a frugal mindset, not a resourceful mindset. So when you, in your culture of spending, there's directionally three cultures. Frugality, gluttonous.

• 52:40Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 52:41Speaker 01

  And resourceful. Frugality is when you will not waste a cent, but you will not invest a cent either. You're just cutting costs at all costs for everything. What it does, it helps you survive, but it doesn't help you fulfill your potential because you're not investing in your growth. On the opposite spectrum is a wasteful mentality, a gluttonous mentality where you're just spending and you have the ping pong table and you're eating cupcakes on the ping pong and table and the, like, like you're just wasting resources and not. That is the worst because you're gonna go out of business. The magic is a resourceful mindset where you're not wasting, but you're being smart about stretching those dollars, about being resourceful.

• 53:22Speaker 01

  And the perfect example is sampling, where in two thousand and eight, our sampling budget was eight hundred dollars. Because in the Peaceworks years, I had taught myself that any sampling was a cost center. And I hadn't realized that it's also an investment for people to try your product.

• 53:40Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 53:40Speaker 01

  And once we started investing in giving people free product to try, for every person that tried a Kind bar, nine out of ten would lo- love it. And within two months, just a really good ROI, it would pay for itself because people would go and buy more and tell their friends. All of our source of marketing in the beginning was word of mouth. And we're very lucky about that. And so we grew a lot organically. And then we learned, oh, wow, sampling is not a cost center. It's an investment. It's a marketing function. And that first year, we went from eight hundred dollars to eight hundred thousand dollars. In, in, in, in sampling. And within a few years, we were giving twenty million dollars of product for free. And that's what helped the company grow like crazy.

• 54:25Speaker 00

  That's amazing. And it goes back to the, the mission is not gonna sell the product. The product is gonna sell the product.

• 54:32Speaker 01

  A hundred percent that in, in, in the consumer product goods industry. You know, in finance, they say cash is king. Where I say in consumer product goods, product is king. You can have the best marketer, the best salesperson, the best supply chain. If the product is not the best, forget it.

• 54:50Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 54:50Speaker 01

  You're fighting up a uphill battle.

• 54:55Speaker 00

  Uphill battle, yeah. Uh, something else that I loved about the branding of the Kind bar is that you had this translucent wrapper, clear wrapper. And you could like actually see like all the nuts and the berries and all the good stuff that was in there. Was that on purpose?

• 55:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, a hundred percent. The, the concept is the brand of Kind at its essence is about transparency. Transparency in the wrapper, so you can see what you get. Transparency in the way we make the product, so it's all whole nuts and fruits. By the way, I sold Kind, I'm not, uh, I don't have a financial stake anymore.

• 55:26Speaker 00

  But he still, he still brought me a Kind bar today, so he's still a supporter.

• 55:30Speaker 01

  I still love letting people.

• 55:32Speaker 00

  It's your baby.

• 55:32Speaker 01

  It's, yeah, it's still, um, I'm very proud to be able to share the product. But it was about transparency in the way we shared the names. It was transparency in the wrappers. You could see what you're eating and what you're getting. And it was a transparency in the way we communicated with Kima. And what I find is that a lot of founders and CEOs, personalities and values becoming viewed in the culture of the company. So for me, those were values that were very important. And so we created a culture around it. And transparency in communications became a key thing that helped us outperform our competitors because we had a very tightly knit, uh, it was kindness, transparency. There was no hierarchy.

• 56:15Speaker 01

  Everybody was in it together, whether you were the president of the company or the janitor of the company. Anybody after six months of working full time at Kind was eligible to get stock options. And you would vest over a period of time and everybody earned ownership in the company, was a fellow owner. We're all in this together, we're all in the trenches together, we're all equals. Everybody had the, at least as an aspiration, an equal voice in being able to challenge the dogma and notice when we're not doing things best in class and celebrate when somebody noticed, oh, we could do it this way instead of that way. And so there's a lot about that transparency and that candor and that hearty debate culture where we would debate things to get to the best answers.

• 56:59Speaker 00

  Hmm. When I hear you talk about Kind, something that comes in my mind is this idea of like Kind leadership. And, uh, I know that you often talk about like the difference between Kind and Nice. So help us understand like what is a Kind leader versus a Nice?

• 57:14Speaker 01

  A Nice leader doesn't cause problems. A Kind leader solves problems. A Nice leader is very polite. A Kind leader is very honest.

• 57:28Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 57:29Speaker 01

  So a Nice leader is not gonna tell you things that are gonna hurt your feelings. A Kind leader is gonna tell you things that you need to hear so you can do a better job and you can grow.

• 57:39Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 57:40Speaker 01

  A nice person in the party is not gonna make you feel awkward by letting you know that there's something in between your teeth.

• 57:47Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 57:47Speaker 01

  A Kind leader is gonna tell you, you know what? You have something.

• 57:50Speaker 00

  Gotta go to the bathroom, yeah.

• 57:51Speaker 01

  Because you're gonna be the entire party with the thing in between. A Nice leader doesn't bully people, but a Kind leader stands up to the bully.

• 57:58Speaker 00

  Hmm. I love that. Kind ended up growing. Is there any lessons in terms of like? Well, first of all, how long from when you pivoted Kind? Did it actually really start to grow? Like, how long did it take where you're like, oh, man, this is the way better idea that we need to lean into?

• 58:15Speaker 01

  Peaceworks from ninety-three to two thousand and three was two steps forward, two steps back. Two steps forward, one step back. Like, you know, it was barely surviving. Kind, every year, boom, boom, boom, doubled in growth, doubled in growth, doubled in growth. For the first ten years, on average, we grew triple digits every year. And we did so cash flow positively, so that we were getting more cash in our buckets and profitably. So in the P and L, we were making money. And that's what made the company grow so fast and so well.

• 58:46Speaker 00

  How hard it, was it for you to maintain being CEO through growing the business so large? Like from growing a one million dollar business to a, a business that was making millions and millions of dollars?

• 58:57Speaker 01

  Excellent question. It was so much fun because it stretched me and grew me and made me learn so many different things. And at the same time, it was thanks to the people I surrounded myself that I was able to do it. So there were people like John Leahy, Ellie Lanning, Justin Mervis, and, and many others that without them, there's no chance Kind would have fulfilled its potential. So what it means to be a CEO, because the word CEO sounds like, okay, you're a CEO, you're a CEO. No, well, what does it mean? Because, for example, John Leahy was my president, but he was, we were running the show together. Even Ellie, you could argue, was our third person running it with us. And when I was a CEO of a one-person operation, I was a CEO to myself.

• 59:41Speaker 01

  One of the hardest things is when you hire your first team member. Because now you're CEO to yourself and to them. Being the CEO of a two-person operation is super hard, especially for me as a twenty-five-year-old that didn't know how to empower people and delegate and, and, and, and it was, it's a tricky thing when you're three, four, five, six, eight people. Very different. They're all there reporting directly to you initially. And it just takes a very, very essential set of skills. How do you empower people but still coach them? I, I couldn't afford to hire very senior people, so I had to still coach them, teach them, but how do I do my? So it's, it's a completely different set of sets of challenges. Then all of a sudden, you need to build a structure, right?

• 1:00:22Speaker 01

  Then once you're twenty, thirty, fifty people, now you have direct reports and you need to find people that are better than you at each of those tasks. But you still have a lot of knowledge to impart to them. You need to find that balance between guiding them. And the more that you grow, the more that you need to contract yourself. It's fascinating. The more that you're advancing and the company is getting stronger and attracting talent and expanding size, you as a leader need to pivot from doing all of the stocks. By the way, I, it was never very important. I was never beneath picking up the boxes and doing, like, rolling up my sleeves. I, I want a team of doers and that was a culture that we created at Kind.

• 1:01:01Speaker 01

  But you also need to start elevating your leadership to create an ensemble orchestra rather than to just wanna do everything yourself. And I think John and I together were insane. But Mike, who came after us and became our CEO, what he was great at was building, um, ensemble orchestra and ensemble team, the best cast of leaders for each of the departments and to take us to the next level. And as you continue growing, you need to continue letting other people grow with you and grow and, and, and let them lead. And so your, your role becomes more presidential in the sense of like

• 1:01:45Speaker 01

  creating a culture, being there for everybody, setting the tone. And obviously it depends on your personality. I was really good and your skill sets. I was very good marketing, I was good at culture, I was good at new product development. But John Leahy was two thousand times better at sales, three thousand times better at supply chain and operations, three thousand times better at finance. So John owned all of those things. By the way, John owned every department, like it reported to him. But the departments where I was good at in value had dotted lines to me.

• 1:02:17Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 1:02:18Speaker 01

  So it really depends what your skills are. But in all of the cases, as you grow, your role completely evolves.

• 1:02:23Speaker 00

  The coolest thing about being a founder is that you can grow a company where like the whole company is designed around your best skill sets. Like you get to decide like if you're gonna run sales and marketing and somebody else runs finance and ops.

• 1:02:36Speaker 01

  But it's hard because how do you learn to have the self?

• 1:02:41Speaker 00

  Awareness.

• 1:02:41Speaker 01

  Introspection, self-awareness and introspection to know.

• 1:02:45Speaker 01

  This person is better than me at this. And by the way, it's easier said than done, but we talked about ego earlier. I founded this nonprofit, the One Voice Movement, Mohamed Daralsha and I co-founded it. And there was periods where I took a long time to acknowledge that I was jealous. Why I was jealous, I don't know. He and I were doing God's work, but sometimes I felt that I deserved the credit and I had that insecurity. And it took me a while to expunge that from me. And, and so I think everyone of us has those insecurities. And what I coach my team is find somebody that's better than you.

• 1:03:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:03:22Speaker 01

  It's hard. It's hard because then they might upstage you. You might be intimidated. But ultimately, a great leader develops a self-confidence to know that their success is your success. And then certainly in my book, those are the people I want to grow.

• 1:03:35Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:03:35Speaker 01

  And investing, but, but an insecure person might not wanna have somebody that's gonna upstage them. And so it's, it's, it requires a lot of self-confidence to try to build greatness. And in management, what I explain is we are only as good as our, our weakest link. So if I call myself as an eight, to not give myself a 10. And to develop, because my ego is wounded. I don't want eight, nines, or 10s because they're gonna upstage me. I only bring sevens. And then the seven brings a six and a five and a four in terms of performance. Before you know it, you are failing. And think about it the opposite way. If you're always trying to bring in talent that's better than you.

• 1:04:19Speaker 01

  Imagine, and that was what we built at Kind, where we believe so much in everybody is working for a greater goal. And before you know it, it's a machine. Because you're bringing greatness and people that are better than you and they're lifting you up and they're teaching you and you all wanna learn from each other and be surrounded by that greatness. But that, that's a culture that, that everybody needs to be comfortable, that they wanna be stretched.

• 1:04:41Speaker 00

  Yeah. And to your point, it requires you not having an ego to know, like, okay, I'm gonna hire somebody who's smarter than me at this and might even tell me what to do, even though I'm the CEO and the founder.

• 1:04:51Speaker 01

  And by the way, that, even that is not so easy either because, yes, and sometimes you know better than them because you've done it all your life. And so it's, it's also, I'm not saying, all right, hire that person that's smarter than you, let them run with it. Give them the space, but sometimes you do need to coach them because to your point, you're the founder, you're the CEO. And sometimes you might know better than them. So it's not, it's not.

• 1:05:16Speaker 00

  It's not black and white.

• 1:05:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:17Speaker 00

  So was there ever a point where you took out and it's sort of an investment? Did you get an investor in Kind at any point? And then when you sold, like, what was that experience like?

• 1:05:29Speaker 01

  Many different examples.

• 1:05:31Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:05:31Speaker 01

  After my seed investors came in, nobody wanted to invest in me. And what's interesting about investors is, it's very funny. They're like sheep. Nobody wants to invest in you till everybody wants to invest in you. So for many years, nobody wants to take a look at us. I gave up trying. I got lucky. That's why I owned 80, 90% of the company. Cause nobody wanted to invest in me. But once Kind started showing up in the data, everybody's calling us. Everybody wants to be our friend. And guess what? We don't need them because we have money.

• 1:06:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:06:01Speaker 01

  At one point, I brought in an investor, uh, and this investor did not behave very well.

• 1:06:07Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:06:08Speaker 01

  So they agreed to be a minority stakeholder. And months after bringing them in, they saw that this thing is.

• 1:06:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:06:18Speaker 01

  Going places and they tried to push me out. And they tried to force me to sell them a controlling stake in the company. And I'm like, that's not what we negotiated. And they're like, yeah, well, take it or leave it. I'm like, well, I'll leave it. And they're like, okay, well, we're taking all the three or four people we found for you. We're taking them back with you. So I had many nights without sleep. Cause I felt like I brought in a traitor into my organization. So when you bring in an investor, make sure that you do the research. How are they gonna behave during difficult times? And what's their value set? And do they have the right values set? Because that matters so much more than if they're gonna give you a valuation of this or that. Like, yeah, valuations matter, but much more matters, are they gonna add value and are they gonna approach things with integrity?

• 1:07:01Speaker 01

  And a lot of investors are very, very, they just care about the money. It's disgusting, honestly.

• 1:07:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:07:07Speaker 01

  We eventually bought them out. And there were a lot of difficulties because they really squeezed me. But we bought them out and we brought in another investor. And this other investor, BDT, super long-term oriented, best investor in the world. So it really depends what's the value set of the investor. BDT was an amazing investor. And the way they handled themselves is they would put my interests first, which is hard to believe. But they were building a long-term reputation, a long-term culture where they wanted to know that they are the entrepreneur's best friend. And they did that to me. There were two or three junctures where my interests were not perfectly aligned with theirs.

• 1:07:49Speaker 01

  And they were my advisors and my investors and they always guided me the right way. I will never forget it. I'm very loyal to them. I'm an advisor to them as a result. Baron Throt, Greg Lemkow, and Michael Dell now. It's Michael Dell's investment platform, very long-term oriented. I think the difference between most investors and entrepreneurs is that we as entrepreneurs are relationship oriented and long-term oriented. Whereas investors tend to be very transactional and short-term oriented. They're just doing this transaction. And with Baron, Greg, and Michael Dell, who's like best in class, they're very long-term oriented. Their culture is a culture of long-term relationships, of doing the right thing for the long-term.

• 1:08:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:08:34Speaker 01

  And that makes all the difference.

• 1:08:36Speaker 00

  What questions, like if, if somebody was speaking with somebody who is interested in investing in their company, what questions do you feel like they should ask to make sure that the person is long-term oriented?

• 1:08:45Speaker 01

  I don't think they should ask them to the investors because most of these investors are gonna know how to answer whatever they want. I think you need to ask around. You need to look at other companies that these guys have invested in. And discreetly, quietly, and confidentially try to get a sense. And ideally, companies where things have not necessarily gone great. By the way, not all entrepreneurs are perfect either. Like, we've had problems with, like. And the other thing you need to do is put things in writing and make them very clear. Make sure that you have a good lawyer. Because if you enter an agreement that's not good for you, I've, I've tried to help so many entrepreneurs that got in trouble. And if they got screwed in the legal terms, it's very hard.

• 1:09:30Speaker 01

  Don't have too big an ego that you don't understand that the investors do need minority protections to protect their investment. But also protect your rights and, and find the right balance.

• 1:09:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:09:41Speaker 01

  Get a lawyer that's gonna help you find what's fair for all sides. And think that way. Don't think me versus them, but do prepare for the downside. So try to set the culture and the journey for everybody to benefit. But protect your downside by making sure that if you think of a worst-case scenario, you're protected.

• 1:09:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:09:58Speaker 01

  Does that make sense?

• 1:09:59Speaker 00

  Totally makes sense. So did you always imagine that you were actually gonna sell Kind? Were you always like, okay, I'm gonna have this big exit?

• 1:10:06Speaker 01

  Hala, the most interesting thing is, I don't think I thought about it that way. I did. When I built Kind, I was hoping I get $10 million in sales. I think that was a number that I was like, that would be success. And then we got to 10 million, they realized, oh wow, we can get to 50 million. Then we got to 50, oh, we can get to 500, we can get to a billion. But, um.

• 1:10:26Speaker 00

  So cool.

• 1:10:27Speaker 01

  It's very cool to, and you're, you're saying that it's so, and by the way, the numbers are useful and obviously they help you have a good living. But the journey that you have of a built from nothing, a $10 million platform, that's insane. And for people that have the backbone to accept all the vicissitudes of an entrepreneur journey, because you're gonna have high highs and low lows. There's nothing more exciting. Once things started going, I really wasn't thinking about it.

• 1:10:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:10:56Speaker 01

  So there was a situation where we almost got bought out early on. And I almost sold the company for like 20 million dollars for 50% and would have been another 20. And that didn't pan out and I'm lucky it didn't pan out. It's not like I wasn't working at this big CPG company. Got cold feet and I got so lucky. This was before I brought in institutional investors. But then once I started growing, it was just so much fun. That was just focus on fulfilling Kind's potential. And then when we finally grew a lot and started growing internationally and started seeing that we were not able to fully control our brand internationally.

• 1:11:37Speaker 01

  That's where I started getting cold feet because we would hear of stories where our product was being sold in countries where we were not there. How is the product getting in there? People would literally go to Costco by entire containers and ship containers to China, to other countries, and then sell the product without us being able to be in control of our own destinies and manage the brand and, and shape the brand as we wanted. And so we wanted an international partner to help us.

• 1:12:04Speaker 01

  Catch up with that.

• 1:12:04Speaker 00

  Yeah. And then that's when you decided that you were gonna sell.

• 1:12:07Speaker 01

  That's when I decided I want to have a strategic partner, but even that journey was a very tough journey. Even that journey involved many days where I said, no, no, no, no, no, I'm not doing it till the last minute. Till the very last minute when we signed. I remember I called my management, he was like, I'm not doing this deal. I got cold feet, I'm like, I saw this, this and this from them. That's not what I want. We're not doing this. And my team is like, what are you talking about? They wanted some liquidity.

• 1:12:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:12:35Speaker 01

  And so I'm like, well, this is not just my journey, it's my team's journey also. And they want liquidity. So I hardly considered in their, in their journey. But it's, it's a very tough thing for an entrepreneur to decide. And even today, I asked myself if it was the right question, decision. But at that point, we wanted to sell a minority stake to a partner, international partner that will help us grow globally. And what we realized that all of the best in class partners wouldn't do this unless we were giving them a path to own the whole enchilada. So we eventually caved and did that.

• 1:13:09Speaker 00

  And you sold your last stake in the company fairly recently, right?

• 1:13:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, like a year and a half ago.

• 1:13:13Speaker 00

  How does it feel to no longer have ownership over your baby?

• 1:13:17Speaker 01

  It's very weird, it's very hard. It's a good company with good values in terms of like, they care about the long-term orientation of the brand. They have a lot of high integrity. But it's still not, it's not your baby, like, and, and, and it's, and it's hard. By the way, I think they're doing a very good job with new product development for the most part in terms of protecting the brand integrity, very good job. But that culture, that entrepreneurial zeal that an entrepreneur creates, it's gone because you're not part of a gigantic behemoth.

• 1:13:48Speaker 00

  Yeah. But it gave you the bandwidth to do things like Shark Tank, which is.

• 1:13:53Speaker 01

  Shark Tank I started earlier, but it gave me the bandwidth to do a lot of civic work, to start other ventures, to spend, to get better health. Cause when, I don't understand how you look so good when you're in your like high growth stage because, and I, I don't, I'm not saying that too jokingly, I'm serious, because when I was running Kind, that is, like, I joke that I look like a ghost raccoon. I had, I was working so hard and I was losing sleep over it because I had all the eggs in that one basket. So if one, if we lost one account, oh my God, it was like, I was so scared and.

• 1:14:30Speaker 00

  Hmm, so much stress.

• 1:14:31Speaker 01

  I was so stressed and working so hard, I was sleeping four or five hours a day, terrible sleeping habits. And so consequently, you don't work out because if you have half an hour more, you hit the snooze button. And so you don't sleep. Easier set that down when you're starting your venture and you're in your vital, you know, twenties, thirties, even forties. You need to win, you need to build, of course, you need to do that. But if you can give yourself just a little bit of that exercise and sleep, it goes a long way.

• 1:15:00Speaker 00

  I totally agree. Okay, so let's talk about Shark Tank. I wanna, I want to really understand what it was like to get that, you know, initial interest from Shark Tank. It's such a legendary show, especially for entrepreneurs.

• 1:15:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:16Speaker 00

  And you also being from Mexico, I feel like it's just like really special that you get to be a representative on Shark Tank. So how did that feel?

• 1:15:24Speaker 01

  So when I, when they first reached out to me, I didn't quite understand it. I was like, kind of excited because, I was very excited. Because I discovered Shark Tank late, I was on a plane, walking, I think it was an international flight. And all of a sudden, I see this format of people sitting down and talking and I'm like, it's not a movie, what, what the hell is going on here? And, and so I asked, what is this? And they said Shark Tank, and I started watching it. And I was mesmerized, I loved it because as an entrepreneur, I love the stories. And I had so many stories to tell, right, of all my mistakes, of all my failures. And I wanted to give back and tell the stories. So when they invited me, I was so energized and so honored.

• 1:16:06Speaker 01

  And Barry and Tiffany and Holly and Clay and you and the different producers interviewed me in series.

• 1:16:13Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 1:16:14Speaker 01

  And you first get a Zoom interview, then you get a in-person interview, then you go for dinner. Like they, they're very serious and methodic about this. And it was really energizing. The, the funny part is, I show up for my first day of recording and nobody's ever accused me of being shy or quiet. I talk too much, right? And I love.

• 1:16:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:16:39Speaker 01

  People. I'm on the first seg, on the first segment we record, and I feel like I'm interrupting too much and I'm being rude. And the producers are like, Daniel, you need to wake up. I'm like, what? Yeah, you need to give us more. I'm like, what do you mean, I'm interrupting? I don't wanna, no, no, no, just say when, cause what, one thing that people don't understand, first of all, it's very real. You've never seen those entrepreneurs when they show up. And the Shark Tanks really are trying to get their questions in. And ultimately, the producers turn off the mics of the sharks that don't get their questions in. So it's not as filled with friction in the experience to user. But if I'm trying to ask a question and Kevin and Lori and Barbara are trying to get their questions in and Robert, whatever,

• 1:17:23Speaker 01

  you are pushing in to get in a question that matters to you. And so you really need to have the gumption to throw yourself in. Stephen Bartlett, who's in this season, told us that that's not how it is in the UK. They're very polite, my darling.

• 1:17:39Speaker 00

  Oh, really?

• 1:17:39Speaker 01

  They apparently say, you're gonna start with the first question. And they're like, they're very orderly, it's very funny. But in America, it is just free for all, it's like my dinner table, like the kids, like who can get in their questions in? And it's a big studio and the studio sucks out a lot of the energy. So you really need to lean in and stand up and speak and, and you need to be witty and you need to be quick and see the patterns and decide whether you're gonna invest and there's all these strategies. It is very stimulating, I enjoyed it a lot.

• 1:18:06Speaker 00

  When you first saw like the first couple of episodes where you, that you were in, could you stand to watch it? Or were you like, ah, messed up here? Or, or did you, did you learn anything about like what you need to do better?

• 1:18:17Speaker 01

  It's interesting. I, as a general rule, I cringe a lot when I see myself.

• 1:18:23Speaker 00

  We do.

• 1:18:23Speaker 01

  But on Shark Tank, I think I enjoyed it because Yun and Clay did such a beautiful job. They do a really good job at making sure, it's not a punch below your belt, waist belt show, right? Like, whether you're the entrepreneur or the shark, it's really above board. It's a really, it's a long-term oriented show. It's kind of like the kind values, entrepreneurial values, they really are trying to do it the right way. And so they, there's maybe been two or three moments where I felt really deeply uncomfortable. In the, you know, I've been eight seasons, countless shows, maybe three or four moments where I felt, aye. But almost always I'm fine.

• 1:19:02Speaker 00

  Okay, let's play another game. It's called Shark Quickfire.

• 1:19:05Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:19:05Speaker 00

  Okay? So who would you say is the funniest shark?

• 1:19:10Speaker 01

  That's a very hard question because they're all very funny, but I think Kevin wins it. Damon is hilarious too, but Kevin is, they don't understand this about Kevin, he's hilarious. You really like, he's a talent like this guy, but he also, he's just very funny.

• 1:19:24Speaker 00

  Everybody thinks he's mean.

• 1:19:25Speaker 01

  Damon and Kevin.

• 1:19:26Speaker 00

  Kevin was so cute and nice when he came and Damon's, Damon's been on the show too and he's really, really nice. Who's the most intimidating?

• 1:19:35Speaker 01

  Well, Mark was.

• 1:19:36Speaker 00

  Really?

• 1:19:37Speaker 01

  Mark, I love Mark, I look up to him. He's one of my few mentors that I sit down with him and I learn a lot from him, I love him. Um, there's a handful of mentors that I love learning from, but that are intimidating to me. And when I'm with him, I wonder if I'm doing, having that impact on others, because I don't wanna be intimidating.

• 1:19:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:19:56Speaker 01

  But Mark's.

• 1:19:59Speaker 00

  He can be really intimidating, yeah.

• 1:20:01Speaker 01

  Um, he processes so fast, but you know, the guy's so loyal. And he's always doing the right thing for the right reasons, very long-term oriented, very good values.

• 1:20:12Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 1:20:12Speaker 01

  But he processes really fast, like he would see something that would take me three more minutes before, oh shit, that's what he was going after, that's what he was, like he, he has very good pattern recognition.

• 1:20:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, he's based in Dallas, so we're trying to get me to interview him. He, we haven't secured an interview, but he always responds to his emails.

• 1:20:31Speaker 01

  Isn't that crazy?

• 1:20:32Speaker 00

  Always responds to his emails.

• 1:20:33Speaker 01

  Directly, he.

• 1:20:34Speaker 00

  Hey, I know, and it'll be one word answers like, ask in a month. Do you know what I mean? Like, it's like one word answers.

• 1:20:41Speaker 01

  Email me and I'll try to.

• 1:20:42Speaker 00

  Oh, thank you. What's an investment that you were most wrong about? The worst investment that you did on Shark Tank?

• 1:20:51Speaker 01

  Well, the thing is, they're closed, right? Because there's investments that there's three or four levels. I'll answer this in a way that will be interesting to your audience. Sometimes entrepreneurs work really hard to get on that stage. And they, their film and their show doesn't air. Their episode doesn't air because the producer reserved the right for it not to air. And it might not air because it was just really boring, which is rarely the case, but it can be. Or it might not air because the entrepreneur didn't keep their word or because they found out something bad or something else will happen.

• 1:21:27Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:21:28Speaker 01

  And so there's one that I agreed to the deal on, but it never aired. So you wouldn't know about it. So that's, that's a cheating way to answer. Every one of the deals that I've done, there's one that aired and didn't close because entrepreneurs re-traded. I really wish I would talk about it because I'm upset that they did that. But I'm going to be nice to them, not say it. So once in a while, you get the data because you have the right on due diligence to, to look at the data. And if the entrepreneur tells you, hey, I sold $4 million and they only sold 2 million.

• 1:22:01Speaker 00

  You can, you can back out.

• 1:22:02Speaker 01

  Not close the deal or say, this is, information is wrong. We need to re-trade. I don't like re-trading, so I just don't close those deals. Those have happened a couple. But a couple of times, the entrepreneurs tried to re-trade and say, oh, you know, we gave you too good a deal. Now we want this. And those, I think, those are the ones that bother me when people don't keep their word.

• 1:22:21Speaker 00

  Okay, last couple of ones. What founder trait makes you lean in immediately? Like you see them on stage and you're like, oh, I like this person.

• 1:22:28Speaker 01

  I look for people that I enjoy working with, that are high integrity. High integrity still should always be the case. But this thing about me enjoying working with them, I've realized sometimes the people that are borderline annoying are driven and are getting shit done, sometimes that's what you need.

• 1:22:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:22:48Speaker 01

  So, I mean, I think I always explain about how a great sales, if you have a lame salesperson that doesn't go out and just lazy and doesn't do the work, of course you don't want that. If you're an annoying, persistent one that's driving you nuts, they're getting the stuff done, but they're annoying people. That's also not optimal. The idea is someone that's working really hard, pushing the envelope, but being loved for it. That's where the magic is and it's very hard to do. So I want this person. I want the entrepreneur that's persistent, resilient, but adorable. But it's very hard to find. If I only have this option and this option, I'll take this option.

• 1:23:22Speaker 00

  Take the annoying one, yeah.

• 1:23:22Speaker 01

  Because they're at least driving. I don't want annoying, but at least they're driving. You need somebody that's driven.

• 1:23:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, I love that. So now that you've sold Kind and you've got more money in the bank, are you going back to your original mission with Peaceworks? Tell us about Peaceworks 2.0 and your builders movement.

• 1:23:42Speaker 01

  Well, more broadly, I, I realized that we're living in an age where a lot of people are being told to be victims and to not have agency and to it's us versus them, us versus them. And that is so dangerous for society. And so builders is a movement to try to help all of us build together rather than tear each other apart.

• 1:24:01Speaker 00

  I love it. So it's builders versus destroyers, right?

• 1:24:04Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:24:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:24:04Speaker 01

  But the, because nobody has to be a destroyer. Like yes, builders versus destroyers, but a destroyer is someone that chooses when they wake up in the morning to deny the humanity of the other and to divide, demolish and diminish. It's a choice. You're not born a destroyer. People have the choice to become builders. A builder is a person that wakes up and says, how can I elevate humanity? How can I build together? How can I work with others to solve problems together, to unite society and, and, and, and help? And so it's a, it has 500 plus incredible movement partners from Mark Cuban to Chef José Andrés, to from Lonnie Lee, to, I mean, an incredible roster of people, Liv Shriver.

• 1:24:49Speaker 01

  Just an incredible group of, it's like the Avengers of the, of the builders, trying to find a way to empower all of us with a toolkit. And Build or Break, the show that I just launched, spotlights conversations with the most fascinating builders that talk about their things that could have almost broken them, but how they overcame that and built something incredible instead. And they give you practical tools and stuff. In terms of Peaceworks 2.0, it's very appropriate that you're asking about that because for the last two years, behind the scenes, I've been working with an incredible group of Palestinians, Israelis and internationals to try to help the builders in Gaza reclaim their lives.

• 1:25:29Speaker 01

  Because a lot of people don't understand that besides the devastation of the war that was, you know, when Hamas attacked Israel and Israel responded with so much force and destroyed so much of Gaza, it's not just the destruction that happened in the last two years. Prior to that, Hamas had taken over the land for, I don't know, like 17 years and sapped out the energy from the entrepreneurial spirit. And there's a lot of destruction, corruption and, and forces that are preventing that entrepreneurial spirit, which in Palestinians, in their nature are very entrepreneurial. But in Gaza, we need to re, re revitalize that. And so we have a whole methodology to create a builder's village and a builder's ecosystem

• 1:26:11Speaker 01

  and to try to help invest in entrepreneurs, help provide them loans, help provide them know-how and experience for them to start rebuilding their societies. And I'm really excited about the potentials, daunting and very challenging to navigate so many challenges you can imagine. But I, I'm really bullish about the opportunity to demonstrate the potential of builders in Gaza to provide a contrast to, to all of those alternatives.

• 1:26:36Speaker 00

  It's so amazing. I would love to help you with that in any way that I can, like seriously.

• 1:26:40Speaker 01

  Absolutely going to recruit you.

• 1:26:41Speaker 00

  Yeah. If you could wave a magic wand and foster peace in Israel and Palestine, what, what, what is the future that you imagine there?

• 1:26:51Speaker 01

  Honestly, imagine that what we did in, with the builder's village in Gaza, which starts with 5,000 people, then it's 25,000 people, then 100,000 people, then a million people. And then you expanded to cities across Israel, across the West Bank. Eventually you expand it across the Middle East. And there's so much entrepreneurial spirit in the region. There's so much beauty inside the people there and so much magic. You could create an incredible region. I mean, the oil and the gas can be a building block for greatness. It shouldn't be something that attracts from them.

• 1:27:27Speaker 01

  So right now, the Emiratis, the Saudi, what's interesting, Hala, is that the countries around there have figured this out and they've turned against extremism. And right now, the people that are in leadership in the Emirates, in Saudi Arabia, in Bahrain, in Jordan, they want to create a future of builders. They want to work together to build a better future for everybody. And so all it takes is for them to continue gaining momentum and to prevent the people that are want to divide, demolish and diminish, the destroyers from, on doing that. And I, I really do think it could be a thriving region, but it's, it's going to probably take, just to be clear,

• 1:28:12Speaker 01

  generations for this vision to be fulfilled. But we're going to start tomorrow. We have to start today so that 20 years from now, this is a shining example to the world.

• 1:28:22Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, my dream is for it to be one state. I don't care what it's called, where everybody has equal rights and.

• 1:28:30Speaker 01

  The problem with one state is that both Palestinians and Israelis have national aspirations to have their own homeland. So it could be a confederacy, which is the closest to what you're saying.

• 1:28:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:28:41Speaker 01

  Where Palestinians have their state that they call Palestine, Israelis have their state that they call Israel, and they all are part of a confederation.

• 1:28:48Speaker 00

  That's a good idea.

• 1:28:49Speaker 01

  I think Jordan, Palestine, Israel, each are very small pieces of land. They should all form a confederation and create an, an alliance, but you need the builders to win. Right now you have extremists in all of these societies trying to bring them apart. But that, I think first you need to fulfill the hopes for self, for sovereignty from each of the peoples and from self-confidence, have the builders build together and create a confederacy.

• 1:29:16Speaker 00

  I feel like we could talk about this for hours, but Daniel, you've done such an incredible job. This has been such a great conversation. I end my show with two questions that I ask all of my guests. The first one is, what is one actionable thing our young improffitters can do today to become more profitable tomorrow?

• 1:29:32Speaker 01

  Follow us on Build or Break. I promise you, the, the stories that we are telling, go to Build or Break, wherever you get your podcasts. After you follow all of Yap Media's content, then do Build or Break also. But we like have everyone from Mark Cuban to Matthew McConaughey, talking to us about some of the, you know, Kevin O'Leary was crying in the show, telling us some of these biggest confessions. And it was very, very powerful to learn the lessons that these amazing people have learned. Join the builders movement because it really is going to provide you a set of tools for you to build. And start by just looking at people in their eyes and, and look at them with humanity and treat every human being with respect. Because I'm telling you, that's going to make you so much more effective in your daily job.

• 1:30:16Speaker 01

  Treat every one of your team members and every person you come across, look at their eyes and just give them love. Just for one second, look at their eyes.

• 1:30:25Speaker 01

  Give them that smile, give them that authenticity. It's going to make you more fulfilled, give you more energy and give you more purpose and more, more ability to execute.

• 1:30:34Speaker 00

  And what is your secret to profiting in life?

• 1:30:37Speaker 01

  Think holistically and long-term. Don't think in a narrow-minded way. How can I make more money tomorrow? You know, at Kind, I almost never looked at the financials.

• 1:30:48Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 1:30:49Speaker 01

  Never, almost never. Of course I had Zaher Ibrahim doing that and he was the best CFO you could have found. But, and John Leahy, but once in a while I looked at it, but I focused on how do we create the best product? How we create the best brand, the best story, the best culture, the best team? And I knew that if we did that, the financials would come. It's not that the financials don't matter. The financials matter a lot, but the fundamentals matter most. Think long-term, just think holistically in your own life. Well, as far as we know, we only live once. So do it for more than just making money and.

• 1:31:28Speaker 00

  So good. What a great episode. Daniel, thank you so much for joining us on Young and Profiting Podcast.

• 1:31:34Speaker 01

  Thank you. I'm so excited to meet you and think we're going to have a lifetime friendship.

• 1:31:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, likewise. What a deeply inspiring conversation with Daniel Lubetzky. Most people look at a multi-billion dollar exit or a seat on Shark Tank and assume success was just a straight line. But when you hear Daniel's story, you realize so much of what he built came from a decade of painful, messy failures. One lesson that really stood out to me is that a noble mission is powerful and it's respectful, but it can never make up for an inferior product. Daniel learned this the hard way when he was selling products with confusing names and pushing jars onto shelves where they simply did not sell. His mission gave him fuel, but the product still had to earn the customer. And that's why I loved his point about pushing versus pulling. It's not enough to just be pushy and get your product on the shelf.

• 1:32:21Speaker 00

  You need to create something that customers actually want to pull off the shelf and come back for again. Daniel also made such a smart distinction between being frugal and being resourceful. Frugality can keep you alive, but if you're afraid to invest, it can also hold you back so you never grow. Kind once only spent $800 a year on sampling because Daniel saw it as a cost center. Then he realized that nine out of 10 people who tried the bars loved them and sampling could actually drive many repeat purchases. Once he saw the return, he was willing to invest much more. That's what being resourceful really means. Stretch your dollars, protect your cash, but when you find something that truly works, don't be afraid to put your money behind it.

• 1:33:02Speaker 00

  I also loved Daniel's distinction between nice leadership and kind leadership. A nice leader avoids hurting your feelings. A kind leader tells you what you need to hear so that you can grow. That kind of leadership takes courage. It means giving honest feedback, putting your ego aside and being confident enough to bring people in who may be better than you in certain areas. That's what true leadership is. To every single one of you tuning in today, thank you for investing your time with us. I hope Daniel's story gives you a new way to look at failure, not as wasted time, but as experience you can turn into better judgment, better decisions and eventually better results. If you got value out of today's chat, make sure you hit that follow button, share this episode with a friend and drop us a review.

• 1:33:45Speaker 00

  We've been doing so much in-person interviews this year. So if you're a video person, go catch the full visual experience over on YouTube, Spotify Video and soon to be Apple Video. Just search Young and Profiting. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn at Hala Taha or find me on Instagram and TikTok at @YapWithHala. Until next time, this is your host, Hala Taha, AKA The Podcast Princess, signing off.