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

Hala Taha (0:00)

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Daniel Lubetzky (1:08)

Ten years of failures taught me enough to then turn KIND into five to seven billion dollar company, depending on how you calculate it. We had almost no investment and we had generate billions in sales, cash flow positively, profitably. Because of all the lessons I learned from PeaceWorks.

Hala Taha (1:24)

Daniel Lubetzky 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 we turned them into the foundation for the massive success he had with KIND later on, and all the ventures that followed.

Daniel Lubetzky (1:39)

The mission was super powerful, it kept 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. I reached upon reflections, what? I needed, how did I not know that?

Hala Taha (1:52)

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

Daniel Lubetzky (1:56)

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 for every kind, the objective is to...

Hala Taha (2:19)

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

Daniel Lubetzky (2:23)

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 do I say in consumer product goods?

Hala Taha (2:38)

Daniel, welcome to Young and Profiting podcast.

Daniel Lubetzky (2:41)

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

Hala Taha (2:43)

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.

Daniel Lubetzky (3:02)

Well, my entire life, not just the 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.

Hala Taha (3:19)

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, OK, I want to be an entrepreneur and I want to focus my mission around peace?

Daniel Lubetzky (3:35)

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 graduated from college and law school and then I tell them I'm not going to pursue a legal career, they're like, what?

Hala Taha (3:59)

Are you crazy? Yeah.

Daniel Lubetzky (4:01)

So I think it was just driven by my dream of... My father was a Holocaust survivor, he was in the Dachau concentration camp. And I early on figured out that what gave me the most meaning was building bridges to try to prevent what happened to him from happening again to other human beings.