Daniel Lubetzky is the founder and executive chairman of Kind, the multi-billion-dollar food company that’s become a household name. The Kind brand is known as a healthier snack food with a social cause. In this episode, Jeremy and Talia dive into Daniel’s entrepreneurial journey, the lessons other founders can gain from his experience, and how he built a food empire with a mission.
- How failures of his previous venture (PeaceWorks) led to successes at Kind: “PeaceWorks was a decade, which you could say was the lost decade, but it was a decade of lessons. So many mistakes that I made were two steps forward, two steps back,” Daniel reflects. “I held onto those lessons, some of them very painful. Right now, I can wax poetically about it, but I literally cried in my basement or in my studio apartment many times when I felt that I just had a huge defeat, but eventually, I had the idea for Kind about 10 years later, and I absolutely attribute a lot of the successes of Kind to the early failures of PeaceWorks. A lot of the mistakes that I made in the early years helped me make sure I didn't make them again with Kind.”
- Fundraising for a consumer packaged goods company: “By the time we did our first private equity investment, we kind of skipped the Series A,” Daniel said. “We got the friends and family angel investment, and then we didn't have an investment until Kind had already $30 to $50 million under its belt, and it was like a very, very exciting company for a lot of investors. All the private equity firms were lining up that they wanted to invest in Kind. So the total that we ever invested in Kind, in the company, in the life of our company was $5.2 million. The $100,000 from my friends, and the $5.1 million from my investor BMG. Ever since then, whenever we brought in investors it's more to sell our shares to them, but Kind has never needed it.”
- The value of immigration in America: “I would not be alive today were it not because of not just the immigration policies, but the courage of Americans who rescued a continent. My father was liberated by American soldiers, and I immigrated to the United States as a 15-and-a-half, 16-year-old kid. So were it not for that, I would have not been able to provide thousands of jobs to Americans, and my story repeats itself across the board to the point that the number's stunning of the number of Fortune 500 founders or CEOs that are immigrants or children of immigrants is enormous. [As immigrants], we are an important addition to the makeup of society because we see things. We don't take democracy for granted. We don't take freedom for granted. We don't take rule of law for granted, so those of us who came from countries that had much less perfect democracies, that had no rule of law, really, really appreciate and cherish, and will do everything we can to defend those values. I do think that for all us Americans it's really important to not take these things for granted.”
To learn more about the show go to bvp.com/atlas/this-is-series-a
