This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. I talk to entrepreneurs all the time who are looking for a way to upgrade their digital footprint. Well, whether you're just starting out or you're scaling your business, Squarespace is the easiest way to build a great website that stands out. It's an all-in-one website platform that gives you everything you need to claim your domain, showcase your products, and get paid.
Anyone can use Squarespace's cutting-edge design tools to build an online presence that truly reflects what makes your business special. There are templates, intuitive drag-and-drop editing, and even an AI-enhanced website builder. Then Squarespace's built-in analytics tools help you make smarter business decisions. Review website traffic, learn where to focus engagement, and track revenue all in one place.
Looking to grow your business? Squarespace even offers fast, easy business financing through Squarespace Capital. Go to squarespace.com slash built for a free trial, and when you're ready to launch, use offer code BUILT to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Loans issued by Celtic Bank and serviced by Stripe.
All loans subject to credit approval. This show is in partnership with Airbnb. This past summer, I took my family to Vienna, and it was incredible. We spent our days wandering the old streets, stopping for coffee and pastries, visiting museums, and just soaking up the history of one of the most beautiful cities in the world.
And one of the things that made the trip so special was the home we booked on Airbnb. It had tall windows, beautiful old details, and plenty of space for all of us. And being in that home on Airbnb, right in the middle of Vienna, walking distance from so much of the city, made it feel less like a visit and more like we were actually living there. Plus, taking a trip is the perfect time to host your space on Airbnb.
Your place, with all of its personal touches and its amazing location, could make someone else's vacation even better. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at airbnb.ca slash host. Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.
I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how Daniel Lubetzky tried to bring peace to the Middle East and ended up building a $5 billion snack empire with KIND bars. Starting a business with a mission in mind is great. I meet a lot of entrepreneurs who want to solve a critical social problem with the product they sell. Again, awesome.
Everyone loves a good cause. The problem is when a founder tries to sell the cause as the product. It may feel good and righteous, but most consumers don't shop to support a cause. They buy things they like.
Girl Scout cookies are a great example. There's a reason the Thin Mints and Samoas and Tagalongs sell out first. They're good cookies. And yeah, it's nice to support the Girl Scouts too.
But if they were only selling, say, the Lemon Ups or the Trefoils, do you really think as many people would buy Girl Scout cookies? I doubt it. My guest today, Daniel Lubetzky, learned that lesson the hard way. In the 1990s, Daniel was trying to build a business around one of the most challenging, most intractable issues on the planet, the Middle East conflict.
He started a company called PeaceWorks. It was built around the idea that if people from different sides of a conflict could build a business together and succeed together, it might create a meaningful path towards peace. So Daniel started producing gourmet foods with partners from Israel and neighboring Arab countries, things like olive tapenade and sun-dried tomato spreads. The story behind the products was compelling.
People loved hearing it, and they admired it. Unfortunately, they just didn't buy a whole lot of it. But while running PeaceWorks, Daniel came across a snack bar at a trade show. And even though it had nothing to do with the business he thought he was building, he had the good sense to say yes when he got the chance to distribute it.
That bar became a badly needed source of revenue. And then when that revenue suddenly disappeared for reasons completely outside of his control, Daniel found himself at a crossroads. Walk away or build something of his own. And that something became Kind Bars.
And once Kind Bars hit, they really hit. But not without major challenges along the way. Today, Kind Snacks is owned by Mars. They bought the brand in a deal valuing it at around $5 billion in 2020.
And Daniel never really backed away from his original passion project, even though he admits peace seems as elusive as ever. Daniel Lubetzky was born in Mexico to a family of Eastern European immigrants. His mom was second generation, but his father arrived to Mexico as a Holocaust survivor after the war. And Daniel says his dad's resilience and kindness were huge influences on him.
He was born in Riga, Latvia, raised in Lithuania. And when he was nine years old, the World War II broke out. He ended up in a concentration camp and after surviving, he was for six months in a refugee camp and then ended up in Mexico. So he was in a concentration camp as a child, as a teenager.
Yeah, it was very rare, guy, because only 1% of kids his age survived. And he was a tall kid. So when he was registered in the Dajao concentration camp, he was 12 and a half years old, but the documents say that he was 15 and a half because my grandfather lied and convinced the guards to let him work for, it was a labor camp. There's a lot of deaths, but it was designed to make the inmates build machines for the Nazi operation.
And my father ended up being with my grandfather in that camp for three years. And so both of them survived. Them and my uncle Ari, who was his older brother, was with them also. Wow.
I have to imagine, did your dad talk about it? Because there were many people who survived the camps that didn't talk about it. Today, the remaining survivors do talk about it because they're encouraged to do so, but there are very few left. When you were a boy, did he talk about it?
He did. And now you're correct. There were a number of survivors in our community in Mexico City, and there were predominantly two types. One were the people that shut it out.
They could not talk about it because it's too consuming and painful. And then there was the others who were so consumed that they were embittered and darkened. And my dad was neither. My dad was very rare in that he talked about it and when he talked about it, it consumed him.
But then he lived his life with kindness. He didn't let that darkness of that chapter darken him quite the opposite. He saw his new life as an opportunity for him to bring light to the world. And he always, even today, if you come to San Antonio, Texas where we moved to after, when I was 16 years old, people, when they see my last name, they go, Oh, were you related to Mr.
Romand Lubetzki? I'm like, yeah. It's like, oh my God, he was. And they'll tell you stories about how kind he was to them.
Like everywhere you go, people still talk about him. And you look back and it really did shape almost all of my decisions. So your father comes to Mexico as a 17, 16 year old kid, probably by the time, after a couple of years in Europe. And presumably he doesn't speak Spanish and had no education for the previous seven years during the war, I'm assuming.
And what did he do? What did he tell you he did when he got there? The way he educates himself is by watching movies and reading the subtitles and then by borrowing or being gifted used encyclopedias and devouring them, reading them cover to cover. Volume A, volume B, volume C.
After working two and three shifts in a factory, he eventually garnered enough money with my grandfather to start a little jewelry shop. And that grew and grew. In Mexico City. In Mexico City.
And then almost like a pious joke, five Holocaust survivors joined forces to build a business on the border between Mexico and the United States where they sold duty-free wares. For example, my dad was in charge of watches. One of his partners was in charge of wine and liquors. The other was in charge of cosmetics.
The other one electronics was very big. Okay. You're born in 1968 and you spend the first 12, 13 years of your life, maybe longer, in Mexico. And we'll get to you moving to the U.S., but what was life like for you?
What do you remember about being a kid in Mexico City in the 70s and, you know, in the early 80s? I was raised in an immigrant community where there's like a little bit of a bubble of a lot of Jewish survivors and immigrants in Mexico. And in my school, they taught you Yiddish and Spanish. Wow.
Because Yiddish is not spoken by anyone, very few people. It's not. But back then, we were living a little bit of a bubble or a cocoon. And we're very proud of being in Mexico and being Mexicans, but we're also very proud of our heritage.
And like all sorts of funny things. Like my grandmother would make, you know, how people make fun of the most disgusting thing in the world. I'm sorry not to offend people, but gefilte fish. Have you ever tried gefilte fish?
And it's cold and just horrible. We had a Mexicanized version of that called gefilte fish a la Veracruzana. So we would meld this red warm sauce with a lot of spice and made the gefilte fish warm and taste good. So we did Flea markets and sell not just watches, like, but also singing cups that you'd lift a mug and it would start singing, and Christmas lights, and all the crazy things you can imagine.
And my dad helped me out. He connected me to a couple of suppliers that would sell me some of these products, and then I would buy them. But then I had to wake up at 5 a.m. in the morning and set up the booth in the Eisenhower flea market and then finish at 6 p.m.
And it was really fun. And I had a car washing business with my cousin, and we had a lawnmower business, but we didn't have a lawnmower, so we had to borrow the owner's lawnmower. I didn't even realize till, like, all these years later that that was unacceptable. You're supposed to have your own lawnmower.
When you, when it was time for you to go to college, you stayed local. You went to Trinity University in San Antonio. And did you, I'm assuming you continued to sell watches, or, I mean, was that sort of your main, did that become like your main source of income? Yes, it was a very good business.
The most fun business was that I was a magician, and I studied one year abroad, and I helped pay for my studies by traveling and doing shows in the streets of Paris and in the streets of all over Europe. Like card tricks or what kind of tricks? Mentalism, card tricks, sliding a sword through a woman's body, anything you could imagine. How did you learn how to do that?
I started for my dad. As a Holocaust survivor who was nine years old when the war started, he didn't have a childhood. So he lived his childhood through our childhood. Like he, he loved magic, so we would go to magic conventions.
But yes, when I was in college, I had a network of students that would sell watches. We also had a couple of booths in shopping malls. It was fun but challenging. Were you intending to be like your dad, go into business and be an entrepreneur?
Or, because this is the late 80s when you go to university, and there was a time where people didn't think about starting businesses. Like they'd go to law school or medical school or be a consultant. Like when you were an undergraduate, did you know that you were going to probably go to law school? Was that your goal?
My hope was to become partners with my father. I wanted to start a business with my dad. And my dad wanted me to do something with my life, quote unquote. For him, who had been the breadwinner in education and him and my mom, they wanted me to get a graduate degree.
So I applied to Stanford Law School. I got in. And when I went to law school, besides starting a business, my passions were resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict. I was very passionate about figuring out ways to use economics to help Israelis and all of their Arab neighbors recognize each other's humanity, break stereotypes, and make relationships.
How did that, I mean, obviously you grew up in a Jewish home. Your father's a Holocaust survivor. But how did you, even when you were in college, this was your sort of obsession. Yes.
And I started learning more about this conflict. And I started thinking, once I went to law school, I thought I was going to become a diplomat. And then that idea of building bridges with the people kept being around in the back of my mind. And I ended up writing a legislative proposal in law school for how to turn my theory into practice.
You, I don't think you ever really practiced law, right? You briefly worked for a law firm, but you... I practiced for a couple of months. I passed the bar.
I worked at Sullivan and Cromwell. And that's when the Oslo process happened. This is 1993. This is when the famous Rose Garden, Bill Clinton, Yasser Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin, that handshake that was, it's hard to imagine today how much optimism there was in the world around resolving that conflict.
But that that was a watershed moment. You are at a college, at a law school. And I was in Mexico watching the Rose Garden ceremony. And I'm like, oh my God, I need to do this.
And so I told Sullivan and Cromwell, I'm taking a leave of absence. I'm going to try this out. Alright, so from what I understand, you're so inspired by this that you get a fellowship and move to Israel to work on your idea. And basically, the idea is that you believe that economic cooperation, like building businesses between Arabs and Israelis, could encourage peace.
Yes. All right, so you decide to start a business to try to prove this out. And I guess it's called PeaceWorks. So how did you start?
What did you do? The way it works is I'm doing my research. And I go to a supermarket. And I see this obscure looking jar of sundried tomato spread.
And I don't know what is a sundried tomato. I've never tried a sundried tomato. I try the spread and it's delicious. It's so good.
And I go back to the store to buy some more and there's no more. And I talk to the store manager. Where's this thing? I want to buy some more.
It's really good. And they're like, sorry, the company went out of business. And I can't get the idea of my joint venture out of my head. I can't get the idea of this delicious spread out of my head.
And all of a sudden, they merge. And I'm like, oh my God, what if I can restart it? So I ask for the name of the bankrupt guy. And he connects me to Yoel Benish.
And Yoel Benish is this beautiful human being who had a number of Arab friends. And I tell him the idea for PeaceWorks. And the reason he went bankrupt is he was buying glass jars from Portugal and olive oil from Italy and sundried tomatoes. He was buying all this stuff in Europe and it was very expensive.
So I start mapping out with Yoel. We could buy the glasses in Egypt. Through my research, I knew that we could buy the sundried tomatoes in Turkey and we could buy the olives from Palestinian farmers. And I start showing him, why don't we do this together in the Middle East?
And he decides to give it a shot with me. And this could be the beginning or the first product. Because PeaceWorks is going to be, was it going to be like a consumer product or was it just going to be any joint venture? Back then, Guy, I thought I was going to have ventures in all sorts of industries.
I didn't know anything. Okay, so now, how do you identify the sourcing? Like, how do you find a Turkish sun-dried tomato producer and the Egyptian glass jar makers? Like, how do you start that?
Because this is pre-internet. I mean, there's a little bit of internet, but it's... Exactly. I was going to say, it was not using Google.
So you have to go to trade shows. You have to go to the governments. You have to go through introductions. You have to...
It was so much harder. Okay, now, my question is, when you started to approach some of these other suppliers and you said, hey, we're based in Israel. We want to start this company. We want to work with you.
Were they receptive to it? I mean, were they hostile to it? They were super receptive because this was, remember, the romantic time. This was after 1993, after the Oslo peace process.
And it's hard to appreciate and remember how magical that time was. But you would go to Arab capitals and you would go to Arab towns and they wanted to do business with Israelis. Like, it was like the new Middle East. It was Shimon Peres' new Middle East.
There were a lot of resentments, a lot of suspicions, but I can't recall right now a single incident when somebody said, no, I don't want to deal with Israelis. Got it. Okay, so you settled on making, first, I guess, this sun-dried tomato spread. But I think the idea is to create a line of spreads, right?
That you could export, presumably. You're not going to sell these in the Middle East, right? Or were you? Was the idea to sell them in the West, in the U.S.?
After a few months in Israel, to your point, I realized that I need to go to the U.S. because we need to develop a market. He can make the product. We'll figure out the first part, right?
How to make it. But I need a client. And so I go to, I moved to New York. I go to Zabar's.
I bring in this jar of this obscure-looking product. They look at it and they laugh. And they're like, you got it all wrong. Your pricing is wrong.
You didn't create enough margin for us. Your label's all these regulatory problems. The oil is leaking. So Scott Goldstein and Saul Zabar spent, by the way, they were really tough and rough.
The sweetest people. A lot of what I learned was from them and other merchants who loved the concept because think about it. This is the mid-90s. People are rooting for the Israelis and Arabs to figure this thing out.
So they would give me a ton of free time of advice. So I go back to the drawing board. I tell Yoel, we need to fix it, fix it. I come back six months later.
They're like, what? You're still alive? I show them the product improved. They give me a shot.
And then multiple iterations till we start figuring out something that people wanted and were willing to buy. The At least people who were dealing with warehousing and logistics and maybe even sales. Like how many people did you have working for you? Five team members.
Everybody would pay $24,000 or something like that. I call them victims because they're poor guys. Like, none of us know what we're doing. Like, most of them are kids that just graduated from college and they don't have a better option.
So, okay, so you are kind of humming along. And I guess at a certain point you are because you're going to trade shows and you find a product that is like a yogurt apricot almond, like a granola bar, but coated in yogurt, I guess. And you like it and you ask if you could distribute it. What's the story?
So at the Natural Products Expo, as I'm working and looking at the products, I try this product, which is an apricot yogurt almond bar. And it is delicious. And I'm like, wow, this is really good. And it was called the Bee Natural Bar?
The product was called Bee Natural. And Peter Sudharma, who owns that company, asks me for advice. And then like six months later or a year later, he's, Daniel, my product is really good. Why don't you start distributing it?
And I'm like, Peter, I can't. I have a piecework submission. Your product is not made through piecework. It doesn't matter, Daniel.
You come up with a different company, distribute it for us. Long story short, he convinces me to start a separate division of pieceworks. But you had a business that was focused on building peace between... So didn't this...
I mean, in your mind, why would you do this? Why would you sell this product unless you could make money off of it, right? To make money. Yeah, for a while, I'm eight years into this now, actually.
And you guys are not doing well. We're barely making ends meet. It's very, very hard. And this product is a good product.
You start distributing it and did it do well in the U.S.? Everything is relative. For us, it was nirvana. At that point, we're selling half a million dollars of this product, $1 million of this product.
It's incredible. It's very quickly become something. And then something bad happens. Peter tells me that there's a company that wants to buy the product.
The company decides that they still want to keep me as a distributor. But they start adding a number of ingredients that were not approved by Whole Foods. Whole Foods at the time, and still, their list is like the Magna Carta for natural. And they start adding two or three ingredients that are not approved in the Whole Foods list.
And we plead to them to not do so, but they don't care because in Australia, they sell predominantly to convenience stores. They don't have a highly developed natural marketplace. We explained to them that in the United States, it's going to kill our market. They said, sorry, Daniel, but we have to do this.
So we lose all of our sales from one day to the other. So all of our hard work goes to nothing. When we come back in just a moment, how Daniel turns disaster into opportunity and gets back into Whole Foods in an even bigger way. Stay with us.
I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2003, and Daniel's in trouble.
His cash cow, an apricot almond yogurt bar that he's been distributing, has been reformulated and kicked out of Whole Foods. And that's a huge chunk of his revenue gone. And it's not the only struggle he's facing. This actually was one of the darkest periods of my life because along the way, my dad passes away.
And I'm doing a lot of civic work in the Middle East. And as you know, the second Intifada breaks out and there's a lot of violence and stuff. And it's a very difficult time. And so I'm exhausted.
I've been 10 years at this. And I remember very well the meeting that happened where we had about 60 members around the table, and every one of us has to vote whether we give this another shot or we just give up. And we unanimously say, let's give this one last shot. A few months later, we design it and we launch what became Kind.
And the company just takes off. So you decide that you're going to build, you're going to make your own bar. And let's talk about this for a minute. So tell me how you get to Kind.
We knew we wanted to have three pillars for the product. Kind to your body, meaning healthful ingredients. Kind to your taste buds, it has to be tasty. And kind to your world, the way you do things matters.
And my dad just passed away, so I think he's front of mind. And I told you earlier about how in spite of all of the darkness, he just was a very, very kind human being. So we named Kind in honor of my dad. And initially, the motto was all natural always because we were so freaked out by the incident that we had.
And we wanted to control our destiny. This is a very, very important moment. Up until that moment, I don't have control of the manufacturing ever. I work with my manufacturing partners.
They have control of manufacturing. After I get my ass kicked here, I say, all right, I have to control the manufacturing. I control the formulas. I control the recipes.
And I identify a manufacturing partner that can do it for us. But where we control the rights and control our destiny. Tell me about the concept, because a concept we know, people know Kind bars, it's basically nuts and fruit, depending on the bar, kind of stuck together. Was that the concept from the beginning?
Yeah, I would just add a little bit more broadly. I am trying to solve a problem for my needs, which is I have this snack on the go. And so what are some of the implications of the design process? It cannot melt too easily in your hands.
It has to be portable. It has to be compact. It has to be nutritionally dense. I think initially, it's just like almonds and different nuts bound together in a bar, right?
Maybe some fruit too. That was the original bar. And so let's talk about this for a sec, because this is going to be a bar, right? And it had to be cut and it was going to have whole nuts in it.
And it had to be bound together. And, you know, I think a lot of people listening might think, okay, what's the big deal? But I think this is going to be a challenge to actually produce. It's really, really hard because in our industry, most bars, I think 95% of bars are what's called an emulsion or a paste.
And it flows really easily to the manufacturing line. If you take a product, you macerate it and make a mix, it flows very well through the line. It's very easy to cut. It's very easy to load.
When you're not doing that, when you're trying to preserve the wholeness of the almond, because the almonds are better preserved, they're not pulverized. If you cut them, they can oxidize. They can go rancid. They lose some of their integrity.
So you want to try to preserve the whole almond. And it's very hard to do that and do that at scale and do that through a manufacturing line. So it took us a very long time to develop the technology to protect nature. And who was going to manufacture these for you initially?
So initially, we tried to find somebody to do it in the United States and nobody wants to. And so we went with relationships with Peter that were willing to do it for us in Australia. Initially, Australia, I imagine that creates some challenges because you've got to export them to the U.S. And then how did you finance even the early production in Australia?
How did you pay for that? Remember, we didn't have that big of sales. One of the most interesting challenges for a consumer products entrepreneur is that the more you succeed, the harder it is for your cash flow. But ironically, when you're starting, you don't have that much sales.
So you don't need, like if you're selling $10,000 or $20,000 a month, you just need those $20,000 for your working capital. Once you're selling a million dollars a month, then you need a million dollars in working capital. So the problem starts getting harder as you grow. But the first year, I can pull it off from what I've saved over those last 10 years.
Right. And did you also work through the branding and the look of the packaging or would that come later? I mean, it's evolved somewhat, but it really, the essence was worked out from the day one. Like it was the thought of the four blocks and they were kind and the lockup and the colors.
And also, very importantly, we wanted a very, very clean design. We didn't, because everybody out there used a lot of photography and allegorical stuff and designs to obfuscate. And for us, the hero was the product. We had a transparent window, which we introduced, which was very, very revolutionary.
From the beginning, you had the transparent packaging. The transparent wrapper was, it was very hard to achieve because about, I don't know, 50% of the product is just, you're seeing the product itself. And so it's very hard. How do you communicate everything you need to communicate in only 50% of the space or maybe 40% of the space?
Because the transparent part of the wrapper, you were not going to print anything on it. Exactly. We wanted people to look at the product themselves and know, oh, this is real. This is not like everything else.
This amazing opportunity, you get into Walmart, and then I guess you get dropped. What's the story? Walmart came to us, and the buyer liked our product. And you know, one of the most significant dangers is when a buyer loves you, because sometimes you're not ready, and you couldn't say no to Walmart, and we didn't have salespeople or systems to check if our product was selling through.
And one of the things that I learned in our industry is you can get reports and look at your sales per store. What do you think it means, Guy, if you're selling zero per store? It means it's not good. No, no, that's what I thought.
If you're selling zero, it could be that it's really not good, but it could also mean that the product didn't even make it to the shelves. Right. So the system, at least back when I was starting, at Walmart, was so complex that the distributor would drop off the product in the back of the store, and nobody had thought to put it in the front of the store. And so it was my job to identify that I didn't know that.
And so after we failed miserably at Walmart, because we didn't know what we were doing, we licked our wounds, and a year and a half later, John Leahy, who's got the great heart to prove it and the experience, comes in as our president and as my partner. And then he taught us how to do it right and how to get to Walmart. And I'm like, John, let's get back into Walmart. He's like, slow down, buddy, slow down.
We need to be ready. Up until this point, you're still, I mean, up until 2008, I think, you had not taken on any outside investors at all. It was entirely funded by you or... I had three friends, two friends and a friend of a friend who had, in the PeaceWorks years, invested $100,000 in PeaceWorks.
But when I started Kind, it starts within PeaceWorks, because I wanted to find a way to thank them and my investor and my board for that. So eventually, in 2008, we started getting a lot of interest. You were getting investors coming to you saying, hey, we're interested in... 2008, it's very interesting how the industry works.
Nobody wants to touch you until everybody wants to touch you. It's fascinating. Like, we were like persona non grata in the investment community. We didn't even try anymore because we couldn't raise a cent, which turned out to be really good for me because then I didn't dilute myself.
But then all of a sudden, in 2008, people are seeing the data and the company is big enough. We're reaching now, like all these private equity companies, they're looking for the numbers. It needs to have more than $10 million in revenues, this, this, this. And they see it and all of a sudden, everybody's calling us.
And now we're ignoring them because we're cashflow positive and profitable, so we don't need the money. But then we wanted to have a partner that could be a partner to help us. So in 2009, we allowed an investor to come in and they wanted to spin out the PeaceWorks business because they didn't care about the PeaceWorks business. So we separated PeaceWorks from Kind, and then they both lived separate lives.
Got it. So, and this is VMG, the private equity firm, I believe, that bought a share. I mean, at that point in 2009, they valued it at $45 million, the business. And does PeaceWorks then die?
Do you continue? Like, were you selling tomato spread and olive oil, tapenade? Or was that done? So I didn't want to give up on the PeaceWorks dream.
Kind was growing like crazy, but I didn't want to give up on the PeaceWorks mission. So my friend Joshua Schertz, who's an amazing entrepreneur, agreed to take it on. And he had his other lines that he was selling, and then he started selling PeaceWorks. PeaceWorks lived for 25 years.
So from '93 till 2018, I think, when we decided to close it. I wonder, I mean, Kind is doing really well, obviously a really successful product, but it's completely different from what you originally intended to do, right? Which was like source the nuts from here and the sun-dried tomatoes from there and bring people together. And was any part of you like, you know, I just, I don't know what to think.
First of all, Kind was such an amazing journey and it brought so much happiness to so many people that it never was, am I doing the wrong thing? I was always delighted about the Kind journey. I'm so grateful for it. But yes, there was a piece of me that misses the opportunity to get PeaceWorks right.
Along the ways, I helped build something with an Israeli Arab co-founder, Mohammed Darash, called the One Voice Movement. And we recruited close to a million Israelis and Palestinians to stand up against extremism and hate and terrorism on all sides. And that gave me a lot of meaning and helped fulfill my need for purpose. Kind also had its own purpose, but obviously not as deep as PeaceWorks or One Voice.
But the One Voice mission kept me very busy. And between 2003 and 2007, I was spending more time on One Voice than I was on Kind. And it was interesting that Kind did so well when I was distracted also building the One Voice Movement. Part of the way I explained it is that I am a very creative guy, but sometimes I can drown my team with creativity.
And I kind of divided myself between what I was doing with One Voice and what I was doing with Kind, where we managed to stay focused in Kind and do a good job. That's the explanation I give myself. But I'm in the process of ideating additional things to do in the context of Israeli-Arab and Israeli-Palestinian relationships to try to help develop a better future for the people of that region. When we come back in just a moment, while Daniel goes on a years-long quest to get Kind associated with a very specific brand.
Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz.
So it's 2008, 2009-ish, and Daniel has taken a private equity investment and separated PeaceWorks from Kind. He's now focused entirely on Kind and on the verge of realizing a personal obsession. One of the things that is interesting to me is you were, from what I read, like just obsessed with getting these in Starbucks, which makes sense because Starbucks has not that many products available to buy, but they're right there as you're at the register. What was it about Starbucks?
I think you worked on this for like three or four years to try and get the Kind bar into Starbucks. Tell me about that obsession. Why did you think that that was going to be a breakthrough? For me, the insight was, this is an incredible iconic chain.
Back then, they had, I think, 11,000 stores. And they didn't, at that time, sell any healthy snacks. They didn't have a single healthy snack. And I'm like, this makes so much sense for you to carry a Kind bar on the go.
And unbeknownst to me, they liked us too much. They were trying to make their own versions. Unfortunately, that did not pan out for them. And after years and years of developing relationships, things aligned and they gave us a shot.
You got into Starbucks in 2009, I think, and you landed a deal with them. And was that, did it prove to be, I mean, I imagine it did prove out to be just massive because, I mean, at that point, 2009, probably not everybody in America knew what a Kind bar was. A lot of people discovered us, well, they discovered us through it, right? Word of mouth, they saw it at Starbucks or through our sampling.
Our sampling went from $800 in 2008 to $800,000 in 2009. And within a couple of years, we were sampling $20 million. It's like maybe 40 million bars or 30 million bars. Just giving them away.
Giving, because what we found out, Guy, is that anytime somebody tried a Kind bar, nine out of 10 would fall in love with the brand, would tell others about it. And within a month, they would pay for itself because they would start buying the product. It was a great ROI. So sampling was the biggest thing.
Getting in checkout counters at Starbucks and other places was another really, really important one. And those things were probably the reason why we accelerated our growth. You mentioned this guy, was it John Leahy? Yeah.
Who joined in 2008, I think, right? John joined either 2009 or 2010. And he became the president of the company? John became the president of Kind.
And you remained the CEO. But tell me a little bit about, I mean, you know, this brand is just growing and growing. And so I imagine, you know, you are also hiring more people. And then there's also people coming to you or you to sort of really, as you're scaling, you want to bring in people with like deep experience.
How are you sort of thinking about the team that you were building as you could see this thing scaling? That's an amazing question. John Leahy, without any doubt, was one of the most pivotal forces to help Kind become what it became. So John had a lot of experience.
He had worked at Playtechs. He had worked at a nutritional company that sold vitamins. But he didn't have snack food. He didn't have snack experience, but he had experience in huge CPG companies.
And A Chinese gentleman came and said, I'd like to buy your product. And we told the gentleman, thank you, sir, but we're not ready to go into China. Into the Chinese market, right? We're not ready to start selling in China.
And he said, well, I already sell your product in China. I was like, okay, I assume he buys a few suitcases worth of product, makes them and sells it. I was like, thank you, sir. He's like, no, no, no, let me explain it to you.
And he, apparently, there's something called cross-docking where Costco would sell to this guy container loads of KIND bars. And he would take them to China, and he would sell them in China. And he was selling millions of dollars of KIND bars. And we had no control over it.
And at the same time, every large brand was trying to recreate what KIND did in the United States in other countries. And we were afraid that if we didn't move fast enough, we were going to lose control over the brand globally. And somebody else would be the first commerce. So we felt that we need a partner to help us globally.
And our goal was to sell them the rights to sell internationally, not in the United States. And unfortunately, none of these big companies want to do that. They want to help you build internationally if you're willing to sell them the whole enchilada eventually. And to this day, I mean, to your point, thanks to the resources, we're doing a lot of good things in the world, and I'm very grateful.
But I do sometimes, it's very hard for an entrepreneur that imbues the personality and the character and the story in a brand that we did with KIND. And it's very hard to give up your baby. But obviously, it's not my baby anymore, and you need to acknowledge that. And it's very hard.
You are completely out of the company, right? I mean, maybe even divested from, entirely divested from. I sold 100% of my financial stake as of December 2024. And the relationship is predominantly very informal.
I think I consult with them three times a year. But I'm emotionally, I'm really, really incentivized for them to win because it's my reputation too. Yeah. You know, I want to just kind of shift for a moment because, you know, KIND is certainly what you will be known for, right?
That's going to be on your, maybe on your gravestone. But I mean, you know, one day we all die. When you die, that's probably going to be in the first paragraph, KIND bars. But your passion, your personal passion is this idea of Middle East peace.
And it started with PeaceWorks. And here we are today in 2026, and it seems things are worse than ever. I don't think it seems. I think they are.
I think most people would agree. Like, I mean, this is a long conversation we had, but I wonder what you think. I mean, you poured decades and millions of dollars into trying to build bridges, and yet this is where the world is today. First of all, everything you said is, to some degree, correct.
It's also the case that out of the greatest darkness comes light. And it's not just a poetic thing. It's a reality, right? When there's so much hate and despair, people realize that that's not going to lead us anywhere.
That's when people get mobilized and activated to find a different way. And of course, I want to be clear, I'm not an optimist. I'm also not a pessimist. I'm a, I worry all the time, but then I catalyze my worries into action.
What I call an actionist. You may recall you and I met many years ago and I talked to you about the one voice movement and how it was moderates against extremists. And it was a very incomplete way of seeing the world because the better framework is builders versus destroyers. And extremists that wakes up in the morning and think, how can I deny somebody else's humanity?
How can I divide, demolish, and diminish? That's a destroyer. A person that wakes up in the morning and says, how can I build? How can I unite?
That's a builder. And the overwhelming majority of us want to be builders, want to put positive things to make this a better world for our children. We're not doing it for somebody else's sake, for our own sake. I mean, here you are now, right?
You are probably getting close to 60, I think, right? 57, yeah. Which means you're, you know, you've got a lot of life ahead of you. And I know you're on Shark Tank now and you've got, you invest and you're doing other things.
But how much of the rest of your life do you imagine you're going to try and commit to this project of trying to see if you can make a contribution to bring about what seems totally elusive and unimaginable, which is peace among Israelis and Palestinians and their neighbors? You said earlier that if I die, the story of KIND would be at the top of my paragraph, whatever. I hope that what I build with builders globally will be my primary contribution. This is what you're working on now.
What I'm working on now, which is not just in the Middle East, but globally, in the U.S., it's a big, big mission. So it is going to take years, but we're making headway and I'm very confident that it will be a greater contribution than KIND. Daniel, before I let you go, how much of the success of KIND do you attribute to the work and the grind you put in? And how much do you think had to do with just luck and timing, like the right product at the right time, the right place?
What do you think? It's both. It's very hard to separate them, but there's no question that luck played a gigantic role because if I were wrong, it was predominantly me that was a genius and all the other entrepreneurs that you interview, you'd have many more entrepreneurs that have built many multibillion-dollar companies. The fact is that you can count them with your hand.
The vast majority of us get blessed if we do that once. It's very hard to replicate that. So that means that, yes, you also need to be, work hard and be witty and greedy and everything, but without an element of fortune and luck, I don't think there's that many people that can do that more than once. That's Daniel Levinsky, founder of KIND.
By the way, in 2024, Daniel joined Shark Tank as the first new regular investor added to the series in 10 years. In his time on the show, he's invested in everything from Hanukkah and hammocks to fitness equipment made out of fire hoses to a wearable hummingbird feeder. Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show.
And if you're interested in insights, ideas, and lessons from some of the world's greatest entrepreneurs, sign up for my newsletter at GuyRaz.com or on Substack. This episode was produced by Alex Chung with music composed by Romteen Ebeluey. It was edited by Andrea Bruce with research help from Noor Gil. Our engineers were Maggie Luthor and Robert Rodriguez.
Our production staff also includes Casey Herman, Chris Massini, John Isabella, Sam Paulson, Carrie Thompson, Catherine Cipher, Romel Wood, Neva Grant, and Elaine Coates. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.