I started my first
company with ten thousand dollars, it was not
easy at the beginning. I never thought I
would become a multibillion dollar company. That
entrepreneurial spirit is really, really important to
preserve here in our country. I'm Daniel Lubetzky
and the founder and executive chairman
of Kind. And I was born in
Mexico City in a Jewish community that was pretty
tightly knit, but maybe a little bit isolated. I did always have very
unusual choices in my food. My mom and dad used
to tease me that I, as a three or four year
old, would make tacos with papaya, ketchup and ice. Fortunately, Kind bars
are choosing very different types
of ingredients. So I've always
loved food. But if you had asked me if
I was going to end up in the food or snacking
business at any point prior to ending up there,
I would have told you, you're crazy. I wanted
to solve the Arab-Israeli conflict. I wanted to
become an attorney. I tried so many other
thoughts about what I would have done. I would have
never crossed my mind. When I came to America, I
saw my role as trying to export those values that
make us such an extraordinary country, the
ability to build bridges in spite
of our differences. I was around eight years
old when I started doing magic shows. I used to
do bar mitzvahs and weddings and birthday parties
around 60 years of age. I started the
network of student representatives selling watches and
I was twenty five when I
started Peaceeworks. And around thirty five
when I started Kind. I wanted to use business
as a force for bringing people together, and food
became the ecosystem through which we fostered
joint ventures among Israelis and their
Arab neighbors. So 10 years into running
peace talks, I had kind of finally figured out
the natural food space. But I felt very frustrated
with my own snacking options. I was on the
go all the time selling products all over the country,
and every time I needed a snack for myself,
I felt very frustrated that everything was very
indulgent or looked like cardboard or tasted very
off and wasn't wholesome. And that's how I
had the idea for creating Kind. 100 percent
of every single thing we made leads with
nutrient dense ingredients as opposed to like refined
carbohydrates or sugar or some sort of
artificial ingredients. The name Kind is significantly
due to honor the memory of my father, who
was a Holocaust survivor and who didn't forget the
horrors that he went through, but also made
sure to remember and remind us of all the
kindness that he experienced along the way that enabled
him to survive and how in those darkest of times
he was able to survive because people took risks
with their lives to help him keep going. And then throughout his
life, he treated people with kindness and his heart
like his mission to try to put smiles
on people's faces. Something I'm very proud of
is that I started kind with ten thousand dollars
in savings from my prior jobs at different
law firms kind was launched and it just grew a
lot and a lot of very, very fast. And I was
able to do it without financing. And it was around
2008 when we had reached close to 15 million
dollars in sales that I brought my
first institutional investor. And that helped propel us
because we're able to sample more and promote
more and we just turbocharge the company. Total we ever raised
in primary dollars coming into the company was
5.2 million dollars. And because we were
very, very diligent and learned how to value money,
we got to over a billion dollars in revenues
without having ever had to raise more money. Our number one bestselling bar
is also the number one bar in the
category, according to many measurements. It's the kind
of dark chocolate monotonously sold and it's
one that I'm very proud of because it was
two years to develop it, to get everything right so
that it would have only five grams of
sugar while still delivering an incredible taste. And it's got the
right interaction between the sweet and just a tiny
bit of the sea salt. It's just delicious. We now
have over 80 products and every one of them
takes a different location and they need when
we launch them, people didn't know where to put
them because they were so different from what's
out in the marketplace and we didn't know
where to merchandise them. So we go to the buyer
of this and say, no, that doesn't belong or have
anything that looks like it to the other buyer. And eventually we try to
get into the nutritional bars of the natural stores
and the buyers would say, I can't carry this
with people who look like an additional buyer. Look
what an additional buyer looks like, an
astronaut food looking thing. And I'm like, but
the point is an actual story to carry softwoods,
ingredients you can see and pronounce. And because
I have deep relationships and people
appreciate my mission, they gave us a chance. And then once it was
in stores, people with a transparent wrapper understood
it immediately and they started buying
it like crazy. When we launched kind of
keystrokes, we had been hovering between one and
two million dollars in sales. And then once
we launched, we basically for the next 10 years
doubled every year, one year, 160 percent,
another 60 percent. But on average, we were
doubling our sales every year for 10 years. We did
so in a cash flow, positive manner. So we're very, very
proud of that. I want to try to not
just make money, but find my own small way to make
this a better world. Kind... of our mission is
to make the world a little bit kinder, one snack
than one act at a time. I think that I should
come back to launch a Peaceworks venture in the
future because I think the model of using
business to bring neighbors together has a lot
of potential that's going unfulfilled and that I've
learned so much. Perhaps I'll give
it another shot. But right now I need to
finish my work with Kind.
