Daniel Lubetzky

Published Jul 20, 2021, 7:30 AM

On door to door sales and kindness.

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Okay, So I am engaged to Paul, who is very generous and um has bought me beautiful gifts from the beginning. He is like Prince Charming. The flowers are crazy. His flower game. He could easily be a floral designer because he calls the florist and he talks to them and he chooses it, and he designs the floors. He doesn't physically put the floor the flowers together, but he he designs the flowers and it's literally crazy how spectacular they are. So he also has bought me beautiful jewelry from the beginning, Like now when I look back and think about what date that was and how soon after we met, like he was coming in for keeps. You know, he was literally Prince Charming. He wasn't literally Prince Darming, because Prince Charming is Prince charming. He was Paul, but he was not literally Prince Charming. So UM, I have some gifts and jewelry from other people. I have an X that once bought me a nice watch that he then later asked me if he could buy back from me because it became the hottest watch. It's a collector's item now, so just he bought me a very nice watch, but not like crazy crazy, and all of a sudden it became a collector's item. It's a he was expensive. I don't know what it was to begin with, because I think he bought it used, which is fine because I believe in buying watches. He used and I'm a collector, so on another day we can also talk about watch collecting and how to start and how to maintain it. But um, he bought me a Rolex Hulk, which is a stainless steel Rolex that has a green face and a green dial, and when it came out, Um, there's just another Rolex watches right now in the world because of the pandemic and people being home and wanting better and value and collecting in quality Rolexes they cannot keep in stores. It sounds crazy, and I know it's insensitive to um people that are on the unemployment line and at food banks. And I'm not trying to be insulting. I'm just explaining something that's going on in the luxury goods market right now, where watches are crazy. UM, watches, I assume, like high end jewelry, probably luxury goods. I mean in Miami, every single person had a Gucci or Lou Louivittan or channelle back every person. I don't know where everyone's getting all this money, but it seems like a lot of people have disposable income. Maybe they've been hoarding and storing since being away, but I'm air mes bags are probably way up. So this role X is now worth probably four times what it originally was. So I don't really wear it because of Paul, and I know he's not a big fan of wearing jewelry from exes, but what if you have like your major watch, you what are you gonna do? You're gonna just not ever wear it? And thank god, Paul has brought me the best presence of any person I've ever been with. But what is the rule on presence from X's Is that just out? Like what if someone got divorced, got married to someone else, had that original diamond and then wanted to put it in a pendant. Isn't that then just a new piece of jewelry? Because I have a setting that initially a really nice setting as diamonds on the side, and it was initially supposed to go with a ring from someone else. But I designed this setting. I now own the setting. It doesn't have a diamond or a stone or anything in the middle of it. But because it was originally intended to be for something that was going to be paid for by somebody before, does that mean I couldn't wear it now? Like where do we where do we draw the line on presents from X's. I think you wear it. You don't bring it up, and you don't bring it out, and you don't wear it when you're with the person it does. It could be a don't ask, don't tell you enough to do, like a jewelry tour of everything you own. So Katie's husband should be wearing it today when she's here, but not when she's around, and that should be a deal. I don't wear the Hulk with Paul. There's no reason He's brought me so many beautiful watch is way more valuable than the Hulk, and so I don't wear when I'm with him. But when I'm knocking around the Hamptons are with Brin, I'll wear it. And I don't think she Paul. Paul would probably care if I give it to Brin one day because they're very close. So just don't wear it around your person is my opinion, But I don't think you need to sell all your memories. So what do you think? Can you wear gifts from X is? Does it matter how valuable they are, doesn't matter how meaningful they are? Does it matter what X it is? Or do you just don't ask, don't tell, don't wear around them? What do you all think? My guest today is billionaire Daniel Lubetski, the founder and executive chairman of snack company Kind. He launched a company in two thousand three when he was unhappy with the unhealthy or unappetizing snack choices went on the run. Kind has since then become the fastest growing snack company in the US. Today, we talked about how the best brands come from your personal mission, the importance of building a strong foundation for your business before expanding, the secret of clear branding, and how the struggle of building your business will be some of your fondest memories in the future. Daniel built Kind from the bottom and was incredibly savvy and expanding the brand. You're going to learn a lot from his story. I definitely did. Hello, Hi, Bethany, So you have done some podcasts. You were on Sharp Tank, so we have that in common. And you've created a household name brand certainly in this country. Have are you all over the world. We're in thirty five countries. Wow. And in creating this brand, was this a happy accident it or did you plan to have a healthy food brand or did you just want do this just solve a problem in your own life? So I started by chance in the food industry. Had gone to college and law school and reading about how to use business to try to advance the peace process between Arabs and Israelis. I'm a confused Mexican Jew trying to get Arabs and Israelis together. And I started a company called Piece Works to use business to bring neighbors together. And seven or eight years later, I stumbled upon the idea of what I needed for myself with a healthy snack that I could feel good about eating on the go when I was traveling, while skipping lunch to dinner, going on the go. And that's how kind Oh okay, But you did not think that that was going to be your main thing. That was like a side thing to solve a problem, and it became your main thing. If you had told me that I was going to be in the food industry or no. I thought I was going to be a diploma bringing peace to the world, which that have failed miserably. Interesting, but it's it. But it's also interesting how somehow you found a way to weave into your business brand, your personal mantra and goal set, which is interesting to me. I mean that that you know exactly what your brand is. I agree completely, and I I learned that the hard way. I have figured out now when I look back, that what I'm here for is to try to build bridges between people. And so if you look back through when I was a twelve year old on the world to now, it's always been building bridges between people, partly because I was raised in Mexico in a very small Jewish community, where my parents taught me to build bridges. My father was rescued from a concentration camping that how by American soldiers, and so for them it was very important to prevent what happened to him from happening again to others by connecting with other fellow human beings. And so I discovered my mission early on. I didn't understand branding that well. And I think you're right, Bethany, that what I'm lucky that I had that purpose from an early age. And once I started Piece Works and I had discovered that you can actually through business, have some social impact, I wanted to try to create a model in Kind where we could really actually embed a commitment to make our small contribution to make this world a little kinder. And so I was very mission driven. But I hadn't learned early on that this important tenant that a brand is a promise, and a great brand is a promise well kept. And so I used to be all over the place and tried to do too many things. And once we launched Kind, we learned from our mistakes and Peace Works, and we're very very very clear on our guard rails of what we would be and what we would not be in terms of our mission, in terms of our products, what our products stood for. We didn't need to go overly high end or overly lower end. We wanted to be precisely a premium healthy snock brought up. But that was I mean, we were very very focused, and I think that made all the difference. Like you said, that we understood what we were about and what promise you were making dark consumers, and we needed to keep that well, that's an excellent point that has never come up on the show, even though I've thought about it so many times. Is that you said you were all over the place, and in many points I was all over the place, because you are all over the place until you figure out what it is that you're supposed to do. I've heard people say I want to find out where white spaces and I want to create something, and I want to do something, and typically good brands come from within. You could really I was just on the phone about a home line five minutes ago with this this this company that manufactures different home products and some of the things that I want to do have already been done before. But I want to do them in my way. But I will understand how to brand them, how to explain to people what the solution is that they bring. Where four people could sell a towel, but am I selling a towel with a certain feeling that has uh some other um tewelholder that encases it or a hook on the towel that makes it easier to hang, because that would be part of the brand versus just selling a towel. But it's also you know, entrepreneurs and you're a entrepreneur, and I think I am too. Since I was a kid, I was looking for president entrepreneurs. Their greatest strength is also their greatest weakness. We see opportunities, and we are resourceful and entrepreneurial, and we want to pursue opportunities, and a lot of people just sit at home and don't pursue those opportunities. Entrepreneurs have the opposite problem. They want to pursue too many opportunities. And I think focus. You need to balance that resourcefulness with the need to be disciplined and focused, because you cannot be everything to everybody or else will be nothing to nobody. But then you have a question for you, because I've observed over the last many years that a lot of personalities and celebrities that have incredible and do not succeed when they try to build consumer prob goods brands. The vast majority of incredible stars just don't succeed. You did a great job, like you have one of the most prominent brands that really did establish itself very well and has Like you said, is that Do you think the secret was that clear branding or what else did you do to make sure that you're brand becomes such a success. Well, I think I'm an expert on this only because I was in a vehicle and a platform within being on television reality television. I was the first one to say, I'm on television, I'm going to monetize this, and I'm going to use this as a business vehicle. I just knew that very clearly. So first of all, having a plan and setting yourself up regardless of which road you're going to go down, is hugely important. Second of all, people slap their names on things. It's too tempting. Once you get attention, people want you to do a bunch of different things, and if you're not um select, even if you don't have a very cleared roadmap, you will get on the wrong road and get tempted. So someone said to me years ago, you always are making the right moves. I see it as chess. I think four steps down the line, and so I am very methodical. I hold the steering wheel very tight and make sure that I really make good decisions. And that's risky sometimes because you give up money. But I left the Housewives because I didn't think it reflected where I am now, and I didn't think it was good for my brand overall. Even though I was leaving a lot of money on the table, I was doing that so I could jump and fly because I wanted to preserve the brand um And I think it's about excellent decision making and the right roadmap. And there are people way more famous than me, Ryan SeaQuest, Jennifer Aniston, people that they don't have a brand. They are a brand because they're successful, but they don't have a consumer products brand, as you said, because they have to focus on their main career being on television doing all that. It's not that easy to be the CEO and the talent. Besides being highly strategic with your choices, which you clearly were, Is there anything else that when you grew up you learned from your parents or that made you be a good business person and have a good head on your shoulders to this out how this happened or how did that come about the business side. I grew up in a very dysfunctional, abusive, gambling race track household, so I was a hustler early. It sounds crazy. I was going to nightclubs when I was fourteen years old, thirteen years old. When I was thirteen years old, I was going to night clubs. I was getting myself into Manhattan on a train, figuring out a way to get myself in. I wasn't like crazy with drugs or anything like that. It wasn't like that. I was almost like an adult because at four or five o'clock I used to hear physical abuse in my house called cops like I was responsible. So I was an adult very early, and I was analytical and thinking very uh strategically, very very early. And also the race track is really there's no second. You come in first. Nobody cares about who came in second at the Kentucky Derby. So it's just a very competitive um and strategic place to be. So I I think I was always new. We went to I went to thirteen schools. I was always knew that means you have to pivot, shift, a just work in a crisis. So I have a lot of the ingredients for someone that can hustle and really doesn't get ruffled by crazy things happening. In fact, when crazy things happen, that's when I really kick in and figure out the solutions. And as a person who's an entrepreneur or a brand builder, you have to really understand ship's gonna go sideways, and any entrepreneur knows that he. Did you grow up wealthy, you went to good colleges, did you what was your background? So it's a it's a very good question because I when I grew up, I didn't realized how blessed I was. I never wanted for anything, and I had. We lived in Mexico City, we had a very nice home. And when we immigrated to San Antonio, Texas, we I was fifteen and a half years old, and the contrast from my father to us was, you know, my father, when he was fifteen and a half years old, was liberated from the Dachau concentration camp and he immigrated to Mexico with nothing but the clothes on his back, and he had a third grade education because after that he had been in the war and he just had so compared to that, I had everything. And so I would say we were upper middle class or you know, I think we were very, very comfortable. And what I have right now with my kids, what one are the things that I tried to do is to try to make sure that you know, because I think my dad's greatest success came when we were a little bit older, but I'm not certain, and I want to make sure that they remember, because they didn't see when I was like waking up at six m in the morning or five am in the morning and finishing at five am at night, like you know, sometimes literally twenty four hour days, eighteen our days, sixteen our days, where I had to go walk up and down the streets of Manhattan to knock on the doors to try to get the orders, then process the order of myself, then deliver the products myself, then invoice them myself, and try to like myself. And it was it was a very you know, and many many months and years I could barely makends meet, to make no money. And you're too young to know this, uh, Bethany. But back when I was doing this, there were no apps and there was no internet. So I would literally take a piece of paper and then I would hand right the map and I would plot okay on forty second streets brother store, and I would like literally I still today, I can tell you the best treat for the most grocery stores per capita in New York City is Broadway on the west side of Broadway, and I and tell you the iris the streets that you shouldn't waste your time on. And like the delis and the forties were good. The delis and the forties were good. They sold more cookies. Yeah, it's so funny. No, I totally remember you no GPS, you had no you know, you just drove up and down the streets. I I did it to make no money. And the best parties that whenever I had a quote unquote vacation, I was working. So if I had my friend's wedding in Cape Cod, he always teaches me about it. That when they were doing the clam bake, I was going selling products to the little corner shops and I had no idea what I was doing because I was selling these Mediterranean spreads made through corporation between Abs and Israelis. And I was going through these like New England clam bake shops and they're like why was exactly no sense to us. But I would not relent fill the people buy, you know, one case for thirties six dollars. I got it, I really do. I know that's an entrepreneur. You don't even know what you're doing. And the thing is that I always say to people making the mistakes early is so great because the mistakes you made then you still can remember now and apply them to what you're doing now on some level, like throwing good money after bad a main, main, main thing that every new entrepreneur or young entrepreneur mistake, that they make good money after bad. You are halfway between Cuba and Florida and you have no idea to keep swimming. You're drowning whether you have to go back, because you just know you're not making money. It's very hard on your ego to shut it down. You think you might be able to make it because people do like what you're selling, but you're not making any money and it's not working out, and it's honestly brutal, brutal being an entrepreneur. But that is what really makes you. I remember that like it was yesterday, and also to the entrepreneurs that are listening to you and right now, we it's actually really interesting because those horrible memories and end up being the most fun to look at ten twenty years later. But to be clear, when you are in the midst of it and you spend three days pummeling the pavement and trying to get into the stores, and you look back and you realize that you made no money or you lost fifty dollars. It is depressing as hell. And there were many very, very tough moments along the way. But then you look back and those are the moments when you forged your you know your grit. And and like you said Bethany, as long as long as you are self reflective and you analyze your mistakes, it should be okay for you to make those mistakes as long as you're learning from it. Because really, truly, a lot of Kind success and you know, Kind is not five billion dollar company, and a lot of those successes came from the lessons of the mistakes that you make earlier. And you just need to be disciplined in the future. And you wouldn't feel as good about your success if you couldn't say that you had gone through that they have been handed to you. That grit is part of the you know your fiber. So are you particularly I want to get into the building of your business, but are you personally very healthy? Are you? Are you fastidious about your exercise, your food and your diet. So one my former greatest weaknesses was solved by COVID. I didn't used to exercise or sleeping off. I still I think don't sleeping off uest. I got six and a half hours, but it's much better than it used to be. And on average right now I'm averaging seven hours where it used to be five. Why I I, yeah, I always have stuff going on in my mind, and I'm always worried about the world. And I'm worried worried about, you know, the world we're inheriting to our children and the stuff that's going on. I don't know I have this. You know, well, I I told you I'm a confused Mexican Jews. So I have this neurotic worrying and you know, being with my background, I worry a lot about a lot of things. But also I didn't used to do enough exercise. And then in the last year now I realized that I was telling my wife recently, I work out five to seven days a week now and it's something I feel so much better about it because I used to only work out two days a week. I think my eating habits are relatively speaking, very good. It does not mean that I don't need doledge a lot of When when we did this partnership with Mars, the CEO in his great Scottish accent, that I'm not gonna try to imitate. I said, oh, I heard, well, maybe I will try to imitate U. He said, I heard you don't like swits. I said, no, that's not It's not that I don't like sweets. I don't like dishonesty, and so I love Donald Tilots sweets and I just for me, it's very important to make sure that you are what you say rather than you know, convey something or something other than what it is. I want to understand how you took this business to five billion dollars. So you're peddling your your bars and you're peddling them to the deli's and you know, no one knows who you are. You're not on a television show, So so what happened? Like what's going on? And you own how much of the company do you own to You allowed to say this type of thing, like I want to get into the business a little. Um now we're in there an NBA, but I still own an ongoing financial stake. But I did have a transaction earlier, you know, a few months ago when I sold out for the time in my in the last six months we I saw them a majority state for the first time to Mars, so they were our partners. So Mars helped us um grow global. You asked earlier, and we we had on our own gun into four or five countries, and we were maybe thirty four countries, but without us controlling our destinies. And we realized that if we didn't do this ourselves, somebody else was going to do it, and they were not going to do it right. They were just gonna We literally have people going into Costco and buying palette loads and then exporting them to their countries, and then your brand is not being handled the way you want to handle it. So we're almost forced to find an international partner. And Mars is a very long term oriented family. Most people associate them with candy, but their number one businesses veterinary services and pet food and they are a very very large company, very long term oriented. So we chose them as our partner to help us grow globally, and that's they helped us get to these verty five countries. The reason why we achieve what we achieved is because I surrounded myself with amazing people and when I figured out that I should feel common it's not easy. It's easier said than done. But you need to find people that are better than you at whatever they focus on. And so you know, when you are a one person operation, you're doing every job and it's actually good because you learn all the facets of business. But once you're able to attract talent, you want to feel comfortable movie ego aside, which is not easy. All of us as human being sometimes feeling timidi about people that are better than us. But once I found the comfort with that, that's when we started soaring. Well, you need to build an all star team, like a basketball team. And I think about this because I'm going through this with the show that I have in hiring the right person. And the truth is it takes time. It's very tedious and taxing to build a team. So all right, so you're selling bars to Deli's. So what's the first thing that makes you realize, Okay, this is gonna pop off? Like what year was that? I need some sort of a timeline, some sort of an understanding you'll understand. And this because you're from the East Coast. I used to live in a tiny studio apartment and I had my car that I had used in college and law school. I drove it to New York and I couldn't afford parking spots, so I used to parking on the streets and it was totally beating up, and it was I used doct tape to hold the the trunk closed. And I used to go to a friend of mine. His parents were so sweet. It never crossed my mind where I was in my twenties, I used to They used to invite me to the Hampton's and I would arrive with my beating up car with with the trunk literally doct taped, and it never crossed my mind that I was embarrassing this poor family. But the neighbors were like, oh, that was this guy hosting in their fans at Hampton's home. But they were so loving and so welcoming, and so they actually had fun that I was an entrepreneur and that I just did my stuff. So the year, the year we came up with the idea, who's we keep saying we are motley crew of ex or seven people that were working at Peace Rocks. And it was a very tough year to us, and three because my dad had died that year, so I was suffering a lot from that and and missing him a lot. And then we had lost distribution of one of our lines that we had been building that we represented somebody else and they had changed the ingredients and we had lost a lot of our distribution. So we sat around the table and we said, you know, should we give this a goal or should we just close? It was that, Bethany, we were this close from throwing in the towel. Literally, I remember that meeting. We sat around the table, Why were you going to close? It just wasn't going well. I could barely pay myself my salary or pay my team member salaries. We had just worked for two or three years building this other brand, getting it to one or two million dollars, and then all of a sudden losing everything and losing all of the distributions. So all of our investment had gone to zero. But none of this was the Kind bar that we know, None of this was that. But now we were we were designed, we were incubating the Kind brand, but we were losing a lot of money, and so it was very very hard, you know, it was two steps forward, three steps back. It was very tough. And so we sat around the table and said, do we give this a shotow do we just? I was almost asking for permission from a team because I didn't want to let let them down. But I almost felt like I should just go back and look for a job. And you know, I had a lot of degrees, so I could go work for one of my friends and my each of my team members would go to their own thing. We literally said, should we give this a shot of closed down? And we're voted, and everybody voted, let's give this one last shot, and if it doesn't work, then we close up shop. And then we launched Kind and the rest is history. And so what happened is that exactly what we're talking about earlier. What year was that? It was two thousand and three when we conceived the concept. Alright, so two three you you have the idea for Kind, or you're launching Kind. And then two dozen three conceived that, incubated, voted to pursue it, two four we launched it. And what happened is each hit a spot. You know the product as you may have seen it. It's ingredients. You can see I'm pronounced, which is a trademark that's in my first book, Naturally Thin literally eat ingredients you can pronounce oh, that's literally from two seven, and it's all. It's all you know, crafted. You can see beautiful whole almonds in transparent packaging, which back then, all of that was very disruptive. In fact, when I would go to the stores and I would try to get them to even the natural stores, they didn't know what to put it because there wasn't our healthy snack bar said so they were like, well, this doesn't look like a nutrition bar. And I'm like, but that's the whole point, that this other stuff looks like astronaut food and like it doesn't look real food. This is real food. But they would give me a shot. But then the consumer would really resonate with people. We had this little stands or pop displays, and the product would just sell itself. You know. The first billion dollars that we solved was with almost no advertising. We had over our our entire marketing budget that got us to a billion dollars in revenues was only five million dollars. So whose money was that all these people are marketing what you came from our company? The investor at that point that we didn't really have investors, It was just us it was just me and I had three friends from childhood that had invested a hundred thousand dollars in peace Works, and peace worksgrad on sideways. The investment was worthless. But when I launched Kind, I launched it from peace Works so I could give them hopefully credit. And though these guys that had believed in me for ten years with that their investment had gone to nothing, then ended up making tens of millions of dollars because of what Kind became. But but we were just bootstrapped it and we just whatever we sold, we put it back into the business. So through two dozen and eight we had no investment. We had just you know, whatever would make would put it back into the company. We just grew aneically. So you had five years and you're all freaking out like we have something crazy here right, Like you're like, wow, this is major. Right from two thousand and four to two and eight, it just doubles every year cash flow positively and profitably, and it just we just fuel their own growth. And in some ways it's amazing because it allowed me not to loot myself. In some ways, we were not being assertive enough. I had learned the wrong lesson The lesson I had learned is don't waste money, which is good, but it was taken to an extreme. I had a scarcity mentality where I assumed any amount of money spent was a waste. Where sometimes you need to invest. And so there's three types of mentalities in business. There's a scarcity mentality, which is the one I have adopted by not having money. The opposite extreme is the wasteful mentality, were just you have all these money from investors and you're just wasting. Put the money back in the business. Put the money back in business. With the money back in the busin you might not be wasting, you might think you're not wasting, but wasting mentality is where you're buying that ping pong table and you're just we're just you're like spending money without thinking, and or you or you're throwing an advertising but you're not checking that the advertising actually works. And then the right mentalities in the middle is the resourceful mentality where you don't waste but you invest. And so in us, in our case it was we found out that nine out of ten people that tried a kind bar would come back and within three months the investment paid for itself. So we just started sampling. We just started getting people free kind bars, and that's when our growth just explored it and accelerated. And the key was that we started making strategic investments in our community. We would just give them product to try for free. So what works for you and your wife in your relationship being successful? Being an idea hamster um. I don't know. Does she work? Does she have a career, Yeah, she's a she's a doctor, she's a transplant netthrologist. Okay, so you have four kids. You both have serious careers, not just jobs, and how do you manage that dynamic and what goes right and what goes wrong? So many years ago, when I was dating Michelle and my wife, I talked to one of my best friends, greg Or Schneider, and he said something that's helped me a lot. He he said, Marge, what people tend to forget and they think it's like Madison Avenue or Disney, and it's like the romance and there is, there's hopefully romance, and all those elements are very important, but the most important thing is it's a partnership. You have so many decisions to reach about raising your children. Every single day, and you might have differences in opinion. You will have difference opinion because by definition, people are individuals and they hopefully have individual personalities or else. It's like the woman from Coming to America that Eddie Murphy was going to be forced to marry. So you you have to understand that it's a partnership, and you need to learn how to navigate a partnership like with a partner, how to listen to your partner and and learn to converse with each other and work things out together. I think it's it's very essential when you're in a relationship that you learned to it's almost like it's a partnership. The other thing that I try to remind myself, and Michelle and I tried to remind ourselves, is you cannot take it for granted. You have to invest into it every single day. That's the next question I was gonna have working at it? Would you say you work at it actively like you do your business. You work at your relationship, which she and I talked about it very frequently, and we you know, life gets in the way and all these things happen, and so then you neglect going out on dates together. You neglect going on and walks together, You're gonna neglect enjoying each other. And then your kids go to call lege and you realize that you don't have that partner anymore. So we try wherever we can to go out for a walk together here there, to go for a talk here there, to go for a date here there, and and it's I think it's very important that you not take your partner for granted, and then you constantly invest in one another. So it's a discipline, just like sleep or health or anything else. It's a discipline. You have to work at it and a conscious effort to not you know, you and our entrepreneurs I have, you know, hundreds of team members that recognize that I'm the leader in the company or in in either in our foundation or in our family office or when I was the CEO. What kind that you're used to? And I tried to create a culture in all of those organizations with people are comfortable challenging me and are comfortable keeping me, you know, grounded. But the best person to do that is your spouse. And you need to remind yourself that you're not the boss, and she is a good job, and that your partners, and it's it's really important. A lot of the good CEOs and a lot of the good marriages are people whose partners are very comfortable telling them where they're wrong. You know. I was talking to chef cos Andres, who's a very dear friend of mine, and we were talking about this topic and he basically told me his wife just reminds them who he is. And I think it's really important. The more that you succeed in life, the more that you surround yourself with people in your team and in your friends that are not just gonna tell you what you want to hear, it's very hard to succeed. And then for the people that report you to not even give you too much benefit of that. Well, he got there, so he must be right. And the minute you surrounders some people that think that way, you're gonna start making more mistakes. So what So now, do you feel that you still have control in your company? Do you feel that it was a great decision? Do you have a little bit of growing pains? You know, as every entrepreneur does when they're getting involved with big business. And this is a new marriage for you, So how do you feel about the future and having such a massive partner. I'm super excited about Kind and its future. But absolutely it's a very, very challenging journey. But it didn't start now. It started when I was a one personal operation. Right, you're one personal operation and you're bringing that one first person. That's the hardest thing. Where you need to go from one to two and that just takes so much learning and I made a lot of mistakes along the way initially. Then you go from two to three and to five and that's a whole set of new things. So you need to and throughout your journey, if you're a good leader, you are contracting yourself and letting people make mistakes and letting people lead and attracting people that are in many ways better than you're what they do, but in many ways they're not, and you need to just learn to deal with it. And as long as people have a commitment to excellence, records that they are going to make mistakes and it is not easy. And then going from thirty to fifty two two d at every step of the way, you are like, you know, going from when I was CEO to becoming executive chairman was very hard for the first time. No longer executive chairman. I'm moving into a chief impact officer role, and you know, I'm always going to be the founder. It's by the way, it's really fun too, because it's a lot of your personal and professional growth. You want to do additional things. I want to do more things for society. I'm working really hard on building a movement for moderate voices to discourage. You alluded earlier about the environment we're living in. I think you were talking about what all of us feel, whether you're left, center or right. Suddenly we're living in a very unforgiving world where people are very quick to judge and to and and and it's so on forgiving. People make mistakes and their lives are obliterated, and we just need to learn to be a little bit give people more the benefit of the doubt as some positive intent accepted. All humans by definition make mistakes and are going to make mistakes, and just give people the opportunity to learn from their mistakes, not be so militant. And the generations that are growing up with social media being an attack platform, with this inhuman things, it then goes you know, ten years ago and fifteen years ago, we started noticing the danger of this online chace where people were just so nasty to one another because of the anonymity, and it's the death of human interaction. But we thought it was going to stay there, right, we thought, and guess what we are? How we behave every single day, and all those little moments becomes who we are, and we as a society, all of these things are now sipping into our offline worlds, and all of a sudden we find a society that's much less respectful were we have stopped listening, where we're no longer learning to more humble and pathetic listeners and critical thinkers and and just recognize that we're not perfect, and then we can learn from others that we don't have all the answers. And so we're in the press of creating a platform for radical moderation. What does it mean to be a radical moderate that you consciously because it represented vast majority of society are not on the fire extreme left, on the fire extreme right, whether you're you know, progressive or conservative or centrist. How can you learn to listen to others better? How can you learn to think more reflectively and to be more accepting of others and more forgiving and that we're in the process of building this home for radical moderation. Well, because it eliminates the fear based aspect where you say you might want to vote for someone, or you believe in something, and someone says you're an idiot, you don't know anything, you're a racist, or whatever it is, versus saying, okay, explain to me why you feel that way and having an actual conversation. This is why people closet vote. This is why people don't discuss who they vote for what they believe in, because they're terrified they're going to be bullied in trolled for saying something that they might think. Maybe it's ignorant what they think, but someone educate them and have a conversation. I completely agree with that. So you know, you know John Mackie, Yeah, why do I know that name? Who's John McKie? John McKee is the founder of Wholefood and he's he had not become friendly over the last several years, and he gave me one of my favorite frameworks. There are people that are progressive, there are people that are conservative, but there are people that try to learn from both and say, you know, and he calls those integrationists and he says we need more integration ist. We mean more people that say there's great things in progressive thinking and there's things that are not great. There's great things in conservative thinking, and there's things that are not so great. We just learned the best things from me and accept that no ideology is perfect, that no party is perfect, that no leader is perfect, and that we should be a little bit more humble to learn about each other. I agree. That's an amazing saing note to end on. You are amazing, wonderful to speak to. It's such a learning experience and I'm just so grateful for today. So congratulations. It's amazing what you've done. You've built it with a great team, but you know the idea came from you. So um impressed and I appreciate you giving us your time today. Thank you, Evan. It's a pleasure to meet you and I look forward to meet person one day. Absolutely. Thank you so much. Have a great day. The conversation with Daniel, the founder of Kind, was very interesting. He is very kind, he's very humble, and he has so much information about creating a business from the ground up when it's challenging, when you think you're not going to make it when you really don't know which way to turn and which way to go, And we really went into the grass tacks of business and struggles and moves to make and creating a business is really like just getting on your hiking shoes and going on a hike, and you just don't know what path you're going to take. And many of the paths could work. If you're a really driven, hard working, passion it smart entrepreneur, many of these paths could work. We're just hearing about the paths people actually took. You have to create your own path. You have to figure out how you're going to navigate this journey, knowing that all of these people that I speak to have a completely different journey than each other. So good luck with your journey and I can't wait to hear more about it. YEA. Just b is hosted and executive produced by me Bethany Frankel. Just Be as a production of Be Real Productions and I Heart Radio. Our Managing Producer is Fiona Smith and our producer is Stephanie Stender. Our EP is Morgan Levoy. To catch more moments from the show, follow us on Instagram at Just Be with Bethany

Just B with Bethenny Frankel

If you can’t handle the truth you can’t handle this podcast. Just B with Bethenny Frankel is the bes 
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