From Magic Shows to KIND Bars: One Entrepreneur’s Unpredictable Journey
By Daniel Lubetzky, Founder & CEO of KIND
Like many start-up stories, mine has been rocky. The last two decades, in particular, have been a series of ups and downs that alternately made me deliriously excited and desperately worried. But my entrepreneurial journey started well before I created my first real company, back in elementary school. From there, a series of events and experiences — some serendipitous, others intentional — gradually directed me toward a life of entrepreneurship. Reflecting on it now, I think that entrepreneurship probably chose me just as much as I chose it.
When I was eight, I started what could be considered my first business, performing magic shows in Mexico City. Years later, when my family immigrated to San Antonio, I lost my customer base and turned my attention to a new venture. I started a lawn mowing business, which soon floundered probably because I lacked a car, a client list and even a lawn mower — if a homeowner wanted to hire me, I asked to use theirs! With certainty that this business didn’t hold the key to my future, I moved on to watches and clocks. During my college years, I sold these wares at mall kiosks, which I called “Da’Leky Times” and “Watch-U-Want.” In my junior year, I took a break to study abroad. In Paris, the street performers revived my love for magic. I improvised with home-made supplies, mustered up the courage to start performing again, and eventually took my show across Europe, paying for my travels with the money I earned. I continued on to do a second semester in Israel, which drew my attention to the Arab-Israeli conflict and gave me a more profound understanding of business’ potential to build bridges between neighbors.
Three years later, after graduating from Stanford Law, I faced a critical juncture. I could either settle into a comfortable law job in Manhattan or pursue a less traditional path of peacemaking, which my time abroad had stoked. I opted for the latter and accepted a fellowship in Israel to explore how business could help foster relations in the region by bringing Israelis and Palestinians together through joint ventures.
This second stint abroad accelerated my path to social entrepreneurship. It all started when I stumbled upon a delicious sundried tomato spread at a grocery store. After a few days of craving the spread, it dawned on me that it could be the vehicle for turning my theory into practice. I went back to the store, hounded the manager, and got the name of the distributor that supplied him the sundried tomato product. I called the distributor, and in broken Hebrew tried to explain that I was a crazy Mexican Jewish lawyer who wanted to use the spread to prove a joint venture model for bringing peace to the Middle East. The distributor was perplexed, to say the least. But he gave me the number of the manufacturer, who had just gone bankrupt — Yoel Benesh. I’m certain Yoel wondered how a lawyer with no food experience could revive his business, but he had nothing to lose and was intrigued by my theory. Together, we decided to give it a shot, first identifying a glass jar manufacturer in Egypt, then a supplier of sundried tomatoes in Turkey and a supplier of olives, olive oil, and basil in Palestine. By spring of 1994, I decided it was time to advance my new venture, called PeaceWorks, more purposefully. Back stateside, I embarked on what would be the most tumultuous decade of my life; little did I know, I was about to make some of the biggest mistakes of my career, while also laying the foundation for what would become my successes.
To say PeaceWorks had modest operations initially would be overstating its size. When product shipments arrived, I brought them down to the “warehouse” — otherwise known as the basement of the Manhattan building where I rented a tiny studio — by sliding the boxes down the stairs on recycled wooden planks. I equipped my basement cubbyhole with used furniture that I scavenged from curbside garbage piles. The same windowless storeroom doubled as my office. Friends of mine joked that the “worldwide headquarters of PeaceWorks” had a finance department next to coin-operated laundry machines and an operations department next to the building’s garbage compactor. During this particular era, I relied on my entrepreneurial grit to get me through, waking up at dawn every day to hit the streets for twelve hours of door-to-door selling. Sometimes, my gas and travel expenses outstripped what I had sold for the day, and during the worst periods, I had trouble meeting payroll and could barely afford to pay myself a salary. I often thought about giving up and returning to work as an attorney. What kept me going — amidst these humble beginnings and nearly insurmountable challenges — was my sense of mission. I was doing this to help build a footing for peace in the Middle East — failure was not an option.
In the subsequent years, PeaceWorks struggled as I paid for mistakes in inventory control, marketing, new product development, and strategy, but what never wavered was the company’s purpose. That purpose was essential because it enabled me to view every setback as an opportunity to learn and improve. Slowly, I grew my knowledge of the food industry. This experience, coupled with frustrations with my own snacking options, sparked the idea for my next venture — KIND. Ironically, KIND was conceived during one of the most trying years of my life. Right around that time, I was seriously contemplating giving up on PeaceWorks. I thought longingly about what it would be like to draw a steady salary and not bear the responsibility of other families’ sustenance, but I kept going. Had I decided otherwise, KIND would not exist today.
In 2004, we launched KIND, and the early years were certainly not devoid of challenges. For one, we were creating a new category — at that time, consumers were accustomed to eating bars made from homogenous pastes, which looked different from the whole nut and fruit bars we were selling. This meant that we had to convince buyers that our products not only were going to be great sellers, but also filled a need consumers didn’t know they had. Gradually, the brand caught on, and today KIND is among the fastest growing snack companies in the U.S., offering 60+ products in more than 150,000 stores for a variety of occasions. I never could have imagined KIND would grow to what it is today, nor could I have predicted that all of my previous experiences would lead me here. Along the way, I’ve learned a lot about myself, business, and what it takes to lead a life of entrepreneurship. Here are a few lessons I’ve picked up that continue to guide me:
1. Find a purpose that gives you meaning. Channel that purpose, and the passion and energy that accompany it, as you build your business or pursue your vocation. For me, having a purpose became a source of near invincibility, and harnessing it gave me staying power during the toughest of times. If there’s one thing my experience with PeaceWorks taught me, it’s that pursuing what you believe in already constitutes success, regardless of the outcome.
2. Embrace failure, and draw on it to fuel your success. I cannot think of any venture I have initiated where an earlier failure wasn’t an important precursor to an eventual success. The most notable example of this is KIND; our success today can be directly attributed to the mistakes I made with PeaceWorks and the learnings I took away. Failure holds the seeds for greatness –so long as you water those seeds with introspection, they can be the root of your success.
3. Challenge false assumptions by thinking with “AND.” The AND philosophy is a great tool for entrepreneurs, particularly social entrepreneurs who detect problems in society and try to find solutions to improve the world through business. Thinking with AND can help you solve social problems and identify commercial gaps as it forces you to confront underlying assumptions, uncover objectives that are in tension with one another, and think creatively about whether there are ways to accomplish both at once. At KIND, the AND philosophy guides us every day as we strive to create products that are healthy and tasty and a business that’s economically sustainable and socially impactful.
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