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.