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.