The Mexican immigrant and son of a Holocaust survivor is on a mission to do the KIND thing. 


How KIND’s founder went from mowing lawns to selling his company for $5 billion—and becoming the newest ‘Shark Tank’ judge 

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Daniel Lubetzky is on a mission to do the KIND thing. 


KIND Snacks' founder pulled off a $5 billion sale—and now he’s judging entrepreneurs on 'Shark Tank'

KIND’s founder went from mowing lawns to selling his company for $5 billion

So I literally would receive boxes from each factory and I would try a product from every single batch. So like I would take all of these 2030 40 bars a day, cut them into pieces. And I would try from every product every day. That was like for many years, if you look at my face, I looked like a kind bar because that's like how many kind bars I was eating at the time. Hello, this is Daniel Lski. I'm the founder of Kind and this is how I made my first million. I grew up in Mexico City. We came to United States when I turned 16 to San Antonio Texas. My mom was a homemaker. She took very good care of us. And my dad was an entrepreneur. My dad was an extraordinary figure. He arrived to Mexico with a third grade education. He had been a Holocaust survivor that robbed from an education at the age of nine and was liberated by American soldiers when he was 15.5 and was in a refugee camp and arrived in Mexico when he was 17 and he didn't speak Spanish or English only had a third grade education. So he educated himself by reading used books and using encyclopedias covered to cover volume, a volume B volume C, he spoke nine languages. By the time he passed away, he had read thousands of books. He was one of the most educated self made people and he started working in factories two or three shifts in a row. So eventually he and his father had a little bit of money and they started a small jewelry shop which grew. So they owned ultimately a chain of duty free stores on the border between Mexico and the United States. I first went to a Jewish Mexican immigrant school in Mexico City where they taught us Yiddish and Hebrew and Spanish as kids. Then I went to a public high school, Robert Lee High School in San Antonio, Texas. Well, when I moved to the United States, I didn't have had a permit to live here. We moved here legally, but I didn't have a permit to work. So I had to be an entrepreneur because I was allowed to do that. So I would start my own business. I had a lawn mowing business, but I didn't have a lawn mower. So I had to borrow the one from the people whose lawns I tried to mow and I had a car washing business with my cousin. I also had little businesses here and there, culminating before law school with uh business selling watches, I sold them in flea markets. Eventually we had different booths uh in different uh shopping malls, selling watches. And I had a network of students selling watches to all the administrators and the teachers and the professors and to each other. And it was a lot of fun. I went to Trinity University in San Antonio and Stanford Law School. I worked at a couple of law firms for little stint during the summers. But these were all stints right after law school or in between law school. But what happened is I was very passionate about the Arab Israeli conflict when I'm trying to resolve or contribute towards resolving the Arab Israeli conflict. And I got a fellowship to go to the Middle East to research, to turn my college thesis into practice. And I actually ended up taking a leave of absence from the law firm that I was going to join and studying peace works. The partner thought that I was going to give up after six months. I thought that it was going to become an incredible success, but it ended up being my vocation and my passion for 10 years. But it's a peace works where I learned so much of the food space. And it's all those mistakes at peace works that with the benefit of self reflection and improvement benefited me when we launch time when I was doing piece works just so you get an idea. I was literally knocking on doors and walking the streets of Manhattan going from 100 and 20 seconds and Broadway down all the way to Financial District where we were filming then going crossing and going all the way up Broadway. I would start east and the west or west and go east and along the way when I was like spending the long day skipping lunch or dinner and I wanted a healthy snack. I couldn't find something that I could feel good about eating. And I'm like, wow, if I don't find it, I'm sure others also have that need. So I was on the lookout for a healthy snack or something that was wholesome, but also convenient. That was healthy, but also tasty. And that's how we came up with the idea for what became kind. When we started making kind bars, it was all done by hand. All of the industry relies on what's called extruded products. Every one of our leading competitors takes a bunch of ingredients, macerates them beyond recognition and then plops them what's called slab bars because it's a slab of a slab of this homogeneous stuff, but it's unrecognizable. You don't know what you're eating with kind. We wanted to celebrate nature and use whole nuts, whole fruits, whole grains and really, really preserve their identity. So they don't oxidize them so that they are as nature intended. And that's actually much harder to do because it doesn't flow as easily through the line. So initially everything was made by hand and we had to cut the product in the lines. And over the course of years, we developed ways to automate the process. And today, you know, we make tens of millions of bars a day. The center of the tasting for kind bars was meal for many, many, many years. Like that was my lunch and dinner because I was so obsessed as that I would not even once we were making the product and toil, we were scaling and then we have one factor and then two factors and three factors and four factors. I was very worried about quality control because in my early years of peace works had made the mistake of not being obsessive our quality and disappointed my consumers and they had punished me for it by stopping to buy our peace works products. So I was determined not to make that mistake with kind. So I literally would receive boxes from each factory and I would try a product from every single batch. So like I would take all of these 2030 40 bars a day, cut them into pieces. And I would try from every product every day. That was like for many years, if you look at my face, I looked like a kind bar because that's like how many kinds I was eating at the time when I started kind, it was an offshoot of peace works and I had not delivered an investment for my investors at peace works. So I rolled them over into kind so that they would have a chance of getting their money back. And what would have turned out to be probably the worst investment in history probably became one of the best investments in history. They got anywhere from 1000 X to 5000 X, which is crazy. But that's how kind uh exploded once we start doing things, right? But honestly, other than my initial investment of $100,000 from my closest friends, nobody wanted to invest in me. So I I held on to most of the company, not out of choice or wisdom, but just nobody wanted to invest. It was not until late 2008, early 2009 that I finally brought in a private equity investment of $5.1 million. And that was the only time that we brought in money for primary shares into the company to supposedly grow the company. We actually didn't need the money because the company was profitable. And uh that was 2009 and that was the last time we ever received primary shares, we never needed more. One of the mistakes I made that I encourage entrepreneurs not to make is that I left my fate in the hands of my investors, of my private equity investors and their interest ended up not being aligned with me. You really need to be careful when you get an investment together with someone that's aligned with you. And that really wants to have the vision and also recognize that the vision might change. Because when I did this thing, I said five years later, I want to sell kind that's fine. But then I realized I had reached that zenith and realized that it was a much higher one. And I was just getting started and I wanted to continue doing it. And the private equity investor pushed really hard for us to sell the company and said, no, I don't want to sell it. So it was a very tough negotiation where I ended up buying them back at a very crazy valuation they put in uh I think between the primary shares and the money that I brought in in secondary for myself and for all of our investors, I would think we had brought in $16 million. They got like a hit $227 million back plus distributions in the course of 4.5 years. But I got over 80% of the company at the time, the period when the private equity investors were pushing me to sell, uh the company was very painful and difficult. I didn't sleep well for, for many years, there's just so much intensity in the journey. And so very often times I couldn't put myself to bed. And that period was one of the many when I was really, really really worried and I just worked through it. But right now I can be a little bit nostalgic and proud. But back then I was frankly just scared this business advice I got was from Martin when there, when I was a freshman in college and I asked him to come speak to my class and he said, whatever you do, do it to the best of your ability. Give it the very, very best you got, give everything you got to whatever you choose. Because every morning something, someone is waking up and doing that. And if you really want to stand out and win, you need to, wherever you're focusing, really deliver you very, very best. We did a transaction where we saw a controlling stake of kind. I still own a minority, a significant portion of kind but not uh controlling stake. But when we did the closing dinner with my partners, I ended up doing a magic show and it was a mentally performance when my colleagues, my bankers actually thought that I had read their minds and they were actually like, really upset for a while that had like used that in the negotiations and like, like, you know, it's magic. It's not, I can't really read your mind, but maybe I can.