706: Daniel Lubetzky - KIND Snacks Founder & Shark Tank Investor on Kindness, Grit, Values-Driven Leadership. and Building a Billion-Dollar Brand

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk www.LearningLeader.com The Price of Becoming is a USA Today, LA Times, and Publishers Weekly National Best-Seller! www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming This is brought to you by Insight Global . If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. My Guest: Daniel Lubetzky graduated from Stanford Law School. And then declined lucrative job offers to start his own business, only paying himself $24,000 a year for a decade. And then he founded KIND and grew it into a snack brand that Mars later valued at $5 billion dollars. Today he invests full-time on Shark Tank, and he's the son of a Holocaust survivor whose story shaped everything he's built. Find work that gives you energy, purpose, and meaning. If you enjoy what you're doing, you're far more likely to be great at it. And you're already winning, because you get up every morning doing something satisfying. The danger of loving your work is overworking. Daniel did it building PeaceWorks and KIND. You have to pace yourself. His father survived a death march out of Dachau. Twelve and a half when he entered the camp, fifteen and a half during the march. Six feet tall and under 70 pounds, and no shoes. The Nazis were walking prisoners up a mountain to push them off a cliff because they didn't have enough bullets. A snowstorm saved his life. His father, grandfather, and uncle hugged to say goodbye. The snow buried them and formed a kind of igloo that kept them warm through the night. They woke, dug out, and the Nazis were gone. The soldiers who liberated them were Japanese American. The 442nd, the most decorated unit of its size in American history, was made up of men whose own families were being held in internment camps back home. Daniel's family had never seen an Asian person and didn't understand what they were witnessing. Seventy years later, he got to say thank you. A friend called saying they were sitting with a doctor who had a postcard from Larry Lubetzky. That was Daniel's uncle, who had just died. Daniel reconnected with the captain, who had gone on to become a scientist at Harvard, and eventually gave a eulogy at his funeral. The lesson he takes from it isn't perseverance. It's the power of one person to change another person's life. You won't pull off a rescue every day. You can still look someone in the eye at the supermarket. "You have no idea what that person's been going through." Human connection is what pulls people back. At a conference on fighting hate, Daniel heard how young people vulnerable to recruitment were pulled back by ordinary human connection. Being kind in your daily life makes it harder for the people trying to recruit them. There's no such thing as failure or success. Daniel keeps shelves of successes in one office and shelves of failures in another, and now thinks the separation is a mistake. He never would have built KIND without ten years of mistakes at PeaceWorks. PeaceWorks was a college thesis turned into a company. The argument: get neighbors on opposite sides of a conflict doing business together, and you shatter stereotypes, build relationships, and give both sides a stake in each other. He got Israelis, Palestinians, Jordanians, Egyptians, and Turks trading with one another. Daniel turned down $86,000 out of Stanford Law to pay himself $24,000. That's what he could afford, and it's what he paid his team. Grit, wit, and fit. Grit is the work ethic and refusing to give up. Wit is the strategy, the creativity to outthink competitors. Fit is whether the product actually matches what people want. Grit alone isn't enough. Do not assume he was invincible. He cried alone in his studio apartment more than once, convinced he'd made a mistake and was wasting his life. He questioned himself multiple times a day. The jerk who broke him was also right. At a tra