GRIT

Steadfastly Advancing Your Vision

One of the toughest challenges when starting a company is when your “brilliant” idea, the one you just know the world will love, involves altering consumer behavior or introducing something that didn’t exist before. With KIND, we were creating a whole new category of products. We had to convince food-store buyers that our products not only were great sellers, but also filled a need consumers didn’t even know they had.

The first question was what to call our new category. We spent years mulling over a name. Initially, to capitalize on the energy-bar rage, we called KIND a fruit and nut energy bar. Then we realized that the term “energy bar” bore the negative connotation of not being made from real food and not tasting good. We switched to calling our products fruit and nut bars. Then we began referring to the broader segment in which we competed as the “healthy snack bar” market—in line with other emerging competitors in this space. To distinguish KIND from bars made with fruit and nut pastes that were being introduced around the same time, we refined the name of our products as “whole nut and fruit bars” to highlight that our products were made from whole ingredients without emulsifying them.

These distinctions seem so trivial or obvious looking back, but they matter a ton, and figuring out the taxonomy took us hundreds of hours. When you’re creating something new, everything has to be done for the first time.

Making a KIND bar brought its own challenges. We had to develop a recipe to bind the nuts and fruit with natural ingredients. One of these was honey, which also helped protect the nuts from oxidizing. We initially made small batches by hand and laid out the finished product in large baking trays to dry. Then we’d cut every bar individually. It was a labor of love, and very expensive and inefficient. We had to devise a process to automate the formation and packaging of the bars, which was extraordinarily trying because delicate whole nuts were moving through the line. We tinkered with every aspect of operations until each step worked, sweating long hours to figure out new ways to do things, and hiring experts when they were available and we could afford it. Our arduous manufacturing process is the result of thousands of brainstorming and trial-and-error hours.

I am aware that an often-accepted maxim of business strategy is to pursue the path of least resistance. It makes sense to avoid unnecessary headaches. And it’s true that entrepreneurs do often have a penchant for embracing challenges, which can make us miss more efficient ways to get somewhere. But the easiest path is not necessarily the right path when pursuing a new venture, particularly one anchored around the AND philosophy. When it comes to defining your unique value proposition, you have to be wary of shortcuts. If in finance “cash is king,” in consumer goods, product is king. So when crafting our products, we could accept no compromises. Yes, it was much harder to make a whole nut and fruit bar than a slab bar. But we could not cut corners on the essence of our concept. It took a lot of determination to stay the course.

Once we had a product to sell, we went door-to-door around the country to present our new bars. We had been selling healthy foods to specialty and natural stores for the past ten years, so we had relationships with stores that got us meetings about KIND.

One of these early meetings took place at a natural foods store in Colorado. I sat down at a table in the store’s cafeteria with a nice buyer who looked me in the eye and said, “I don’t know where to put your products.” He explained that KIND bars did not look like they fit in the nutritional bar section of the store. And clearly they were not candy bars or cereal bars. He didn’t think they would work in the checkout aisle.

“I don’t know where to merchandise you,” he said. “This is not what a nutritional bar looks like.”

I took a deep breath. What was so obvious to me was apparently not getting through to him.

“The whole point is, it’s not made as an emulsion because we’re using ingredients you can see and pronounce,” I said, reciting KIND’s tagline.

He smiled politely. His concern, he said, was that consumers had become accustomed to eating pastes with a homogenous puréed texture.

“People are used to a smooth texture in their bars,” he said.

After highlighting that our products were minimally processed and closest to nature, I convinced him, as a personal favor, to allow KIND in on a test basis, with a small rack over by the nutritional bars (but not on the same shelf).

In many natural foods chains, because buyers said KIND did not fit into the traditional nutritional bar selection, it was the grocery-section buyers who gave us a chance. At Whole Foods Market, for instance, most nutritional bars can be found in the natural Whole Body section. Because the original buyers didn’t think we belonged there, KIND initially launched in the candy bar aisle, at the bottom of the shelves. Customers had to bend all the way down to pick up our bars. That was tough, because traffic was slower on that aisle, and people looking in it were looking for chocolate or candy. At the time, consumers who were looking for a “performance” bar tended to head for the nutritional bar aisle instead. And, as there was no “healthy snack bar” segment, or familiar products in that space, consumers didn’t even know to look for anything like that anywhere. They had to discover us.

Despite the difficulties, KIND attracted consumers’ attention with our transparent packaging. Eventually our products performed so well that they were moved from the candy section to the granola and cereal bar aisle. Now another roadblock emerged: Cereal bars are drastically less expensive than KIND bars, because they contain grains rather than pricier nuts and fruits.

We had to rely on the KIND bars themselves at this point. Luckily, once consumers tried them, they overwhelmingly bought our products again. Eventually we helped pioneer a whole “healthy snack bar” section within the grocery area. After some time, the healthy snack bar section became so popular that other nutritional bar companies started asking to move from their dedicated aisle to the section where KIND was located.

SOLDIERING THROUGH THE LEAN YEARS

Grit is about perseverance, the ability to keep going at all costs. At a small, struggling company, where every sale can spell the difference between the ability to pay your bills or not, grit means getting up every morning and selling as hard as you can.

As KIND was born in the aftermath of our losing everything PeaceWorks had invested to import the Australian brand of bars, we were in danger of going out of business. I had no idea how I would make payroll. Frequently I deferred paying myself part of my annual salary of $24,000. On top of all this, there was the pressure to deliver for PeaceWorks’ investors.

I had taken on a $100,000 investment several years earlier, in 1998: $50,000 and $25,000 respectively from my childhood friends Jaime and Gregorio, and $25,000 from a friend Gregorio had brought in.

A couple of years before the launch of KIND, Gregorio’s friend came to me and said she wanted me to buy back her stake. I wasn’t legally bound to do so, and I could have just told her we did not have the money, but I felt morally obligated and I did not want an unhappy investor on my hands. So I bought out her shares. That took most of the cash PeaceWorks had, and it was money that was no longer available to put into the business when our situation worsened later.

I did have a safety cushion that others starting businesses do not. I knew that my parents would have bailed me out if I had been in danger of starvation. In the mid-nineties, my dad lent me $100,000 for the company, and I was enormously proud when I was able to pay it back a few years later. If things had gotten worse in PeaceWorks’ early days, my family could have thrown me a lifeline. I didn’t want to rely on them, and I wanted to make it on my own. But knowing they were there in case of an emergency gave me the fortitude to keep going.

For several years after I repaid my dad, PeaceWorks was going sideways. The most painful times were immediately before we launched KIND bars, when I had a half-dozen team members and we suffered a drop in sales. When that happened, our cash flow issues got worse, because our accounts receivable—the money stores owed us—were not being paid on time. A small company without an essential product is always the last in line to get paid by retailers, because they don’t require more shipments from you. You have to beg and cajole and just stay on top of the people working in accounts payable at the stores. In addition, because we were a food company, our inventory had an expiration date, after which we had to throw it out or sell it to a liquidator at a steep loss.

The situation took a toll on me. I was too busy to be depressed, but I was terrified and felt isolated. To handle the financial constraints, I turned to time-tested methods familiar to anyone who’s ever been broke in a big city. I spread my limited budget as thinly as I could. I searched out all-you-can-eat brunch restaurants and filled up—one satiating seating to last me an entire day. Or I bought a falafel or shawarma, loaded—and reloaded—on the vegetable toppings, and considered that my one meal for the day.

I consider myself a guy with a lot of vision, but at the time I was just trying to survive. When you are desperate, your ability to strategize and visualize is far more limited. PeaceWorks was nearly fatally wounded, on the cusp of going out of business. Luckily, after we developed KIND, the business took off, and all our hard work paid dividends. But it took a good decade.

If you can believe it, the minefield environment around the years immediately preceding KIND’s launch (2001–2004) was nothing compared to PeaceWorks’ first years (1994–2000), when I was young, naïve, and inexperienced. The mistakes I made during the decade before KIND could fill a business-school course primer on how not to run your start-up. And fortunately for me, KIND was able to benefit from ten years of lessons from my earlier efforts.

It’s still not hard to remember—viscerally—lying on my futon in my old studio: I literally faced a towering column of boxes of mud soaps threatening to fall on me any minute. As I sought a ray of sunshine during the day, rows of cartons of sundried tomato spreads blocked the light from the windows. Going to get a bowl of cereal or to take a shower required advance planning because I had to trace around a maze of cases and assorted supplies that doubled as an obstacle course within my tiny studio apartment. Neighbors in my building swore that I was running a spa because the pungent smells of aromatherapy permeated the entire eighth floor. The Mother’s Day gift baskets had not worked out. I had tied up all my savings in inventory. I needed to sell that inventory swiftly to generate a little income and to enable me to buy a second generation of product, which would hopefully benefit from the lessons of what I had done wrong in the first round.

SELLING: HOW I GOT IT WRONG

I thought I knew how to sell products. I was convinced that my experiences with booths, fairs, and kiosks back when I was selling watches as a teenager, my first start-up, would be translatable into my new lines at PeaceWorks. All the grit in the world couldn’t make up for my lack of knowledge, unfortunately.

In 1994, I rented a kiosk at the Port Authority Bus Terminal and one at the World Trade Center, and offered both the skincare products and the Mediterranean spreads. I also took booths at trade shows and at Manhattan’s ubiquitous street fairs. The booths at the trade fairs were barely breaking even; sales from the kiosks were not enough to cover the rental fees, let alone other overheads. This clearly wasn’t the way to scale the business.

I quickly learned that kiosks did not elicit sufficient trust to sell food. I also picked the wrong locations. Harried commuters rushing in and out of the train tunnels at both the World Trade Center and Port Authority were not looking for groceries and did not want to buy and travel with jars of spreads; they just wanted to rush home. It was an uphill battle trying to cover the costs of the booth rentals every day.

I gradually realized that we needed the validation of an established food store, especially one that specialized in gourmet foods. There, the customers were looking for specialty food and were willing to pay for it. The imprimatur of a top retailer would carry considerable weight with consumers. If I could get my products into a specialty store, I would generate far smaller margins because the retail prices would need to incorporate a margin for the retailer and even for a distributor, but I would make up in volume what I lost in margin.

A new problem arose: My presentations to specialty retailers were not yielding any approvals. My products had many deficiencies—from the price structure to the nutritional information on the label, to the look and feel of the brand—but I didn’t know what the problems were, let alone how to fix them. I started going into retail shops and refusing to leave until the buyer or store manager either ordered my products or taught me what I needed to do right. The managers appreciated (and were entertained by) the sincerity and incongruity of my efforts: Here was a crazy Mexican Jew who had abandoned a law-firm career to carry around bottles of sundried tomato spreads in a gigantic brown vinyl briefcase, all for the sake of advancing economic cooperation in the Middle East. They liked my story and my willingness to learn and do anything to make things work. So they were a bit more patient. It helped that the product was really tasty. Some gave me a shot; some gave me advice.

I remember walking into the famous Upper West Side grocery store Zabar’s, the pantheon of specialty foods. I loved the energy and all the characters there—Neil Simon and Woody Allen characters alike, and all together in one store. I approached a clerk and asked to meet with the general manager or the owner. I waited perhaps an hour to talk with someone. Eventually, Saul Zabar himself and Scott Goldshine, his loyal manager, came over. I didn’t get the chance to go present the product inside an office or even at a buyer’s desk. “You have one minute,” Saul said to me as he tapped the far end of the last register, where people were bagging their groceries.

Right on that metal table, I positioned the jars and explained the concept. Saul and Scott proceeded to insult me in a friendly way: “You have no idea what you are doing. Your labels are too busy,” said Saul. “Your pricing structure is all off,” said Scott. “The product is too salty,” exclaimed Saul. “And too oily,” added Scott. “This is all wrong,” they both concluded. In between insults and curse words for how completely inept I was, they gave me exceptional advice. I listened intently and promised to work on it all. The whole ordeal may have lasted ten or fifteen minutes in the end, but it felt like I had been in a boxing match with two heavyweights for an hour. Zabar and Goldshine agreed that if I made the changes they suggested, I would get a chance. I am sure they doubted I would come through, but a few months later I did, and they placed what at the time was a huge opening order (ten cases). We ended up building a twenty-year relationship; we’re still friends, and our products are still sold at Zabar’s.

At the beginning, PeaceWorks’ Mediterranean spreads had even more problems. The jars were leaking oil because they had not been vacuum-sealed correctly. The labels were misaligned because they were placed by hand. Our pricing was a mess because we had not created the appropriate margin structure to allow retailers and distributors the profits they needed. I had to go back to the drawing board again and again.

That was how I educated myself about the food industry. In retrospect, it was one of the greatest learning opportunities I was given, because these were the people who were in the trenches. I brought in my jars of samples; they told me what I was doing wrong; I fixed it; I closed sales, and I ordered more products from my trading partners.

While I was trying to get into the specialty stores, I was also casting as wide a net as I possibly could. I had no distributor and had to make every sale myself. My system was not exactly time-or cost-effective: I walked the streets of New York City selling to any store that would carry my products.

I was a newcomer to Manhattan so I didn’t really know the city well. In the early days, after a night out with my friends, once the streets were quiet, at around 2 a.m., I would drive my old Cougar down every avenue and street, doing reconnaissance. I would stop every few blocks after observing any food stores to indicate their presence in my notes. It took several nights of driving, but eventually I had a hand-drawn map showing the location of every grocery store, convenience store, bodega, department store, and any other shop I thought sold food on the island of Manhattan.

Then it was time to hit the pavement. I started off on foot at 7 A.M. at 122nd Street and Broadway, up near Columbia University. Walking down the west side of Broadway, I headed downtown, stopping at every store that I thought might carry my products. I carried my fake-leather briefcase filled with thirty pounds of Moshe & Ali’s spread samples in glass jars and a loaf of bread for taste-testing purposes. I would not leave unless the store owner gave me a chance. If the person in charge of the store didn’t have the authority to place orders, I asked for the phone number of the person who did. Later, I would call the buyer at headquarters.

Sometimes it would take a full day for me to walk the length of an avenue all the way to the tip of Manhattan, just doing one side of the street. Then the following day, I would do the other side of the street, store by store. On other avenues like Madison or First, with fewer food stores, it was more efficient for me to crisscross the street as I walked. I covered every avenue in Manhattan in this manner. Most of the opportunities lay on Broadway and on Second and Third avenues, with some exceptions on the Lower East Side and in SoHo.

When I received my boxes of goods from the Middle East, I packed up my battered Cougar and delivered the orders myself. Since the trunk’s lid was broken, I used duct tape to keep it shut.

After I had some small success selling the products into retail stores, I was permitted to set up demonstration tables so customers could sample my goods. Doing demos at Zabar’s was the highlight of selling for me. I spent about $50 buying delicious crusty baguettes from their famed bakery counter, and saved money by conducting the demo myself. Over the course of several hours standing in their store and telling customers about PeaceWorks’ products, I would go through two to three cases of spreads in samples alone, and would sell thirty cases, or about $1,000 worth of spreads in one day. The store was the epicenter of gourmet food in New York City, and I loved to make customers laugh as I told them why I was so passionate about my products. I had similar experiences at Fairway Market, West Side Market, and other independent retailers across Manhattan.

Once I had about two hundred stores in New York City buying products, I engaged small distributors to service them. I would open the account and make the first sale, and my distributor would maintain the business, delivering the reorders. I still had to do all the selling but I no longer had to make deliveries, which freed up some of my time for more sales.

My next target was Philadelphia. I was twenty-five at the time, and dating a senior at the University of Pennsylvania. I followed the same procedure I used in Manhattan, driving the streets around the university and drawing out a map of all the food stores I could see from the car. I looked through the Yellow Pages and made a list of everything listed under specialty stores, natural stores, health food stores, kosher stores, or grocery stores. Then I tried to call each store to make an appointment with a buyer.

This was a completely inefficient way to sell, but I didn’t realize how wasteful I was being with my time. I often drove for an hour to an appointment in the Philadelphia suburbs, only to discover the store specialized in Hungarian meats or Hispanic food or was a tiny convenience store with little chance of attracting consumers who would shop for specialty Mediterranean spreads. Or I arrived at 5 A.M. at the Germantown farmers’ market to meet a buyer at his stall, only to learn he had taken the day off.

One account that I was able to sell to was Ashbourne Market in Elkins Park. This customer represented a typical sale: a two-hour round-trip drive, for an order of less than $40, with a potential for a second order later in the year. I realized how scant the progress was at the time. A logical human being would have given up, but I was determined and naïve. And the naïve aspect was part of what kept me going because I was somewhat unaware of the huge obstacles I was going to have to overcome.

One of my first big scores was a big distributor on my way to Philadelphia, Haddon House. They were a serious national distributor, and getting them on board was an energizing win for me. Once they were stocking my products, I made a point of getting to know the sales representatives who serviced my customers. I would take groups of them to lunch at a nearby Applebee’s, a huge expense for me, but worth it because it bought me time to explain my products as we ate. My hope was that they would open accounts for me, and sometimes they did. I also went on ride-alongs with them when they visited customers. They would introduce me, and I would pitch directly to the buyer at the store. Moshe & Ali’s spreads barely registered on Haddon House’s radar; in contrast, KIND is now one of Haddon House’s most important lines.

TWO PHASES OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP: FORGING GRIT THROUGH CERTITUDE

Grit is about attitude and temperament, about staying power forged from character. But where does that determination emanate from? Besides sheer character, can the process through which you reach a decision to pursue a venture influence your level of steadfastness? I believe so. Furthermore, a two-stage process can save an entrepreneur from himself before the venture starts. An entrepreneur has to have conviction to get to the finish line no matter the obstacles. But what if one is pursuing the wrong idea? You could end up mired in the mud your entire life. That is why it is essential to separate the research and development phase from the execution phase.

Once you get an idea, it is vital to first test it. Had I delved into a big marketing campaign before testing the Dead Sea minerals as I did through the newspaper ads and the street fairs, I could have wasted millions instead of thousands learning from my mistakes. During this initial phase, one must question every aspect of the idea. Does the idea make sense? Is someone already pursuing it?

If you do your research and find that you don’t have any competitors, you clearly have not done enough research. Every idea under the sun has some competition. For instance, even though I had never tried sundried tomatoes, I quickly learned that an entire cottage industry in Italy and California existed around them. This is a time for healthy skepticism. Is there truly a problem that needs to be addressed? Does the idea address it in a credible and satisfactory way? Is it efficient and effective? Is your process for getting there sound and realistic? Do you have what it takes? Invest the time during this phase to ask all the tough questions, even about yourself and your temperament and financial situation. The research phase has to incorporate true introspection as well as empirical research. It is prudent during this period for you to ask those you trust for their earnest assessment.

Only once you question yourself and your concept thoroughly and deeply—only once you’ve walked through the fire of doubt—should you feel comfortable moving forward with your idea. If after a serious period of research and introspection you are still convinced that your venture is sound, you then flip a switch within your heart and your brain—and move from skeptic to evangelist.

The evangelist phase begins with the first moment of execution. From that point forward, you can never look back or give up. You are invincible and cannot be stopped. You draw strength from knowing you tested and retested, and that you can get there. Nobody’s doubts can discourage you. You can have moments of failure and weakness. But inside you carry that fire that tells you, “I must stay the course, and I will achieve my goals—failure is not an option.” Of course it is normal and necessary for you to constantly ask yourself questions about how to adjust strategy, about how to incorporate feedback and new information, and about how you can improve your product or delivery system. You have to be a critical thinker at all times. But, during the evangelist phase, you cannot doubt the essence of your pursuit. You have to put all such doubts aside. Nobody and nothing must stop you or discourage you, only strengthen you and your conviction. You become an actionist, a person who gets things done in a single-minded fashion.

The process of moving from skeptic to evangelist is vital. If you confuse or mix up these separate phases, you can cause yourself and your dream a lot of harm. If you have false assurances about the certainty of your idea because you didn’t test it thoroughly, you can end up in the wilderness for decades and waste your energy and your life—is that motivation enough to take the research phase seriously? On the other hand, once you flip that switch, it is vital that you not let setbacks stop you. Anchoring around the conviction you draw from the righteousness of your purpose and from the certainty of your path, backed by the thorough research and thinking you did during the skeptic phase, should give you the sheer determination to stand up when you fall.

Not everyone is cut out for a life of entrepreneurship. It is like parenting—enormously rewarding and enormously challenging. There’s a great satisfaction in doing something that you love. But you need to understand you will experience both higher highs and lower lows than in a traditional office job.

Unanticipated things will go wrong—sometimes horribly wrong. It’s okay to feel scared and isolated; you can accept those emotions and get back to work. You may have some of the most difficult moments in your life. At the end, though, if this is truly your baby and your mission, you will end up loving the journey because it is the journey you are meant to walk. Even with those setbacks and horrible failures, you will draw meaning from your efforts.

I wish I could say it never crossed my mind to give up, but in the years before we launched our first KIND products, I did consider quitting and going back to a safe career in law. Sometimes I thought longingly about what it would mean to draw a steady salary and not bear the responsibility for other families’ sustenance. I worried that my company might never be successful and that I would not achieve my mission.

What kept me going were the underlying anchors of grit, purpose, and conviction. I just couldn’t let go of my dream, and I couldn’t let my team down.

CAN YOU TEACH GRIT?

As a kid, my favorite story was “The Three Little Pigs.” The lesson about investing time in quality work stuck with me, and in everything I do I always try to build a solid structure. Now my wife and I read this folktale to our children. We also read them the story about “The Little Engine That Could” (“I think I can, I think I can, I think I can”).

Can you teach resilience? How do you forge a young (or less than young) personality to know to get up and not stay down? How do you inculcate the sense in your kids that they should not take no for an answer when they truly believe in something? As parents, we sometimes face the perverse incentive for our kids not to question us and to accept whatever we tell them. But teaching your kids that it is okay to question authority, that it is okay to press you, is sometimes useful. You don’t want to raise someone who can’t get along with his peers because he is too pushy or stubborn. But you also don’t want a pushover who accepts whatever life throws at him or her and will blindly obey when someone imposes an arbitrary rule or condition.

The lesson has to be taught and then restated for them: If something goes wrong, don’t be afraid to try again. What matters is effort. What matters is that you don’t give up. Don’t be afraid to fail. Be afraid to not try. Children (young and old) want to avoid disappointing their parents. It is important for us to learn to compete with ourselves and be proud of our effort and not to try to succeed to impress others. A great book that shares insights on this front is NurtureShock, by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman.

Much of our success—or lack thereof—in life stems from luck. But much of that luck is also related to our persistence in the game. If you don’t play the game, after all, you can’t score. Life will certainly throw many curveballs, so teaching ourselves and our loved ones to have a resilient mindset can help us deal with that uncertainty and persevere. It is critical that we build—in ourselves and in our offspring—the self-confidence necessary to keep playing the game, even if we don’t think we are that good at it. The more we play it, the better we get at it.

From an early age, I saw my father working hard on his business selling timepieces. Often people would come to ask for his advice. I loved to sit next to him as he worked in his study, doing my homework and listening to the conversations he had with his colleagues. Watching my father’s work and life ethic had a lot to do with my drive to become an entrepreneur and to try to improve our world.

I started earning money from an early age. Although my family was well-off by Mexico City standards, we were taught the value of being as financially independent as possible. Even when I was too young to truly understand what that meant, I put money away in a piggy bank.

When I was six or seven years old, I started my first business, organizing carnival games for my three siblings and my cousins. I would charge each kid a couple pesos to play a ringtoss game, with a spicy Mexican candy called chamoy or a stick of gum as a prize. My sisters Tammy and Ileana, my brother Sioma, and my cousins Sandy and Eddy played all the time.

When I was eight, I did my first professional magic show. Eventually, my magic business grew and I needed to acquire a stage name. Taking inspiration from Houdini, my “uncle” Jordan suggested The Great HouDani. When I partnered with my friend Jaime Jaet, he insisted on becoming HouJaime (which doesn’t sound like Houdini at all). Another friend, Gregorio Schneider, joined me and Jaime as the fantastic clown Huevolete (which would roughly translate as “Eggoletto”). Together we did shows at kids’ birthday parties, bar mitzvahs, retirement homes, schools, children’s hospitals, and at a center for kids with severe developmental delays.

Our best gig was at a department store that Jaime’s parents partially owned. On Children’s Day, the Mexican holiday of Dia de los Niños, we would do eight back-to-back shows for two hundred kids at a time. We would make about 500 pesos (roughly $80 today after adjusting for inflation), which was a lot of money for us.

My partnership with Jaime and Gregorio continues. As I shared, they were the first investors in PeaceWorks, and they still hold stakes in KIND.

Around the age of twelve, I wanted to learn more about business, and I wanted the experience of doing things on my own. I asked my parents if I could get a real job for the summer. They were hesitant to let me go off by myself, but they spoke to my godfather, and he arranged a job for me, helping in a textile wholesaler in downtown Mexico City.

I would ride the bus to the subway and then take the subway all the way downtown and walk a few blocks in the heat of the Mexican summer. The city was even less safe then than it is now, and children from well-off families—and certainly Jewish children—never left their homes unattended. Playtime occurred behind the high concrete walls of each family’s home. So it was unusual for a kid my age and in my situation, from a private school, with plenty of opportunities, to go downtown on the subway every day.

“I think it wasn’t very easy to discourage you from anything,” my mom told me when I asked her recently how I managed to convince them to let me take the subway downtown alone. “When you set your mind to something, you did it.”

My job was to carry big rolls of cloth on delivery runs to different locations several blocks away. I also would measure and cut cloth for customers, and work the cash register. In the middle of the eight-hour workday, at 1 P.M., I would get a soda break and could buy myself a cold orange Crush. That was my favorite part of the day.

When my family immigrated to San Antonio, Texas, when I was in high school, I lost the customer base for my magic-show business. I still wanted to work but only my dad had a work permit. I had a new friend who had immigrated to San Antonio from Russia. He convinced me to take a job getting leads for an aluminum siding salesman.

That was perhaps the weirdest job I’ve ever held, and the most unpleasant. Just like the movie Tin Men, with Richard Dreyfuss and Danny DeVito, aluminum siding salesmen often come up with unscrupulous, laughable, or dishonest techniques to entice poor families to install siding over their wooden homes, ostensibly to protect the house.

My friend and I earned less than minimum wage on an hourly basis, plus $50 if any of our leads turned into an actual sale. The salesman we were helping, who I’ll call Bill, would pick us up in our neighborhood in a big old seventies Cadillac with burgundy velvet seats. He would drive us for a half-hour into the gang-infested south side of San Antonio. Dropping us off on a corner at eight in the morning, Bill asked us to walk the streets for the next four hours under the scorching Texas sun, knocking on every door.

If somebody answered, we would tell them about the benefits of aluminum siding. Here’s the sleazy part of the job, which I to this day regret: Bill had told us what to say to get people excited. We would tell them that the head of our company was coming to town, so we were running a promotion. Or we would say that National Geographic magazine would be visiting to take pictures of the most-improved homes. Using these tactics made me feel uneasy.

The downsides of the job were significant. I was propositioned. I was bitten by a dog (which required rabies shots). And I never earned one of those $50 payments, because I did not get even one appointment for Bill. My friend got two or three, which made me wonder what I was doing wrong.

Once I realized that selling aluminum siding was not my calling, I switched to more entrepreneurial activities. I created a lawn-mowing business with another kid named Danny, which we aptly named DND Mowing Services. We offered to mow lawns in my neighborhood, Hunters Creek, and elsewhere. The business floundered, however, because we had neither a car nor a client list—nor, in fact, a lawn mower; if a homeowner wanted to hire us, we asked to use theirs!

Eventually, I started selling watches. My dad did me a big favor by introducing me to one of his suppliers from his duty-free business, a friend of his, who handled the MICHELE brand of watches. He agreed to sell to me initially just as a favor, at wholesale prices. Eventually I sold a significant volume, and I was proud that they wanted me to sell because I was good at it, not because they were doing my father a favor. My dad also hooked me up with a few low-end Chinese-made novelty watch brands. Once my watch-selling business got off the ground, I also got Citizen to sell me some watches and some of their clocks. I would eventually buy full lots of clocks that Citizen needed to liquidate, five hundred to a thousand clocks at a time.

I started selling at the Eisenhauer Road flea market in a bad part of town, the year I was sixteen. I would drive there at 7 a.m. on a Saturday, often bringing my younger brother Sioma, who was twelve, along as my assistant. I priced my watches between $20 and $60.

The flea market had dirt floors and a labyrinth of small booths with people hawking everything from counterfeit Chinese merchandise to novelty goods. There was a pawnshop, and stores selling the kind of trinkets you find in an Oriental Trading Company catalog. Bizarre characters walked the aisles. Our favorite thing, once we had sold one watch and had some income, was to buy one of those huge smoked turkey legs and share it. (I don’t think I could eat one of those monstrosities today.)

My time at the flea market helped me hone my business skills: negotiating, bargaining, pricing, keeping books, factoring in all costs including shipping and overhead. In essence, I learned about retail merchandising.

When I started college, I upgraded my watch business by renting little kiosks in shopping malls, most frequently at North Star Mall—San Antonio’s fanciest—and at Ingram Park Mall. I called some of the kiosks Da’leky Times (which sounded better than Daniel Lubetzky’s Times); others were dubbed Watch-U-Want. I started developing a network of students who would help me man those booths. Staffing the booths was tricky because our leases required us to be open whenever the mall was open. On a couple occasions I had to skip classes.

The most dreadful moment was when there were no interested shoppers and no foot traffic in the malls—while I had to listen, over and over again, to a track of “oldies but goodies” songs wafting from the shop next to my kiosk. But it was a lot of fun when customers stopped by. I could sell more than $1,000 in a weekend, and I managed to turn a profit almost every week. My favorite customers were the tourists. I enjoyed negotiating with them. Many were Mexican, like me, and were used to haggling, which is a time-honored way to buy things in Mexico. I would sometimes sell five to ten watches to one family at once, as gifts for their relatives back home. Because I didn’t have much overhead, my prices were very competitive.

My biggest challenge was dealing with shoplifters. When customers swarmed the booth, it was difficult to keep an eye on all my watches. I came up with a system of tying my watches in groups of five or seven with a ribbon, and memorizing the precise order of those clusters. Some of those watches cost me more than $100 each, in particular some cool Citizen scuba diving models I carried, and I didn’t want to lose them.

There was one strategic spot where I could stand and see all my merchandise at the same time. If I was trying to close a deal with a customer and didn’t happen to be standing in that spot, I would have to keep apologizing and leaving his side to circle the kiosk, just to check on the other side’s displays. Having two team members was too expensive for my business model.

Once, when the booth was busy, there were a bunch of people on one side of the kiosk and one young woman, alone, on the other side, unattended. Within seconds of seeing her there, I checked the displays and a whole swath of watches, about a dozen, was missing. The young woman was the only person who had been near them.

As she walked away, I asked her to stop, but she ignored me and kept walking. So I quickly asked a salesman in the next booth to watch my kiosk and I ran after her, shouting, “Call the police! Shoplifter!” The kiosk workers around me, who shared my fury against thieves, tried to help by flagging down mall security guards as I ran after the woman. She was walking quickly, and I couldn’t tackle her lest I be the one accused of assault.

Finally, she reached the doors leading to the parking lot. I was sweating, knowing that if she got through I would lose my merchandise (which would put a big dent in my college savings). So I held the doors closed until the police came. She kept trying to push me but I would not touch her; I just kept holding the doors.

Finally a police officer came up and asked what had happened. I explained what I had seen.

“Did you see her take those watches?”

“No, I did not,” I answered.

“Then how can you be so sure that she stole them?”

“Because she was the only person on that side of the booth, and I check my watches periodically,” I said.

The lady was carrying a purse and a white bag with a teddy bear on top. I asked the guard to get her to open her purse. He hesitated but I finally persuaded him to tell her to open her purse, over her objections.

The purse was absolutely empty. I gasped.

The security guard gave me a stern look. “Let go of those doors and let her through.”

I started looking down at the floor in defeat. Then, as a final try, I said, “Ask her to show you what’s in the white bag, under the teddy bear.”

He hesitated; then he finally told her to lift the teddy bear. She started crying. Under the bear were not only my dozen watches along with their display packaging, but also a host of other items that she had clearly been shoplifting all day. Even the empty purse, it turned out, had been stolen.

Da’leky Times went on hiatus while I went abroad to spend my junior year studying in France and Israel. For the first semester, I studied at the Institute of European Studies in Paris and took some courses at the Sorbonne.

I hadn’t brought my magic trunk with me, but I became enthralled by the street performers I saw. I observed how they approached total strangers. It seemed daunting and intriguing. I decided to try it, so I compiled tools for a routine: a deck of cards, some rope, some coins, a ring. I practiced and practiced. Then I went back to the tourist area of Les Halles.

After a bit of hesitation, I meekly approached a table and asked in a low voice and broken French if the guests wanted to see some magic. They flatly said, “No” and waved me away as if swatting a fly. I went to another table and timidly asked again, “Voudriez-vous voir un peu de magie?” “Would you like to watch a little magic?” They, too, looked at me as if I were an insolent kid interrupting them and went back to their conversation.

I was frustrated and upset at myself. I walked back to my host’s apartment in shame. I remember sitting on a bench, staring at the wall of the Métro, and feeling an enormous hole of anger in my stomach. Why was I so nervous? I was clearly emitting that insecurity to the prospective audience. Why would they want to waste their time believing I may have something worth showing them if I didn’t believe in myself? Why was I even asking, rather than showing them something up front? I went home. That night, while lying on the bed unable to fall asleep, I came up with a different strategy.

The next evening, I showed up at the same spot wearing a sports jacket and self-imposed confidence. I approached a table and, rather than ask anyone’s permission, just smiled at them, tossed a coin into the air, and made it disappear before their eyes. They all were surprised and exclaimed in unison, “How did you do that?” I smiled again, approached the woman seating closest to where I was standing, and “discovered” the coin from behind her ear. My small audience was having fun. I was enjoying it—so I kept going. Fifteen minutes later, I thanked them, and everyone at the table gave me a few coins. The table next door had seen some of the commotion and laughter and immediately called to me. That night I made $300 in tips, a very hearty sum for a college student having fun at work. But of course the greatest reward was that I had conquered my fears and insecurities and figured out how to become a street performer.

The next step was doing large shows. This was an even harder challenge. At a plaza outside the Centre Georges Pompidou, a series of street performers competed for tourists’ attention at the same time. You could watch the sword-eater, or the break-dancer, or the mime. A performer needed to keep the audience’s attention, or else they’d just keep walking or go see someone else. I invited three friends to come watch me, and I started inviting people to gather around as I launched into my stage-magic routine. About thirty people surrounded me at one point, but they soon moved on to watch other shows. I got nervous and started stammering and losing my voice. All I could muster were small grunts. People thought I was affected and stayed away. I was left with three people watching—my three friends.

Again, I was embarrassed and disappointed with myself. But I reflected on what I was doing wrong and determined to fix things. I realized that good street performers marked their stage and took time to prepare people for the performance. They wouldn’t start the show right away. Instead, they carefully created an imaginary perimeter: People in the front row held the “best seats in the house,” so they’d have an incentive to stay and see the show. I also convinced my friends Fiona and Hendrik to play the violin and the drums. I’d start the show by asking someone in the audience to “volunteer” and would pick my friend Wendy. I would slide a gigantic needle through her tummy, and would leave her in hypnotic suspension throughout the performance. I would only remove the needle after passing on the hat for contributions from the audience. The money was not nearly as good—we’d collect about $60 for a performance, which we’d need to split among the four of us, and then we’d have to wait our turn in the self-organized queue of performers to get another shot at the stage. But the intensity of having four hundred people on the streets watching your performance when you know you have nothing holding them—other than a needle through Wendy’s body!—was electrifying. The experience of engineering the stage so that people stayed to watch taught me a lot about organization and behavior. Eventually I took my show on the road and traveled across Europe, paying for my travels with money from my magic shows.

Although I saw myself as a businessman, my experience in Israel sparked a new nerdiness in me. During my senior year, back in San Antonio, I got prescription glasses for the first time, after spending countless hours in the library researching my thesis on the Israeli-Arab conflict. In place of my social life, I now stayed in, working, at nights and on weekends, because I was so passionate about the subject. The thesis in the end was 268 pages long. (I still keep a copy in my office, and lend it to friends who are suffering from insomnia and need something to fall asleep.)

I applied to several law schools and was fortunate to get into Stanford Law, which was my first choice. With my acceptance in hand, I had to choose whether to continue with my watch business or head off to Stanford. It was a hard decision. My dad, who had never had anything more than a third-grade education, cherished the thought of his son going on to be a nice Jewish lawyer. He also wanted me to pave my own path and not go into the watch industry. He himself had dreamed of becoming a doctor, but his education had come to an end when the Germans invaded Lithuania. He had started selling watches because he had no other options, whereas I, through his sacrifices, did have choices. I had several long conversations with my dad where I tried to encourage him to let me come work for him at his duty-free company. It was clear that, in his heart, he would have enjoyed it if we worked together. But it was a testament to his selflessness that he wanted me to aim higher.

The two abiding interests in my life—commerce and peacemaking—were pulling me in opposite directions. It’s possible to do magic shows on the side while in university, but eventually one has to choose a career path. I was conflicted about how best to achieve my goals. Eventually, I was lucky enough to figure out a way, using the AND philosophy, to do both. The way I avoided having to compromise on either of these dreams was to start my own business with a social mission. As an entrepreneur, I could set the terms.

WHEN OTHERS DON’T SHARE YOUR COMMITMENT

One of the most painful experiences of KIND’s early years was the rash of defections that the company suffered as key team members jumped ship. I couldn’t blame them. After ten years of trying to get PeaceWorks to take off, a significant minority of my team thought we were going nowhere with our new KIND Fruit & Nut bars. I had private meetings with some team members whom I really liked, serious hardworking salespeople who were good at their jobs. They all told me they didn’t see a future in the company and its new line. These departures wounded me personally, because, while I could see why they were making these moves, I believed fervently that KIND held opportunities for us all.

I had one team member who was a truly gifted saleswoman. I had invested in her, training her to make her even stronger. When she came to me to tell me she was leaving, I pushed her to explain why. She said I wasn’t launching enough new products and expanding in enough directions.

“We just launched KIND,” I said. “We need to let it take off first.” But she would not be persuaded. I received the same feedback from several sales brokers who worked with us. They were happy to sell KIND bars, but they were eager—desperate, even—for new products. All these questions made me wonder if I wasn’t moving quickly enough to innovate.

Despite this clamoring for more KIND items, I was terrified of overextending the brand into irrelevance, a mistake I had made before, which almost tanked PeaceWorks. How could I know if it was time to be disciplined and stay focused on KIND’s core items or if the time for expansion had arrived?