Daniel Lubetzky, the newest member of Shark Tank’s slate of regular judges, is already developing his niche. The man behind the snack company Kind gravitates to novel food-focused pitches, like one from a vegan fish startup. But on a recent episode, Lubetzky was captivated by a different type of quirky product: a transparent hummingbird feeder worn over your face, all the better to view the hovering, swift-moving birds up close.
“When my dad passed away, all of us saw a bird outside of where he and my mom lived,” a visibly emotional Lubetzky said on the show. His father had loved hummingbirds, flying wonders of engineering, he added, before offering the contraption’s inventor $75,000 for 35% of the company.
Such heartfelt personal revelations from Lubetsky can be disarming. At times, he reads more soulful artist than power broker. But his net worth of reportedly more than $2.3 billion is no accident. That’s clear in the Shark Tank moments when a more serious Lubetzky schools entrepreneurs about the true cost of scaling, or how to master negotiations.
In a business culture that tends to be dominated by a guarded, cool-heads-prevail sensibility, Lubetzky is the model of a different type of leader; one who makes room for his inherent impulsiveness and what he described to Fortune on a Zoom call as “a lot of Latin passion.” Those traits helped to propel Kind—best known for its elevated granola bar made with ingredients like whole nuts, coconut pieces, and caramel drizzle—to ubiquity. And while Lubetzky believes in offering frank appraisals of a person’s ideas or telling them plainly when they’ve made a mistake, his ability to accept feedback, course correct, and surround himself with people who bring order to the chaos is what grew Kind into a $5 billion company.
“The way I think about strengths and weaknesses is that they’re the same,” Lubetzky said. “I’m impulsive,” he continued, accidentally triggering a halo of digital fireworks as he gestured. “And the combination of creativity and impulsiveness can either create those fireworks,” he quickly added, “or the fireworks can burn the barn.”
The unlikely magnate
Lubetzky has said his trajectory in business epitomizes the American Dream. The snacks titan, now in his mid-fifties, was born in Mexico City. His father was a Holocaust survivor from Eastern Europe, and his mother was the daughter of Jewish immigrants from Lithuania. The family relocated to the U.S. when Lubetzky was a teenager. A bright student, he eventually found his way to Stanford Law School, graduated, and flirted with a career as a corporate lawyer before making a hard pivot to start his own company, PeaceWorks.
As its name might suggest, Lubetzky’s first venture wasn’t strictly about selling products. Its goods, like soap or tapenades, were coproduced by suppliers on both sides of a conflict, such as Israelis and Arabs, with the idea that shared business ventures and prosperity would fuel mutual understanding.
PeaceWorks was profitable, but not wildly successful, at least partly because Lubetzky didn’t know what he was doing, as he makes clear in Do the Kind Thing, his 2017 career memoir. In the book, Lubetzky describes eking out a living by persuading Manhattan shopkeepers to sell his goods, schlepping boxes of his company’s products around himself. The many lessons he gained from that experience—some delivered as blunt, unsolicited commentary from New York merchants—came in handy as he built Kind. According to Lubetzky, the idea for the snack company was itself inspired by fruitless searches for something healthier than a candy bar to munch on as he hustled to sell PeaceWorks merchandise door-to-door along New York’s shopping corridors.
Lubetzky started his second business, Kind, in 2004, this time mapping out a distribution strategy that fit the product: He began with local higher-end grocery stores and then expanded to specialty retailers like Whole Foods, regional supermarkets, and finally, with help from people who had done it before, he approached big-box giants like Walmart and Target. The company’s social impact goals were still embedded in the business through various philanthropic projects, but not foregrounded, as they had been with PeaceWorks.
Kind’s sales charts show 2009 as a pivotal year, when slow-and-steady sales began to go vertical. Several things clicked into place around that time: In late 2008, Kind took an investment from a private equity group—a $20 million stake Lubetzky would later buy back for just over $200 million—that allowed the company to expand into new markets. In 2009, Lubetzky landed a deal with Starbucks to have Kind bars sold in its coffee shops, boosting sales and cementing its brand recognition. And perhaps most important, Kind hired the right staff, including John Leahy, a consumer packaged goods veteran who was president from 2009 to 2019.
Lubetzky saw the huge market for the healthier-for-you snack category long before shelves were crowded with chickpea puffs or prebiotic sodas, Leahy told Fortune, but he also had the kind of creative mind that needed to be counterbalanced by someone with more discipline. “He’s an entrepreneur, he has a new idea every weekend,” said Leahy.
By 2019, Kind was selling nearly 460 million bars per year, compared with 20 million in 2009. Annual sales reached about $1.5 billion before its sale, according to the New York Times. Although several suitors came knocking as Kind grew, Lubetzky settled on a sale to Mars in 2020 for a spectacular exit. Because Lubetzky gave full-time staff, including the office cleaners, equity in the company as part of their compensation package, the sale led to “life-changing” payouts to employees, from hundreds of thousands of dollars to millions.
The Kind culture
Lubetzky still holds a minority stake in Kind, but has moved on to other ventures, including Camino Partners, his investment firm, which also oversees his Shark Tank gambles. Its president is Elle Lanning, who worked at Kind for 12 years, becoming Lubetzky’s chief of staff and CEO whisperer. (She is still an advisor to the company.) At Kind, she was another key counterweight to Lubetsky’s dreamer personality.
Lanning recalled her first meeting with Lubetzky, which lasted two hours, most of which was focused on his social beliefs and general business philosophy. At the time, Lubetzky was still running PeaceWorks while building Kind. Lanning remembers Lubetzky saying, “‘We are going to break down barriers between human beings. We are going to make them see their shared humanity,’” she recalled. “And I’m looking at him like, ‘You do want to sell these bars, right?’”
She became the person who would explain Lubetzky’s peccadillos to those employees who didn’t always know what to do with the CEO’s bold blue-sky ideas. And there were plenty of them. Miguel Leal, a former chief marketing officer at Kind who has since launched a Mexican food company, Somos, with Lubetzky as one of two other cofounders, said he still receives “the most interesting” emails from Lubetzky at 2 a.m. “He cannot sleep with all the ideas in his brain.”
Many of the founder’s ideas for new products, marketing schemes, or ploys to salvage a faltering partnership were brilliant—and Lubetzky could deliver them convincingly. “He can crystallize so much in his mind, and he can energize a group to see it as possible,” said Lanning.
But there were also some wacky fantasies.
In his book, Lubetzky writes that his team at PeaceWorks talked him out of an idea he had to open a café in Manhattan where homeless patrons would dine with paying customers and the two could build empathy for each other. At Kind, Lubetzky wanted to explore accepting Bitcoin payments on the company’s website. At a recent meeting with his Somos cofounders, he suggested allowing AI to create an entire marketing scheme. (Someone at sneaker maker Skechers apparently had the same idea. It didn’t work out well.)
“You need to be really good and very comfortable saying, ‘Daniel, we’re not going to do that,’” Leal told Fortune.
Not everyone knew how to stay grounded in the storm of his ideas, or how to respond to his wired energy. New staffers would say things to Lanning like, “‘I’m just not used to every decision being so emotional,’” she told Fortune. Lanning coached employees to see his out-there suggestions as “a jumping-off point for a discussion” that might end with an idea or plan of action that otherwise would not have been explored. For instance, when the FDA challenged Kind’s use of the word “healthy” because nuts are high in fat, Lubetzky started a campaign to have the FDA rethink its guidelines, arguing that they were based on outdated science. As he saw it, public health messaging ignored the role of natural, healthy fats in a balanced diet, while low-fat, sugary products got a pass. Not to mention, Kind’s entire raison d’être was in question.
The idea of confronting the FDA seemed crazy to advisors at Kind. But Lubetzky prevailed. (This was another theme in interviews with ex-employees: The founder didn’t accept setbacks if he could help it.) The company won the right to call the bars healthy, and the FDA is reviewing its label guidelines.
Containing chaos
Most Kind employees appreciated Lubetzky’s idiosyncrasies, Leal said, seeing that the founder’s goal was always to push Kind forward. However, there were a few employees over the years who couldn’t adjust. At meetings, Leal recalled of Lubetzky, “he’d be like, ‘Okay, time-out. I don’t want to hear from anyone that agrees with me. I am not interested in that. I just want to hear what I’m missing.’”
Former employees also said that working at Kind wasn’t for the process-oriented. In the early years, for example, Lubetzky listed his annual goals on a Word document that was circulated to staff. The company ran its accounts on QuickBooks until 2014, former head of supply-chain optimization at Kind Keysha Bell-Brown said, even though Kind was already making hundreds of millions in sales. (It eventually jumped to more suitable software.)
Depending on where you were in your career, Lanning said, one group of new hires could find Kind’s unconventional culture “refreshing and meaningful” and a reason to stick around, while others saw it as “frustrating or just too hard to personally navigate.”
Kind, like any startup, eventually matured into a well-managed, more traditional food company. It made that transition largely thanks to people like Leahy, Lubetzky’s opposite in many ways, according to several former staffers and Lubetzky himself. Pragmatic and systematic, Leahy had held leadership roles at major manufacturers like Nestlé and Johnson & Johnson. “Daniel was probably the best boss I ever had, but also one of the most challenging because of his entrepreneurial spirit. You know, entrepreneurs believe that they can knock down walls and run through them,” Leahy told Fortune.
In time, Lubetzky said, he, Lanning, and Leahy created what they called the “not now” system, a plan that allows for the free flow of ideas while containing some of Lubetzky’s “passion.”
“An entrepreneur doesn’t like to hear ‘No.’ They’re like, ‘What do you mean? No, it’s a great idea,’” said Lubetzky. With this approach, they instead hear “Not now.” A meeting begins, ideas are collected, but the team then executes only the best without discarding the others. You can only move on to the next big idea once you’ve completed one of the top three tasks. But there’s no cap on the number of ideas that can appear on the list.
That last rule was critical to Lubetzky. “An organization that doesn’t have entrepreneurial creativity is never going to really change the world,” he said, adding that the same goes for “an organization that does not have the focus and discipline to execute.”
Lubetzky learned that many times over. In one instance, Lubetzky pushed the company to secure a deal with Walmart despite a disastrous first outing with the retailer. (Kind had previously lost track of its supply chain and left shelves empty at 600 stores.) When Leahy tried his hand at it, however, bringing in data scientists and account managers, Kind “knocked it out of the park,” the founder said.
Former Kind employees who spoke to Fortune confirmed that the founder was sincere about taking feedback, and he would listen to their rationale to reject his proposals when appropriate. He was intense, they said, but he was a gentle and empathetic person as a boss, even when he was hard on someone’s ideas.
Watching him on Shark Tank, many said, sometimes feels like being back in a meeting at Kind.
