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

Lubetzky grew up in Mexico City, the son of a Holocaust survivor father with a third-grade education. He dabbled in law after graduating law school, and then worked for years at Peaceworks, a nonprofit focused on Israeli-Palestinian peace and collaboration. In 2004, frustrated by the dearth of healthy snacks in New York supermarkets, Lubetzky launched KIND—a first-of-its-kind fruit and nut bar that he’d eventually sell to Mars for $5 billion. 

Lubetzky told Fortune about his upbringing, his first jobs, what he looks for in entrepreneurs on Shark Tank, and how he scraped together the funds to allow KIND to enduringly dominate its category.

The following transcript has been lightly condensed and edited for clarity. 

Tell us about your upbringing.

I grew up in Mexico City. We came to the United States when I was 16, to San Antonio, Texas. My mom was a homemaker, and my dad was an entrepreneur—and he built, with a few partners, a chain of duty-free stores on the Mexico-United States border.

My dad was an extraordinary figure. He arrived in Mexico with a third-grade education. He was a Holocaust survivor that was robbed from an education at the age of nine, and was liberated by American soldiers when he was 15-and-a-half. Then he was in a refugee camp, and arrived in Mexico when he was 17. He didn’t speak Spanish or English. And because he only had a third-grade education, he educated himself by reading used books and used encyclopedias. By the time he passed away, he spoke nine languages and had read thousands of books. He was one of the most educated self-made people. He worked in factories two or three shifts in a row. 

Tell us about your education.

I first went to a Jewish-Mexican immigrant school in Mexico City, where they taught us Yiddish, Hebrew, and Spanish as kids. Then I went to a public high school in San Antonio,then Trinity University in San Antonio, and Stanford Law School. 

What were your initial business projects?

Even when I was eight years old, I was already making magic shows and doing parties, trying to force them into letting me do magic on them. And I don’t know what was more painful: that they had to pay me for it, or they had to sit through the magic show. But I also had little businesses here and there, culminating before law school, selling watches. 

That’s thanks to my dad. He introduced me to a couple people that I would buy watches from. I sold them in flea markets. Eventually, I had little kiosks in 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. 

Do you still practice magic?

I still practice magic. I love magic. I used to do this tradition once a year where I would do magic for my whole team. Around the time of our largest trade show, we had about 100 people, and I would really try to not get rusty and invest the time to prepare a new repertoire. 

I love doing magic. It’s so much fun for me, but because you don’t want to embarrass yourself, you really, really need to practice. The last couple years, I have been bad about it.

But I’ll tell you something else about magic. When we sold a controlling stake of KIND, I ended up doing a magic show—a mentalism performance—at that closing dinner. My colleagues and my bankers actually thought that I had read their minds, and they were really upset for a while that I had used that in the negotiations. And you know, it’s magic. I can’t really read your mind, but maybe I can. 

What were some of your first jobs?

When I moved to the United States. I didn’t have a work permit, even though we moved here legally. So I had to be an entrepreneur, because I was allowed to do that. So I would start my own businesses. 

I had a lawn-mowing business, but I didn’t have a lawnmower, so I had to borrow one from the people whose lawns I tried to mow. I also had a car-washing business with my cousin.

I worked at a couple law firms for little states during the summers in law school. I worked for the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Texas one summer, at Sullivan & Cromwell, Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, Hogan & Hartson, and at McKinsey & Co. But these were all stints right after law school or during law school. 

I was very passionate about trying to resolve, or contribute towards resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict. And I got a fellowship to go to the Middle East to research and turn my college thesis into practice. And the theory was, how do you use business to bring neighbors together? And I actually ended up taking a leave of absence from the law firm that I was going to join and did Peaceworks. 

The partner thought that I was going to give up after six months. I thought that it was going to become an incredible success. It ended up being my vocation and my passion for 10 years. It was a lot of two steps forward, three steps back—a lot of mistakes, but it’s at Peaceworks where I learned so much about the food space, and it’s all those mistakes at Peaceworks that, with self reflection and improvement, benefited me when we launched KIND. 

How did you make the jump from Peaceworks to KIND? 

When I was doing Peaceworks, just so you get an idea, I was literally knocking on doors, walking the streets of Manhattan, going from 122nd & Broadway down all the way to the Financial District, taking orders. Then I was, the following day, in my beat-up car, delivering the product from the curbside. 

And I was a one-person operation. I would take the orders, I would collect the money, I would make all the mistakes. Over the course of 10 years, I had a monthly crew of team members, and we all struggled to try to make it work. I made so many mistakes and drew on so many lessons.

On those long days, when I was skipping lunch or dinner and I wanted a healthy snack, I could not find anything good. And I was spending all the time in grocery stores, and I couldn’t find something that I felt good about eating. And I was like, wow, if I can’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.

Back then, that category of healthy snacking didn’t exist. It’s really interesting to think about it. In the late 90s, those options that we now see in the supermarkets didn’t exist. I have to confess that I feel like a grandfather. 

Describe the first KIND bar.

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 into what are called slab bars, because they’re a slab of this homogeneous stuff. 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 and so that they’re as nature intended. And that’s actually much harder to do, because it doesn’t flow as easily through the production 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, we make tens of millions of bars a day. 

Who were your first taste-testers? Was it your family or friends? 

The center of the tasting for KIND bars was me. For many, many years, that was my lunch and dinner. I was so obsessive. I was very worried about quality control, because, in my early years at Peaceworks, I made the mistake of not being obsessive about quality and I disappointed my consumers. They punished me for it; they stopped buying our products. So I was determined not to make that mistake with KIND. 

I literally would receive boxes from each factory, and I would try a product from every single batch. I would take all of these 20, 30, 40 bars a day, cut them into pieces, and I would try every product, every day, for many years. If you looked at my face, I looked like a KIND bar, because that’s how many KIND bars I was eating at the time.

People were encouraging us to launch other products at the beginning, because KIND was doing well. Our brokers and our stores wanted us to do more stuff. And the smartest thing I did—and I don’t do too many smart things—was saying no.

I said we’re going to stay focused on this product and fulfill its potential. Because all of us, as entrepreneurs, our greatest strength is that we’re creative and we’re sniffing for opportunities to do more stuff. But that’s also our greatest undoing—we can spread ourselves too thin. I did that at Peaceworks. It was a tiny company trying to do too many things. I needed to commit to really, really staying focused and doing things in a disciplined and strategic way, and it made all the difference. 

I saw your TikTok handing out KIND bars on a flight. Do you still do that? 

I still try to hand out KIND bars, wherever I can, wherever I go. I brought some with me on this trip. Each box has 12, and I normally take six to 10 cases. I really try very hard to have the product with me and to not lose that hustle and passion to connect with people. 

It’s actually much harder than people realize, because sometimes you go into a place where people look at you funny and they’re like, no, I don’t want your product. And you feel a little bit hurt, and sometimes you’re like, why do I need to do this? I’m exhausted. But then something inside me says, Daniel, don’t lose that. Don’t lose that grit, that down-to-earth, authentic commitment to other humans. Always retain that grit and that connectivity with your consumer. 

And I get scared that the day I lose it, it will mark that I’ve changed who I am. So I really try to continue doing that, and I hope to continue doing that for a little longer. 

How are you transporting all those boxes? 

I have a whole system for carrying my KIND bars. When I’m traveling, I have a KIND bag with 6 to 12 boxes inside. So that’s a lot of arsenal for our weaponry. Also, my backpack has a side pocket. Any backpack I buy needs to have at least one side pocket, and I stuff each side pocket with 12 to 24 bars, so I can quickly go on delivery. 

Sometimes you’re on a plane, and then sometimes you’re in a row, and people want the KINDS, and that’s exciting, but you don’t want to run out. It’s kind of like the Wild West, you know, with guns. Like, that same level of skill set.

When you first started KIND, how much money did you have?

When I started KIND, it was an offshoot of Peaceworks, and I had not delivered an investment for my investors at Peaceworks, so I rolled them over into KIND so that they would have a chance at 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 1,000x to 5,000x, which is crazy, but that’s how KIND exploded once we started 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 held on to most of the company—not out of choice or wisdom, but just because 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. That was the only time that we brought in money for primary shares into the company. 

We actually didn’t need the money, because the company was profitable. We always have about $3 to $5 million of cash in the balance sheet. We never ended up needing that money, but investing that money gave me the gumption to take risks, because over 10 years at Peaceworks when I was in survival mode, I developed good habits of stretching the dollars. But I also developed bad habits of a scarcity mentality, where I didn’t want to spend, but I didn’t want to invest either.

You don’t want to have the scarcity mentality, because you’re not going to fulfill your potential. You for sure don’t want to have the wasteful mentality where you’re spending money and living gluttonously and dying from that. You want to be in the middle. You want a resourceful mentality where you learn where it makes sense to invest, but you invest smartly. 

2009 was the last time we ever received primary shares. We never needed more. So we reached the heights that we reached in the multi-billion dollar space, in revenues and in valuation, with only a $5.2 million lifetime investment with the private equity. 

They kind of gave you an ultimatum that they wanted you to sell your company. Walk us through that, and why you decided not to sell.

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, or my private eco-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 your 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 it was much higher, 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. 

I 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. But I took the risk and it ended up being worth it. It was a calculated risk. I had a good sense of where we were heading. There was real risk, but I also had done enough work and research to feel that it was warranted. So we bought them back, and between the primary shares and the money that I brought in secondary for myself and for all of my investors, I would think we had brought in $16 million. I got over 80% of the company at the time. 

What was going through your mind when that deadline to sell was approaching? Were you nervous about your decision or very bullish on your choice? 

The period when the private-equity investors were pushing me to sell the company was very painful and difficult. This was my baby, and I was scared. I was actually really terrified. I was terrified of selling and then losing my baby. I was terrified of buying them back, and then, you know, potentially choking on such a loan and so much debt. I didn’t sleep well for many years. 

The life of an entrepreneur can be very romantic, but it can also be sleepless. I would worry about it, because in the life of an entrepreneur, everything is more intense. Your highs are greater highs, your lows are greater lows. There’s just so much intensity in the journey. And so very often, I couldn’t put myself to bed. I couldn’t sleep well. 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. 

Tell us about the Mars acquisition. Were you excited about that deal? What was going through your mind?

Around 2016 and 2017, we felt that KIND needed to grow internationally, and we started to do that ourselves. We went into the United Kingdom, Canada, Mexico, Dubai, and the Emirates, but it was going to be hard for us to grow. We realized that KIND was performing so well that a lot of our competitors—every one of the large conglomerates—was launching a KIND copycat, which is interesting, because none of them survived. 

If you look on the shelves, none of them actually survived. Everybody was coming after us, and a lot of people would just buy container-loads of KIND without us selling them. They would go to Costco and buy literally pallets upon pallets and start selling them in other countries. We were losing control of our brand, so we were looking for an international partner that could help us grow globally. That’s how we decided that we wanted to get an investor.

What is your role right now with the company?

Right now, I’m the chief impact officer, and, of course, the founder. My role is to try to help the CEO and the global president and the team keep the KIND promise.

A brand is a promise, and a great brand is a promise well-kept. And if you do not know what you are here to do and what you’re here not to do, you might end up going in the wrong direction and then trying to become everything to everyone and becoming nothing to no one. So you really need to set your guardrails, and my role is to make sure that we stay within our guardrails and that we observe the pillars of being kind to your body, to your taste buds and to your world.

Tell us about becoming a judge on Shark Tank.

I used to enjoy Shark Tank. My kids, my wife and I still like to watch it. We use it as an opportunity to, in an entertaining way, teach the kids a little bit about the enterprise system and about capitalism and about business and about how to build something. And it’s a really fun way to learn about creativity and builder skill sets. 

When they first offered you the job, was it an immediate yes?

It was an organic set of conversations over the course of six years, and it was also a lot of introspection for me, and conversations with my wife and my kids and my team about the slightly greater obligation. Do we really want to take this on? The greatest commitment is the work that happens after the taping to try to really help those fledgling entrepreneurs get it right and grow, and it just takes a lot of work. So I think that was a predominant consideration, whether we could balance with all the obligations we have.

What kind of judge do you think you’ll be? A scary shark? A fun shark?

First of all, what’s cool about Shark Tank is that the sharks are who you see. Mr. Wonderful actually is an amazing guy, but he really is a tell-it-like-it-is type of guy. And Lori truly is very, very nurturing. I want to be the person that says what needs to be said, but does it in a respectful, nurturing way. But I don’t pull punches. I try to give people the gift of feedback, because feedback is a gift, and it sometimes costs the blunt authenticity of Mr. Wonderful. 

I want to try to provide that authenticity, but in a way that the entrepreneur can embrace it and really take it and do something with it. It’s providing kind feedback. The difference between being nice and being kind is what I want to be in the tank. 

Being nice is easier, because you can be polite. You don’t need to invade people’s spaces. You don’t need to say things that they might not want to hear. Being kind requires the strength of honesty. You need to say what needs to be said. It’s like if you’re at a party and somebody has a little piece of lettuce in between their teeth. A nice person doesn’t want to embarrass them. But then that poor guy is walking with a piece of lettuce across the party. A kind person says, listen, you need to go get rid of that thing. They might be uncomfortable for that minute, but you saved them. 

Has Mark Cuban given you any advice or wisdom? 

Mark is just incredible inspiration in the way he thinks. He processes at such a speed, he’s like a computer. He sees patterns, and like two or three questions later, you realize what he meant. The guy is just impressive as hell, and he’s very candid, too. Mark’s advice is to just be in the moment. I think that’s something I did take from him from season 11. 

What will you be looking for in the entrepreneurs?

For me, the most important thing is, do they have integrity and are good human beings? Because every entrepreneur is going to get in trouble. Not every journey is going to be perfect. And when you’re in the trenches, you want to be with someone that you want to invest time and support in. You want them to be critical thinkers, critical listeners, and introspective, loyal, and have the values that you want your partner to have.

For me, it’s all very, very principled and value-centric, first and foremost. On top of that, the product and the service, or the service should be compelling, should provide a unique value proposition and be something that I feel the marketplace needs. But it starts with the entrepreneur. 

What would you say makes the best type of pitch? And are there any products from the Shark Tank history that you think are the best pitches that you’ve ever seen?

The best pitches have a little bit of creativity, but not so much that you lose the essence of the product. My parallel is when I was doing Peaceworks, sometimes I went too far away to achieve something magical with my social mission or with my creativity, and I lost sight of selling the product’s core claims. 

So when you’re pitching your product or your service, you want to make sure that you’re convincing the sharks that your product has something magic. If you get too hokey, you might be hiding that you don’t actually have something substantive. But on the other side, you don’t want to be too dry and boring. 

But in my opinion, the most important thing is that a pitch is authentic and sincere. And if people ask you a question where you have a vulnerability, be okay with showing your vulnerability. Because if you have an answer to everything, a shark will worry that you’re a know-it-all, and that you don’t have the ability to be self-reflective, which is one of the most important skill sets for any of us to grow. 

I think the ability to not be too harsh a critic on yourself, but be critical enough for you to adjust is something that helps all of us grow, and I want to see that in the entrepreneurs. 

What’s your advice for young entrepreneurs of today? What do you think they’re doing right or could be doing better? 

It depends on the entrepreneur, but as a general rule, I’ve noticed that some young entrepreneurs are too focused on the superficial look, on the performative appearance, rather than on actually building something lasting. 

Like, don’t worry about building a fancy office. Don’t waste money. Be smart about how you’re investing and stretching your dollars. 

Who is a founder or a business leader that you look up to?

My fellow sharks. My fellow guest shark, Kendra Scott. She started from nothing and built a beanie business, and that wasn’t really working great, and she pivoted. Almost all stories of entrepreneurs is that they start something, and then all of a sudden, from there, they see something else. Kendra ended up starting her jewelry business. 

Daymond John, and almost every entrepreneur you ask, they’ll say they started one way, and then they saw the opportunity, then adjusted, and then they hit it big. Daymond is one of my favorite people, because he’s so witty and he’s so authentic, and he’s the same person on and off set. He’s such a beautiful person. He’s in the tank to help entrepreneurs that need that help. He’s not there to just make money. He’s done that. He’s there to see which entrepreneurs can really use his help. And I really admire that in him.

How is your work-life balance?

Work-life balance is essential. And looking back, it’s easy for me to not criticize myself the young person, because when I was 25 to 35, or 40 or 45, it was 18-hour days, and it was “whatever it takes.” Maybe that’s what needed to happen. When I look back, I was severely, chronically sleep-deprived. I was sleeping five or six hours a day. What would happen is that after I would kiss my kids goodnight, I would start checking my emails from 10pm till 2am, 3am, 4am. I just had to get that inbox to zero, and the email box was controlling me rather than me controlling my faith. 

If you look at pictures of me 15 years ago, I look like a phantom. I’m all pale and a little pudgy. I was maybe 10 pounds overweight, but it was more that I was severely sleep-deprived and I wasn’t working out. Because when you’re not sleeping, if you can have half an hour, one hour that you schedule for workout, but you can get it to sleep, you’re just gonna sleep. And so I think it is really, really important that you invest in your family, that you invest in yourself, that you find a way to do so. At the same time, sometimes an entrepreneur, when they’re starting, they have to give it their all. So it’s a very, very tricky balance. I don’t have any perfect answers. 

During the pandemic, I was actually completely in balance. I realized that, you know what, if I don’t answer every email that night, the world’s not going to fall apart. And I started adjusting. It’s still a work in progress for me, because I worry a lot about the world that we’re living in and that our children are inheriting. But it’s tricky, because even now, oftentimes I am sleepless of worry about the world that we’re living in, and it’s constantly a struggle that I’m still dealing with today.