Daniel Lubetzky - Do the KIND Thing: Think Boundlessly, Work Purposefully, Live Passionately

It was May 1994. Mothers Day was a week away, and I sat anxiously by the phone. Across New York City, small ads in neighborhood newspapers proclaimed the launch of my new venture, through which Arabs and Israelis cooperated to make skincare products like Dead Sea bath salts, hand-treatment creams, and mud masks that I had assembled into gift baskets. These would make the perfect gift for moms, the ads explained, sending a thoughtful message of peace through business.

Cramped studio apartment/corporate headquarters; narrow black IKEA desk; second-hand chair: I had set up my office in anticipation of a flood of orders. My biggest worry was how to process and fulfill them all.

I had been starting businesses since elementary school, beginning with the magic shows I put on for neighborhood kids in my native Mexico City. But, at age twenty-five, I had just thrown away the promise of a Wall Street legal career to start my own company, based on a new concept I thought could change the world: economic cooperation between conflict-torn peoples as a way to help them get to know one another, create an incentive to build a shared future, and achieve peace. Building bridges between people was my passion, and I wanted to use commerce to help nudge neighbors closer together.

I was convinced that it was possible to build a company that was not-only-for-profitone that sold great products and also did its small part toward making a better world. I believed I did not have to choose one or the other; our company could achieve both goals at the same time. First, though, I would have to get customers to buy the goods.

A week earlier, a delivery truck driver had rung up to apartment 8A, on the corner of Eighty-Fourth Street and Second Avenue, to announce the arrival of my Dead Sea cosmetics shipment.

Come on up, I said over the buildings intercom.

You dont seem to understand, he replied tersely. Please come down.

For my trial, I had asked my trading partners to produce a few hundred each of mineral-rich mud masks, hand-treatment creams with avocado oil, Dead Sea bath salts with various essential oils, and seven varieties of mud soaps. I had assumed it would all just fit in a corner of my tiny studio and would sell out quickly.

When I came down to the street, I saw that my order actually occupied an entire twenty-foot container truck. The driver and I hauled box after box up to a room already filled with samples of sundried tomato spreads made through cooperation among Israeli, Egyptian, Turkish, and Palestinian trading partners, as well as packaging materials for the gift baskets. After stacking the boxes to the ceiling of my studio, I had to convince my landlord to rent me a windowless basement space next to the trash compactor to store the rest of the product. For the next two years, this crypt-like cubbyhole would become my new office.

The company had now officially taken over my life. When I lay on my futon bed, I stared up at a towering wall of boxes that threatened to fall on me any minute.

But it would all be worth it, I felt. The idea that Bedouins and Jews had partnered to make Dead Sea cosmetics would surely please any mom who cherished soft skin and peaceful cooperation. With such a fresh, novel concept, I thought, the challenge would be keeping up with all the incoming calls.

The week passed. Mothers Day came and went. Not one customer bought a single gift basket. Zero consumer inquiries. Zero sales. Most of my savings were locked up in inventory I could not move. And the smell of essential oils was suffocating.

I felt depressed. Terrified. In addition to sensing my dream slip away, I had no idea how I was going to pay my rent.

I worried about what my parents would think. They were already concerned that I was wasting my law degree. I was the first member of my extended family to get a graduate degree. As a Jew whose father had survived the Holocaust and a son whose parents had sacrificed so much to provide me with an education, I felt a keen sense of guilt and obligation.

And yet, this was my passion. This was my mission. I had to pursue it. I couldnt quit. I was going to make this work.

At the end of the week, I threw some product samples into my battered fake-leather briefcase, closed the apartment door carefully so the boxes wouldnt crash down, and hit the pavement. I was going to sell my stock if I had to go door-to-door across the entire island of Manhattan and convince every buyer personally.

This book is the story of what I discovered when I devoted my life to creating businesses that build bridges between people, from PeaceWorks Dead Sea products to KIND, the snack foods company that evolved from those experiences. By 2014 KIND had sold over a billion KIND snack bars and KIND clusters in more than 100,000 stores. The KIND Movement, which advances our social mission by performingand inspiring our community to performunexpected kind acts, has touched over a million people.

Like many start-up stories, mine has been rocky. The last two decades have been a series of ups and downs that alternately made me deliriously excited and desperately worried. Entrepreneurship isnt for the faint of heart, and its impossible to tell how your story will turn out. All you have is your conviction, your ability to work hard, and your determination to never give up.