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

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My Guest: Daniel Lubetzky graduated from Stanford Law School. And then declined lucrative job offers to start his own business, only paying himself $24,000 a year for a decade. And then he founded KIND and grew it into a snack brand that Mars later valued at $5 billion dollars. Today he invests full-time on Shark Tank, and he's the son of a Holocaust survivor whose story shaped everything he's built.

Find work that gives you energy, purpose, and meaning. If you enjoy what you're doing, you're far more likely to be great at it. And you're already winning, because you get up every morning doing something satisfying.

The danger of loving your work is overworking. Daniel did it building PeaceWorks and KIND. You have to pace yourself.

His father survived a death march out of Dachau. Twelve and a half when he entered the camp, fifteen and a half during the march. Six feet tall and under 70 pounds, and no shoes. The Nazis were walking prisoners up a mountain to push them off a cliff because they didn't have enough bullets.

A snowstorm saved his life. His father, grandfather, and uncle hugged to say goodbye. The snow buried them and formed a kind of igloo that kept them warm through the night. They woke, dug out, and the Nazis were gone.

The soldiers who liberated them were Japanese American. The 442nd, the most decorated unit of its size in American history, was made up of men whose own families were being held in internment camps back home. Daniel's family had never seen an Asian person and didn't understand what they were witnessing.

Seventy years later, he got to say thank you. A friend called saying they were sitting with a doctor who had a postcard from Larry Lubetzky. That was Daniel's uncle, who had just died. Daniel reconnected with the captain, who had gone on to become a scientist at Harvard, and eventually gave a eulogy at his funeral.

The lesson he takes from it isn't perseverance. It's the power of one person to change another person's life.