Doug Evans: Lessons from Steve Jobs, Raising $120M, and the Future of Food | E150

friend Doug Evans. Doug is a serial entrepreneur and early pioneer in the health food movement, which has been a passion of his for almost four

years. He is the founder of organic Avenue, the first organic cold pressed juice and raw food retailer in the United States, the founder of juicero, a high tech juicing machine that used fresh pre packaged fruit and vegetable pouches in which raised $120 million in venture capital funding from leading VC firms including Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins and thrive capital, among many others, and which famously went out of business only 17 months after

its product launch. Doug is also the founder and CEO of the sprouting company, which provides products and information about the incredible nutritional and other benefits of eating sprouts, and which helps people to easily grow their own sprouts at home. He is also the author of the sprout book, tap into the power of the plants, most nutritious food. Dog, thanks for being here. Hey, it's my

He was very articulate and he was smart and but then he he would, like anything could trigger him. And like, now I can look back and go, Oh, that's PTSD. That's trauma, you know, that's the result of being in war. But the time we just thought like, you know, he raged. So I thought everyone raged so in in our in our household, it was a little

chaotic. And for me, it was safer to be out in the street with gang members, with graffiti writers, with other delinquents, because I felt more like I could relate to them, and I felt safer there than being in the house. What about your mom? My mom was sweet. My mom, like, carried the torch. She was like a secretary, and she was the one that was working, and she was always putting food on the table, and but we lived in a lot of scarcity, and we didn't have a lot of food, and everything was

rationed. So for me, like, I wanted to get out, and the challenge of being in New York, where you could have the poorest people, you know, and the wealthiest, and then you wonder, like, why you can have things so without being grounded in moral virtues and guidelines, you don't think of like what's right and wrong. You want your needs,

so you'll just go take them. And so a lot of what I was doing and a lot of my my crimes were all associated with writing graffiti, so stealing spray paint, breaking and entering, stealing supplies, being in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong people, so

get a slap on the wrist. So then you do it again. And so this whole madness happened, you know, until I was 17, and then I just, like, just woke up and like, God, I got to get away from these people. They're all degenerates.

good. I mean, it's, it's terrible that that they're doing, and people are risking their lives to tag all of these billboards, or whatever they're doing. Look,

Freddie. When I was 13, these guys were 18 to 25, to 40 years old, and I was in that environment, and I felt so at home and like that's just what I did, until I decided I needed to change. I mean, what's

So what did that look like? You sat down in the classroom. You didn't want to do it. You You said, I don't care about my education. Well,

early to class. I'd be sitting in class thinking of like, how can I get out of it? I remember, like, pulling a thread out of my shirt. And, you know, I didn't floss at the time, but I flossed my teeth until they bled so I could leave the classroom, because I just couldn't sit in that room. You didn't graduate high school. I ended up graduating, but not on the most honorary way. They just, they just gave me the grades. The guidance counselor just filled stuff in, just to get me out.

And I went to three high schools,

sign? And I was 17, so I had to go back and get my parents authorization and consent, which wasn't too hard, because they wanted me out anyway, but it was still a step in the process. I think it's

popped. It really hurts. It's mind over matter. Keep going, and then the blister would start to bleed, and then it would scab, and then the scab would come off, and then the whole body starts to ache with the weight and your knees and your back, and you just had to keep going. And if you slowed down, the rest of the troops would keep going, and then they would keep going further and further.

And then the drill sergeants would take all the troops and make them go back and go all the way back and all the way behind you, and now you'd have 6090, 120 people pissed at you because they had to walk twice as much as you were. So the peer pressure, what was extreme to keep people going along the way. You know,

that path. And I remember an instance where my car, I had a car like a muscle car, 1967 Camaro, GT, and it was manual. I didn't really know how to drive stick, and I flooded the carburetor. The car burst into flames. It crashed into a wall and and burned. And I called one of my friends from a pay phone, you know, to his his shop where he was working. I was 17 at the time. I said, Dude, my car just

just blew up. And he's like, Hey, take the license plates off the back and take the the van off the inner door and get out of there. And I was like, Okay. And then for weeks, I was obsessing on what was I going to do to get a car? And various thoughts came in to mind of like, oh, I'll just find the same car in the same color and put my license plates on it and do that. And that would keep me up at night until I had a conversation I was having. Lunch with you know, today you would

call the mentor. I called it an older friend, but he was a trust fund kid who is now 40 from like the Carnegie Steel or era, and he had galleries and buildings, and he was a graffiti photographer, and I sat with him over a slice of pizza, and he's like, You look terrible. And I was like, Yeah, I'm not sleeping. My car blew up this and and then he described to me that I was experiencing anxiety, and I had no idea what that term

was. And he said, I said, well, well, how do I get rid of the anxiety, you know, can I take a pill? What can I do? He said, No, you just need to make a decision that you're going to let that car go. You're going to let the license plates go. You can let the value go. You've ridden on the subway for the last 10 years. You go back on the subway and you just forget that. And that night, I went to sleep, and I slept through the

night. The anxiety went away, and I started to work again, and soon after, I joined the Army, but I remember now, like I could never have had that conversation, you know, with my dad. You know, Dad, my car blew up. I'm thinking about stealing another car, or whatever, like they just would have come down on me, you know, which would

have made me probably do it. And here someone held space and had love for me and compassion, and I made the right decision because I knew and so he was wise beyond his years to be able to hold that space for me, and I'll never forget that. How

reserve parachute. So it's, it's very intense. And you're doing some jumps in the daytime, some at night. We also on the c1 30, they would open up the back of the plane and you would run off the back ramp off. So even further insane than on the side doors. So just insane adrenaline rush. How long were you in the armed forces for? I was in the armed forces for 13 months, and

why did you leave? They asked me to leave because some of my earlier infractions of the law, which were documented to be juvenile delinquencies with a sealed record, turned out that I was such a good trooper in the military, I was so committed to excellence that I did my boot camp, my airborne training, my infantry training unit, armor training, Special Forces, explosives and demolitions, training, training, training, training that I got nominated to go to Officer Candidate School.

And in the process of going to Officer Candidate School, they needed a top secret security clearance, and during the course of the clearance, they found all these juvenile infractions, and even though there were no warrants out for my arrest, there wasn't the proper documentation when I joined the military that got me the appropriate waivers to go through, because now, in hindsight, the recruiter, his job was to fill boots. I had shoes, and so he wanted to fill

the boots. So I disclosed everything, but I didn't know the formal protocol. So at the time, the army was unnegotiable, so any infraction to the Uniform Code of Military Justice required an immediate dismissal. But the irony is, and I'm actually very proud of this, I have an honorable discharge, an army Achievement Medal and cause of discharge at fraudulent. Enlistment,

work a lot of hours. So because I didn't do drugs and I didn't have other vices, and I never really had a normal childhood, so I didn't really listen to music and have fun things, so I had nothing else to do but work. So workaholism was actually my, you know, something that kept me sane and honest. So it was less about the money, because I never bought fancy things. I just wanted to have the freedom. And also, you know, I guess part planning for the future, when

Emerson. So I was reading classic um literature, and that really, you know, is a whole, you know, new world for me, because before I was like watching, I Dream of Jeannie, you know, and the Brady Bunch, and to go from there to reading complex literature was a big shift. You're

great. This is a very expensive steak, and it's cool. So you started eating a lot of stuff, and today we look at our family tonight. I mean, health is just a big thing today, right? You proactively, we're going to talk about this is what your life, devotion and passion is back then no one's really thinking about it, or really talking about if you were fat, you were fat. You knew you needed to lose weight. Today, it's a whole nother thing, and at some point you had a lot of family health

issues. So I think your mom, dad, aunt, uncle, uncle, other brother and so, and you gain, I think, 36 pounds very quickly, yeah, and so what was the, what was the thought process? And one of the life changing moments in your life, I

And then, you know my mother and my father, you know both passed from chronic illnesses, and then my brother became overweight, obese, diabetic, and has had three strokes and three heart attacks. At what age I started when he was 35 so for the last 25 years he is his his health has just continued to degrade and really complex. But for me, when I was 33 I met a woman, and she looked me in the eye and said, because I thought I was genetically cursed, and she lost her sister and her. Mother to

cancer. Are we talking about Megan right now? No, this is Denise, okay, this is Denise Mari. And Denise said to me, you're living a carcinogenic, diabetic, heart disease laden lifestyle, and that's not your genes, it's your lifestyle. And like, I couldn't imagine there was a connection, like I just thought, like, hey, we need to eat meat, chicken, fish, dairy, pizza, pasta, bread, candy, soda, like these were all nutrition. Like this was all

nutrition. And what I realized was that it was actually killing me. And so once I realized that it was dangerous, I made the same leap like I did into the army, out of the airplane, and I said, I'm going to go far away from that food as possible. And literally the furthest thing away from that was to eat fresh, raw fruits, vegetables, seeds, nuts, seaweed and sprouts. We

But like, we're there and we're just talking, and then, instead of talking about partying and dancing, or the thing, you know, here's two sober people in a nightclub, you know, talking about death, talking about cancer, talking about loss, and we had this connection that, you know, that cut through all of the superficiality that was in that club into something really, really deep And like our first date, right? And it wasn't even necessary whether it was

platonic or sexual. Like our first meetup, we went to the Big Apple Vegetarian Society to go to a battle of the diets. And just so happened, that was the next activity that she was doing, and she invited me, and we went. And I'd never even like I thought a diet is when someone doesn't eat, right? And here people were talking about the nuance of the plant based diet, so all extremes of the plant based diet. And there were speakers, people who I'm still

in touch with today. And I sat through that mesmerized, because I thought it was incomprehensible that these people were functioning. Because I thought we required meat, chicken, fish, dairy, pizza, cheese, like I thought these were requirements. And there was one guy there, Paul Nissan, who was living a raw vegan lifestyle, and he was just eating fruits and vegetables raw.

being. So like even the horse and carriage in Central Park, that is a non vegan activity wearing like the wool, you know, which technically, they don't have to kill the sheep to get the wool, but it's exploiting the sheep to get the wool. So there's no animal products. People talk about leather being a neat byproduct, when, in fact, it's a whole industry in and of itself, so nothing that involves the exploitation of a sentient being. And then there's plant based, which is very similar to

vegan on the dietary part. And a lot of people will choose to use the term plant based because they don't want to discuss the geopolitical. Political moral issues. They just want to keep it very simple and say, Hey, I eat plants where they're they're vegan. But they don't want to get into the stigmatism of a vegan in the political part,

web. But I didn't like the technology as much as I liked it as a platform for for for creating things,

just doing it to make money. And he said, Well, did you know that you have, you know, great artistic design skills that, why don't you do something in your category? And I'd never heard of commercial art or graphic design or advertising. So I remember going to Barnes and Noble and there was like books and books of all these things. And there was one book called a designer's

art by Paul Rand. And Paul Rand, almost single handedly, transformed commercial art into fine art, and he designed the logos and corporate identities for IBM ABC, UPS Westinghouse. And he had a new client, who was doing a new computer company called next computer, and this was in the mid 90s, and so I saw his book. I got out of the army. I'm fearless. I called him up. I went to his house in Western Connecticut, and I became a unpaid intern, apprentice for Paul Rand for seven years. Till

the day he died. I was at his bedside in the hospital when he died of stomach cancer in 1994 96 and so being with Paul, I still had to earn my own keep. So I was still doing my side hustles along the way, but I got to go work with this master. And so one of his clients was Steve.

And so I got to work on the next corporate identity, and being on late night calls, early calls, discussions about the nuance of, you know, what Steve wanted in the corporate identity and how Paul, you know, worked, and these were two people that were extremely strong willed, and I was in the middle, you know, on quite a few of the interactions. So

Steve you. And I opened my mouth, and he said, Get to the point like he didn't want to hear any stories, any digressions, and I didn't know much. Like, we didn't have the internet. You couldn't google someone before, you know these meetings with people, so you had no idea. Like, I didn't know the whole journey of Steve and Apple beforehand, I had no idea he went public. He got fired. All I knew was this was a guy. He was coming out with a new computer

company. It was black and the logo was in a cube, and he wanted it a certain way, and Paul could not be manipulated by Steve. So Steve would give his feedback, and Paul would just listen, and Paul would do whatever he wanted. I

back to Apple. So if I mean, we could talk about this for a few hours, but let's simplify it for people. Well, what was the company called and what happened? Yeah, so

president of Pepsi Cola. And John and Steve had a love affair, and then basically John felt that Steve was too disruptive, and moved him to a side building, and then, in a board struggle, forced Steve out of the company, and Steve sold all of his Apple stock, and saw that he felt that there was a market using a graphical user interface For the education market, and decide to start a new computer company called next computer company using Linux as

the operating system. And today, all of our iPhones are using the next operating system. And so Steve starts next raises $400 million from Ross Perot and cannon and other people.

computer imaging and Pixar. So it was an amazing part that here was a guy who just wanted to create excellence along the way in design and engineering and education and products. So for me, I knew not. Thing here, like I was working, like Steve was dealing with technology and I was dealing with the two dimensional aspect of design, but I had to get this design so perfect that it would meet the criteria of both Steve and Paul. What's

going to go off the rails. And I think it was very strict, because $400 million acquisition at the time, also, as you were saying, was not a fire sale, like it was a very strategic acquisition. And Steve had already made the decision, you know, at next to stop making hardware. So originally, he was making hardware, and then he realized that he had this Unix kernel that could go anywhere,

and that was a threat. And there were, you know, people like Vinod Khosla and Scott McNealy that had sun and Java became one. So no one really, like, it's so funny when I hear that, because, like, that's what

people say. But having been there at the time, like there was a more optionality, because, as you know, there's no shortage of money in the world, but Steve knew that this would probably be the best thing to get his creation out to the most people fastest, so it was a very humbling move to sell and to be on the sidelines along the way.

So we were making a lot of products, but if we it's hard to predict when you have a. Dozen retail stores and a short shelf life. Who's going to buy what on what day? And so if you make too much product, you have a lot of waste. And if you don't make enough product, you sell out. And if you sell out and Randy Kaplan comes in and his product isn't on the shelf, then you're training Randy not to come in the store. So these conflicting factors resulted in a business

that at best was break even. At Best was break even, doing, you know, a lot of volume, you know, million dollars plus a month in revenue, but hard to measure.

Fortunately, that experience helped me today with, you know, we'll talk about sprouts later, but it helped me understand how important it was for pricing, like everything that we sold at organic Avenue, in hindsight, should have been priced the way air one prices things today, like we didn't have the audacity, or the chutzpah or the vision to charge what air one charges today, like you're going to Air One? Have you been to air one of

into. You want food that's made with conscious, organic, prepared ingredients, they'll charge $25 for for, you know, roasted vegetables per pound, because that's what it costs to run an infrastructure where you have valet parking, and you're in premium real estate, and you want workers that show up on time and they're doing things safely. And I that was beyond my comprehension at the time, so

get screwed. Yeah, tell us about your experience with Wells north and what happened. And what's your advice to all the entrepreneurs out there listening who get calls from private equity firms and say, Hey, I'm gonna give you some cash and we'll let you keep some of it. But here's a good way to cash out.

not going to happen to me. And I had a private equity guy who was advising me on the transaction, and he looked at me and he goes, Doug, you understand that as soon as they have control, you're going to be out. And I was like, well, there's no way I'm too valuable. I know everything, like I'm doing everything. And he just laughed right in my face. He just laughed, and he's like, You have no clue. And he was right, and I was wrong.

dollars. Dan Gilbert bought it back, I think, for $200 million got to keep the queen. He sold his mortgage company. Then they got to keep the name Quicken, which obviously is a brand name. And at some point that company was worth I think it's the second largest mortgage company in the world. The first is national wholesale mortgage. Mattis BIA, who owns the Phoenix Suns, Detroiter go lines, by the way, has a number one mortgage company in the United States,

the most valuable. But it's amazing how many entrepreneurs sell out the. The private equity firms. Oh, we know more than you do. We got consultants who work at McKinsey, whatever, and they fuck it up, and then you get to buy back. Yeah.

a bottle was pasteurized. And it's different when you're pasteurizing dairy right where you're just killing the microbes, then when you're pasteurizing fresh juice, which you're killing the phytonutrients and the vitamin C and all of the elements are shifting. So I wanted to do with with I wanted to keep things real and fresh, like I liked fresh. I'd been eating fresh, and everyone wanted a shortcut. So everyone is saying, Doug, we should freeze things. We should pasteurize things. We should put

them in cans and bottles. And I was like, no, no, no. If you do that, it's not going to be it's not going to taste as good, and it won't be as nutritionally viable. So that's the essence of that. That part of the interview,

they see a consumer product. How long did you take a four year so tell us about the impetus for the idea, and then the development of the product itself.

it. So commercial juicing, which I was doing for 10 years prior, we were using a juice press. And so what does that look like? A juice press is basically two large plates, either horizontal or vertical, and you put the produce into a a mesh bag, the chopped produce, and then the press slowly extracts the the juice from the fiber. And that's a juice press. So all commercial juice presses work in that two

step process. So I had started with a small juice press that did 12 quarts per hour, and then I had a commercial juice press that did 15 gallons per hour, then I bought six of those, and then I bought a commercial press that did 50 gallons per hour, and I bought six of those. And then I bought a commercial juice press, which was like a monster the size of this room, that had 24 consecutive plates that did 500 gallons an hour of juice. And so that was like my vision of the mainframe, and that

created really great juice. And so my thought was when I realized that people who had a home juicer were only using it once or twice a month because they had to go buy their produce, make the juice, clean up the juicer all the waste. They didn't always have the ingredients, so they weren't

using it. Right, and that all juice that was in a bottle was pasteurized, and all the life force, the enzymes, the vitamin C, all these things, were denatured so that it could have long shelf life and not taste very good. So I said, if I can bifurcate the juicing process as I know it, and take fresh, organic produce, slice it, chop it, keep it fresh, keep it raw, keep it unpasteurized, put it into a little pouch. And the part of the patent was having the cheese cloth inside of an

outer carrier. So when you put that pouch into the machine. It didn't make a mess. All the juice went into the glass. So we built up a supply chain, and so I started off my first prototype was literally an airbrush compressor, filling up a hot water bottle, pressing two cutting boards together to make a little manual press. How big? What's the size? We talked countertop size, like a little bit bigger than an espresso machine. And that thing blew up in my lap because I didn't

understand, caught fire. No, no, blew up because of the psi of the 150 psi was more powerful than the structure in the frame that I built to contain the bladder that was inflating. So if you just think it up the pressure as you blow up a balloon is a lot of force. So if you blow up a balloon, you know, or blow up a bladder there, turns out that there are presses made out of bladders and moving things in and out, and they filling the bladders with air or

with water. Turns out with air is the most dangerous, because it can explode water or oil is less so I built prototypes, and I wasn't a mechanical engineer, so I went and had to find mechanical engineers welding shops, and I built a prototype that worked. And I was taking this little prototype around, and I'd take my my little cooler bag, and I still travel with the

cooler bag. I took my cooler bag with these homemade packs of fresh produce, and I would go show them to people and make a juice for them, and they would drink that juice, and it was like nothing that they ever experienced in their whole life, because it was fresh. And so people had fresh juice before, but they never had fresh cold

pressed. So the flavor profile I have an interview, a video I could show you with Chef Jean George Michelin, star chef that I was making juice for his restaurants, and I said, Does this meet your quality standard? Your excellence? Jean George, and he goes, Doug, you've exceeded my quality standards. You've exceeded my excellence. So I built something that was so good, and then the challenge was Y Combinator scale, the

unscalable. How do you scale something where the original prototypes, I was making, every one of those packs of produce, I was building the machines locally, by hand. How can you scale that up to meet the numbers of George Foreman grill for 100 million grills?

doing vegan clothing. You know, could you meet with her? So I'm meeting with her, and she's showing me her designs, and then she tells me that she has a meeting coming up with Kleiner Perkins. And I'm saying the back of my head, why is Kleiner Perkins meeting with you? And she said, Oh, well, Kleiner Perkins funded beyond meet, and Beyond Meat was started with a guy that was at the Humane Society, and I know that guy, so I got this in connection, and I said, What would you introduce

me? And similar to when you asked me to introduce you to somebody, she was very open, saying, Sure. So she gives me the the name and the contact person of who she was at Kleiner Perkins, I call up, and I said, Hey, I'm going to be in San Francisco on Thursday, and I'd love to meet with so and so I was referred by so and so, were you really

decision, do I go to them? So first of all, TSA confiscated my machine because they thought was a bomb, so it never came. And I have to decide, do I postpone the meeting, or do I go anyway, without a PowerPoint and without my my demo. And so what do you think I did?

And he described it that it was going to be like the iPhone and iPod of thermostats, etc, and how they'd be able to compete, you know, with all of the big thermostat companies. So he felt that they would be able to do that. And I didn't know that at the time that that meeting was but that was the power of being able to just like, I think the point of me telling that story, there's another example that the founder really has to know their stuff like, it's not about like,

how. The idea it's about understanding what's involved on actually going from concept to execution. And in the case of Tony Fidel, he obviously built product and knew how to do that. So it was low risk for me. I knew how to make juice. The big risk was, could I actually make hardware? Could I build a supply chain? Could I build a manufacturing process to fill

millions of bags? And I have to say, I'm so proud that juicero shipped over 1 million packs of produce that the people who had a juicero, forget about all the haters, because there's going to be a lot of haters. The people who had the machine loved it and used it 9.2 times a week, statistically accurate data of 1000s of people using this machine 9.2 times a week and loving it. Let's

that ever happen? And so walk us through the Kleiner Perkins, did they gave you a term sheet, and then how did you scale? Because one round was 14 million, then you had a $70 million round. And we will definitely get into the numbers in a little bit, because I think the numbers tell a lot of the story. So what was the business model? So

hardware business, right? Or supplying technology to hardware. Hardware is hard, like when you want to build anything hardware. And I had experts around me that mapped out the path that people think like you make a tool to make a piece of hardware, and no one understands these are all abstract terms. And I remember teaching a class at Harvard Business School, and all of these lovely students were asking you, saying, Well, why did it cost so much, and why didn't you do this? And they

have no idea. Like, if you want to make something that's custom and that's pretty and that functions, and in small quantities, it's very expensive, just very expensive. Like the to make the juicero v1 is over, like, 400 parts, and almost, you know, half of them were custom, so there was no, you couldn't just go to a McMaster catalog to get it, or the machine would

have been this big. So if you want to create something that's small and that's pretty, it's, it requires a lot of engineering to to to make so, so how we got to how much money we raised was predicated on how much money we would need in order to build out the manufacturing process, the supply chain, get the team, do the quality, do the food safety, do the recipe development, do

all the administrative. Managing the IP, doing the testing, like doing the app, like, this was a lot of moving pieces in order to do this. So it wasn't like, hey, I want to just raise $100 million because it's a big number. It was like, How much money do we need to execute on this business

the actual projections. Because no way on earth anyone can ever raise $100 million without giving some seriously complicated financial model that people believe in. Yeah.

that could scale. And there's a lot of you know nuance into that, but basically, you know, if you want to raise venture capital, right, you have to show something that could actually scale to five years, $50 million or greater in revenue, so an investor can get a 10x 20x 100x

return. So there's two ways. You could just make numbers up, or you could be very rational and very practical, and having a command of every dollar required to acquire a customer, what the acquisition cost is, what the value of the customer is, what the churn, what the cost of manufacturing is, what the tooling cost is, what the scaling cost, and then what is the team in the organization need to look like in order to have it? And what kind of waste will you have? What kind of

turnover? What's the taxes, administration and rent? There's so many insurance, there's so many variables that you need to have to build an organization. But what gets funded in Silicon Valley is something that has the potential to become a multi billion dollar business. Otherwise, you go to your rich uncle, or you go Go Fund Me, or

you do a Kickstarter. But you know, there's a degree of discipline you have to have when you're raising venture capital, and there's also a process that's extremely hard, like for outsiders. So I think one of the one of the reasons I experienced so much love and so much vitriol is because I was an outsider, and what I didn't know was how treacherous it is in that world, like I'm a raw vegan yogi, you know, like I was on the product.

I had no idea of, like, what it was like in that world, like it was so beyond me, because I was an outsider to it. So I came in and it looked like I was doing really well, but I didn't have my guard up. I didn't understand the complexity. Was so far from me riding graffiti on subway trains, so far from me jumping out of planes in the army, so far from me making juice in a lemonade stand in New York City, this was like a entirely different world that was

incomprehensible. So I think, for my first time, going into, you know, the into the cage, you know, in MMA, like I think I did, I think I did great. And now I could step back and I can describe it, and I see it and like, the thing is, you can go back into the ring at any point in time. Most people, when they get their their head stuff between their legs, along with their tail stuff down their throat, they don't want to go back into the arena like they

want to kind of cower off. But the true entrepreneurs aren't doing it for the money. They're not doing it for what other people think, like the idea comes through them and they. Have to do it. They just have to do it. So juicero, I had to do and what I learned was that entire process and journey was $120 million education into Doug Evans, the entrepreneur, the Father, the founder, the CEO, the philanthropist. It was just part of my journey, and it had to happen.

right? You warm them up, or her up, and you say, okay, you know you're gonna raise a million dollar seed round. What are you gonna pay yourself? $200,000 All right? Well, that meeting's over, right? You're not gonna, you know, we're not paying someone $200,000 but I can't tell you how many people, even, who have revenues coming in after a while. What were your gap revenues last year? And you know what they say? I have so

many blank faces. They can't tell me what their actual The only thing that matters to these companies is cash in the bank, right? So if someone talks about monthly recurring revenue and growth rates, and they talk about the projections, I don't sure that's helpful. I care about how much cash do you have in the bank? Are you profitable? What your margins are? And it's shocking to me how many entrepreneurs come into the office and cannot answer these

simple questions. If you're gonna raise money, you better know the answer to every single question. You are a fiduciary of my capital. That's

it doesn't work. And so there's a lot of collateral damage. There's a lot of people, you know, dead on the side of the road, and it's hard, it's just, it's just hard to do it, and most deals don't get funded, you know, for those reasons. If

There's there's some cardinal sins when you're trying to raise money that you don't do, and there are some essentials that you have to do to help yourself get the funding, and it's critical. Every entrepreneur out there needs a mentor or needs to go seek advice and fundraising and only fundraising once they launch, on how to keep going and how to sustain and build a profitable company. It doesn't have a phone and call somebody or

network. I was going to hang out with Steve Wozniak because I want to talk to Steve about my show, and you end up hanging out with me. It wasn't hanging out with you, but I see this, you know, cool guy at the end of the room. We're standing there. Kind of people are are wandering out, and we're both successful people, right? I'm not out networking now just to meet people, but I love meeting talented. Smart, motivated, similar minded people who want to do good, want to build companies. I find it

exhilarating. Yeah, yeah,

founder, better, whatever. Let's

aircraft grade aluminum. Yes, that could lift two teslas. That's right, was one thing that you said, and what I love better than that was juice is so good that drinking it is like getting kissed by the juice. People drink it and all of a sudden they want it. I mean, this sounds like you should put some kind of a warning label on it for the kids.

to bring somebody down. And in the world, you know, prior to, you know, the term fake news and calling things out like they're able to get spiral dynamics and get things to go so, you know. But for me, it was always about the product, and that's what you want to you want as an entrepreneur, you want to create a product that people love, that

people are obsessed over. And I could tell you, like the people who had you Sarah, were obsessed with it, the people who didn't, it's easy to hate on it if you don't, if you've never experienced it, because trying to describe something that's indescribable, so I tries to use poetic words. But some people, you know, just never got it, and it's easy to hate on. And then you have the pylon like which is really just a sad thing about

society. It is and and that's what really hurt the business, was that the pylon caused some of the investors to feel shame, and they just were like, oh, you know, I don't like being associated with this. I don't even know what really happened, but I'm done, so

to use the machine. And the thought there was that it's a one time purchase for the machine, so you have to determine if people really willing to pay that for espresso machine today. By the way, the one I bought was $1,200 in my home, right? And it makes pretty good out there every day. The

this. These same reporters at Bloomberg had done a hit piece on a different food tech company prior, so there was like weariness around talking to them, and then they found the fact that you could squeeze the pack by hand would be like saying you could pour hot water over an espresso pod, and you don't need your $1,200 machine.

And so Bloomberg came up with this story, and then they went down the cap table, and they called 100 different investors, two investors who I don't know whether they invested $25,000 or a million dollars, but Bloomberg said to them, Hey, did you know that juicero is a fraud? Doug is a charlatan. You don't need the machine. You could squeeze the pack by hand. And we're writing an expose around about the

company. And they got a quote from the investor that said, if I knew that Doug was selling bags of juice, we never would have met with him. And obviously they did meet with me. They opened up the packs. They went to the lab. People did diligence, but so they got that quote. So then Bloomberg writes an article that says, juicero feeling the squeeze investors

unhappy. And I swear on my life, the reason why investors were unhappy is because Bloomberg was bullshitting to them for the click bait, and then without any challenging, without any fact based behind it, that article got then picked up by other people. No one did primary information, no one did follow through, and all of a sudden it's so easy to hate on it's like, they bring you up and then they just hate you and bring you

down. I don't think anyone thought that the company was so fragile that this one article, you know, would would tear it down. Like, there there are people food companies that kill people. Like, I'm proud. We served a million servings. No

one was sick, right? I'm proud that we raised the capital, we built the machine, and we sold out of v1 sold out of v1 so there were so many things to celebrate, but it's such a fragile part, because when you're moving, you know, at 500 miles an hour, the slightest deviation from plan, can you know cause you to go off the

rails? And for me as the founder, My biggest mistake was not knowing that I should have stayed in the in the horse seat in the jockey seat that I should not have given up and let a new CEO come in.

America. I think he ran Campbell Soup as well, a billion dollar, several billion dollar company in getting funding from a venture capitalists, one of the questions that I always ask everyone always asks is, Are you the right person to leave the company forever, and if somebody else comes along, who's better than you to take the company to where it needs to go through an acquisition or public offering, are you willing to give up control the company to let somebody more talented than you.

We recently had a guy coming into the office, Doug. This guy was one of the most offensive people I've ever met in my life. He's he was arrogant, conceited, and it was clear to me he was not the right person to lead any company, let alone his company. I gave him some critique, some advice. You don't know You don't know enough. We're just meeting for the first time. And I said to him, I said, you have the kind of personality that is irascible. People are not going to work with you. You're not a

leader. You may be the idea, but you're not going to lead this company. And I said, You are not the right person. And he said, You don't know what you're talking about, but I do know what I'm talking about, and that's a common question, yeah, what happened?

And I'm very open, loving, trusting, and I remember, you know, every conversation, and then, you know, when the board members were like, Doug, this would be great for the business. Like, if Jeff comes in, he knows about juice, he knows about raising capital, he knows about scaling, he knows about managing, you know, 1000s of people. And you know, we have a rocket ship, and you are doing too much. You're running sales, marketing, product development, capital raising, like this would

just be great. You know, he you can design the trains, he can make them run on time. And I was like, if you guys put up all this money and you think this is the right thing to do, like, I'm not going to be, you know, obstinate. I'm not going to block what, what you guys think, because we had a strong board smart people. And I was like, like, if this is what you think.

And I was like, as committed, because when I talk about the things like, I literally organized meetings with all of my direct reports and all the teams, and made sure that everyone knew that I was 100% supportive of bringing Jeff on and doing, you know, all the parts and All the transition but it's so different running a big corporation versus running a startup that's

remember I got this guy. I found him. He was a friend of a friend. He comes to work at the company. It was a disaster. Just because you're on the board of directors or help run a billion dollar business does not mean that you know how to build a startup with 10 people. You don't have a culture. You're in some ivy tower at this huge company. You haven't been on the front lines, you're not cold call, you're not dealing with

customers. You can't deal with young employees if you're 65 years old and haven't built teams like that. It's a different culture, different people, different leadership style, and it was a company killer. It's amazing when you hire the wrong CEO, things can go that. And, you know, there's a lesson that we learned as well. You know, hire slow, fire, fast, and at some point you've committed to the wrong horse, the wrong leader, and it's too

late to shift. The company is in such a downward spiral, spiral, at that point it's game over.

team to build this product. And I really feel like, aside from the customers that are disappointed, they have the product, these people who came from the greatest companies, you know, in the valley and in the world, to come build a product that all of a sudden, like I realized afterwards, when I stepped down, that it was the beginning of the end for me, for them, for the company and for the clients, and that was the

hard part. Like they work, and I'm still so close with so many you know, of the key juicero people, because we're, in a way, we're still in shock because the product was so good, and especially with the new administration and everything that's happening now. Like the juicer, we talk about clean ingredients. It's like you picked up the pack of juicero. It was like orange carrot, lemon, kale, spinach, like five ingredients. We had one product that was 100% pomegranate, no

additives, no preservatives. It was fresh pomegranate. And we had to create a system to open up pomegranates and knock out the individual arrows and then put them in the pouch.

interesting. Three of the patents that you were granted were for pouches, d7 87 341, d7 89 799, d7 9361 the details matter. And I think if you're an entrepreneur, you should go look up all these patents on the USPTO website. You file two patents for food press, d7 93 820, and d7 96 272, and then you file the patent with this title, juicing methods and apparatuses for extracting juice from food matter using juicer cartridges.

That patent issued was d4 93 298, really patents were issued for a juicer, for pouches in a press. How did you get those patents issued, and how important was it for you to get funding?

liquid not to go out. And then on the pouch, we had to make it so it could support the produce and then release it on demand, where it was just such a beautiful detail that, you know, originally, when I was doing my demos, I would have to take a scissor and I'd cut open the pouch, and a few drops would come out, and then you'd put it in the press, and then we created a the technical term was frangible, that the force of the press would cause just that one part of the pouch to open, and

then we had a membrane inside that would contain the fiber but allow the juice to go through. So it was all of these things that were constructed into this pouch because the the the idea was that a we needed to fill these at scale. They needed to work if, if you, if you just tried to do it manually, it just wouldn't work. And I didn't want to do all this work so that someone could easily copy it. But I actually had the CEO of Nestle fly from Vive, Switzerland to come to my

office. I had the chairman of Nespresso come to my office several times, and he said they had been working on trying to crack this code for 10 years, over a billion dollars funded, and they couldn't do it, and they were so impressed with what we had done with seemingly a fraction of the dollars that they had applied, because it was really difficult to do anything at scale. So we were on the way to, you know, on the way for success with this product. And the IP was something to support

this. So all these systems were very important. And I I can tell you, I would stay up at after working a full, you know, eight hours on sales calls, four hours on investor meetings and then manufacturing meetings with China, with China and Asia, and then I'd spend the remaining time until my next call reading and working and editing on the patents.

property law firm. I see another mistake having Doug all the time, which is, you hire someone who doesn't have the expertise, because the lawyer is too expensive to do it, and they just went with someone who's a corporate lawyer. Doesn't know what they're doing. Hiring the right IP counsel is critical. And the third thing is, a lot of people don't understand when they're have a proprietary

product or computer. Meeting with someone like Google or Microsoft or Apple who has billions of dollars of resources at their potential that patent lawsuits, when you go to trial are typically a minimum of ten million an Akamai situation. We had proprietary technology. There was a it was a really novel way, revolutionary way to serve web traffic. Company, ultimately, I think today, still serves 30% of the world's web

traffic. Another competitor copied our patents, issued patents, and Akamai spent somewhere between 200 and $400 million in lawsuits to go to trial. We won. It was appealed by the other company. We won again. It's hugely expensive to get the IP and it doesn't mean that you're done. It doesn't mean that someone's not going to come copy your product anyway. Yeah,

that they were like, wow. And we started to file those patents very, very early on, even before we had the money to do that.

right near city of industry. And had we gone slower and said, Okay, we're only going to produce the packs one day a week, so we'll have one day of setup, one day of production, one day of cleanup, as opposed to running those extra days that would have saved hundreds of 1000s of dollars a month in payroll. Another kind of key thing was wanting to scale faster outside of, you know, like LA. We could have just

stayed in LA for a while. There was so much business here, and instead we we tried to go national early, and that, you know, required resources and engineering and packaging and distribution, where it would have made more sense to stay local sooner. And then the other part was we had a subsequent design for lower cost machine. And after we did v1 and we sold out of v1 we should have said, Okay, that's it for this. Instead, we were we did two concurrent engineering projects.

One was trying to work on V 1.5 to cost, reduce what the v1 machine looked like. And that took resources and time and capital, as opposed to the leap frog product, the v2 product. And that that I think, was a mistake, that that was

from VC. Firms grow at all speed. They don't care about the profits. Now things have tightened up a little bit as all these huge, massive failures. The second thing founders raise a ton of money don't realize is you are materially shrinking the possibility and probability of you having successful exit and outcome, because at some point you've raised too much money. You're raising $100 million probably gonna have a $500 million minimum acquisition, or $500 million minimum valuation.

And all these founders said, Oh God, I want to have a $2 billion $3 billion valuation. At some point there's more room. Boom for downside, decreased valuation, then upside appreciation, and we've seen it so many times. I mean the WeWork example, what do they have a $38 billion valuation and then ultimately had under a $1 billion valuation? How can you be the growth rate that you have to have to sustain increasing

valuations. When you get to the billions and billions and billions of dollars, if you're not going public, there's only a handful of companies that can afford to buy you.

So you know the another, you know you asked about another mistake that I made was, if no one knew how much capital we raised at juicero, no one would write about it. We know like no one would care, right? So what happened is like, why is Bloomberg writing about like a juice company, like a juicer company that's not public, that's not going public anytime

soon. They only wrote about it because that hook of the 100 million dollars gave them something that they figured that they could turn into click bait. And I don't know this for a fact, but I've heard that Bloomberg incentivizes and motivates their writing and editorial staff, not only just based on clicks and traffic and volume, but if they can make a stock go up or down, or they could cause A change of control in the company, like, that's like their culture of how cut

throat is. And the funny thing is about Bloomberg is, since this is a business, you know, oriented podcast, Bloomberg is software as a service. The Bloomberg terminal at $2,000 a month, where 90% of the data that's on the Bloomberg terminal is available for free on Yahoo

financing and Google and AI. So you talk about like, the the pot calling the kettle black, Bloomberg is attacking someone that someone should go like doing expose a on Bloomberg, where they even forced, like the secretaries, to get the Bloomberg terminal, even though they'll never use the advanced, complex financial models, etc, because, like, that's their their their stick. But for me, if no one knew how much money we raised, no one would have cared.

We could have been happily on our way to just building building a

to $100 a share. And he said, Yeah, it was too much money for you beforehand. And I'm thinking, What? What kind of comment is that? And then when the stock goes from 340 $5 $345 a share to 49 cents a share, I think people were happy. People were jealous. Oh, you didn't deserve it. You got lucky. Whatever the case may be, why aren't people happy for others who do well,

inadequate. So if someone feels inadequate, like I celebrate your success, like I see your success. I see your beautiful family, like I see the world and like, I was like, Wow, that's beautiful. I. Love that, and so that's because, like, I'm feeding my mind with information that's about love, that's about contribution, that's about generosity, that's about the animals, the environment, like, like in my world is I want everyone to win like I'm coming from an abundant perspective.

And if people are living in scarcity and they're living in lack, then everything is about not enough. Not enough. You know, what am I going to do? Fear based? So that comment that person, you know, basically what I would do like in that instance. And I do this all the time, and I call people, I was like, Can I ask you something like, why? What? What motivated

you to say that? Like, I want to unpack, like, what wound they have that would cause them to say that, because it's like, look, I mean, I want you, I want you to know you're running the bank, you're doing this like, I celebrate your success. What would prompt you to think, like, not celebrate my success. Maybe my evaluation was 20% higher than market because I did something that you don't know

about. Maybe other people know like but let's get people to support other people on their mission and journey, and not be jealous, not constrict. And I think the only way to do that is literally by giving more love to these people.

friend, anybody else. I couldn't be more happy or proud of my friend. He's gone on to have a massively successful career, massively I'm happy for him, but such a weird cup of no one's in competition with anybody else, yeah, or if they are, they shouldn't be. And I think it's, it's something exactly what you said. Maybe they should examine internally, what that what? Where's that coming from? Let's,

let's move on. Because I really want to talk about your future, yeah, and all the great things that have happened to you in your life, and talk us through the post juicero story and journey. And we'll, we'll talk about kind of how you ended up in a tent, essentially, yeah, down in Palm Springs in the middle of nowhere, yeah. So,

one thing, right? Because I really felt like during COVID, like juicer would have done extremely well, and it would still continue, but it was so way ahead of its time, and it was just like, okay, so what did I learn from that? And I taught my class at Harvard Business School with Len Schlesinger and Matt Higgins, and I learned a lot from there, and really being vulnerable on my blind spots,

and being humble. And so how I ended up in the desert was I was doing during juicero, this New York, LA, San Francisco triangle. I called the a hole triangle, and I just going from one asshole to the next one to the next one, and then, like, all of a sudden, I didn't have to be anywhere. Like, as a matter of fact, not only did I not have to be there, certain people, when you're on the up and up, they want to hang out

with you. They invite you to things, and then all of a sudden, you become radioactive.

know, women. I want to just be so I went to Burning Man, and in Burning Man, I saw the desert, and I saw dune and I saw the desert, and like, whoa, like you could live in the desert. And then I read the alchemist, you know, where he's on the Oasis, and with Wells and palm trees. And I was like, I think I'm gonna find land with hot springs on an oasis in the desert. So in a typical entrepreneurial way, I hire geologists, I hire well drillers, I hire realtors, and I find Wonder Valley hot springs

near Joshua Tree. And I buy a little five acre lot, you know, that had RAM shackled cabins, but it had a geothermal mineral well that the water was coming out of the ground 135 degrees Fahrenheit. So beautiful hot springs. I go to Bali to buy furniture, and I discover these 5000 pound monolithic boulders made out of granite, onyx or marble. So I buy a container of six of these, and I ship over 58,000 pounds. How much did that

cost? I mean, you know, relative to you just not a not a lot of money, 15,000 pounds, yeah, to ship the containers. Like $20,000 to buy them. But there's a lot of things like, you know, finding the boulder, having it carved, transported, forklift, polished, the whole thing. But I have to say, like, I didn't even think about the money. I just thought these things are so

beautiful. And my vision was I wanted to be able to soak in this in this tub, under a billion stars on a dark sky, and just see the universe and see galaxies and see the Milky Way and see sunrises and moon rising. And so that was my vision. So I I bought the tubs, I found the hot springs, I

figured out the hydrofluidics. I pumped it up, and then, like there was no place for me to live, so I took my Burning Man yurt, which was a 13 foot diameter, 176 foot yurt that was a wooden lattice wrapped with an LA, recycled la billboard over the lattice that I felt like a sail. You know, when the wind would blow that it was going to blow away. But so I moved into there, and then I got a mattress, and I was so content no running water in the in the

yurt. And so I'm living there, and everything is beautiful, except for one thing, that not only was I in an environmental desert, I was in a food desert. And there was no air one, no Whole Foods, no farmers markets, no restaurants, like there was one bar in the entire 100 square miles of Wonder Valley. And so I'm now like eating out of my Yeti like cooler filled with gourmet, gourmet raw food from air one and produce from the Santa Monica farmers market. And

I'm eating it. And as the cooler was going down, my cortisol levels were going up because I was wondering, What am I going to do for food? And then, while staring at the stars, I the universe like whispered in my ear and said, Doug, you know how to sprout, because I'd been sprouting for 25 years. Sprouts were part of my life. They were part of my diet, but they were always a garnish or a side dish, because I had this abundance of

other food options. So before living in a food desert, I lived in LA and San Francisco and New York, and that's a food swamp. There's more food that you could possibly eat. So when I got the insight and the download from the universe, which I ended up taking the download, and I wrote the book, right, the sprout book, I wrote the book. And there were three simple tenants in here. Was number one, sprouts are. Are vegetables. They're not just a garnish. They are full vegetables. Number two, sprouts

are vitamins and minerals. And number three, sprouts are medicine like there's more than 2000 peer reviewed published studies on sulforaphane, the medicinal compound that's found in cruciferous vegetables, but at the highest degree in broccoli sprouts. So, so I saw that, and I was like, wow, how come no one knows about this? I

You add a fulcrum, and all of a sudden you have leverage, and you can move something bigger, but you're not really creating anything. And you look at all the juicers, blenders, toasters, dishwashers, they're all performing something, but they're not making something. So what makes sprouting so magical is you take, you take one quarter cup of seeds. These are broccoli seeds, one quarter cup of seeds, and you put them into the jar, and in five days, you literally fill the entire jar.

So you go from a quarter cup to six cups. So this is exponential, and these vegetables that are in here are 20 to 100 times more nutrient dense than mature vegetables than you can buy in the in the supermarket or the farmers market. And the average leaf of lettuce in the United States has traveled 2000 miles. This has

traveled two feet. So this is so much fresher, so much more nutritious, and so much cheaper, because you're taking seeds, and the only outside input that you're adding to this is you're adding water, and the seeds are a complete living organism in a dormant state. And when you add the water, you trigger a germination process. And I came

to the perfect analogy. It's like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly, which not only is beautiful, but can fly like it goes from this little thing into this magnificent thing with the power of flight and beauty. And so the reason why people are not sprouting, and they don't know about sprouting, they're not eating sprouts, although the sprout book, you know, is now in the 10th edition, and it's now translated into Spanish language, and we're working on

Japanese next. Love it. The reason why sprouts no one knows about sprouts. John Mackey, who I introduced you to, the founder of Whole Foods, says sprouts are a shit business. And they said, What do you mean, John? He goes short shelf life. Sound familiar? Right? To Sarah organic Avenue refrigerated transportation, because everything is fresh shipping, mostly water weight and low

margin. So there are no national or international sprouting companies like it's just a small niche business, except in Japan, where there's a billion dollar business focused on broccoli sprouts. Because in Japan, you know, their levels of cancer, levels of heart disease, they're tuned in that 20,000 little retailers across Japan, like 711 you can go in and buy broccoli sprouts there

broccoli 365, days a year. So they were grappling with their research, so they had seeds, so they they grew broccoli sprouts just for doing the research. And that's how broccoli sprouts became a thing, right, 25 years ago, and it turns out that every seed has a finite amount of this compound, glucoraphanin, the precursor to sulforaphane. So every seed has a finite amount.

And as the seed turns into a sprout and a micro green and garden vegetable, the amount of the sulforaphane gets diluted, so the sprout has 20 to 100 times the nutrient density and the levels of sulforaphane of the mature vegetable. So what people were thinking was a trivial little garnish or side dish, turns out to be the stem cells of the plant, like this is the golden ticket, right here in the sprouts. And so I living in my tent with water from my well that I figured out how to

desalinate. I start to live on sprouts. So the next 30 days, I'm living exclusively on sprouts, nothing else, nothing else, nothing else. You're sure you're taking this and you're just eating the spouts, eating it. Can we open it, of course. So you're we want to do this at some point during the show, so I'm gonna, yeah, not gonna do that. So I think one of the issue Doug with sprouts is people look at this and say,

God, that looks gnarly. And I think another issue is they think about it as parsley. Because when you told me and we were talking about

has a lot of taste. But a lot of people eat a lot of different foods, even though it may not taste like cotton candy, because it's good for you. Yeah, kale itself, I think tastes like shit. Randy. These,

amazing sprouting kit. Everyone should go out and buy one on the sprouting company.com, it's cool. You're going at home. It's fun, and I can't wait to use it. But Ricky said, Oh my god, that's amazing. I'm telling you about the benefits of surprises. I'm gonna go do that. That's something that I'm going to do, yeah, but I understand too. You know, as you know, I interviewed Tony Robbins the day before yesterday, friend of yours. Thank you for that. You made that happen. He loves sprouts.

He does. And, you know, he made some joke, yeah, dog is sprouting all the time. And he said it doesn't hurt to put some stuff on it make it taste a little better.

to that. So you can add whatever dressing you would normally use on a salad, you can add to the sprouts. So whether it's tahini dressing, ranch dressing, balsamic, oil and vinegar, whatever you want to add to it, you can add to the sprouts. So one insight that I had was, instead of adding sprouts to a salad, was making salads out of

sprouts. So that was one. The next one, which was kind of incomprehensible, but it's proving to be huge, was imagine replacing white rice, which is high glycemic, with sprouts, and you're making sushi and wraps and mixing it with beans with sprouts. It's a whole different level. You're increasing the nutrition by 1000 fold if you replace sprouts rice with

sprouts. Now, when we talk about the power of sprouting for a second, lentils are the staple of the plant based diet around the world, people are eating lentils everywhere. When you sprout a lentil, you increase the vitamin C by 300% you quadruple the antioxidant levels, and you're eating something that's enzymatically alive, so it has living enzymes which make it bio available for your nutrition, for The consumption. So and you're getting soluble and insoluble fiber and in this tender form.

So another thing that you could do, and you know, we could do this as a separate thing, this is what's happening when you bring Madison and the girls over to my house. We're going to eat sprouts as the salad, as the appetizer, as the entree and as the dessert. So you're going to get a seven course sprout meal

in every aspect. But when we do like the main course with sprouts, they're going to replace the pasta, but my wife will make a beautiful marinara dressing with sun dried tomato and fresh tomato and garlic and lemon. And she's just going to pour it over the spouts and mix it, and all of a sudden you're going to have something that will have texture, it'll have flavor, it'll have aroma, and it will feed your microbiome. So people don't understand the

microbiome. Your gut bacteria contains 38 trillion non human micro organisms, yeast, fungus, mold, parasites living in your gut. And if you feed them healthy things, you get health if you put in refined food, processed food, you know, refined carbohydrates, artificial flavors, glyphosate pesticides, you basically get chronically ill, like you caused

your whole immune system. You caused your digestive system to basically malfunction, which is why in the United States, we have 266 million people are overweight or obese, and I guarantee they're not eating sprouts, right? You have 100 million people that are diabetic or pre diabetic, and those that are eating sprouts are able to regulate their insulin levels and reverse their type two

diabetes. So if you think about what's happening right now with air quality right that broccoli sprouts and just everyone here, they're all on AI. You got your your your Claude, you got your Gemini. You've got your chat, G, P, T, talk about sulforaphane and detoxification of benzene and air pollutants from the lungs by the consumption of broccoli sprouts. So whether you got the firefighters or you've got people living so that's why in Japan, they're consuming broccoli sprouts every day.

There's more than 2000 peer reviewed published studies on sulforaphane alone in there. And now we have another epidemic going on on the obesity where everyone and now, I guess we're in LA, so people aren't even obese that want to be on ozempic and the the weight loss drugs because they want to lose 15 or 20 pounds for a photo shoot for a wedding or bachelorette party. But the fact is, they're planning on 47% of the population being on weight loss

drugs for the. Rest of their life, because as soon as they get off the weight loss drugs, they will gain the weight back. And my hallucination is, if they're eating the sprouts, sprouts are the number one weight loss food in the world, because they are high fiber, low calorie, low fat, and you can grow them. So normally you go into air one, and you would like, if we had a bowl and we pour this out, this would be an

enormous bowl. These were, like, expand out if you went to air one, this would be 35 to $45 worth of sprouts, and you could grow them for like, $4 worth of seeds and a little water in your kitchen, in your kitchen. So I was living with six jars in one cubic foot, six jars, and I was generating 1000s of calories a day of the freshest, most nutrient dense food on the planet. Okay,

eat it, and then go onward. But what happens is, it's so easy to trick your brain and get the dopamine release to say, hey, this tastes good. It feels good. I'm going to eat and I'm going to eat and I'm going to eat. And if someone wants to like, you're in good shape, so I don't know what quality of food you're

eating, terrible, right? So you're eating, but you're not overeating, and you're exercising and you're aware of what you're eating, but if you were authentically hungry, like I was hungry, I'm living in the desert. There's no other food. I'm not going to go to 711 I'm not going to eat gas station food. I'm going to eat this. I'm. Like it all depends on where you are. So if you were like me, and there's no other food and you want to survive, sprouts look like a Michelin

star meal, right? If you have other choices and you're living here like you know, Mike Posner is a rock star, right? He could eat anything, anywhere he went to to lunch at sweet green here, and I swear he brought his own sprouts in a Tupperware, and he's sitting at the restaurant because he knows that these are fresher and more nutritious, and he wants to control everything

that that he's eating. So when I look at the sprouting component of this that a revelation that I had was that sprouts contain every single amino acid to form complete protein. Sprouts contain micronutrients, phytonutrients, polyphenols, bioflavonoids, antioxidants, soluble, insoluble fiber. So this is magical food. You can decide if you want to eat any sprouts at all, or how much

sprouts you want to eat. Now, I saw that you had Gary V you know, on on your podcast, Mike and I met with Gary in New York at Vayner Media. And turns out, Gary is a foremost expert on sprouts, and he went to a facility near Tony's in West Palm Beach called Hippocrates, where they treat major chronic illness with sprouts. So people are going there and they're feeding them sprouts for $500 a

day to go eat sprouts. So the fact that affluent people can eat sprouts, and poor people can eat spouts, and foreign people and other cultures, all of a sudden, sprouts have not been on the map because there hasn't been any money in sprouts. So my insight was saying, Hey, I am not going to go through the juicero Organic Avenue experience again. I want fresh. I want raw, but I don't want to be in the business of fresh and sprouts turned out to be like the magic secret, because seeds

are shelf stable. Like in my book, I found seeds that were 1200 years old that still germinate. So seeds have a protective coating around them, and when you soak them in water for the five hours or the eight hours, you remove the lectins, you remove the phytic acid, you remove the enzyme inhibitors, and you trigger a germination process that causes that seed to sprout into the most nutritious food on the planet, and you can watch it happen in front of your eyes.

about gallons for meat. When we talk about me, you're talking about feeding the crops and feeding the cattle, beef, 1800 to 2500, gallons water per pound chicken, 500 to 750 sprouts, one gallon of water per pound. Yeah,

bag of the ultra premium. These are the high glucoraphanin top shelf seeds. These were the seeds that I researched, that they were using for the making, basically supplements, and so I found them for the supplements that had the highest level of sulforaphane. So if someone wanted to treat some sort of chronic illness and they couldn't eat a lot, but they wanted the high concentrations of the medicine properties I got

be great for me. And I'm going to start with the broccoli sprouts. Number I love broccoli. And number two, it seems like the most healthy kind of sprout, given the anti cancer agents in here, how many meals am I going to be able to generate from this $50 bag?

everyone to sprout. The second thing is, you can buy the sprouter, and if you want to buy seeds elsewhere, they work in there. So it's just open. There's no, you know, there's no digital piracy preventing you from putting things in. The reason why probably 95% of our people buy our seeds is because they're priced competitively, and our seeds are tested for pathogens. They're tested for high germination rate, and they're tested for glyphosate.

So literally, the endocrine disruptor, the number one used pesticide in Roundup, is glyphosate, and there's literally hundreds of billions of dollars of lawsuit for that. So I wanted to make sure that here people are eating this to be healthy, I wanted to make sure that there's no residue of the toxic pesticides

Burning Man. Burning Man is this very interesting thing that a lot of people don't understand, yes, including me, when I first heard about it. And I'll just tell you a story, a couple stories. One in particular, we have a friend who's a well respected person in the media who is in a committed relationship and will go to Burning Man, and we'll have sex with seven other guys. And that's that's what happens there. We have another friend I remember going to this self selected high octane group of

founders and entrepreneurs. It was his dinner. There were 12 of us there, and this amazing woman sitting next to me said, Yeah, I'm going to Burning Man. I just fucked 10 guys in two days, and we did a lot of drugs. What is happening with that subset of Burning Man. I know it's not. I mean, you heard these stories too. Say that is happening at Burning Man, where this is a thing,

no exchange of money. So that's first of all, there's no exchange of money. You could have a port a potty, like everyone has to either poop in their RV or poop in a porta potty. And yes, there are people that have fancier RVs and the like. But if you're out on the playa, which is huge from, you know, four miles from one side to the next, and you got to go, you can't poop on the playa. You have to poop in a porta potty. So I swear you have billionaires pooping next to, you know,

starving artists, right? So there's a level of equality. The other thing is, the level of creative expression is beyond I have a friend who is a aerial artist who choreographed 1500 drones to create art in the sky magnificent. Took him a year to prepare the show with the most advanced keeping the drone steady to within three millimeters. It's just unbelievable. Color art show amazing as an alternative to

pyrotechnics. You know, which are more dangerous and explosive in the like, and they're investing that the level of sculpture and art and color. And what I found there are people like, maybe the the people that you're talking about or who are having sex. They could have sex anywhere. They don't need to go to Burning Man to have sex with. 10 people. I'll give you a list of seven places they could go, you know, within three miles of here to have sex with 100

people. You know, four different glory holes with the name Randy K come, you know, put it in where you don't need to go to Burning Man to have that. You have to be clear, that's something that's not gonna

happen. But I get it. I get I'm just, I. Just saying that you don't need to go to Burning Man to have, you know, to have sex and play parties, and the like, the art that are there and the convergence that, let's say there's some people, and this is for real, you could walk through, and there's some that really like spanking people. And they're there out in the sun all day long, and they've got their hand and they'll ask you, would

you like to be spanked? And they're not forcing you like there's, there's almost no bad activity, bad actors at Burning Man, you don't get there's not rapes happening at Burning Man. There may be, you know, drug overdoses, but there's not, like, aggressive behavior in that community. But if you go, do you want to get spanked? Randy? No, thank you. You just keep going. Someone else likes pickles, and they bring a van with 12 barrels of pickles, and they're just handing out their

pickles for free. So if you get to the level like I go and in my camp, my gift was, I talk about sprouts, right? So they build a 5000 square foot theater, they create programming. And someone's talking about Brock Pierce is talking about crypto there, and he's in blue lightning, red thunder. And people are talking about different I'm talking about sprouting, and someone else is talking about permaculture, and someone else is talking about,

you know, Animal Rescue. So people are just talking and then there's yoga classes. And unlike going to wearing your your Aloe outfit and spending $50 for class, everything's free. Can go to any class, and then, like Mike Posner, who's Grammy nominated singer songwriter, is walking around with his guitar, no one knows him from the next homeless guy, except he's playing his music and sharing. Someone came up to him, goes, Hey, you know you got a good

voice. Maybe should consider, you know, doing this for real, right, real stories. So people are going there, you know, to celebrate freedom. Now, there are people walking around naked. There are all these different consortiums, but you find like, I never went into any, I never saw any physical engagement of activity in my Burning Man experience like I never saw any people humping on an art car. Ever saw that? One of

to look at. I can't tell you how many times we get these business plans, they're great, and then we do the social media research, and it's like, I can't believe you've got some photos on Instagram of flipping a double bird at somebody or they're doing smoking a joint somewhere. And yeah, marijuana may be legal, but we don't want to be funding people who have the stupidity of putting a joint out. And there was a company Doug, that we were going to fund, frankly, and again, we're

doing our search. At the last minute, I had the documents, they were signed on my desk, and I was just about to send them in, and someone had sent me. Oh yeah, you know this, this couple, they go to Burning Man, and the husband had a company. We were interested in finding very talented people. So I look at this photo, and the woman is basically naked, where this is on Instagram, almost full nudity. You could see her breast. And again, I'm I'm a proponent of people having free

expression. If she wants to be nude, she wants to be nude. I personally did not think right or wrong people are gonna make it hate comments on on my social media because of this. I did not think that that was appropriate for somebody who is going to lead a company if it struck me in the wrong way, my guess is it may strike customers in the wrong way, employees in the

wrong way. And when I looked into some of the comments, the comments reinforced some of my beliefs, which were, I can't believe a CEO of a company who's raised all this money is basically posing naked on her social media, there were a lot of hate comments on that. Again, it's like I can put aside my personal judgment for the personal judgment of different people. Maybe I have a one off view, and I can be convinced.

All right, maybe I'm a little too conservative here, but it was the reaction from a lot of people. One and two. There was a picture of her smoking a joint. And I said, you know, Elon Moss, this is before he came out and smoking a joint, and he can do what he wants to do, right? But I think if you have the CEO of, you know, GE or Ford or GM smoking a joint, that person's done.

months, right, right? So, so the the Tech Crunch troll who wrote that article is just looking for click bait. Now, I they, they will when, when you're in the target of the media, it doesn't matter what you do. I they took a picture of me in air one they took a picture of me, you know, I'm doing water fast, right? And today, water fasting is cool, like it's, you know, bio hackers are there. I'm doing water fast seven years ago, and they're

thinking it's crazy. And, you know, vice, you know, writes about that like so no matter when they want to come after you, it doesn't matter. I go under the belief that anything that I do, I should be prepared to be on the front page of the Wall Street Journal or New York Times or anywhere. So I'm very

conscious of it. The picture of me at Burning Man was walking into the dust there was a dust storm, and I took a picture of me going into the dust storm and no shame, like I have no no inappropriate part, but and like, I have a daughter, right? Like I like, I'm concerned and

aware of it. But I think that the notion of of where things are in terms of judgment, you know, and people having a community, one of the reasons I go to Burning Man is there's people that I know around the world, from Singapore, from Asia, from Australia, from Europe, that from or even in the United States that I never see except at Burning Man, like it's just the convergence of these people, where there's no place else in the world that they converge. One

hide. Like I, you know, you and I are very responsive on communication, like I'm pretty much like that. I respond so there's no hiding, and I think you have to explaining to do like that. That's real. But I think that I raised a lot less money. I raised it, oh, after I did a lot of de risking, and I also, you know, reinvested 100% of my Founder CEO salary. So I've drawn no salary from the business because I wanted it to go towards R and D or marketing

or or the like. But it was the hardest thing, and this is good for the founder, was for me to feel worthy, confident, abundant, to go out and ask for the money like because that was the hard part. The money's there. And if the idea is there and the experience is there, and the vision is there, and the numbers are there. People have money that they want to invest, and some people really like

this. And some people, you know, want to just do crypto, and some people just want to do, you know, AI, but there's people that really care about this, and they're like, Oh, we think that this is this is great. You. So

from one doctor. We had another influencer. Health influencer sent out like a little note in their newsletter to 300,000 people generated 10s of 1000s of dollars in revenue in one thing. So we're seeing that this awareness, my biggest challenge, literally, is to be able to define how we can articulate this so that it's really simple that you could tell someone in wondering under a minute, and then make it easy for them to have access to try it. I think it's

And how much better is this than like I wouldn't do it on Zoom, like I'm the guy gets on the plane, gets in the car, goes wherever. So in terms of preparation, you know, I keynoted Tony Robbins unleashed the power within in New York, his largest live event that he does all year. I was the closing keynote speaker. What an honor. Yeah, it was incredible. It was incredible. I spent easily, and I only had two weeks to prepare for that. So I easily in the two

weeks, 168 hours per week. I was easily spending 80 hours a week to the equivalent to full time jobs, writing my speech, rehearsing the speech, thinking about it, incorporating jokes into it, and then bringing in a

voice coach. So I reached out to Tony's voice coach, Roger love, came to LA, had a one on one session with Roger love, and then I hired someone else to help me with my stage presence and my gravitas, who is a professional actor, speaker, producer, comedian, and I had referred him to Mike Posner, and he did a great job on Mike. And then I referred him to someone else who prepared their TED talk. And I was like, God, I'm worthy of this. So then I went to work with him, you know, on

this. So in terms of extreme preparation, 50, you know, I had 15 minutes to rock this stadium of people that are used to seeing the big guy on there, and I got a standing, dancing ovation from that audience. Thank you. And so here. Up when you say it, I can see it, yeah. I put in the work, yeah. And, and the reward from that was, like, countless like, now, I mean, so many things are happening. And I, as a result of that, I got invited to keynote the largest Food Expo in the

world next month in Dubai. So 100,000 people go to that show. I'm giving a master class on sprouting, and I'm on the big stage, you know, giving a keynote. So two things are happening, and then so all of these things, like, you have to do the work, and no one saw the opportunity for sprouting. Like, literally, no one saw it.

Sprouting has been around since the beginning of time, and I can mark my words, and I could say this when, when I wrote the spout book, and I went to New York, like, you know, I got an in with one of the largest publishers in the world. She took my meeting. She was like, sprouts, like, you know, there's a few self published books on it, like, what are you going to write that's new and different? And I hired Oprah's recipe developer to create 40 recipes

with sprouts. I hired a local chef to make those recipes and prepare them with the sprouts. I go into the meeting, and I had to get in the conference room an hour early for a 15 minute meeting because I wanted to prepare everything, and I had the editor of St Martin's Press, McMillan, eating sprouts out of the palm of my hand one meeting, I got a book deal, and I'd never written anything other than graffiti on a subway train in my

life. And so the ability extreme preparation, like I did, a lot of preparation when I decided that I wanted to write a book, like I did the preparation, do the work.

on the show. And I my goal was, I want very well known people who are the most successful or and or the most successful people in the world, what they do. And it was really, this isn't a business podcast. I don't see it that way. It's an inspirational and motivational podcast. I have a business background, but we've had all kinds of people from the show, from music, acting, athletes, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, public speakers, motivational speakers, and someone introduced this guy

named Rodney Jerkins. He said, Yeah, I talked to Rodney. He'll do your show. I said, I've never heard of Rodney Jerkins. He said he's one of the biggest music producers of all time. He's a legend in the business, so that I'm really looking for some more high profile people. And this person said you should ask someone in the music industry about Rodney. And so I did, we have friends in the music business, and so Rodney Jerkins is a legend. You should have him on your show. I thought, okay,

here you go. He's an interesting guy. He heard a Michael Jackson on a song playing in a mall in Indianapolis when he was 10 years old, and he decided right then and there, I'm going to produce songs from Michael Jackson, which he was doing when he was 19 years old. And he's produced everybody, Rihanna Beyonce. He turned down very famous person. I'm not gonna say it was to do sizza and produce her last album, which went to

number one. Wow. And when we're done with the show, he said to me, would you like to would you like Mike Tyson on your show? And I said, obviously, you know, yes, I'm and I'm saying to myself, and this is on a zoom, because it was during COVID, I'm like, fuck yeah, I want Mike Tyson on my show. And, you know, I was mouthing that, you know, as soon as I hung out with something like Mike Tyson. But you can't get too excited,

because I can't tell you. Doug, how many people have offered to help introduce me to this person or that person, right? And sure enough, I'm expecting nothing, right? I don't want to get too excited, but I can't really sleep. Mike Tyson, you know, I met, right? Might, might, you know, interview Mike Tyson, and Rodney calls me back the next day. Hey, I spoke to Mike, and he loved to do your show. I thought, you know this, this is just absolutely insane. Tony Robbins was the number one guest

that I wanted on my show. When I started my show, I read element of power, as I shared with you I was a freshman in high school. It changed my life. I've been a huge fan of his forever, and we had lunch four weeks ago. Yeah, battery like that. And you were telling me organically, four weeks ago to the day as a four weeks ago, January 15, because I flew to Asia, you were telling me organically, and not a Name Dropper or nothing, it just came

out in conversation. And we're catching up with one another. You know, we met, I don't know, a year ago now, and this was the first time we really sat down together and we shared each other's background. You mentioned Tony Robbins, and I said, Well, you know, do you know him well? Because I can't tell you how many people I even when I posted Tony was doing my show on Instagram. Oh, I met Tony here. I met Tony there. I know Tony. And I you know all these people, and I'll introduce

you to Tony. And you said, Yeah, I know him well. And I said, you know he's the number one person that I like to have on my show. And he said, Well, I'll call him, and I think if I recommend you, he'll do your show. And sure enough, Tony that night left me a voice memo. You know Tony labman and his motion Doug Evans. And you know, you're a very impressive guy. And normally I you do these things on Zoom, but he seemed like a very special guy. And I'd, you know, love, love to be on your

show. And sure enough, yesterday, I went and I interviewed him at his house for my show. And is a huge thing. And you know it, I'm so grateful to you. You're a generous guy. I We live in a world Doug. And by the way, I've had 10 famous people, some who've been on my show, who said, Yeah, I'll introduce shoes to Tony come there's a mastermind. You know, for those people who don't know what a mastermind is, and I didn't know what it was until I got on the podcast, because

mastermind is I mastermind. Is where you have all these speakers, noteworthy speakers. Some are paid. And you go to this conference, and, you know, could be a $25,000 mastermind. People pay, you know, lots of money to be inspired and go. And you do learn lots of lots of things. And it said, you know, Tony's coming here to the mastermind. By the way, I don't think he even does that many masterminds, but you know, you could pay $40,000 and Tony will be there, and I'll introduce

you. And I've never, I'm never going to pay for an introduction to someone who I want on my show. I'm never going to pay a single person to be on my show, and I'm not going to pay it's just something that I won't do. But you said you could do it, you did it. I'm grateful to you, and I think so many people out there, if you're not going to follow through with something, don't offer to do it. I think that's such an important

ingredient of our success. Do What You Say, say what you do, and follow through on on what you're going to offer to people, yeah,

don't live. So for me, like, you know, the generosity, the inclusiveness and the immediacy, like we had that conversation. And I think what I what I showed you, was that I had, I was impressed that on, you know, these months are happening on, on october 17, I we had a big milestone event at the spouting company. I keynoted for Jesse Itzler at Running Man,

1000 people. And then I jumped to over 20,000 people at Tony Robbins. But so I had just, I was very proud, and just talking about, like, Hey, I reached out to Tony on october 17, november 17, you know, I was on the big stage, just just crushed it, and then, you know, I was telling you, and part of it was my auditioning, you know, to being on your podcast. But I can't wave something out there that I have a relationship. But it's only for me. So to me, I want to say, like, Hey, I'm doing this.

And you expressed with earnest desire that that was something that was important to you. And if this were your first episode, like, if you're just some rich guy that says, hey, I want to do a podcast, and can you get Tony on my podcast? It would be a non starter. I'd say, Look, you know, I'm happy to send it to Tony, but you know, you haven't done the work. You're not

prepared. But I felt your podcast, you have done the work, you've invested so much of your time and your money and your energy and your relationships that I felt like, hey, this would be a great fit. And I think it was, it was a great fit. I saw the tears in your eyes and Tony's eyes afterwards, and it felt, it felt beautiful to me to be able to help someone who was extremely prepared. And I have no problem, like other people have asked me for introductions, and I'm like, No,

I don't feel comfortable. My relationships not that strong. I don't think it's a fit. You know, if you ask me something else, I can introduce you to someone else. But I have other other podcast people that I've been on some big podcasts where people want to go on the podcast, and nine out of 10 people I've referred to this person, they've said no, and the other person they didn't even respond to. So I'm like batting

zero, right? Zero. So you just have to know, you know, who's got the juice, you know, all the

same thing. You know, you want to get right out of the gate. You want Costco as a customer. That's, that's not a good idea, yeah. And for me, I'm very grateful that I'm just about to hit my fourth year. And it's, it was a perfect time. And once again, it's, you remember all the people that got you there? I remember we were starting our company, Akamai Technologies. We didn't have any money. And I remember every person's couch I slept on. We didn't have any

money. I remember everyone who did everything for me and and, you know, you never forget where you came from. And I And that's a huge moment for me with Tony, and I've already seen on my social media, and people who I never thought, you know, are would would be on my show. Suddenly, oh, Tony's gonna be on your show. Andy Elliot just dropped like a hat. You know, I couldn't get Andy, we've been trying for you again. Andy for

two years. I think the quote was, he's excited to hear show, and it's, and it's, it's, it's great. Let's, let's end the show. I always end the show with before

pitch a lot. You want to get the feedback, and you want to like not you know, in one mistake that that entrepreneurs make is that they think they they have a level of entitlement that, oh, I pitched Randy, and he gave me 30 minutes, and now, after the meeting, I expect him to come back and give me a debrief, and give me the the comments and tell me why he's investing or why he's not investing, and give referrals. No, you have 30

minutes with him. Save some time in that meeting, so you're not talking the whole time to get the feedback, like even five minutes in the. What do you think? What's your feedback? What's the direction? Who should I talk to? Because you may never speak to that person again. They owe you nothing. They're not getting there, and if they don't like the idea, or they don't like your presentation, you still have time to take copious notes and to take feedback.

Because to me, I hadn't raised money before, like I was a novice, and so every person that said no to me, every nay brought

me closer to a yay. And I took the notes, I did the work, and I constantly shaped myself, my pitch, my deal, my business, my model, until it got correctly and then when I did have the meeting with Kleiner Perkins, even without the demo, even without the deck, I was able to communicate because I had a command of the business and I knew, and it was literally like, boom, shake, done.

investment banks. I love you to be a speaker this summer, putting on a spot.

And like you said, it's going to be a relationship where someone knows somebody to get a meeting with me. It's rare, although it happened, where I will take a cold pitch meeting, but they have to do the preparation in advance, and it's what you said. I mean, you can easily eliminate low hanging fruit by going in

for practice pitch meetings. And when someone comes in, and it's the same thing, when someone comes in and they they say, Okay, I'm coming in for a meeting Randy to fund the company and and I may tell them in advance, and again, if this a friend or referral, I'll still spend time with you, because I want you to learn. I've done well. I'm grateful, and I want

to give back. But what I tell people Doug is that if you're coming in for a meeting with me, and that meeting is intended for me to somehow give you advice and benefit something that is going to be your baby, you have to be able to take direct advice, and I'm going to be extraordinarily blunt, to the point where a lot of people don't like it, but I've had people come in and I just don't believe and say, Oh yeah, yeah, that's a good idea. You know,

not for me. It's sort of like Shark Tank where the judges will explain to people briefly, why they wouldn't fund this company or not, but I will tell people extraordinarily bluntly and give them advice. I've had people walk out dog shell shocked before, but I tell them, if you don't want the blunt advice, don't come in for a meeting, because here I am, and I'm trying to help you, and it's sort of same thing. You know, you have to what you said is

exactly right. You got to practice that pitch meeting before Sequoia, and where we were raising money for, you know, our tech company a long time ago. Yeah, we walked in and we were just floundering, right. And then we walk out of there and we say, okay, you know what? What went right, what went wrong? And, you know, we could

see people's reactions. And 111, of the one of the first thing is, I work at Sun America, Eli brothers, and our boss, Assistant to the Chairman, is a force, 400 guys, one of only two people at the time. We had started two Fortune 500 companies. One of only three people at the time. We started two Fortune 500 companies. And, man, I was wearing three piece suits. I had ties. Of course. I bought them for 40% off it booms the house when they when I went on sale. And then you're going

to Silicon Valley. And by the way, you're in awe, right? Silicon Valley, Sand Hill Road, you're there. You're like, oh my god, I can't believe it is where Apple and all these other companies are funded. I remember wearing a suit to the first meeting, and they looked at me like I was an alien. Yeah? And it's like, you you learn all

this stuff. And then I remember, you know, we're there, and I remember where we're walking out of a meeting with, I won't even say what firm, and we're gonna give you a offer to say, well, it was Sequoia, probably the best, or one of the best VC firms in the world. I remember in the elevator on the way down, like,

of a sudden they see it. And so it's incumbent upon the entrepreneur to have the tenacity and have the endurance to get through this is an endurance game, and like a lot of people, have no idea, and you have to choose something that you're really, really passionate about, that you're willing to do the work for free and to make the sacrifice. So that's been a common theme for me, that I'm willing to do the work, delay the gratification, and focus, you know, on the mission first.

And that way I feel great about like, literally, I went to bed last night, you know, one o'clock in the morning, got up at five, exercised, did my sprouts, packed things up, got in the car and drove four and a half hours and got here, you know, right on time, yeah, so, so this is what you have to do. This is entrepreneurship. Is an endurance game. And if you're doing it only for the money, you'll probably quit too early.

But if you're doing it because you really believe that this will impact the world in a positive way, like it's just a matter of you're willing it to happen, like the will, really will make the difference. And there are entrepreneurs, and we know them that they are so successful in their mindset, that they could go, you know, and you would believe, and they would believe that they could go do anything. If they wanted to go do something, they could go

do it. And I think there's examples everywhere, and it's the self doubt, and it's the the laziness and that that causes people to not get up the hill. You know, it's the syphis go up the hill, get pushed back down. Get up, get down. And so you have to have the mindset like, you know, the entrepreneurships a long journey, and you just have to be in the moment and be present to what you can do today. And so, what I what could I do today? I'm doing this podcast. I'm doing another

podcast. I've got two calls in between the things. And, you know, that's about all I could cram into today. I appreciate

done. And then we said, All right, well, we can get maybe one or two more shows here. And it was the same thing, nope. I committed Doug. We're coming back for Doug, and I'm grateful it's one of the best shows I've done. Yeah, thank you. At the end of every show, I conclude with a game called fill in the game to excellence. Are you ready to play? I'm ready to play. The biggest lesson I've learned in my life is believe in myself. My number one professional goal is.

Professional goal is to make sprouting as ubiquitous as coffee. My number one personal goal is

we can keep going. I'm on,

dying. But there's things that I want to do, you know, so I want to make sure I live

taste the best juice. You're going to have the best meeting, etc. And they're like, where is it? I was like, oh, TSA, confiscating it. We're just going to talk today.

talk about. But what are your goals for money? And if you if the sprouting company sells for ten billion one day, and you've created this massive market. Are you gonna get yourself a jet? I am,

classes online. I'm going to be doing public speaking large. I'll start small, like you do, like Tony did, and hopefully I'll I'll get to a level now at some point where I'm speaking in front of 20,000 people, and I have a book extreme preparation that I'm working on that's one two, I want to be a great dad to my kids and great husband to my amazing wife, and be great to my rest of my family and my friends, and then free is I want

to give back to society. And I think there's a misconception about if you have money, you can do that by giving money. I think giving your time is a lot more valuable than giving your money. So and all that is kind of encapsulated is my desire to make a difference and make a world