· Peter Rahal, David Senra
[00:00:00] S1: Yeah. [00:00:00] S0: And those are the kind of friend group that you should have, where you have all these other fakers out here that are playing politics. You can get ahead that way, which is completely different than how the entrepreneur thinks. [00:00:00] S1: Yeah, I agree with that. Yeah. [00:00:00] S0: There's another thing that you were saying, because I'm not going to leave this alone. I want to hear more about your resentment and this attraction that you have to pain. So the founder of the Four Seasons, this guy named Issy Sharp, he has this great line where he started, he's kind of embarrassingly ambitious, and I mean that in a great way, where he's like, "I'm going to build the world's greatest high-end luxury hotel chain." He didn't know anything about it. He never built a single hotel before he had that goal. And so his autobiography is excellent. And in there he says, one of my favorite maxims in his entrepreneurship, he says that "Excellence is the capacity to take pain." [00:00:00] S1: Yeah. [00:00:00] S0: And this same thing, he had this very complex relationship with his father. He had a lot of people doubting him. This idea, like what you just said to me makes perfect sense because it's just in these biographies over and over again, and a lot of people that have come on the show. I just mentioned Adam Vergi. Like one thing that he drove himself was like, "I tried to raise money. I was willing to sell 25% of my company for a million dollars." [00:00:00] S1: Correct.
· Peter Rahal, David Senra
[00:00:00] S1: Correct. [00:00:00] S0: Right? This is the company that's going to wind up being worth 100, 200 billion dollars. They turned me down. These VCs turned me down, and then they funded some of my competitors, so we made it a company principle to put those competitors out of business. [00:00:00] S1: Yeah. [00:00:00] S0: So when I hear you, I hear this guy Josh Wolfe has this great line where he says, "Chips on shoulders puts chips in pockets." [00:00:00] S1: Yeah. [00:00:00] S0: It's like using that pain that you had when you were younger and channeling it to drive an achievement. [00:00:00] S1: Yeah. And I think the key is if you have that, if you don't channel it and focus it, I think it's destructive. So, for me, it all gets channeled through the art, through the company building process, and then it's productive because it can be destructive if you don't channel it. [00:00:00] S0: Okay, so how are you channeling it into what you're building now then? [00:00:00] S1: The company's output is really impressive. Just a lot of hours, butts in chairs in the office, just dedication. [00:00:00] S0: What do you think is impressive about the output that you're doing right now? What does that mean?
· David Senra, Peter Rahal
[00:00:00] S0: What do you think is impressive about the output that you're doing right now? What does that mean? [00:00:00] S1: We're only two years old and it feels like five years. So our relationship with time is really bizarre. But in two years, I mean, we're run rating over 400 million this year. We'll do 300 million this year. We're in the frozen category. We're obviously in protein bars. We have an RTD. We've launched a confection with three different formats. We're launching another brand in November. In my field, you don't see that sort of output. And it keeps getting better. Like, all our products keep getting better. But I mean, we're the fastest growing food company, I think, no, I know, in history. So it's really hard to scale it. And the pace in which we're doing it, I think this would take normally 10 years, and we've done it in two. [00:00:00] S0: Explain to me why it's so hard to scale. [00:00:00] S1: Why it's hard to scale is because it's inventory. So you need to go buy the raw materials, convert it into finished product, and some of the raw materials take a long time. And for example, the dairy market was super tight. So if you don't... Like growing 300%, 400% a year is really, really... or even closer every six months is really demanding on the supply chain. To take Travis, like this is all atoms. Like, we're not a digital business at all. So, yeah, the inventory part is really, really challenging. So matching supply and demand has just been very difficult and... [00:00:00] S0: So you've had times in the company where you ran out of supply, correct?
· David Senra, Peter Rahal
[00:00:00] S0: So you've had times in the company where you ran out of supply, correct? [00:00:00] S1: Oh, constantly, yeah. [00:00:00] S0: Is this when you started... I saw Rob and everybody's been telling me about David Barr, and then I saw an ad and you were selling cod or something. [00:00:00] S1: Yeah. [00:00:00] S0: Is that as a result of the fact that you ran out of supply? What happened there?
· David Senra, Peter Rahal
[00:00:00] S0: Is that as a result of the fact that you ran out of supply? What happened there? [00:00:00] S1: The story of cod was we're creating our website and we're doing a comparison table. And the one metric we think is really important is how many of your calories are coming from protein. And on this chart, we were number one, and we were number one on everything. And for me, my investor influence, anything where I see a chart where it's all number one, I'm like, "It's bullshit." So we were like, "All right, well, we need to find something that's-" Number one, what has a better protein-to-calorie ratio than our gold product? And the only thing we found was boiled cod. And so in our comparison chart, we put boiled cod number one and David number two, and just left it there as like a dorky sort of comparison. And why it worked is like the juxtaposition between our bar and the cod is like signals convenience, it signals value, and like cod's pretty unappetizing. And then we're halfway through our first year, and I was like, it's like deja vu for me. I'm like, "This is super boring." Like another flavor. I'm like, "We need to do something bold." And so we're like, "Let's actually sell cod." And not like a stunt, like actually seriously sell fish. And so we did this boiled cod campaign, and it was funny because it was like- [00:00:00] S0: You like pain. Let me know.
· David Senra, Peter Rahal
[00:00:00] S0: You like pain. Let me know. [00:00:00] S1: Yeah, it was like got in the frozen business, and it's back to our brand values. Like, it was actually a very intelligent thing because it centered the conversation around protein-to-calorie ratio. So, but did it in a way that wasn't sort of like, hey, like right on the nose. It was like a little bit of a riddle. And it's like 55 dollars frozen cod online. Like, no one really wants that. So we didn't have product market fit, but it functioned as a really great communication tool. [00:00:00] S0: So creating a product for marketing benefits. [00:00:00] S1: Yeah, we call it product as marketing. I'm not giving up on it. Like, we're going to keep going. We're going to keep going on cod until we get product market fit. [00:00:00] S0: I don't think you will. I don't think you will, man. [00:00:00] S1: I know. It's funny because if you look at our website, it's like, protein bars, bronze and gold, pints, frozen ice cream, and then there's like RTDs, and there's like fucking fish. And it's weird, but like the whole food space is so fucking boring, to be honest. It's like they all say the same shit, they all do the same things. And so being a second time, I was like, "We've got to have some fun with it." [00:00:00] S0: Okay, so that was not in response to supply issues, because there was no demand for this frozen cod so far. [00:00:00] S1: Yeah, no. It happened to work at the same time we were out of stock on some things, but no, it was independent.