Doug Evans: Lessons from Steve Jobs, Raising $120M, and the Future of Food | E150 - In Search Of Excellence

Episode Transcript
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Randall Kaplan (00:00):
From tagging to graphic design to working with
Steve Jobs, Apple was terrified.

Doug Evans (00:06):
Apple bought NeXT for $400 million and they made a
preemptive move before a someoneelse would have bought it or
they would have gotten the amplefunding. I went to his house in
Western Connecticut, and Ibecame a unpaid intern,
apprentice for Paul Rand forseven years till the day he

(00:29):
died.

How many times did you actually jump out of a
plane?

Doug Evans (00:33):
I jumped out of planes 13 times. The first time
was easy, but the second time, Ican't

believe a CEO of a company who's raised all this
money is basically posing nakedwhen they

Doug Evans (00:43):
want to come after you. It doesn't matter.

Welcome to In Search of Excellence, where we
meet entrepreneurs, CEOs,entertainers, athletes,
motivational speakers andtrailblazers of excellence, with
incredible stories from allwalks of life. My name is
Randall Kaplan, I'm a serialentrepreneur, venture capitalist
and the host of In Search ofExcellence, which I started to
motivate, inspire us to achieveexcellence in all areas of our
lives. My guest today is my goodfriend Doug Evans. Doug is a

(01:12):
serial entrepreneur and earlypioneer in the health food
movement, which has been apassion of his for almost four
years. He is the founder oforganic Avenue, the first
organic cold pressed juice andraw food retailer in the United
States, the founder of juicero,a high tech juicing machine that
used fresh pre packaged fruitand vegetable pouches in which

(01:33):
raised $120million in venture capital
funding from leading VC firmsincluding Google Ventures,
Kleiner Perkins and thrivecapital, among many others, and
which famously went out ofbusiness only 17 months after
its product launch. Doug is alsothe founder and CEO of the
sprouting company, whichprovides products and
information about the incrediblenutritional and other benefits
of eating sprouts, and whichhelps people to easily grow

(01:56):
their own sprouts at home. He isalso the author of the sprout
book, tap into the power of theplants, most nutritious food.
Dog, thanks for being here. Hey,it's my

Doug Evans (02:06):
pleasure, Randy, let's go. Let's do it. Let's
talk about your

upbringing. You grew up in New York, the Bronx
queens, Harlem, and I want totalk about your parents. What
did your parents do? How didthey influence you? And then how
did those influences lead toyour juvenile delinquency. I
think you said you were arrested50 times 12 times before I was
1712. Times you arrested 12times before you were 17. Yeah.

(02:30):
So,

Doug Evans (02:31):
I mean, my parents, may they rest in peace? You
know, they had their challenges.
My father was a combat world wartwo veteran and at the time, we
didn't understand PTSD and othertrauma, and so he was the
sweetest man in the world untilhe wasn't. And I don't recall my
like ever seeing my fatherhaving a job because he couldn't

(02:54):
work because of his his ragingand in the trauma, so he
couldn't get along with people.
He was very articulate and hewas smart and but then he he
would, like anything couldtrigger him. And like, now I can
look back and go, Oh, that'sPTSD. That's trauma, you know,

(03:17):
that's the result of being inwar. But the time we just
thought like, you know, heraged. So I thought everyone
raged so in in our in ourhousehold, it was a little
chaotic. And for me, it wassafer to be out in the street
with gang members, with graffitiwriters, with other delinquents,

(03:38):
because I felt more like I couldrelate to them, and I felt safer
there than being in the house.
What about your mom? My mom wassweet. My mom, like, carried the
torch. She was like a secretary,and she was the one that was
working, and she was alwaysputting food on the table, and
but we lived in a lot ofscarcity, and we didn't have a

(04:00):
lot of food, and everything wasrationed. So for me, like, I
wanted to get out, and thechallenge of being in New York,
where you could have the poorestpeople, you know, and the
wealthiest, and then you wonder,like, why you can have things so
without being grounded in moralvirtues and guidelines, you

(04:25):
don't think of like what's rightand wrong. You want your needs,
so you'll just go take them. Andso a lot of what I was doing and
a lot of my my crimes were allassociated with writing
graffiti, so stealing spraypaint, breaking and entering,

(04:45):
stealing supplies, being in thewrong place at the wrong time
with the wrong people, so

breaking and entering. You broke into a
hardware store or somebody'shome to. Steal things.

Doug Evans (05:00):
No no more into this subway yards to write graffiti.
Okay? And the crime was reallylike stealing spray paint so
that you could paint on thetrain. You would

run into a hardware store, kind of grab and
run and grab some paint. I

Doug Evans (05:15):
mean, you would try not to be so obvious, putting
your paint on something, puttingyour pants, put in a bag, just
little things. But eventuallywhat happens is, you do get
caught. Like as Emerson says,Every crime will be punished,
every truth will be told. So ifyou you know, you get beginners
luck, you know, you get awaywith it the first time the

(05:36):
second time. Then you think, oh,it's easy. And then you get
caught. And then you think, Oh,I just had a bad day, and you
get a slap on the wrist. So thenyou do it again. And so this
whole madness happened, youknow, until I was 17, and then I
just, like, just woke up andlike, God, I got to get away
from these people. They're alldegenerates.

What was it that led you to spray paint. And did
you kind of practice on thewall, or you just wanted to
deface public property? Andthen, how old were you when you
were arrested for the firsttime? 13. What was that like?
You're painting at night, andsome cop comes out to you, hey,
put the paint down.

Doug Evans (06:16):
No, I think to answer the first part, in my
junior high school, there weredrug dealers. There were
outright, like, criminals andgang members, and there were the
graffiti writers, and theyseemed to be, like, the coolest,
like, and they were buildingbrands, and they were creating
artwork, so, you know, and therewere different goals that they

(06:37):
had. Some people were paintingon the inside, some on the
outside, and people wanted toexpress themselves creatively.
You

know, what's crazy is, you drive down the
freeway, you see thesebillboards that are 3040, feet
in the air. That's like a fourstory building, and there's a
graffiti on there, and there's alittle pole up there, and
sometimes there's wire that youcan't get through. And you see
these things. And I've alwayswondered, I mean, they've,
they're doing it at night. Someof the painting is actually
good. I mean, it's, it'sterrible that that they're

(07:06):
doing, and people are riskingtheir lives to tag all of these
billboards, or whatever they'redoing. Look,

Doug Evans (07:14):
I think for them, the the more extreme it is. It's
kind of like ultra performanceathletes and the rare the parts
there was different angles. Butwhen I was 13 years old, I have
an original Keith Haring pieceof artwork that Keith drew for
me. And I look back now as I seelike, you know, your kids that

(07:37):
were 13, and I look at myselfsaying, when I was 13, I was in
nightclubs with Basquiat andKeith Haring and Fab Five
Freddie. When I was 13, theseguys were 18 to 25, to 40 years
old, and I was in thatenvironment, and I felt so at
home and like that's just what Idid, until I decided I needed to

(08:02):
change. I mean, what's

crazy is talking about Keith Haring Basquiat. I
think there have been Basquiatpaintings that have sold for
between 20 and $30 million andthese guys were taggers, and
they started out their careerthat way. Yeah, taggers, drug
addicts, criminals. Education, Ithink, is one of the most
important investments we canmake in ourselves. It didn't go
so well for you. We were thrownout of high school, kicked out

(08:23):
of high school, every everyschool I went to, every school.
So what did that look like? Yousat down in the classroom. You
didn't want to do it. You Yousaid, I don't care about my
education. Well,

Doug Evans (08:33):
you know, a just the vanity. I should have been
wearing my glasses since fifthgrade, and I didn't start to
wear my glasses until I got intothe military at 17, because you
had to have them on the militarybecause I couldn't see the
target.

They give you a physical and an eye test. I get
it, yeah. But

Doug Evans (08:52):
then, you know, part of your performance is you have
to point a rifle at a target andshoot, and without wearing your
glasses, like, you know, Iwould, I would end up having
friendly fire. So not wearingthe glasses meant I couldn't see
what was on the blackboard. Icouldn't follow what the teacher
was saying, and energetically, Ijust did not you know, my method

(09:15):
of education was not sitting ina classroom. So I would show up
late to class. I would leaveearly to class. I'd be sitting
in class thinking of like, howcan I get out of it? I remember,
like, pulling a thread out of myshirt. And, you know, I didn't
floss at the time, but I flossedmy teeth until they bled so I

(09:38):
could leave the classroom,because I just couldn't sit in
that room. You didn't graduatehigh school. I ended up
graduating, but not on the mosthonorary way. They just, they
just gave me the grades. Theguidance counselor just filled
stuff in, just to get me out.
And I went to three highschools,

and then you went into the. Us our Army as a
paratrooper, correct? Did youjust say to yourself, hey, I
want to go jump out ofairplanes? Well, my

Doug Evans (10:08):
friends were all degenerates, and I knew that if
I didn't make a radical change,I could end up dead or in jail
like they were. And so when Iwent to the recruiter's office,
I knew that, like I was seekingthe most transformative
experience I could have, and Iknew that I needed discipline.

(10:30):
So I said, What is the roughest,toughest thing that you have?
And they said, 82nd airborne,Paratrooper, infantry, combat
engineer. And I said, Where do Isign? And I was 17, so I had to
go back and get my parentsauthorization and consent, which
wasn't too hard, because theywanted me out anyway, but it was

(10:52):
still a step in the process. Ithink it's

very important for successful people to always
want the challenges and thebiggest challenges, and it's
it's cool that you did that.
What did the army teach you interms of lessons, and what
didn't it teach you? I think yousaid that it didn't teach a lot
about morality. And I've heard alot of people actually learn
negative habits In the armedforces. I

Doug Evans (11:13):
mean, the army taught me, you know, that I am
not my body, and that I couldwork through pain. And I
remember going on a 20 mile, 25mile hike, carrying a rucksack
with 50 pounds, a rifle, extramunitions and water, and my feet

(11:33):
started to blister. And Iremember saying, drill sergeant,
my feet are blistering. And hehad the standard response, It's
mind over matter, I don't mind,and you don't matter, keep
going, and the blisters wouldpop, and I would I would stop
again and say, the blisterpopped. It really hurts. It's

(11:54):
mind over matter. Keep going,and then the blister would start
to bleed, and then it wouldscab, and then the scab would
come off, and then the wholebody starts to ache with the
weight and your knees and yourback, and you just had to keep
going. And if you slowed down,the rest of the troops would
keep going, and then they wouldkeep going further and further.

(12:17):
And then the drill sergeantswould take all the troops and
make them go back and go all theway 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 muchas you were. So the peer
pressure, what was extreme tokeep people going along the way.

(12:42):
You know,

peer pressure is such a such a big thing, not
only in our personal lives, butin our professional lives as
well. I think there's peerpressure to do drugs, if your
friends are doing drugs and ifyou're doing bad things, what's
your message to all the peopleout there, either the parents
who are looking for jobs or abetter future, and to all the

(13:03):
kids out there today in college,young professionals who, one way
or the other are areexperiencing peer pressure and
in their lives, I

Doug Evans (13:14):
think the message is that a lot of times, parents or
people think they know what'sright for someone, and they try
to tell them what to do. And Ibelieve, especially now that we
all know what's good forourselves, and we need to create
the trust with the people thatwe're communicating to that we

(13:38):
have their best interest in mindand explain to them, not tell
them what the consequences couldbe if they go down this path or
that path. And I remember aninstance where my car, I had a
car like a muscle car, 1967Camaro, GT, and it was manual. I

(14:01):
didn't really know how to drivestick, and I flooded the
carburetor. The car burst intoflames. It crashed into a wall
and and burned. And I called oneof my friends from a pay phone,
you know, to his his shop wherehe was working. I was 17 at the
time. I said, Dude, my car justjust blew up. And he's like,

(14:24):
Hey, take the license plates offthe back and take the the van
off the inner door and get outof there. And I was like, Okay.
And then for weeks, I wasobsessing on what was I going to
do to get a car? And variousthoughts came in to mind of

(14:45):
like, oh, I'll just find thesame car in the same color and
put my license plates on it anddo that. And that would keep me
up at night until I had aconversation I was having. Lunch
with you know, today you wouldcall the mentor. I called it an
older friend, but he was a trustfund kid who is now 40 from like

(15:10):
the Carnegie Steel or era, andhe had galleries and buildings,
and he was a graffitiphotographer, and I sat with him
over a slice of pizza, and he'slike, You look terrible. And I
was like, Yeah, I'm notsleeping. My car blew up this
and and then he described to methat I was experiencing anxiety,

(15:34):
and I had no idea what that termwas. And he said, I said, well,
well, how do I get rid of theanxiety, 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 tolet that car go. You're going to
let the license plates go. Youcan let the value go. You've
ridden on the subway for thelast 10 years. You go back on

(15:55):
the subway and you just forgetthat. And that night, I went to
sleep, and I slept through thenight. The anxiety went away,
and I started to work again, andsoon after, I joined the Army,
but I remember now, like I couldnever have had that
conversation, you know, with mydad. You know, Dad, my car blew

(16:17):
up. I'm thinking about stealinganother car, or whatever, like
they just would have come downon me, you know, which would
have made me probably do it. Andhere someone held space and had
love for me and compassion, andI made the right decision
because I knew and so he waswise beyond his years to be able

(16:40):
to hold that space for me, andI'll never forget that. How

many times did you actually jump out of the
plane? What was it like thefirst time you're looking down
and says, shit, I'm up 10,000feet, and this is the coolest
thing, or I'm scared shitless.
And how long were you the armyfor? I

Doug Evans (16:56):
jumped out of planes 13 times. The first time was
easy because of the crazyadrenaline in airborne training,
stand up, hook up. Shuffle tothe door. Stand in the door.
First guy in the door, greenlight, go, go, go. And you know,
guys going out. Both sides areplaying, boom, boom,

boom. This was like a C carbon, 30 c1 30 c1 30,

Doug Evans (17:20):
non pressurized cabin, sitting one trooper with
their legs in front the next,and the rucksack and the reserve
parachute in the front, the mainparachute in the back. No
windows, either. No windows, no,just it's just crazy. Just
crazy. Yeah, but the second timewas the most insane, because you
already know and you're not at10,000 feet like you're you're

(17:42):
dropping about 3000 feet, whichdoesn't give you a lot of time.
In case you know, your parachutedoesn't open for the for the
reserve parachute. So it's, it'svery intense. And you're doing
some jumps in the daytime, someat night. We also on the c1 30,
they would open up the back ofthe plane and you would run off

(18:05):
the back ramp off. So evenfurther insane than on the side
doors. So just insane adrenalinerush. How long were you in the
armed forces for? I was in thearmed forces for 13 months, and
why did you leave? They asked meto leave because some of my

(18:25):
earlier infractions of the law,which were documented to be
juvenile delinquencies with asealed record, turned out that I
was such a good trooper in themilitary, I was so committed to
excellence that I did my bootcamp, my airborne training, my

(18:46):
infantry training unit, armortraining, Special Forces,
explosives and demolitions,training, training, training,
training that I got nominated togo to Officer Candidate School.
And in the process of going toOfficer Candidate School, they
needed a top secret securityclearance, and during the course
of the clearance, they found allthese juvenile infractions, and

(19:07):
even though there were nowarrants out for my arrest,
there wasn't the properdocumentation when I joined the
military that got me theappropriate waivers to go
through, because now, inhindsight, the recruiter, his
job was to fill boots. I hadshoes, and so he wanted to fill

(19:29):
the boots. So I disclosedeverything, but I didn't know
the formal protocol. So at thetime, the army was unnegotiable,
so any infraction to the UniformCode of Military Justice
required an immediate dismissal.
But the irony is, and I'mactually very proud of this, I

(19:50):
have an honorable discharge, anarmy Achievement Medal and cause
of discharge at fraudulent.
Enlistment,

even though you're perfectly honest going
in, yeah, just

Doug Evans (20:03):
bureaucracy, red tape like the, you know, my my
commanding officer thought thatI would still be a great
officer, and wanted me, youknow, support me along the way,
because I had enormousleadership. I now had the
discipline, I had theintelligence, I had the
leadership skills. And he wasdisappointed. So

you're probably getting paid nothing or close to
nothing. Then you get out, andthen you had a lot of odd jobs,
bars, supermarkets, and wantedto make money. Obviously, you're
motivated by money, and you weremaking money. What was the
thought process there? You justwere you making money to support
yourself and save your future,or you just like having money
for the first time.

Doug Evans (20:41):
Well, I wanted freedom, like I wanted to be
able to eat, I wanted to be ableto pay rent. I wanted to have my
freedom, and so if I didn'twork, and I also knew that I
needed to be absolutely inintegrity and honest, like there
was no deviation at the time. SoI thought by working so the

(21:03):
army, there's no punching of aclock in the military, so you
work a lot of hours. So becauseI didn't do drugs and I didn't
have other vices, and I neverreally had a normal childhood,
so I didn't really listen tomusic and have fun things, so I
had nothing else to do but work.
So workaholism was actually my,you know, something that kept me

(21:26):
sane and honest. So it was lessabout the money, because I never
bought fancy things. I justwanted to have the freedom. And
also, you know, I guess partplanning for the future, when

you got out, you didn't say, I'm gonna go to
college, and I think college isa good investment in my future.
No,

Doug Evans (21:47):
I didn't have the grades in high school. My ego
didn't want me to go to acommunity college, and I didn't
really, I couldn't imagine afterwhat I'd been through to
actually sit in the classroomand do homework. What I did do
on my own was my same mentor,Henry Chalfont, gave me a list

(22:09):
of the 100 classics. So I wasreading dusty F ski and Catcher
in the Rye and To Kill aMockingbird and Hemingway and
Emerson. So I was readingclassic um literature, and that
really, you know, is a whole,you know, new world for me,

(22:30):
because before I was likewatching, I Dream of Jeannie,
you know, and the Brady Bunch,and to go from there to reading
complex literature was a bigshift. You're

making money, you're you're feeling good, you
can pay rent, you got food. Youstarted going to places like
Peter Luger, which I remember, Iwas in college, and I had a
girlfriend, Nicole, and I didn'tknow what Peter Luger was. I'd
never been there. Apparently,it's a big Steakhouse in New
York, very, very famous. Andthen there was a second one on
Long Island. She lived on LongIsland. That's the one that we

(23:02):
went to. But I remember goingthere for the first time
thinking, you know, this isgreat. This is a very expensive
steak, and it's cool. So youstarted eating a lot of stuff,
and today we look at our familytonight. I mean, health is just
a big thing today, right? Youproactively, we're going to talk
about this is what your life,devotion and passion is back
then no one's really thinkingabout it, or really talking

(23:22):
about if you were fat, you werefat. You knew you needed to lose
weight. Today, it's a wholenother thing, and at some point
you had a lot of family healthissues. So I think your mom,
dad, aunt, uncle, uncle, otherbrother and so, and you gain, I
think, 36 pounds very quickly,yeah, and so what was the, what

(23:42):
was the thought process? And oneof the life changing moments in
your life, I

Doug Evans (23:46):
mean, for me, growing up in scarcity and then
having money. Money was theability to buy food, you know,
fast food, processed food,various cuisines. So I was
buying whatever I could,whenever I could. And then when
my aunt developed type twodiabetes, and they had a double
amputation of her feet likethat, was traumatic. I remember

(24:10):
going to the hospital, and Itrying to envision what it would
be like not to have the the useof my toes and and my ankles.
And then, you know my mother andmy father, you know both passed
from chronic illnesses, and thenmy brother became overweight,
obese, diabetic, and has hadthree strokes and three heart

(24:32):
attacks. At what age I startedwhen he was 35 so for the last
25 years he is his his healthhas 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 andsaid, because I thought I was

(24:55):
genetically cursed, and she losther sister and her. Mother to
cancer. Are we talking aboutMegan right now? No, this is
Denise, okay, this is DeniseMari. And Denise said to me,
you're living a carcinogenic,diabetic, heart disease laden
lifestyle, and that's not yourgenes, it's your lifestyle. And

(25:18):
like, I couldn't imagine therewas a connection, like I just
thought, like, hey, we need toeat meat, chicken, fish, dairy,
pizza, pasta, bread, candy,soda, like these were all
nutrition. Like this was allnutrition. And what I realized
was that it was actually killingme. And so once I realized that

(25:42):
it was dangerous, I made thesame leap like I did into the
army, out of the airplane, and Isaid, I'm going to go far away
from that food as possible. Andliterally the furthest thing
away from that was to eat fresh,raw fruits, vegetables, seeds,

(26:05):
nuts, seaweed and sprouts. We

all meet very interesting people in
interesting places in our lifethat have huge influences on our
future. One of them could be anightclub. So you're at a
nightclub 2am what happened fromthat point forward? And take us
through the start of your firstcompany.

Doug Evans (26:23):
Yeah. So I met this woman. She was there. She was
with a bunch of other women, andwe started to talk, you were not
trying to hit on her, and I wasdefinitely trying to hit on
okay, I was definitely trying tohit on her. Did it work? I mean,
we were together for years,okay? So I guess it works. It
was, you know, the mostimportant thing for me was what

(26:44):
I learned from her, you know,and what I learned about myself.
But like, we're there and we'rejust talking, and then, instead
of talking about partying anddancing, or the thing, you know,
here's two sober people in anightclub, you know, talking
about death, talking aboutcancer, talking about loss, and

(27:07):
we had this connection that, youknow, that cut through all of
the superficiality that was inthat club into something really,
really deep And like our firstdate, right? And it wasn't even
necessary whether it wasplatonic or sexual. Like our
first meetup, we went to the BigApple Vegetarian Society to go

(27:31):
to a battle of the diets. Andjust so happened, that was the
next activity that she wasdoing, and she invited me, and
we went. And I'd never even likeI thought a diet is when someone
doesn't eat, right? And herepeople were talking about the
nuance of the plant based diet,so all extremes of the plant

(27:52):
based diet. And there werespeakers, people who I'm still
in touch with today. And I satthrough that mesmerized, because
I thought it wasincomprehensible that these
people were functioning. BecauseI thought we required meat,
chicken, fish, dairy, pizza,cheese, like I thought these

(28:12):
were requirements. And there wasone guy there, Paul Nissan, who
was living a raw veganlifestyle, and he was just
eating fruits and vegetablesraw.

So what's interesting is she was the first
person who taught you ormentioned the term vegan. You'd
never heard the term before. Ithink it's a commonly
misunderstood thing. I didn'tknow what the difference between
a vegan and a vegetarian wasuntil I prepared for the show
tell everyone what thedifference

Doug Evans (28:40):
is. Yeah, I think a vegetarian, for predominantly
moral reasons, does not eat meator flesh, but they'll still eat
dairy or eggs or honey, and avegan consumes no animal
products, and also is under thebelief that they want to do no

(29:04):
harm. So part of veganism isnothing that involves the
exploitation of another sentientbeing. 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

(29:24):
have to kill the sheep to getthe wool, but it's exploiting
the sheep to get the wool. Sothere's no animal products.
People talk about leather beinga neat byproduct, when, in fact,
it's a whole industry in and ofitself, so nothing that involves
the exploitation of a sentientbeing. And then there's plant

(29:47):
based, which is very similar tovegan on the dietary part. And a
lot of people will choose to usethe term plant based because
they don't want to discuss thegeopolitical. Political moral
issues. They just want to keepit very simple and say, Hey, I
eat plants where they're they'revegan. But they don't want to

(30:09):
get into the stigmatism of avegan in the political part,

at some point you register the domain name,
still raw, and I think thatsounded like you were very early
in the domain name entireuniverse, because it was a long
time ago. So what was thethought process there? What was
the first time you heard aboutthe internet and that you could
actually go and buy a domainname?

Doug Evans (30:32):
Oh, probably in the mid 90s, like mid mid 90s, 1990
1994 I remember having, youknow, access to, you know, a
browser, an early Netscape. Andprior to that, I was using dial
up. And in 1991 I actuallynegotiated a deal with Apple and

(30:56):
monotype to create typefaces forthe Mac operating system that
are now on iOS, and they're nowin Windows as well. So I was
using early technology, pre web,and then I was on Apple link,
and then I was on DARPA net, andthen ultimately went into the

(31:18):
web. But I didn't like thetechnology as much as I liked it
as a platform for for forcreating things,

right? So let's go from tagging to graphic
design to working with SteveJobs. Tell everyone those
stories your relationship withSteve.

Doug Evans (31:36):
Yeah. So you know, life is, you know, filled with
synchronicities and doors openand opportunities happen. You
have to make them happen. Youhave to make them happen. But,
but think like I was havinglunch with my same mentor who
saved me from stealing a car,and when I was working all this
time, he had said, Doug, you'reworking, but do you like, what

(32:01):
any of the things that you'redoing? And I said, no, like, I'm
just doing it to make money. Andhe said, Well, did you know that
you have, you know, greatartistic design skills that, why
don't you do something in yourcategory? And I'd never heard of
commercial art or graphic designor advertising. So I remember

(32:24):
going to Barnes and Noble andthere was like books and books
of all these things. And therewas one book called a designer's
art by Paul Rand. And Paul Rand,almost single handedly,
transformed commercial art intofine art, and he designed the

(32:45):
logos and corporate identitiesfor IBM ABC, UPS Westinghouse.
And he had a new client, who wasdoing a new computer company
called next computer, and thiswas in the mid 90s, and so I saw
his book. I got out of the army.
I'm fearless. I called him up. Iwent to his house in Western

(33:08):
Connecticut, and I became aunpaid intern, apprentice for
Paul Rand for seven years. Tillthe day he died. I was at his
bedside in the hospital when hedied of stomach cancer in 1994
96 and so being with Paul, Istill had to earn my own keep.

(33:32):
So I was still doing my sidehustles along the way, but I got
to go work with this master. Andso one of his clients was Steve.
And so I got to work on the nextcorporate identity, and being on
late night calls, early calls,discussions about the nuance of,

(33:53):
you know, what Steve wanted inthe corporate identity and how
Paul, you know, worked, andthese were two people that were
extremely strong willed, and Iwas in the middle, you know, on
quite a few of the interactions.

(34:15):
So

how much time did you spend with Stephen?
What's your impression, if youcould tell people listening and
watching today that Steve Jobsis a Steve

Doug Evans (34:25):
Jobs is a visionary, and Steve had his every Steve
had wounds, and Steve hadclarity of what he wanted. And
the thing that was reallypowerful about Steve is that he
knew what he wanted, and hewould move mountains to get what

(34:46):
he wanted like so in the course,I had never seen anything like
that before. I never experiencedanything like that. So I
remember being in a meeting withSteve you. And I opened my
mouth, and he said, Get to thepoint like he didn't want to

(35:07):
hear any stories, anydigressions, and I didn't know
much. Like, we didn't have theinternet. You couldn't google
someone before, you know thesemeetings with people, so you had
no idea. Like, I didn't know thewhole journey of Steve and Apple
beforehand, I had no idea hewent public. He got fired. All I
knew was this was a guy. He wascoming out with a new computer

(35:29):
company. It was black and thelogo was in a cube, and he
wanted it a certain way, andPaul could not be manipulated by
Steve. So Steve would give hisfeedback, and Paul would just
listen, and Paul would dowhatever he wanted. I

don't want to cut you all, but I we need to
give context to what you'retalking about, because 99% of
people listening and watchingthe show don't have any idea
what next computer was. And ifyou could take us through the
story of what happened, a lot ofpeople may know that he got
fired. They don't know nameslike John Sculley and people who

(36:09):
came in afterward, and they haveno idea how he actually came
back to Apple, and what Applebought this company to bring him
back to Apple. So if I mean, wecould talk about this for a few
hours, but let's simplify it forpeople. Well, what was the
company called and whathappened? Yeah, so

Doug Evans (36:24):
Steve, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak started Apple.
Steve Wozniak, you know, driftedinto the back end after the
apple two. Steve created theMacintosh. You know, after the
Lisa and the Macintosh was notas big of a success as they
thought it would be, right outof the bat,

right? The Lisa was a, I think, the first or
second computer that Apple had,and then it was the Macintosh.
It was like a can box, likelittle box,

Doug Evans (36:54):
self integrated floppy disk, flop floppy drive,
and and the Apple was a verysuccessful company, billion
dollar valuation, and the boardof directors of Apple brought in
John Sculley, who was thepresident of Pepsi Cola. And
John and Steve had a loveaffair, and then basically John

(37:19):
felt that Steve was toodisruptive, and moved him to a
side building, and then, in aboard struggle, forced Steve out
of the company, and Steve soldall of his Apple stock, and saw
that he felt that there was amarket using a graphical user
interface For the educationmarket, and decide to start a

(37:42):
new computer company called nextcomputer company using Linux as
the operating system. And today,all of our iPhones are using the
next operating system. And soSteve starts next raises $400
million from Ross Perot andcannon and other people.

But finally, back then, that'd be like
raising 10 or $20 billion today.
I mean, it just people didn'treally raise those kind of
rounds, but it was enormous next

Doug Evans (38:19):
shipped product, but it ended up being more
expensive, took more time toship, and never got the adoption
that they that they wanted. AndApple continued to flounder,
creating more and more productswithout innovation. So then they
brought Steve back in. Wellbefore

that, there was a guy named Gil Emilio who came
in after they fired scholarly,who was the Savior to Apple and
Gil. Gil didn't do anythinggreat there either no

Doug Evans (38:46):
and so, you know, after Steve got back into Apple,
you know, that's when, you know,I lost all contact. But,

but, but explain the acquisition. Because, oh,
that that's C wouldn't have comeback, but for the acquisition,
basically,

Doug Evans (39:04):
it's pretty interesting. Apple bought back,
bought NeXT for $400 million andthey put, you know, gave, you
know, in stock. Steve worked asinterim CEO for $1 a year, and
then saw that the potential ofeverything that he wanted to do

(39:26):
the first time, with the lessonsof being fired, starting another
company, the humility, and alongthe way, Steve bought Pixar. And
so Steve was in way ahead of,like, what's happening with AI,
you know, with his Renderman andcomputer imaging and Pixar. So
it was an amazing part that herewas a guy who just wanted to

(39:50):
create excellence along the wayin design and engineering and
education and products. So forme, I knew not. Thing here, like
I was working, like Steve wasdealing with technology and I
was dealing with the twodimensional aspect of design,

(40:10):
but I had to get this design soperfect that it would meet the
criteria of both Steve and Paul.
What's

so interesting, too? I mean, Steve was a
visionary in marketing anddesign and color, and people
look at all these matte blackcars today. Next was a matte
black, cool as shit lookingcomputer on your screen.
Everyone said, you have thisblack thing. Does that really
work? You know, black computerwas, wasn't a thing back then,

(40:40):
but it was a very cool lookingcomputer, yeah,

Doug Evans (40:42):
and it functioned.
And literally, it's all part of,you know, the process. There
would be no apple today, hadSteve not have been fired, not
have started next, not have hadgone to India. Not have done,
you know, his chips of acid, nothave like walked around barefoot
drinking carrot juice and rawfood like this is all part of

(41:04):
the Divine process of of whereit is. The saddest part is that
Steve, you know, passed away at56 years old. He

believed too much in the raw product. No,
not, no,

Doug Evans (41:21):
no, no. He was exposed to toxic chemicals.

No, no. Instead of getting traditional medicine
that people said would have,yeah, matured him or made him
healthy, he said, I'm only goingwest, non western medicine. I'm
biting

Doug Evans (41:38):
my tongue on this part of the conversation because
the people who say, most peoplewho say, have no no one knows,
like, what's really going on,and I don't know, so I have no
opinion on that.

Okay, that's fair. One, one footnote to the
next story, then we're going tomove on. Next was failing and
was going to go out of business.
And what's so crazy. Yes, hestarted Apple. He gets fired. He
raises this money. He startsnext. Next raises this money.
Next wasn't going to make it.
You know, they're there. Theirprojections weren't.

Doug Evans (42:12):
I have, it's so interesting. I have a totally
different view of that. Okay, sowhat? What's your view on next?
I think that next was going toraise a fortune from like Larry
Ellison and other people in thevalley, and Apple was terrified,
and they made a preemptive moveto buy next before a someone

(42:35):
else would have bought it, orthey would have gotten the ample
funding. So it was not like itwas positioned as a position of
like weakness, and they weregoing to go off the rails. And I
think it was very strict,because $400 million acquisition
at the time, also, as you weresaying, was not a fire sale,

(42:58):
like it was a very strategicacquisition. And Steve had
already made the decision, youknow, at next to stop making
hardware. So originally, he wasmaking hardware, and then he
realized that he had this Unixkernel that could go anywhere,
and that was a threat. And therewere, you know, people like

(43:20):
Vinod Khosla and Scott McNealythat had sun and Java became
one. So no one really, like,it's so funny when I hear that,
because, like, that's whatpeople say. But having been
there at the time, like therewas a more optionality, because,
as you know, there's no shortageof money in the world, but Steve

(43:41):
knew that this would probably bethe best thing to get his
creation out to the most peoplefastest, so it was a very
humbling move to sell and to beon the sidelines along the way.

You mentioned Steve's fascination with raw
foods and raw juice. Tell usabout Mary strong and Duke
University, and then walk usthrough the organic Avenue
creation of that and whathappened in those years,
doubling sales and not makingany money

Doug Evans (44:16):
when you have really high standards and you don't
have a business background, youcan make decisions that are
seemingly irrational. So atorganic Avenue, everything that
we made was made with freshfruits, vegetables, seeds, nuts,
seaweed and sprouts. We used noadditives, no preservatives and

(44:41):
everything, had a maximum shelflife of a week. So my desire was
to have as many people consumingour products as possible, right?
So we were making a lot ofproducts, but if we it's hard to
predict when you have a. Dozenretail stores and a short shelf

(45:02):
life. Who's going to buy what onwhat day? And so if you make too
much product, you have a lot ofwaste. And if you don't make
enough product, you sell out.
And if you sell out and RandyKaplan comes in and his product
isn't on the shelf, then you'retraining Randy not to come in
the store. So these conflictingfactors resulted in a business

(45:26):
that at best was break even. AtBest 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 experiencehelped me today with, you know,

(45:50):
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 thevision to charge what air one

(46:12):
charges today, like you're goingto Air One? Have you been to air
one of

zero this morning for breakfast? Okay,
that best store. There's peoplewho hear about it, who come fly
from New York just to go toErewhon, that's how big of a
call fell in. And by the way,it's amazing. But we

Doug Evans (46:28):
didn't, we didn't know, like we were just trying
to price things at as the low aspossible so people could afford
to buy them. But we didn'trealize that that what went into
it, in the value of it. So thoselessons didn't apply to me until
year. But you look at air one,and air one is saying, you want

(46:51):
a premium, clean store to gointo. 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 torun an infrastructure where you
have valet parking, and you'rein premium real estate, and you

(47:14):
want workers that show up ontime and they're doing things
safely. And I that was beyond mycomprehension at the time, so

many entrepreneurs build these
businesses, and they think, allright, these private equity
firms all call. Today, they havebiz dev people who just call,
Hey, you want to sell yourbusiness? It's not just the 100
million dollar, billion dollarcompanies, it's the small
businesses. Now there's lots ofprivate equity firms calling,
and then they do these roll ups,and then what usually happens is
the founder can stay on for alittle bit, but a lot of them

(47:44):
get screwed. Yeah, tell us aboutyour experience with Wells north
and what happened. And what'syour advice to all the
entrepreneurs out therelistening who get calls from
private equity firms and say,Hey, I'm gonna give you some
cash and we'll let you keep someof it. But here's a good way to
cash out.

Doug Evans (48:02):
I think the important thing is to really
know what you want, like what'smotivating you, and to really be
honest with yourself, becausethese are all history repeats
itself. There's no surprises.
You know, in my own world, likehaving seen executives and
founders being fired. Like, Ideluded myself to think, like,

(48:25):
Oh, I'm different. Like, that'snot going to happen to me. And I
had a private equity guy who wasadvising 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 wayI'm too valuable. I know

(48:45):
everything, like I'm doingeverything. And he just laughed
right in my face. He justlaughed, and he's like, You have
no clue. And he was right, and Iwas wrong.

And what'd you do when you got fired? Yeah,
when, when, when you got kickedout? I started another company,
like, two weeks later, yeah, onething that I think we should
also talk about is this is agreat thing. Private equity firm
comes along, they pay you a tonof money, and then they mess it
up, and then you can buy it backfor pennies on the dollar. You

(49:23):
look at Quicken Loans. QuickenLoans at Intuit, bought the
company for, I don't know, somecrazy price, billions of
dollars. Dan Gilbert bought itback, I think, for $200 million
got to keep the queen. He soldhis mortgage company. Then they
got to keep the name Quicken,which obviously is a brand name.
And at some point that companywas worth I think it's the
second largest mortgage companyin the world. The first is

(49:46):
national wholesale mortgage.
Mattis BIA, who owns the PhoenixSuns, Detroiter go lines, by the
way, has a number one mortgagecompany in the United States,
the most valuable. But it'samazing how many entrepreneurs
sell out the. The private equityfirms. Oh, we know more than you
do. We got consultants who workat McKinsey, whatever, and they
fuck it up, and then you get tobuy back. Yeah.

Doug Evans (50:08):
I mean, it's all part of just the process. So I
think, and you go into anybusiness, any transaction, and
you have to go with your eyesopen,

let's switch gears to your next company. And
I want to read something from afamous interview you gave to
recode magazine at the time thishappened, and you essentially
got booted from your company.
You said, what happened is, Iknew too much about quality,
like at that point, I knew toomuch about quality. What did you

(50:40):
mean by that? Well,

Doug Evans (50:44):
it's, you know, in the current Zeitgeist today,
right with RFK coming in, theprotests against the major food
companies, the additives, thepreservatives. I knew that all
these additives, all thesepreservatives, all these

(51:06):
processes, were denaturing thefood, rendering it nutritionally
void, and all juice that was ina bottle was pasteurized. And
it's different when you'repasteurizing dairy right where
you're just killing themicrobes, then when you're
pasteurizing fresh juice, whichyou're killing the

(51:28):
phytonutrients and the vitamin Cand all of the elements are
shifting. So I wanted to do withwith I wanted to keep things
real and fresh, like I likedfresh. I'd been eating fresh,
and everyone wanted a shortcut.
So everyone is saying, Doug, weshould freeze things. We should

(51:50):
pasteurize things. We should putthem in cans and bottles. And I
was like, no, no, no. If you dothat, it's not going to be it's
not going to taste as good, andit won't be as nutritionally
viable. So that's the essence ofthat. That part of the
interview,

you said that you wanted to do what Steve Jobs
did, take a mainframe computer,make a personal computer doing
it for juicers, which is takinga mainframe juicer and making a
personal juicer. So tell usabout the impetus for juicero,
and what the idea was, and theyears you develop, and talk

(52:35):
about the prototypes as well,because we have to do the
research. And there's somethingpeople do not understand when
they see a consumer product. Howlong did you take a four year so
tell us about the impetus forthe idea, and then the
development of the productitself.

Doug Evans (52:47):
So all home juicers are based on a centrifuge, and
so they spin the juice around,and that high speed and the
single blade creates oxidationof the juice, which rapidly
causes it to perish and greenwill turn brown. In professional
juicing environments, it's a twostage process where they dice,

(53:11):
slice, chop, shred, the produce,but they're still keeping the
water molecules inside thecytoplasm, inside of the fiber,
and then they put intocheesecloth, and then they press
it. So commercial juicing, whichI was doing for 10 years prior,

(53:31):
we were using a juice press. Andso what does that look like? A
juice press is basically twolarge plates, either horizontal
or vertical, and you put theproduce into a a mesh bag, the
chopped produce, and then thepress slowly extracts the the

(53:52):
juice from the fiber. And that'sa juice press. So all commercial
juice presses work in that twostep process. So I had started
with a small juice press thatdid 12 quarts per hour, and then
I had a commercial juice pressthat did 15 gallons per hour,

(54:13):
then I bought six of those, andthen I bought a commercial press
that did 50 gallons per hour,and I bought six of those. And
then I bought a commercial juicepress, which was like a monster
the size of this room, that had24 consecutive plates that did
500 gallons an hour of juice.
And so that was like my visionof the mainframe, and that

(54:36):
created really great juice. Andso my thought was when I
realized that people who had ahome juicer were only using it
once or twice a month becausethey had to go buy their
produce, make the juice, cleanup the juicer all the waste.
They didn't always have theingredients, so they weren't

(54:58):
using it. Right, and that alljuice that was in a bottle was
pasteurized, and all the lifeforce, the enzymes, the vitamin
C, all these things, weredenatured so that it could have
long shelf life and not tastevery good. So I said, if I can
bifurcate the juicing process asI know it, and take fresh,

(55:20):
organic produce, slice it, chopit, keep it fresh, keep it raw,
keep it unpasteurized, put itinto a little pouch. And the
part of the patent was havingthe cheese cloth inside of an
outer carrier. So when you putthat pouch into the machine. It
didn't make a mess. All thejuice went into the glass. So we

(55:44):
built up a supply chain, and soI started off my first prototype
was literally an airbrushcompressor, filling up a hot
water bottle, pressing twocutting boards together to make
a little manual press. How big?
What's the size? We talkedcountertop size, like a little

(56:06):
bit bigger than an espressomachine. And that thing blew up
in my lap because I didn'tunderstand, caught fire. No, no,
blew up because of the psi ofthe 150 psi was more powerful
than the structure in the framethat I built to contain the
bladder that was inflating. Soif you just think it up the

(56:29):
pressure as you blow up aballoon 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 pressesmade out of bladders and moving
things in and out, and theyfilling the bladders with air or
with water. Turns out with airis the most dangerous, because

(56:50):
it can explode water or oil isless so I built prototypes, and
I wasn't a mechanical engineer,so I went and had to find
mechanical engineers weldingshops, and I built a prototype
that worked. And I was takingthis little prototype around,
and I'd take my my little coolerbag, and I still travel with the

(57:11):
cooler bag. I took my cooler bagwith these homemade packs of
fresh produce, and I would goshow them to people and make a
juice for them, and they woulddrink that juice, and it was
like nothing that they everexperienced in their whole life,
because it was fresh. And sopeople had fresh juice before,

(57:32):
but they never had fresh coldpressed. So the flavor profile I
have an interview, a video Icould show you with Chef Jean
George Michelin, star chef thatI was making juice for his
restaurants, and I said, Doesthis meet your quality standard?
Your excellence? Jean George,and he goes, Doug, you've

(57:56):
exceeded my quality standards.
You've exceeded my excellence.
So I built something that was sogood, and then the challenge was
Y Combinator scale, theunscalable. How do you scale
something where the originalprototypes, I was making, every
one of those packs of produce, Iwas building the machines

(58:19):
locally, by hand. How can youscale that up to meet the
numbers of George Foreman grillfor 100 million grills?

Right? So this is a part of a story that so
many people are going to beinterested in. How did you
approach VCs sell them on theidea, and how in the world did
you raise $120 million from someof the leading, most successful
firms in the world to create ajuicing machine? The whole

Doug Evans (58:49):
thing is like, I I'm not about the money. Today, I
wasn't about the money then. Iwas focused on the excellence on
the product. So when I would gothere and I would have them
experience the product.

Well, take us back. Yeah, hey, Google
Ventures. This is Doug Evans. Ihad a 10 store, juice company
that didn't make any money after

Doug Evans (59:16):
certain amount. I did have a nine figure, eight
figure exit with it. Okay, well,I had some credibility. Okay, we
were

cold calling Google Ventures in Kleiner
Perkins, yeah, do you pick upthe phone, or you showed up in
the lobby? Or No? No, I thinkyou have to network your way
through that. So yeah, and soexplain it. And then what's your
advice to everyone else whowants to get into Kleiner
Perkins?

Doug Evans (59:36):
You need to find someone who knows, someone who
either works there, or who'sbeen funded by there, or who
advises there, or who somehowdoes business there, like
there's there's where there's awill, there's a way. My original
path into Kleiner Perkins camethrough the universe, through a.

(01:00:00):
I'm passionate approach becauseI had, I was helping a young,
organic vegan fashion designerwho I met through Alicia
Silverstone said, Hey, Doug, I'mlooking at this company that's
doing vegan clothing. You know,could you meet with her? So I'm

(01:00:21):
meeting with her, and she'sshowing me her designs, and then
she tells me that she has ameeting coming up with Kleiner
Perkins. And I'm saying the backof my head, why is Kleiner
Perkins meeting with you? Andshe said, Oh, well, Kleiner
Perkins funded beyond meet, andBeyond Meat was started with a

(01:00:42):
guy that was at the HumaneSociety, and I know that guy, so
I got this in connection, and Isaid, What would you introduce
me? And similar to when youasked me to introduce you to
somebody, she was very open,saying, Sure. So she gives me
the the name and the contactperson of who she was at Kleiner

(01:01:03):
Perkins, I call up, and I said,Hey, I'm going to be in San
Francisco on Thursday, and I'dlove to meet with so and so I
was referred by so and so, wereyou really

Randall Kaplan (01:01:15):
going to be there? You just made it up. I'm
going to be there. Well, no, ifI had the meeting, I would be
there, right? But you didn'thave the meeting. Brilliant
idea. I've heard this so manytimes. Hey, I'm going to going
to be there that day. Will youbeen

Doug Evans (01:01:26):
in my mind? In my mind, just, just so, you know,
we were clear. I knew this washappening, so I was going to be
there. And so I was going to bethere. So they set up a 15
minute meeting, and the nightbefore I pack up my prototype, I
go to the airport. I have tocheck it. It's in a pelican box.

(01:01:49):
I land an SFO like 11 o'clock.
I'm waiting. I'm waiting, andthe thing never comes. And my
meeting this next morning onSand Hill Road at 830 in the
morning. So now I have to make adecision, do I go to them? So
first of all, TSA confiscated mymachine because they thought was
a bomb, so it never came. And Ihave to decide, do I postpone

(01:02:14):
the meeting, or do I go anyway,without a PowerPoint and without
my my demo. And so what do youthink I did?

You went, of course, never turned down a
meeting because it may nothappen again. That's

right. That's right.
So I went in the meeting, and Ihad to describe, you know what
the excellence that I had, novisuals, no visuals, no
presentation. And, you know, Iconnected, you know, with, with
the partner. There is

a lesson there that people fund founders, they
believe in and like 100%

well, they it's not that they believe in, they like,
like I was an expert on thiscategory of juice. I knew a lot
about juice, and I was able todescribe the mechanical
infrastructure. You know, mypartner at Kleiner Perkins is
the guy that funded Tony Fidelat Nest. Tony was on my show,

(01:03:20):
yeah, so he was

the first check in. So Tony, for those people
who don't know Tony, adventureof the iPad, of the

iPod, of the iPod, of the iPod. And then the
architect of the iPhone andearly General Magic, legendary
guy. And then co founded nestcomputer nest, Nest Labs, the
thermostat,

which was sold to Google for $4 billion yeah,

so. But when, when nest got funded, Randy Tony
Fidel went with a hockey puckand put it up on the wall and
said, This invention is going tosave energy. This is going to
use AI and machine learning tosee the habits to make sure that

(01:04:10):
the room is always optimized tothe right temperature. And we're
going to save trillions of oftons of CO two and lower
electric bills and do all this.
And he described it that it wasgoing to be like the iPhone and
iPod of thermostats, etc, andhow they'd be able to compete,

(01:04:31):
you know, with all of the bigthermostat companies. So he felt
that they would be able to dothat. And I didn't know that at
the time that that meeting wasbut that was the power of being
able to just like, I think thepoint of me telling that story,
there's another example that thefounder really has to know their

(01:04:53):
stuff like, it's not about like,how. The idea it's about
understanding what's involved onactually going from concept to
execution. And in the case ofTony Fidel, he obviously built
product and knew how to do that.

(01:05:15):
So it was low risk for me. Iknew how to make juice. The big
risk was, could I actually makehardware? Could I build a supply
chain? Could I build amanufacturing process to fill
millions of bags? And I have tosay, I'm so proud that juicero
shipped over 1 million packs ofproduce that the people who had

(01:05:41):
a juicero, forget about all thehaters, because there's going to
be a lot of haters. The peoplewho had the machine loved it and
used it 9.2 times a week,statistically accurate data of
1000s of people using thismachine 9.2 times a week and
loving it. Let's

back up, because I were, we got to go through the
VC process more. I mean, onething, if you read about it, and
this is, this is lore, and it'sa famous story that a juicer. I
mean, people think today ofNutribullet, right? I think
that's common. You can buy onefor 59 bucks. I think the fancy

(01:06:21):
ones, 149, or whatever, youraise $120 million for a juicing
machine. And a lot of peoplethought, How in the world, did
that ever happen? And so walk usthrough the Kleiner Perkins, did
they gave you a term sheet, andthen how did you scale? Because

(01:06:42):
one round was 14 million, thenyou had a $70 million round. And
we will definitely get into thenumbers in a little bit, because
I think the numbers tell a lotof the story. So what was the
business model? So

first of all, it was more than a juicer. It was a
whole ecosystem and a wholeplatform around delivering
fresh, raw nutrition, you know,at large scale. So the process
was, I built a prototype, and Iraised a $4 million seed round
where I went, and there werechecks in that seed round from

(01:07:17):
$25,000

to $500,000 checks. What was the valuation?

15 million, 16 million. Free

money, pre money. So for those people who
don't know what that means, youset a valuation for a company is
pie in the sky. They basicallybase it based on future
projections of what size of themarket and the profits will be
in the future. It's called thepre money valuation. Then you
raise money. Raise $4 million ifit's 14 pre money, four is 18,
post money, yeah,

some something close to that. And I had some really
great people, you know, in inthat round, like and, and I got
those people because I heard alot of no's. But I also when,
when someone experienced theproduct and they saw it, they
said we could see how this canbecome ubiquitous, how you could

(01:08:07):
sell 10s of millions of thethese juicers and hundreds of
millions of these packs, likethey just felt and saw that. So
we did that, and then the nextstage, and you're in the
hardware business, right? Orsupplying technology to
hardware. Hardware is hard, likewhen you want to build anything

(01:08:30):
hardware. And I had expertsaround me that mapped out the
path that people think like youmake a tool to make a piece of
hardware, and no one understandsthese are all abstract terms.
And I remember teaching a classat Harvard Business School, and
all of these lovely studentswere asking you, saying, Well,

(01:08:54):
why did it cost so much, and whydidn't you do this? And they
have no idea. Like, if you wantto make something that's custom
and that's pretty and thatfunctions, 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

(01:09:21):
know, half of them were custom,so there was no, you couldn't
just go to a McMaster catalog toget it, or the machine would
have been this big. So if youwant 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 gotto how much money we raised was

(01:09:44):
predicated on how much money wewould need in order to build out
the manufacturing process, thesupply chain, get the team, do
the quality, do the food safety,do the recipe development, do
all the administrative. Managingthe IP, doing the testing, like
doing the app, like, this was alot of moving pieces in order to

(01:10:08):
do this. So it wasn't like, hey,I want to just raise $100
million because it's a bignumber. It was like, How much
money do we need to execute onthis business

and to raise money. Everyone needs a
financial model, and you musthave had a very complicated
financial money I've gonethrough the numbers. So talk to
us about the two part model yougot, the machine and the
hardware that you buy, and thenyou have something called SaaS.
And talk about what SaaS meansSoftware as a Service, and why

(01:10:41):
VC firms like that so much. Andthen let's go through some of
the actual projections. Becauseno way on earth anyone can ever
raise $100 million withoutgiving some seriously
complicated financial model thatpeople believe in. Yeah.

Well, the thing is the the most important thing,
like really, if you look at TonyFidel, you look at Steve Jobs,
you look at any of theseentrepreneurs, they were focused
on a solving a business need,right? So there's a need that
was being solved, and they hadsomething that was innovative,

(01:11:17):
that could have a moat aroundit, that that was practical,
that could scale. And there's alot of you know nuance into
that, but basically, you know,if you want to raise venture
capital, right, you have to showsomething that could actually

(01:11:37):
scale to five years, $50 millionor greater in revenue, so an
investor can get a 10x 20x 100xreturn. So there's two ways. You
could just make numbers up, oryou could be very rational and
very practical, and having acommand of every dollar required

(01:12:01):
to acquire a customer, what theacquisition cost is, what the
value of the customer is, whatthe churn, what the cost of
manufacturing is, what thetooling cost is, what the
scaling cost, and then what isthe team in the organization
need to look like in order tohave it? And what kind of waste
will you have? What kind ofturnover? What's the taxes,

(01:12:24):
administration and rent? There'sso many insurance, there's so
many variables that you need tohave to build an organization.
But what gets funded in SiliconValley is something that has the
potential to become a multibillion dollar business.
Otherwise, you go to your richuncle, or you go Go Fund Me, or

(01:12:47):
you do a Kickstarter. But youknow, there's a degree of
discipline you have to have whenyou're raising venture capital,
and there's also a processthat's extremely hard, like for
outsiders. So I think one of theone of the reasons I experienced

(01:13:07):
so much love and so much vitriolis because I was an outsider,
and what I didn't know was howtreacherous it is in that world,
like I'm a raw vegan yogi, youknow, like I was on the product.
I had no idea of, like, what itwas like in that world, like it

(01:13:33):
was so beyond me, because I wasan outsider to it. So I came in
and it looked like I was doingreally well, but I didn't have
my guard up. I didn't understandthe complexity. Was so far from
me riding graffiti on subwaytrains, so far from me jumping

(01:13:53):
out of planes in the army, sofar from me making juice in a
lemonade stand in New York City,this was like a entirely
different world that wasincomprehensible. So I think,
for my first time, going into,you know, the into the cage, you
know, in MMA, like I think Idid, I think I did great. And

(01:14:16):
now I could step back and I candescribe it, and I see it and
like, the thing is, you can goback into the ring at any point
in time. Most people, when theyget their their head stuff
between their legs, along withtheir tail stuff down their

(01:14:38):
throat, they don't want to goback into the arena like they
want to kind of cower off. Butthe true entrepreneurs aren't
doing it for the money. They'renot doing it for what other
people think, like the ideacomes through them and they.

(01:14:59):
Have to do it. They just have todo it. So juicero, I had to do
and what I learned was thatentire process and journey was
$120 million education into DougEvans, the entrepreneur, the
Father, the founder, the CEO,the philanthropist. It was just

(01:15:24):
part of my journey, and it hadto happen.

If you're a founder and you're going to seek
money from somebody else, youbetter know every single
ingredient that goes into yourrevenue and your expenses. You
must know everything about thefinancial statements, the
financial model. You must knowthings like gross margin and
profits. I can't tell you, Doug,how many founders have been into

(01:15:50):
my office. And you go throughand you ask simple questions,
what's the average salary? Whatare you going to make? Which is
a fastball down the middle,right? You warm them up, or her
up, and you say, okay, you knowyou're gonna raise a million
dollar seed round. What are yougonna pay yourself? $200,000 All
right? Well, that meeting'sover, right? You're not gonna,
you know, we're not payingsomeone $200,000 but I can't

(01:16:11):
tell you how many people, even,who have revenues coming in
after a while. What were yourgap revenues last year? And you
know what they say? I have somany blank faces. They can't
tell me what their actual Theonly thing that matters to these
companies is cash in the bank,right? So if someone talks about
monthly recurring revenue andgrowth rates, and they talk
about the projections, I don'tsure that's helpful. I care

(01:16:35):
about how much cash do you havein the bank? Are you profitable?
What your margins are? And it'sshocking to me how many
entrepreneurs come into theoffice and cannot answer these
simple questions. If you'regonna raise money, you better
know the answer to every singlequestion. You are a fiduciary of
my capital. That's

right. Well, the point is like, how can they
possibly know when they've neverdone it before, and they haven't
surrounded themselves withpeople that have done it. So in
a way, the culture of SiliconValley, especially with the
incubators and the accelerators,it's really about getting

(01:17:20):
something out to market quickly,minimum viable product, and
seeing is it going to work, andthen figuring out things along
the way. And that model workssometimes, but most of the times
it doesn't work. And so there'sa lot of collateral damage.

(01:17:41):
There's a lot of people, youknow, 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, youknow, for those reasons. If

you're a founder and you do not know what you're
doing, and most founders do notknow what they're doing, your
first time founder, that's fine.
Everyone's a first time founderat some point, but it is
essential to your success to goout and find either a mentor,
someone who's been through itbefore, someone who can tell you
what to do and what not to do.
There's there's some cardinalsins when you're trying to raise

(01:18:17):
money that you don't do, andthere are some essentials that
you have to do to help yourselfget the funding, and it's
critical. Every entrepreneur outthere needs a mentor or needs to
go seek advice and fundraisingand only fundraising once they
launch, on how to keep going andhow to sustain and build a
profitable company. It doesn'thave a phone and call somebody

(01:18:37):
or

or find go out and socialize and meet people like
you can hike. I think todaypeople aren't answering their
phone, so you have to go outlike when you and I met, right?
I drove four hours to Vegas forthat event, right? Because a
friend introduced me and said,Hey, this a worthwhile thing,

(01:19:01):
and I met you, and I met a bunchof other people there, but that
wouldn't have happened had I nottaken the initiative to go meet
people in person.

We did the same thing. I mean, I was invited. We
went to this I wasn't even surewhat it was. Doug, I have a
friend. He invited us. Icouldn't tell if it was going to
be 10 people or 100 people, or Ithought we were going to 25
people dinner. Steve Wozniak wasthere, and some other people.
I'd met Steve at a conference.
He said he's going to do myshow, which I'm excited about,

(01:19:31):
but it's, it's you do meetpeople. And I wasn't going to
network. I was going to hang outwith Steve Wozniak because I
want to talk to Steve about myshow, and you end up hanging out
with me. It wasn't hanging outwith you, but I see this, you
know, cool guy at the end of theroom. We're standing there. Kind
of people are are wandering out,and we're both successful
people, right? I'm not outnetworking now just to meet

(01:19:54):
people, but I love meetingtalented. Smart, motivated,
similar minded people who wantto do good, want to build
companies. I find itexhilarating. Yeah, yeah,

but, but you have to be out there. I mean, the thing
is, you're at this apogee ofsuccess already, right? You've
had exits, you've had yourfunds, and you're out in the
world in that event, like peoplein two seconds, like, Oh, I did.
You said Randy Kaplan, I look, Igo the bathroom while I'm doing

(01:20:32):
my P mail. Randy Kaplan,founder, you know, venture
capitalists, etc. I was like,Oh, this is a meaningful guy.
I'm just, you know, making thatup, but, but the point is,

like, I do do that, by the way, so just, just
to, you know, but

in that context, you know, we never separated until
we separate, right? Like, I metyou and Madison, and then we
just hung out until we didn't.
But there were some veryimportant opportunities there
for other people, and otherpeople were busy literally
thinking how they could getanother drink before the bar
closed. How could they eat onemore shrimp from their thing, as

(01:21:09):
opposed to looking at thatplatform in that room to see how
could this help me become abetter entrepreneur, better,
founder, better, whatever. Let's

talk about marketing, which is important to
sell yourself, sell yourcompany, sell your product. And
you did. There's two things thatI want to talk about on the
marketing side that you did thatstruck out to me as I was
learning more about juicero andthe story and and the rise and
fall. And we'll talk about someof the lessons that that we

(01:21:44):
learned as well when thingsdon't really go our way. You
mentioned, as you were pitchingthe product, that the metal was
aircraft grade aluminum. Yes,that could lift two teslas.
That's right, was one thing thatyou said, and what I love better
than that was juice is so goodthat drinking it is like getting

(01:22:06):
kissed by the juice. Peopledrink it and all of a sudden
they want it. I mean, thissounds like you should put some
kind of a warning label on itfor the kids.

I mean, literally, the product was so good. Like,
literally, there was nothinglike it at any price available
anywhere in the world. Like,literally, it was that good. And
the problem was the people who,like attacked it, like, you

(01:22:38):
know, some you know, lost personwho need a lot of love. At
Bloomberg, who's gettingcompensated for her click bait,
is looking for some hook angleto bring somebody down. And in
the world, you know, prior to,you know, the term fake news and

(01:23:00):
calling things out like they'reable to get spiral dynamics and
get things to go so, you know.
But for me, it was always aboutthe product, and that's what you
want to you want as anentrepreneur, you want to create
a product that people love, thatpeople are obsessed over. And I

(01:23:20):
could tell you, like the peoplewho 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 neverexperienced it, because trying
to describe something that'sindescribable, so I tries to use
poetic words. But some people,you know, just never got it, and

(01:23:41):
it's easy to hate on. And thenyou have the pylon like which is
really just a sad thing aboutsociety. 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

(01:24:01):
know, I don't like beingassociated with this. I don't
even know what really happened,but I'm done, so

let's talk about it. Because you You skipped
ahead, and let's stay there fora second. Sure, there was a
Bloomberg piece that came outshortly after product was
launched, yes, and it said itwould basically ridicule the
machine where you're spending$700 initially, and then you
decrease the price of $400 thenyou buy these juice packs. And
that was part of the SaaS modelsoftware as a service revenue.

(01:24:32):
You had to keep buying the packsto use the machine. And the
thought there was that it's aone time purchase for the
machine, so you have todetermine if people really
willing to pay that for espressomachine today. By the way, the
one I bought was $1,200 in myhome, right? And it makes pretty
good out there every day. The

original one was 2500 so they went from about
2500 down to 100 and came backup for the premium value, right?

So this Bloomberg piece comes out, and
they basically said. Could,rather than spend this you could
squeeze the juice by hand almostas effectively. I think there
was a point two ounce differencebetween squeezing the juice by
hand than what the machine couldactually do itself. And that
ultimately was the beginning ofthe end. Yeah, and

Bloomberg. You know, the back story is Bloomberg
wanted to speak to the company,and the company, the new CEO
didn't want to speak toBloomberg. So then Bloomberg is
like looking for something likethis. These same reporters at
Bloomberg had done a hit pieceon a different food tech company
prior, so there was likeweariness around talking to

(01:25:40):
them, and then they found thefact that you could squeeze the
pack by hand would be likesaying you could pour hot water
over an espresso pod, and youdon't need your $1,200 machine.
And so Bloomberg came up withthis story, and then they went
down the cap table, and theycalled 100 different investors,

(01:26:03):
two investors who I don't knowwhether they invested $25,000 or
a million dollars, but Bloombergsaid to them, Hey, did you know
that juicero is a fraud? Doug isa charlatan. You don't need the
machine. You could squeeze thepack by hand. And we're writing

(01:26:26):
an expose around about thecompany. And they got a quote
from the investor that said, ifI knew that Doug was selling
bags of juice, we never wouldhave met with him. And obviously
they did meet with me. Theyopened up the packs. They went
to the lab. People diddiligence, but so they got that

(01:26:48):
quote. So then Bloomberg writesan article that says, juicero
feeling the squeeze investorsunhappy. And I swear on my life,
the reason why investors wereunhappy is because Bloomberg was
bullshitting to them for theclick bait, and then without any
challenging, without any factbased behind it, that article

(01:27:09):
got then picked up by otherpeople. No one did primary
information, no one did followthrough, and all of a sudden
it's so easy to hate on it'slike, they bring you up and then
they just hate you and bring youdown. I don't think anyone
thought that the company was sofragile that this one article,

(01:27:33):
you know, would would tear itdown. Like, there there are
people food companies that killpeople. Like, I'm proud. We
served a million servings. Noone was sick, right? I'm proud
that we raised the capital, webuilt the machine, and we sold
out of v1 sold out of v1 sothere were so many things to

(01:27:53):
celebrate, but it's such afragile part, because when
you're moving, you know, at 500miles an hour, the slightest
deviation from plan, can youknow cause you to go off the
rails? And for me as thefounder, My biggest mistake was
not knowing that I should havestayed in the in the horse seat

(01:28:20):
in the jockey seat that I shouldnot have given up and let a new
CEO come in.

So this guy, Jeff Dunn, comes in. He's the
president of Coca Cola NorthAmerica. I think he ran Campbell
Soup as well, a billion dollar,several billion dollar company
in getting funding from aventure capitalists, one of the
questions that I always askeveryone always asks is, Are you
the right person to leave thecompany forever, and if somebody

(01:28:50):
else comes along, who's betterthan you to take the company to
where it needs to go through anacquisition or public offering,
are you willing to give upcontrol the company to let
somebody more talented than you.
We recently had a guy cominginto the office, Doug. This guy
was one of the most offensivepeople I've ever met in my life.
He's he was arrogant, conceited,and it was clear to me he was

(01:29:12):
not the right person to lead anycompany, let alone his company.
I gave him some critique, someadvice. You don't know You don't
know enough. We're just meetingfor the first time. And I said
to him, I said, you have thekind of personality that is
irascible. People are not goingto work with you. You're not a
leader. You may be the idea, butyou're not going to lead this

(01:29:33):
company. And I said, You are notthe right person. And he said,
You don't know what you'retalking about, but I do know
what I'm talking about, andthat's a common question, yeah,
what happened?

I mean, what? What happened to me was the board,
you know, after I raised,because I raised all the
capital, like as as the founderand CEO, I raised all the
capital we had. Oh. Over $100million in the bank, and the
board had a can, someone on theboard had a connection to Jeff,
and Jeff came in and he's like,I love the product. I love you.

(01:30:13):
This is great. We can do things.
And I'm very open, loving,trusting, and I remember, you
know, every conversation, andthen, you know, when the board
members were like, Doug, thiswould be great for the business.
Like, if Jeff comes in, he knowsabout juice, he knows about
raising capital, he knows aboutscaling, he knows about

(01:30:35):
managing, you know, 1000s ofpeople. And you know, we have a
rocket ship, and you are doingtoo much. You're running sales,
marketing, product development,capital raising, like this would
just be great. You know, he youcan design the trains, he can
make them run on time. And I waslike, if you guys put up all

(01:30:56):
this money and you think this isthe 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

(01:31:19):
things like, I literallyorganized meetings with all of
my direct reports and all theteams, and made sure that
everyone knew that I was 100%supportive of bringing Jeff on
and doing, you know, all theparts and All the transition but
it's so different running a bigcorporation versus running a

(01:31:43):
startup that's

scrappy, it's huge. We had a startup in Los
Angeles where it was clear thefounders were not the right
person. They just didn't haveleadership qualities. It wasn't
going to work. I went out andfind someone at Accenture who
was on the Management Committee,which is a big deal, was on the
board, which is a big deal, whohad been there 40 years. And

(01:32:09):
there's a guy named GeorgeSheehan who had left Accenture
to run a company called Web van,and that was a huge hire. Made
the Wall Street Journal. Iremember I got this guy. I found
him. He was a friend of afriend. He comes to work at the
company. It was a disaster. Justbecause you're on the board of

(01:32:30):
directors or help run a billiondollar business does not mean
that you know how to build astartup with 10 people. You
don't have a culture. You're insome ivy tower at this huge
company. You haven't been on thefront lines, you're not cold
call, you're not dealing withcustomers. You can't deal with
young employees if you're 65years old and haven't built

(01:32:52):
teams like that. It's adifferent culture, different
people, different leadershipstyle, and it was a company
killer. It's amazing when youhire the wrong CEO, things can
go that. And, you know, there'sa 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 insuch a downward spiral, spiral,

(01:33:17):
at that point it's game over.

Yeah? I mean, it was very unfortunate, you know, the
whole thing, especially thepeople who work there, like I
worked so hard recruiting thisteam to build this product. And
I really feel like, aside fromthe customers that are
disappointed, they have theproduct, these people who came

(01:33:40):
from the greatest companies, youknow, in the valley and in the
world, to come build a productthat all of a sudden, like I
realized afterwards, when Istepped down, that it was the
beginning of the end for me, forthem, for the company and for
the clients, and that was thehard part. Like they work, and

(01:34:02):
I'm still so close with so manyyou know, of the key juicero
people, because we're, in a way,we're still in shock because the
product was so good, andespecially with the new
administration and everythingthat's happening now. Like the
juicer, we talk about cleaningredients. It's like you
picked up the pack of juicero.
It was like orange carrot,lemon, kale, spinach, like five

(01:34:26):
ingredients. We had one productthat was 100% pomegranate, no
additives, no preservatives. Itwas fresh pomegranate. And we
had to create a system to openup pomegranates and knock out
the individual arrows and thenput them in the pouch.

One of the things that every venture
capitalist looks for whenfunding any company in the
technology space is proprietarytechnology. What intellectual
property Do you have that servesas a moat to prevent competitors
from coming in? Yeah. I want totalk about the Patents You
filed, yeah, so we're going togo through these, and I think
the details really matter. Youfiled, 34 applications. Six were

(01:35:09):
granted. I'm just going to readthem right now, because I find
this incredibly fascinating andinteresting. Three of the
patents that you were grantedwere for pouches, d7 87 341, d7
89 799, d7 9361 the detailsmatter. And I think if you're an

(01:35:30):
entrepreneur, you should go lookup all these patents on the
USPTO website. You file twopatents for food press, d7 93
820, and d7 96 272, and then youfile the patent with this title,
juicing methods and apparatusesfor extracting juice from food
matter using juicer cartridges.
That patent issued was d4 93298, really patents were issued

(01:35:55):
for a juicer, for pouches in apress. How did you get those
patents issued, and howimportant was it for you to get
funding?

I think that the there was a lot of novel ideas
and engineering that went intothis, and that created a very
powerful mode,

pouch, a pouch, pouch. How do you patent a
pouch?

Well, the pouch was actually multiple layers. We
had, you know, if you were totake a normal plastic bag, zip
lock bag, and put produce in itand seal it, it becomes
anaerobic, because the produceis alive, so it's respiring and
needs to consume oxygen andrelease CO two. So we had to

(01:36:47):
work with creating a membranethat was like gore tex, that
allowed air to come in butliquid not to go out. And then
on the pouch, we had to make itso 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

(01:37:08):
demos, I would have to take ascissor and I'd cut open the
pouch, and a few drops wouldcome out, and then you'd put it
in the press, and then wecreated a the technical term was
frangible, that the force of thepress would cause just that one
part of the pouch to open, andthen we had a membrane inside

(01:37:33):
that would contain the fiber butallow the juice to go through.
So it was all of these thingsthat were constructed into this
pouch because the the the ideawas that a we needed to fill
these at scale. They needed towork if, if you, if you just
tried to do it manually, it justwouldn't work. And I didn't want

(01:37:55):
to do all this work so thatsomeone could easily copy it.
But I actually had the CEO ofNestle fly from Vive,
Switzerland to come to myoffice. I had the chairman of
Nespresso come to my officeseveral times, and he said they
had been working on trying tocrack this code for 10 years,

(01:38:20):
over a billion dollars funded,and they couldn't do it, and
they were so impressed with whatwe had done with seemingly a
fraction of the dollars thatthey had applied, because it was
really difficult to do anythingat scale. So we were on the way
to, you know, on the way forsuccess with this product. And

(01:38:46):
the IP was something to supportthis. So all these systems were
very important. And I I can tellyou, I would stay up at after
working a full, you know, eighthours on sales calls, four hours
on investor meetings and thenmanufacturing meetings with
China, with China and Asia, andthen I'd spend the remaining

(01:39:08):
time until my next call readingand working and editing on the
patents.

One of the things that founders do when we
ask them about proprietarytechnology, it often comes up,
oh, we have a patent. There's adifference. For founders coming
in explaining that you filed fora patent and a patent that's
been issued a grand patent. Sofor founders coming in, there's
a difference. They have to knowthe difference. Number two, they
also have to hire the rightattorney, a patent intellectual

(01:39:38):
property law firm. I see anothermistake having Doug all the
time, which is, you hire someonewho doesn't have the expertise,
because the lawyer is tooexpensive to do it, and they
just went with someone who's acorporate lawyer. Doesn't know
what they're doing. Hiring theright IP counsel is critical.
And the third thing is, a lot ofpeople don't understand when
they're have a proprietaryproduct or computer. Meeting

(01:40:00):
with someone like Google orMicrosoft or Apple who has
billions of dollars of resourcesat their potential that patent
lawsuits, when you go to trialare typically a minimum of ten
million an Akamai situation. Wehad proprietary technology.
There was a it was a reallynovel way, revolutionary way to

(01:40:21):
serve web traffic. Company,ultimately, I think today, still
serves 30% of the world's webtraffic. Another competitor
copied our patents, issuedpatents, and Akamai spent
somewhere between 200 and $400million in lawsuits to go to
trial. We won. It was appealedby the other company. We won

(01:40:44):
again. It's hugely expensive toget the IP and it doesn't mean
that you're done. It doesn'tmean that someone's not going to
come copy your product anyway.
Yeah,

but I think if you have something that's novel and
clear and you've got good claimson it, then it's important to do
and it was important part of theprocess. I don't think it was a
requisite for the financing,because it was very hard to do
what we were doing, and peoplewould only copy you if you were

(01:41:20):
very successful. And what wedid, from an IP perspective, is
we did make it meaningful forthe large companies that were
looking through our IP portfoliothat they were like, wow. And we
started to file those patentsvery, very early on, even before
we had the money to do that.

What was the biggest mistake you made in the
downfall of juicero, steppingdown the CEO? What was the
second biggest

mistake, probably attempting to grow too fast? And
is that the problem? Well, so,so let me, let me give an
example that we were runningthis plant that had 150
employees in the fresh produceoperation plant. And we were
running the plant six days aweek. Was 110,000 square feet.

(01:42:11):
Yeah, 100 and 110,000 squarefeet on four and a half acres in
right over here in commerce, LA,right near city of industry. And
had we gone slower and said,Okay, we're only going to
produce the packs one day aweek, so we'll have one day of

(01:42:32):
setup, one day of production,one day of cleanup, as opposed
to running those extra days thatwould have saved hundreds of
1000s of dollars a month inpayroll. Another kind of key
thing was wanting to scalefaster outside of, you know,

(01:42:54):
like LA. We could have juststayed in LA for a while. There
was so much business here, andinstead we we tried to go
national early, and that, youknow, required resources and
engineering and packaging anddistribution, where it would
have made more sense to staylocal sooner. And then the other

(01:43:20):
part was we had a subsequentdesign for lower cost machine.
And after we did v1 and we soldout of v1 we should have said,
Okay, that's it for this.
Instead, we were we did twoconcurrent engineering projects.
One was trying to work on V 1.5to cost, reduce what the v1

(01:43:44):
machine looked like. And thattook resources and time and
capital, as opposed to the leapfrog product, the v2 product.
And that that I think, was amistake, that that was

very costly, another common mistake that
entrepreneurs make. There's someprevailing mentality in Silicon
Valley that you have to raisethese massive rounds, $100
million rounds, and that's amethod of accomplishment. You've
done what all these othercompanies are doing. And I think
there's two problems with that,two big problems with that.
First, you feel compelled tospend the money. If it's in the

(01:44:21):
bank, you almost feel thepressure to spend the money.
There used to be this pressurefrom VC. Firms grow at all
speed. They don't care about theprofits. Now things have
tightened up a little bit as allthese huge, massive failures.
The second thing founders raisea ton of money don't realize is
you are materially shrinking thepossibility and probability of

(01:44:42):
you having successful exit andoutcome, because at some point
you've raised too much money.
You're raising $100 millionprobably gonna have a $500
million minimum acquisition, or$500 million minimum valuation.
And all these founders said, OhGod, I want to have a $2 billion
$3 billion valuation. At somepoint there's more room. Boom
for downside, decreasedvaluation, then upside
appreciation, and we've seen itso many times. I mean the WeWork

(01:45:05):
example, what do they have a $38billion valuation and then
ultimately had under a $1billion valuation? How can you
be the growth rate that you haveto have to sustain increasing
valuations. When you get to thebillions and billions and
billions of dollars, if you'renot going public, there's only a
handful of companies that canafford to buy you.

Yeah. Look, I think that, you know, there's so many.
It's such a complex, you know,part when you, when you start a
company, and what motivates you,and part of it is like you
really want to raise the capitalthat you need, and not more, not

(01:45:49):
less, right? And the need is avery subjective part, because
you can do a lot with a littleif you're creative and scrappy.
So you know the another, youknow you asked about another
mistake that I made was, if noone knew how much capital we
raised at juicero, no one wouldwrite about it. We know like no

(01:46:14):
one would care, right? So whathappened is like, why is
Bloomberg writing about like ajuice company, like a juicer
company that's not public,that's not going public anytime
soon. They only wrote about itbecause that hook of the 100
million dollars gave themsomething that they figured that

(01:46:34):
they could turn into click bait.
And I don't know this for afact, but I've heard that
Bloomberg incentivizes andmotivates their writing and
editorial staff, not only justbased on clicks and traffic and
volume, but if they can make astock go up or down, or they

(01:46:55):
could cause A change of controlin the company, like, that's
like their culture of how cutthroat is. And the funny thing
is about Bloomberg is, sincethis is a business, you know,
oriented podcast, Bloomberg issoftware as a service. The

(01:47:16):
Bloomberg terminal at $2,000 amonth, where 90% of the data
that's on the Bloomberg terminalis available for free on Yahoo
financing and Google and AI. Soyou talk about like, the the pot
calling the kettle black,Bloomberg is attacking someone

(01:47:37):
that someone should go likedoing expose a on Bloomberg,
where they even forced, like thesecretaries, to get the
Bloomberg terminal, even thoughthey'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

(01:47:58):
raised, no one would have cared.
We could have been happily onour way to just building
building a

park. What is it about the human condition that
you do well, and you raise allthis money, and people are
reading about it, and they'rejealous about it, and it's
amazing. When I learned is verydisappointing. Akamai goes
public, and there's a lot ofpeople who you think are in your
corner. People are not happy foryou. I remember someone who I

(01:48:30):
respect a lot, investment bank,or someone I like saying when
the stock decreased in valuefrom whatever was $345 a share
to $100 a share. And he said,Yeah, it was too much money for
you beforehand. And I'mthinking, What? What kind of
comment is that? And then whenthe stock goes from 340 $5 $345

(01:48:53):
a share to 49 cents a share, Ithink people were happy. People
were jealous. Oh, you didn'tdeserve it. You got lucky.
Whatever the case may be, whyaren't people happy for others
who do well,

I think it's very clear, because the way that
media works, both paid media,social media and the like, it's
creating more separation betweenthe haves and the have nots. And
when someone sees this like it'strying to that old adage of

(01:49:27):
trying to keep up with theJoneses, that the media creates
such an artificial perspectiveof what someone's life is like
that it creates self hate andself contempt in someone's own
life. So what happens is themedia is making people feel
inadequate. So if someone feelsinadequate, like I celebrate

(01:49:51):
your success, like I see yoursuccess. I see your beautiful
family, like I see the world andlike, I was like, Wow, that's
beautiful. I. Love that, and sothat's because, like, I'm
feeding my mind with informationthat's about love, that's about

(01:50:12):
contribution, that's aboutgenerosity, that's about the
animals, the environment, like,like in my world is I want
everyone to win like I'm comingfrom an abundant perspective.
And if people are living inscarcity and they're living in
lack, then everything is aboutnot enough. Not enough. You

(01:50:38):
know, what am I going to do?
Fear based? So that comment thatperson, you know, basically what
I would do like in thatinstance. And I do this all the
time, and I call people, I waslike, Can I ask you something
like, why? What? What motivatedyou to say that? Like, I want to
unpack, like, what wound theyhave that would cause them to

(01:50:59):
say that, because it's like,look, I mean, I want you, I want
you to know you're running thebank, you're doing this like, I
celebrate your success. Whatwould prompt you to think, like,
not celebrate my success. Maybemy evaluation was 20% higher
than market because I didsomething that you don't know
about. Maybe other people knowlike but let's get people to

(01:51:22):
support other people on theirmission and journey, and not be
jealous, not constrict. And Ithink the only way to do that is
literally by giving more love tothese people.

When this happened, I was walking through
an investment bank at the timewhere a good friend of mine
worked, who I've known most ofmy life I'm walking through, and
one of his colleagues said tome, so and so is never going to
catch up to you. And I look atthe guy thinking, What on earth

(01:52:01):
are you talking about? Yeah, itwas such a common even today, as
I as I try to unpack it, that'ssad to me. I wasn't in a
competition with anybody, myfriend, anybody else. I couldn't
be more happy or proud of myfriend. He's gone on to have a
massively successful career,massively I'm happy for him, but

(01:52:21):
such a weird cup of no one's incompetition with anybody else,
yeah, or if they are, theyshouldn't be. And I think it's,
it's something exactly what yousaid. 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 inyour life, and talk us through
the post juicero story andjourney. And we'll, we'll talk

(01:52:47):
about kind of how you ended upin a tent, essentially, yeah,
down in Palm Springs in themiddle of nowhere, yeah. So,

so it's an interesting thing. So the
juicero journey for me was anincredibly interesting chapter
in my life. It was like a fiveyear journey. And so I'm 58
years old, so it's like 10% ofmy life was there, and it was so

(01:53:21):
beautiful, like I learned somuch. I made great
relationships. I created things.
I my neuroplasticity of my brainexpanded incredible, because I
pushed in all levels. So Ilearned so much, so the juicero
experience did not have thedesired outcome, right? I won

(01:53:41):
one thing, right? Because Ireally felt like during COVID,
like juicer would have doneextremely well, and it would
still continue, but it was soway ahead of its time, and it
was just like, okay, so what didI learn from that? And I taught
my class at Harvard BusinessSchool with Len Schlesinger and

(01:54:02):
Matt Higgins, and I learned alot from there, and really being
vulnerable on my blind spots,and being humble. And so how I
ended up in the desert was I wasdoing during juicero, this New
York, LA, San Franciscotriangle. I called the a hole
triangle, and I just going fromone asshole to the next one to

(01:54:24):
the next one, and then, like,all of a sudden, I didn't have
to be anywhere. Like, as amatter of fact, not only did I
not have to be there, certainpeople, when you're on the up
and up, they want to hang outwith you. They invite you to
things, and then all of asudden, you become radioactive.

I've been there, right? 49 cents, yeah. So you
become radio

and so people don't want to talk to you. You're not
invited to stuff. So I said Idon't need to work, at least not
right now. I don't need to workwhat I want to. Do is I really
want to experience like whathappened. I want to learn from
this. I want to journal. I wantto be in nature. I don't want

(01:55:11):
TVs. I don't want people. Idon't want to, you know, I don't
want to chase unavailable, youknow, women. I want to just be
so I went to Burning Man, and inBurning Man, I saw the desert,
and I saw dune and I saw thedesert, and like, whoa, like you
could live in the desert. Andthen I read the alchemist, you

(01:55:34):
know, where he's on the Oasis,and with Wells and palm trees.
And I was like, I think I'mgonna find land with hot springs
on an oasis in the desert. So ina typical entrepreneurial way, I
hire geologists, I hire welldrillers, I hire realtors, and I

(01:55:57):
find Wonder Valley hot springsnear Joshua Tree. And I buy a
little five acre lot, you know,that had RAM shackled cabins,
but it had a geothermal mineralwell that the water was coming
out of the ground 135 degreesFahrenheit. So beautiful hot

(01:56:18):
springs. I go to Bali to buyfurniture, and I discover these
5000 pound monolithic bouldersmade out of granite, onyx or
marble. So I buy a container ofsix of these, and I ship over
58,000 pounds. How much did thatcost? I mean, you know, relative

(01:56:42):
to you just not a not a lot ofmoney, 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 eventhink about the money. I just

(01:57:04):
thought these things are sobeautiful. And my vision was I
wanted to be able to soak inthis in this tub, under a
billion stars on a dark sky, andjust see the universe and see
galaxies and see the Milky Wayand see sunrises and moon

(01:57:26):
rising. And so that was myvision. So I I bought the tubs,
I found the hot springs, Ifigured out the hydrofluidics. I
pumped it up, and then, likethere was no place for me to
live, so I took my Burning Manyurt, which was a 13 foot
diameter, 176 foot yurt that wasa wooden lattice wrapped with an

(01:57:51):
LA, recycled la billboard overthe lattice that I felt like a
sail. You know, when the windwould blow that it was going to
blow away. But so I moved intothere, and then I got a
mattress, and I was so contentno running water in the in the

(01:58:13):
yurt. And so I'm living there,and everything is beautiful,
except for one thing, that notonly was I in an environmental
desert, I was in a food desert.
And there was no air one, noWhole Foods, no farmers markets,
no restaurants, like there wasone bar in the entire 100 square

(01:58:33):
miles of Wonder Valley. And soI'm now like eating out of my
Yeti like cooler filled withgourmet, gourmet raw food from
air one and produce from theSanta Monica farmers market. And
I'm eating it. And as the coolerwas going down, my cortisol

(01:58:56):
levels were going up because Iwas wondering, What am I going
to do for food? And then, whilestaring at the stars, I the
universe like whispered in myear and said, Doug, you know how
to sprout, because I'd beensprouting for 25 years. Sprouts

(01:59:19):
were part of my life. They werepart of my diet, but they were
always a garnish or a side dish,because I had this abundance of
other food options. So beforeliving in a food desert, I lived
in LA and San Francisco and NewYork, and that's a food swamp.
There's more food that you couldpossibly eat. So when I got the

(01:59:41):
insight and the download fromthe universe, which I ended up
taking the download, and I wrotethe book, right, the sprout
book, I wrote the book. Andthere were three simple tenants
in here. Was number one, sproutsare. Are vegetables. They're not
just a garnish. They are fullvegetables. Number two, sprouts

(02:00:04):
are vitamins and minerals. Andnumber three, sprouts are
medicine like there's more than2000 peer reviewed published
studies on sulforaphane, themedicinal compound that's found
in cruciferous vegetables, butat the highest degree in
broccoli sprouts. So, so I sawthat, and I was like, wow, how

(02:00:28):
come no one knows about this? I

never would. I mean, I've told people about
you. What is Doug doing now,sprout? What like the sprouts
you eat? Yeah, nobody eatssprouts, but you're changing
that. I literally you inventedsprouting as a verb. I

have no idea. I have no idea. What I will tell you
is, in anticipation of thispodcast, I was looking for an
analog of what I could comparesprouts to. And one was like,
oh, like cotton candy. You takea little sugar, you go to the

(02:01:11):
fair, and you get a big LucilleBall, you know, ball of cotton,
but that's all poisonous, andit's manufactured, right?
Another analog I was thinking ofis like a stick. You want to
move a big boulder. You need astick. It doesn't do anything.
You add a fulcrum, and all of asudden you have leverage, and

(02:01:33):
you can move something bigger,but you're not really creating
anything. And you look at allthe juicers, blenders, toasters,
dishwashers, they're allperforming something, but
they're not making something. Sowhat makes sprouting so magical
is you take, you take onequarter cup of seeds. These are

(02:01:56):
broccoli seeds, one quarter cupof seeds, and you put them into
the jar, and in five days, youliterally fill the entire jar.
So you go from a quarter cup tosix cups. So this is
exponential, and thesevegetables that are in here are

(02:02:20):
20 to 100 times more nutrientdense than mature vegetables
than you can buy in the in thesupermarket or the farmers
market. And the average leaf oflettuce in the United States has
traveled 2000 miles. This hastraveled two feet. So this is so

(02:02:43):
much fresher, so much morenutritious, and so much cheaper,
because you're taking seeds, andthe only outside input that
you're adding to this is you'readding water, and the seeds are
a complete living organism in adormant state. And when you add

(02:03:05):
the water, you trigger agermination process. And I came
to the perfect analogy. It'slike a caterpillar turning into
a butterfly, which not only isbeautiful, but can fly like it
goes from this little thing intothis magnificent thing with the

(02:03:29):
power of flight and beauty. Andso the reason why people are not
sprouting, and they don't knowabout sprouting, they're not
eating sprouts, although thesprout book, you know, is now in
the 10th edition, and it's nowtranslated into Spanish

(02:03:50):
language, and we're working onJapanese next. Love it. The
reason why sprouts no one knowsabout sprouts. John Mackey, who
I introduced you to, the founderof Whole Foods, says sprouts are
a shit business. And they said,What do you mean, John? He goes
short shelf life. Soundfamiliar? Right? To Sarah

(02:04:14):
organic Avenue refrigeratedtransportation, because
everything is fresh shipping,mostly water weight and low
margin. So there are no nationalor international sprouting
companies like it's just a smallniche business, except in Japan,

(02:04:36):
where there's a billion dollarbusiness focused on broccoli
sprouts. Because in Japan, youknow, their levels of cancer,
levels of heart disease, they'retuned in that 20,000 little
retailers across Japan, like 711you can go in and buy broccoli

(02:04:57):
sprouts there

explain to people the can. Cancer Research
about broccoli spouts.

So it's very well known that cruciferous
vegetables, broccoli, Clover,kale, bok choy, wasabi, have
anti cancer properties to them.
They have glucosinolates inthem, it turns out that broccoli
had the most of this anti cancercompound called sulforaphane.

(02:05:25):
Broccoli had the most of it. Andin the research they were doing
at Johns Hopkins University thatthey were researching the all
the vegetables to see which hadthe most of the anti cancer
compounds, broccoli had themost. But you couldn't grow
broccoli 365, days a year. Sothey were grappling with their

(02:05:50):
research, so they had seeds, sothey they grew broccoli sprouts
just for doing the research. Andthat's how broccoli sprouts
became a thing, right, 25 yearsago, and it turns out that every
seed has a finite amount of thiscompound, glucoraphanin, the

(02:06:11):
precursor to sulforaphane. Soevery seed has a finite amount.
And as the seed turns into asprout and a micro green and
garden vegetable, the amount ofthe sulforaphane gets diluted,
so the sprout has 20 to 100times the nutrient density and

(02:06:32):
the levels of sulforaphane ofthe mature vegetable. So what
people were thinking was atrivial little garnish or side
dish, turns out to be the stemcells of the plant, like this is
the golden ticket, right here inthe sprouts. And so I living in

(02:06:54):
my tent with water from my wellthat I figured out how to
desalinate. I start to live onsprouts. So the next 30 days,
I'm living exclusively onsprouts, nothing else, nothing
else, nothing else. You're sureyou're taking this and you're
just eating the spouts, eatingit. Can we open it, of course.

(02:07:16):
So you're we want to do this atsome point during the show, so
I'm gonna, yeah, not gonna dothat. So I think one of the
issue Doug with sprouts ispeople look at this and say,
God, that looks gnarly. And Ithink another issue is they
think about it as parsley.
Because when you told me and wewere talking about

sprouts, like I said, I walked away thinking,
like, this guy's nuts, likehe's, yeah, he's created a
company. People are not proudI'm sprouts. No, I mean, we're
going to talk about nuts in asecond. I mean, actual nuts, and
we're gonna talk about theenvironmental benefits of
sprouts as well, which I thinkis huge. But I thought, gosh,
you know, how can you build acompany on this? And then I went

(02:07:59):
back and I tasted some,I thought it doesn't have a lot
of taste. I still don't think ithas a lot of taste. But a lot of
people eat a lot of differentfoods, even though it may not
taste like cotton candy, becauseit's good for you. Yeah, kale

(02:08:20):
itself, I think tastes likeshit. Randy. These,

these questions, I feel like they're softball
questions, but I will say, well,

they're softball questions. I mean, you're an
expert on this, right, right?
And so I view myself as averageconsumer, right, right? I've
raised this sprout company to 25friends, and everyone looks at
me the same way that I did forlike, Huh? I say, Yeah, you
should really check it out. Myfriend Ricky Horowitz is a very
smart guy. I told him I wasmeeting you. What's his
background? I told him aboutyour kit. You just sent me this

(02:08:52):
amazing sprouting kit. Everyoneshould go out and buy one on the
sprouting company.com, it'scool. 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'ssomething that I'm going to do,
yeah, but I understand too. Youknow, as you know, I interviewed

(02:09:13):
Tony Robbins the day beforeyesterday, friend of yours.
Thank you for that. You madethat happen. He loves sprouts.
He does. And, you know, he madesome joke, yeah, dog is
sprouting all the time. And hesaid it doesn't hurt to put some
stuff on it make it taste alittle better.

Yeah. So, so I am a little bit of an extremist, just
a little bit, but the point thatI want to make is that sprouts
are vegetables. And it's wellknown that vegetables are good
for you, right? So these aresimple, single ingredients, yes.
So in my world, you can replacenormal vegetables with sprouts

(02:09:55):
that you grow on your own. Sothere's financial advantages to.
That there are freshnessadvantages to that, and now
there's nutritional advantagesto that. So you can add whatever
dressing you would normally useon a salad, you can add to the
sprouts. So whether it's tahinidressing, ranch dressing,

(02:10:16):
balsamic, oil and vinegar,whatever you want to add to it,
you can add to the sprouts. Soone insight that I had was,
instead of adding sprouts to asalad, was making salads out of
sprouts. So that was one. Thenext one, which was kind of
incomprehensible, but it'sproving to be huge, was imagine

(02:10:41):
replacing white rice, which ishigh glycemic, with sprouts, and
you're making sushi and wrapsand mixing it with beans with
sprouts. It's a whole differentlevel. You're increasing the
nutrition by 1000 fold if youreplace sprouts rice with

(02:11:02):
sprouts. Now, when we talk aboutthe power of sprouting for a
second, lentils are the stapleof the plant based diet around
the world, people are eatinglentils everywhere. When you
sprout a lentil, you increasethe vitamin C by 300% you

(02:11:22):
quadruple the antioxidantlevels, and you're eating
something that's enzymaticallyalive, so it has living enzymes
which make it bio available foryour nutrition, for The
consumption. So and you'regetting soluble and insoluble
fiber and in this tender form.
So another thing that you coulddo, and you know, we could do

(02:11:47):
this as a separate thing, thisis what's happening when you
bring Madison and the girls overto my house. We're going to eat
sprouts as the salad, as theappetizer, as the entree and as
the dessert. So you're going toget a seven course sprout meal
in every aspect. But when we dolike the main course with

(02:12:10):
sprouts, they're going toreplace the pasta, but my wife
will make a beautiful marinaradressing with sun dried tomato
and fresh tomato and garlic andlemon. And she's just going to
pour it over the spouts and mixit, and all of a sudden you're
going to have something thatwill have texture, it'll have

(02:12:31):
flavor, it'll have aroma, and itwill feed your microbiome. So
people don't understand themicrobiome. Your gut bacteria
contains 38 trillion non humanmicro organisms, yeast, fungus,
mold, parasites living in yourgut. And if you feed them

(02:12:55):
healthy things, you get healthif you put in refined food,
processed food, you know,refined carbohydrates,
artificial flavors, glyphosatepesticides, you basically get
chronically ill, like you causedyour whole immune system. You
caused your digestive system tobasically malfunction, which is

(02:13:18):
why in the United States, wehave 266 million people are
overweight or obese, and Iguarantee they're not eating
sprouts, right? You have 100million people that are diabetic
or pre diabetic, and those thatare eating sprouts are able to

(02:13:40):
regulate their insulin levelsand reverse their type two
diabetes. So if you think aboutwhat's happening right now with
air quality right that broccolisprouts and just everyone here,
they're all on AI. You got youryour your Claude, you got your

(02:14:01):
Gemini. You've got your chat, G,P, T, talk about sulforaphane
and detoxification of benzeneand air pollutants from the
lungs by the consumption ofbroccoli sprouts. So whether you
got the firefighters or you'vegot people living so that's why
in Japan, they're consumingbroccoli sprouts every day.

(02:14:23):
There's more than 2000 peerreviewed published studies on
sulforaphane alone in there. Andnow we have another epidemic
going on on the obesity whereeveryone and now, I guess we're
in LA, so people aren't evenobese that want to be on ozempic
and the the weight loss drugsbecause they want to lose 15 or

(02:14:46):
20 pounds for a photo shoot fora wedding or bachelorette party.
But the fact is, they'replanning on 47% of the
population being on weight lossdrugs for the. Rest of their
life, because as soon as theyget off the weight loss drugs,
they will gain the weight back.
And my hallucination is, ifthey're eating the sprouts,

(02:15:11):
sprouts are the number oneweight loss food in the world,
because they are high fiber, lowcalorie, low fat, and you can
grow them. So normally you gointo air one, and you would
like, if we had a bowl and wepour this out, this would be an
enormous bowl. These were, like,expand out if you went to air

(02:15:31):
one, this would be 35 to $45worth of sprouts, and you could
grow them for like, $4 worth ofseeds and a little water in your
kitchen, in your kitchen. So Iwas living with six jars in one
cubic foot, six jars, and I wasgenerating 1000s of calories a

(02:15:55):
day of the freshest, mostnutrient dense food on the
planet. Okay,

so let's talk about the sprouting company,
company itself. And I want totalk about the product now,
because we just talked about,you can grow this in your house.
We're not talking about a roomof sprouts. We're talking about
what you sent me was a sproutingkit. It looked to be about a
foot, foot and

a half well inside when you put it, when you put it
together, you know, it literallytakes up, you know, five and a
half inches on your countertop.
Like, that's it.

And then how long does it take once you put
the sprouting seeds in thesprout container, how long does
it take to get

it'll go from this to this in five days.

And how long is that container? How many meals
is this going to give you? Andhow long is that going to take?
I one of my problems is when Ieat Doug is it takes a while for
my stomach to fill up, yeah, andso it to feel full, so I'm just
chowing down. And then I chowdown too much. I said, oh god.
Why did I eat all that? Yeah,how much of this container is it

(02:17:03):
going to take to make me full

well? You know, you're a beast, right? And our
mutual friend Mike Posner, hewill eat a whole jar, as a whole
jar. He'll put that into a bowl.
He'll make a dressing withtahini and avocado. And I'll put
in some other gadgets, you know,other things into it, and
they'll eat the whole jar. Andhe has six to eight jars growing

(02:17:27):
on

his countertop.
And every time he's jacked, bythe way, I mean, he looks
amazing, yeah.

I mean, he walked across the country. He summited
Mount Everest. He did a 50k withwith Jesse Itzler, I was feeding
him sprouts on the track. I wasjust talking to the Running Man
team, because, like he notedthere, I was literally gave out
600 servings of sprouts, like Iwas practically an obstacle on
the track as people wererunning, as opposed to having,

(02:17:56):
like, the gels, I'm giving themsprouts.

Okay, so tell me, how much is this gonna fill
me up? Like? How much will ittake for this to make me have a
dinner, for

example? So if you understand how your reptilian
mind works, programmed forscarcity, that you reason why
you eat is because you don'tknow where your next meal is
coming from, right? And if youadd salt and oil and sweet
things to the food in the formof dressings and sauces or

(02:18:32):
refined food, you will tend tojust eat, eat, eat.

No, but I do know where my next meal is
coming from. Thankfully, I havethe money where most people
don't. Again, we're going totalk about this. You know,
there's something you don'tovereat. Oh, no, I do, but I
know where my next meal iscoming from. But

at the moment when you're over eating, yeah, you're
you forget that where your nextmeal is coming from. I don't
think about I feel you're thereand you're eating, and all of a
sudden, you trip into yourreptilian brain that says, oh,
there's food here. I better eatthis right now, because if you
really knew where your meal wascoming from, you could have a

(02:19:13):
little dose. You could chew it,eat it, and then go onward. But
what happens is, it's so easy totrick your brain and get the
dopamine release to say, hey,this tastes good. It feels good.
I'm going to eat and I'm goingto eat and I'm going to eat. And
if someone wants to like, you'rein good shape, so I don't know

(02:19:37):
what quality of food you'reeating, terrible, right? So
you're eating, but you're notovereating, and you're
exercising and you're aware ofwhat you're eating, but if you
were authentically hungry, likeI was hungry, I'm living in the
desert. There's no other food.
I'm not going to go to 711 I'mnot going to eat gas station
food. I'm going to eat this.

(02:19:59):
I'm. Like it all depends onwhere you are. So if you were
like me, and there's no otherfood and you want to survive,
sprouts look like a Michelinstar meal, right? If you have
other choices and you're livinghere like you know, Mike Posner
is a rock star, right? He couldeat anything, anywhere he went

(02:20:20):
to to lunch at sweet green here,and I swear he brought his own
sprouts in a Tupperware, andhe's sitting at the restaurant
because he knows that these arefresher and more nutritious, and
he wants to control everythingthat that he's eating. So when I
look at the sprouting componentof this that a revelation that I

(02:20:44):
had was that sprouts containevery single amino acid to form
complete protein. Sproutscontain micronutrients,
phytonutrients, polyphenols,bioflavonoids, antioxidants,
soluble, insoluble fiber. Sothis is magical food. You can

(02:21:04):
decide if you want to eat anysprouts at all, or how much
sprouts you want to eat. Now, Isaw that you had Gary V you
know, on on your podcast, Mikeand I met with Gary in New York
at Vayner Media. And turns out,Gary is a foremost expert on

(02:21:25):
sprouts, and he went to afacility near Tony's in West
Palm Beach called Hippocrates,where they treat major chronic
illness with sprouts. So peopleare going there and they're
feeding them sprouts for $500 aday to go eat sprouts. So the

(02:21:46):
fact that affluent people caneat sprouts, and poor people can
eat spouts, and foreign peopleand other cultures, all of a
sudden, sprouts have not been onthe map because there hasn't
been any money in sprouts. So myinsight was saying, Hey, I am

(02:22:08):
not going to go through thejuicero Organic Avenue
experience again. I want fresh.
I want raw, but I don't want tobe in the business of fresh and
sprouts turned out to be likethe magic secret, because seeds
are shelf stable. Like in mybook, I found seeds that were

(02:22:33):
1200 years old that stillgerminate. So seeds have a
protective coating around them,and when you soak them in water
for the five hours or the eighthours, you remove the lectins,
you remove the phytic acid, youremove the enzyme inhibitors,
and you trigger a germinationprocess that causes that seed to

(02:22:57):
sprout into the most nutritiousfood on the planet, and you can
watch it happen in front of youreyes.

It's fun, it's fun,

it's practically free, and it is more nutritious
than anything you could buyanywhere in the world,

and it's environmentally friendly. Let's
go through some statistics onthat Sure. So let's talk about
nuts as well. Nuts have a lot ofnutrients in nuts. I want to
compare nuts for a second tosprouts today. One pound of
almonds, you need 1900 gallonsof water. Cashews, one pound,
1700 gallons of water per pound,pistachios, 1100 gallons of

(02:23:43):
water per pound. Walnuts, 1100peanuts, only 300 to 500
gallons. I mean, we're talkingabout gallons for meat. When we
talk about me, you're talkingabout feeding the crops and
feeding the cattle, beef, 1800to 2500, gallons water per pound
chicken, 500 to 750 sprouts, onegallon of water per pound. Yeah,

per pound per serving. It's just unbelievable.
Tell us

about your kit, and then tell us what it costs.
And then how much does it costto get a jar like to grow the
sprouts like this, they'rebuying the seeds from you

as well. Yeah, they're buying, they're buying
the seeds. So what does it allcost? So the spouter itself is
6999

that's the one.
Yeah, it comes

with the jar, with the filter, with with the
collar, stainless steel filter,the stand, and the drip tray,
and anything we you know,there's a big discussion today
about micro plastics and thelike, right? Anything that
touches the sprouts or the seedsin here, once they're activated,

(02:24:50):
is glass or stainless steel,very important part. And so the
the sprouter is 6999 and. Andbags of seeds range from $13 to
$50 so you can get a small bagof seeds for like $13 and a big
bag of the ultra premium. Theseare the high glucoraphanin top

(02:25:14):
shelf seeds. These were theseeds that I researched, that
they were using for the making,basically supplements, and so I
found them for the supplementsthat had the highest level of
sulforaphane. So if someonewanted to treat some sort of
chronic illness and theycouldn't eat a lot, but they
wanted the high concentrationsof the medicine properties I got

those, let's say they're not going full stem,
because I think it's gonna, Ithink it's gonna be hard to
convince people to sprout likeyou all meals. Let's assume
people are going to eat forlunch. Let's assume so I, I'm,
I'm going to try to sprout onebecause No, you're going to
sprout, and there's no try. I'mgoing to, I'm going to sprout,

(02:26:00):
and I'm going to do whatever Ican to keep eating sprouts,
because I've learned through youas a great friend and through
the research, this is going tobe great for me. And I'm going
to start with the broccolisprouts. Number I love broccoli.
And number two, it seems likethe most healthy kind of sprout,
given the anti cancer agents inhere, how many meals am I going

(02:26:21):
to be able to generate from this$50 bag?

Yeah, so I would say I wouldn't think in terms of
meals. I think in terms ofservings, servings, right? And
us, dietary guidelinesrecommends today between four
and 13 servings of fruits andvegetables every day. So one bag
of this will give you easily, 48servings. One one pound of the

(02:26:52):
seeds will give you 48 servingsof the sprouts. So

we're doing the math $50 so under $1 serving, on
$1 and

if you were to buy them, you know, like the ones
you bought, you know, in the inthe clamshell, $5 a serving. So
you're basically saving 80% ofthe of the cost of buying the
retail, plus you're not usingthe extra plastic, plus you're
getting them on demand, andthey're convenient and they're
fresher. And

is the business model to keep buying the seeds
from you. It's kind of similarto the juicero model, yeah.

So we have subscription seeds, but also
there's many things that I diddifferent on here with juicero.
One is we created our our app atjuicero was a closed app. Our
app at the sprouting company isopen app, free whether you buy
our seeds or buy our sprout oryou can benefit from the
recipes, from the alerts, fromthe guidelines and the

(02:27:48):
scheduler. So it's a free app,just public service. I want
everyone to sprout. The secondthing is, you can buy the
sprouter, and if you want to buyseeds elsewhere, they work in
there. So it's just open.
There's no, you know, there's nodigital piracy preventing you
from putting things in. Thereason why probably 95% of our
people buy our seeds is becausethey're priced competitively,

(02:28:11):
and our seeds are tested forpathogens. They're tested for
high germination rate, andthey're tested for glyphosate.
So literally, the endocrinedisruptor, the number one used
pesticide in Roundup, isglyphosate, and there's
literally hundreds of billionsof dollars of lawsuit for that.

(02:28:33):
So I wanted to make sure thathere people are eating this to
be healthy, I wanted to makesure that there's no residue of
the toxic pesticides

on them, so your seeds are different than the
seeds that different consumerscould buy elsewhere. Sprouting
seeds similar to danger coffeehas taken out a lot of the mold,
the mold and different things asit is to coffee.

Yeah. So this is just like this. Everything
that's being sourced here isdesigned for sprouting top
shelf, because this is what Iwanted to have myself. So I was
sourcing. And really this is amission based business, because
I think that sprouts create foodequality, food justice, and can

(02:29:23):
be the most effective defenseagainst processed food is
growing your own food, becausekids will love to grow this like
I love seven year olds growingtheir own sprout.

I'm excited for my kids. I showed them the kit,
and by the way, I think that'sgenius. You get the kids
sprouting early. It's like theycome home from second grade, you
know, you put the seed in thereand they grow something. I think
it's genius, yeah.

I mean, I have to say, I'm very proud of this, you
know, without showing flesh, Ihave over 240,000 followers on
Tiktok with over. Over 100million views of my content, and
it's predominantly young people.
Is

this device patented?

There's a design patent on it, and there's some
unique parts of this that dohave a patent pending on it. But
um, my next gen, my v2 sprouter,has an issued us utility patent
with 23 claims on it, and it'spen it's issued in the US. So

(02:30:34):
it's an issued US Patent, andit's pending in Hong Kong,
Europe, EU, UK, and South Korea.
So those are the markets that Iwas most concerned with. In
Japan,

I think everyone listening to this show now is
convinced of the benefits ofsprouts. They didn't know about
it. I think they're going tolearn about it. I hope a lot of
people go out and buy theproduct. I'm excited to try it
and to sprout. I want to go backto the business now of raising
funding after you've had afailure, yeah, and I want to

(02:31:10):
talk about things that areunfair. So there was criticism
of you for posting photos atBurning Man, and people didn't
like a founder posting photos ofBurning Man. Burning Man is this
very interesting thing that alot of people don't understand,
yes, including me, when I firstheard about it. And I'll just

(02:31:34):
tell you a story, a couplestories. One in particular, we
have a friend who's a wellrespected person in the media
who is in a committedrelationship and will go to
Burning Man, and we'll have sexwith seven other guys. And

(02:31:54):
that's that's what happensthere. We have another friend I
remember going to this selfselected high octane group of
founders and entrepreneurs. Itwas his dinner. There were 12 of
us there, and this amazing womansitting next to me said, Yeah,
I'm going to Burning Man. I justfucked 10 guys in two days, and

(02:32:17):
we did a lot of drugs. What ishappening with that subset of
Burning Man. I know it's not. Imean, you heard these stories
too. Say that is happening atBurning Man, where this is a
thing,

I will say I've been to Burning Man many times. I've
never even had sex at BurningMan. I've never kissed anyone at
Burning Man. I've kissed peopleand I've had sex outside of
Burning Man, just to be clear,but never at Burning Man. But
you know about this, it's whatyou're describing. Are great

(02:32:50):
stories, but it is so far fromlike the Burning Man experience
that I have like the way I lookat Burning Man. It's an economy
of 70,000 people where there'sno exchange of money. So that's
first of all, there's noexchange of money. You could
have a port a potty, likeeveryone has to either poop in

(02:33:14):
their RV or poop in a portapotty. And yes, there are people
that have fancier RVs and thelike. But if you're out on the
playa, which is huge from, youknow, 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 billionairespooping next to, you know,

(02:33:38):
starving artists, right? Sothere's a level of equality. The
other thing is, the level ofcreative expression is beyond I
have a friend who is a aerialartist who choreographed 1500
drones to create art in the skymagnificent. Took him a year to

(02:34:01):
prepare the show with the mostadvanced keeping the drone
steady to within threemillimeters. It's just
unbelievable. Color art showamazing as an alternative to
pyrotechnics. You know, whichare more dangerous and explosive
in the like, and they'reinvesting that the level of

(02:34:23):
sculpture and art and color. Andwhat I found there are people
like, maybe the the people thatyou're talking about or who are
having sex. They could have sexanywhere. They don't need to go
to Burning Man to have sex with.
10 people. I'll give you a listof seven places they could go,
you know, within three miles ofhere to have sex with 100

(02:34:46):
people. You know, four differentglory holes with the name Randy
K come, you know, put it inwhere you don't need to go to
Burning Man to have that. Youhave to be clear, that's
something that's not gonnahappen. But I get it. I get I'm
just, I. Just saying that youdon't need to go to Burning Man
to have, you know, to have sexand play parties, and the like,
the art that are there and theconvergence that, let's say

(02:35:11):
there's some people, and this isfor real, you could walk
through, and there's some thatreally like spanking people. And
they're there out in the sun allday long, and they've got their
hand and they'll ask you, wouldyou like to be spanked? And
they're not forcing you likethere's, there's almost no bad
activity, bad actors at BurningMan, you don't get there's not

(02:35:34):
rapes happening at Burning Man.
There may be, you know, drugoverdoses, but there's not,
like, aggressive behavior inthat community. But if you go,
do you want to get spanked?
Randy? No, thank you. You justkeep going. Someone else likes
pickles, and they bring a vanwith 12 barrels of pickles, and

(02:35:56):
they're just handing out theirpickles for free. So if you get
to the level like I go and in mycamp, my gift was, I talk about
sprouts, right? So they build a5000 square foot theater, they
create programming. Andsomeone's talking about Brock
Pierce is talking about cryptothere, and he's in blue

(02:36:18):
lightning, red thunder. Andpeople are talking about
different I'm talking aboutsprouting, and someone else is
talking about permaculture, andsomeone else is talking about,
you know, Animal Rescue. Sopeople are just talking and then
there's yoga classes. And unlikegoing to wearing your your Aloe
outfit and spending $50 forclass, everything's free. Can go

(02:36:41):
to any class, and then, likeMike Posner, who's Grammy
nominated singer songwriter, iswalking around with his guitar,
no one knows him from the nexthomeless 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 peopleare going there, you know, to

(02:37:02):
celebrate freedom. Now, thereare people walking around naked.
There are all these differentconsortiums, but you find like,
I never went into any, I neversaw any physical engagement of
activity in my Burning Manexperience like I never saw any

(02:37:24):
people humping on an art car.
Ever saw that? One of

the important lessons to founders, again, I
think people just don't gothrough the normal, easy, common
sense checks, and one of them isthey don't look at their social
media and understand that whatthey're putting out is something
that every potential venturecapital angel investor is going
to look at. I can't tell you howmany times we get these business
plans, they're great, and thenwe do the social media research,

(02:37:52):
and it's like, I can't believeyou've got some photos on
Instagram of flipping a doublebird at somebody or they're
doing smoking a joint somewhere.
And yeah, marijuana may belegal, but we don't want to be
funding people who have thestupidity of putting a joint
out. And there was a companyDoug, that we were going to
fund, frankly, and again, we'redoing our search. At the last

(02:38:15):
minute, I had the documents,they were signed on my desk, and
I was just about to send themin, and someone had sent me. Oh
yeah, you know this, thiscouple, they go to Burning Man,
and the husband had a company.
We were interested in findingvery talented people. So I look
at this photo, and the woman isbasically naked, where this is

(02:38:36):
on Instagram, almost fullnudity. You could see her
breast. And again, I'm I'm aproponent of people having free
expression. If she wants to benude, she wants to be nude. I
personally did not think rightor wrong people are gonna make
it hate comments on on my socialmedia because of this. I did not
think that that was appropriatefor somebody who is going to

(02:39:00):
lead a company if it struck mein the wrong way, my guess is it
may strike customers in thewrong way, employees in the
wrong way. And when I lookedinto some of the comments, the
comments reinforced some of mybeliefs, which were, I can't
believe a CEO of a company who'sraised all this money is
basically posing naked on hersocial media, there were a lot

(02:39:23):
of hate comments on that. Again,it's like I can put aside my
personal judgment for thepersonal judgment of different
people. Maybe I have a one offview, and I can be convinced.
All right, maybe I'm a littletoo conservative here, but it
was the reaction from a lot ofpeople. 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

(02:39:43):
smoking a joint, and he can dowhat 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'sdone.

I love this, this conversation. So, so for one
what? Like, I'm pretty active onsocial media. I don't have any
pictures on social media that Ihave any shame of or any fear
of, period, and, you know, andlike, I have hundreds of 1000s
of followers across platforms,nothing that I'm ashamed of when

(02:40:17):
I was at Burning Man, right? Andthe Tech Crunch article said,
juicero founder at Burning Man,while juicero burns, I hadn't
worked in the company for sixmonths, right, right? So, so the
the Tech Crunch troll who wrotethat article is just looking for
click bait. Now, I they, theywill when, when you're in the

(02:40:37):
target of the media, it doesn'tmatter what you do. I they took
a picture of me in air one theytook a picture of me, you know,
I'm doing water fast, right? Andtoday, water fasting is cool,
like it's, you know, bio hackersare there. I'm doing water fast
seven years ago, and they'rethinking it's crazy. And, you
know, vice, you know, writesabout that like so no matter

(02:41:01):
when they want to come afteryou, it doesn't matter. I go
under the belief that anythingthat I do, I should be prepared
to be on the front page of theWall Street Journal or New York
Times or anywhere. So I'm veryconscious of it. The picture of
me at Burning Man was walkinginto the dust there was a dust

(02:41:22):
storm, and I took a picture ofme going into the dust storm and
no shame, like I have no noinappropriate part, but and
like, I have a daughter, right?
Like I like, I'm concerned andaware of it. But I think that
the notion of of where thingsare in terms of judgment, you
know, and people having acommunity, one of the reasons I

(02:41:44):
go to Burning Man is there'speople that I know around the
world, from Singapore, fromAsia, from Australia, from
Europe, that from or even in theUnited States that I never see
except at Burning Man, like it'sjust the convergence of these
people, where there's no placeelse in the world that they

(02:42:09):
converge. One

of the common misperceptions that the average
person has is that once youfail, you're not going to get
funded a second time. We believethat failure sometimes is a
great thing, because you learnmore sometimes from your
failures than your mistakes. Andwe happen to love second time
founders, even after theyfailed, how hard was it for you

(02:42:33):
to raise money after such a highprofile financial failure, when
you were raising money for asprouting company. There's

a lot of investors that are extremely gun shy, and
they are, they are followers,yeah. So they're, you know, if
they hear that Randy Kaplaninvests, they'll want to throw
money in. Doesn't matter which

is a stupid way to invest. By the way, never
rely on someone to do your owndue diligence. For you, 100% of
the biggest mistakes I made inmy career, but,

but, but you know that that happens. Yeah. So to
answer the question, I was ableto raise as much money as I
needed in order to do this, andI would say my, out of my first
investors, probably a third ofthem had were in juicero and
still funded in and they take avery mature approach to saying,

(02:43:29):
Hey, that was great. You know,what did you learn? What was the
issue? You know, what happened?
Explain it. You don't try tohide. Like I, you know, you and
I are very responsive oncommunication, like I'm pretty
much like that. I respond sothere's no hiding, and I think
you have to explaining to dolike that. That's real. But I
think that I raised a lot lessmoney. I raised it, oh, after I

(02:43:56):
did a lot of de risking, and Ialso, you know, reinvested 100%
of my Founder CEO salary. SoI've drawn no salary from the
business because I wanted it togo towards R and D or marketing
or or the like. But it was thehardest thing, and this is good

(02:44:19):
for the founder, was for me tofeel worthy, confident,
abundant, to go out and ask forthe money like because that was
the hard part. The money'sthere. And if the idea is there
and the experience is there, andthe vision is there, and the
numbers are there. People havemoney that they want to invest,

(02:44:42):
and some people really likethis. And some people, you know,
want to just do crypto, and somepeople just want to do, you
know, AI, but there's peoplethat really care about this, and
they're like, Oh, we think thatthis is this is great. You. So

I'm not going to ask you how much you raise, for
the simple reason that there'sstill the haters out there who
are going to say, Doug, raisethis much money that's already
so I'm not going to ask thatquestion or anyone else. And I
would ask that question. I dowant to ask the question, What's
your goal for the company? I

mean, my my goal is to help mitigate the
consequences of toxicenvironment for food, diet,
nutrition and lifestyle. So mygoal for here is, I believe, you
know, we had a great year 120,24 was an outstanding year.

(02:45:40):
Exceeded my expectations.

You beat your written projections that you
gave to investors. Yes,

amazing, yes. And for year two, like now we have a
whole, you know, new productsthat we're rolling out, new
software, new upgrades, youknow, new testing, new content.
Like, I cannot wait for you togo to New York and for us to sit

(02:46:06):
in a Michelin restaurant and beable to order a broccoli sprout
avocado toast and a sprout saladand the like. And so we just had
a functional medicine doctor,you know, put a post out and
sold like 1/3 of the units inthat day were sold by one post

(02:46:30):
from one doctor. We had anotherinfluencer. Health influencer
sent out like a little note intheir newsletter to 300,000
people generated 10s of 1000s ofdollars in revenue in one thing.
So we're seeing that thisawareness, my biggest challenge,

(02:46:50):
literally, is to be able todefine how we can articulate
this so that it's really simplethat you could tell someone in
wondering under a minute, andthen make it easy for them to
have access to try it. I thinkit's

great that you are branding sprouting sprouting
company. I think is a great nameI branded the term extreme
preparation, and extremepreparation, which means
preparing 10 hours for ameeting, where the average
person prepares 15 minutes for ameeting. That's shocking to me,
when you think about that. Howimportant has extreme
preparation been to yoursuccess? And can you give some

(02:47:27):
examples? I

literally binged listened to your podcasts, you
know, with Dave Asprey and GaryV and Mike Tyson and like going
through so I could understand,like, what to expect, so I'm not
coming into a lion's den, and Iunderstand, like, how deep you

(02:47:49):
go and how much you care and howmuch research you you do. So
preparing for a podcast, becausethis is a major thing, like,
this isn't just, you know, forme, I drove four and a half
hours each way to come here. I'mgrateful to do beyond grateful.
And how much better is this thanlike I wouldn't do it on Zoom,

(02:48:10):
like I'm the guy gets on theplane, gets in the car, goes
wherever. So in terms ofpreparation, you know, I
keynoted Tony Robbins unleashedthe power within in New York,
his largest live event that hedoes all year. I was the closing
keynote speaker. What an honor.
Yeah, it was incredible. It wasincredible. I spent easily, and

(02:48:33):
I only had two weeks to preparefor that. So I easily in the two
weeks, 168 hours per week. I waseasily spending 80 hours a week
to the equivalent to full timejobs, writing my speech,
rehearsing the speech, thinkingabout it, incorporating jokes

(02:48:56):
into it, and then bringing in avoice coach. So I reached out to
Tony's voice coach, Roger love,came to LA, had a one on one
session with Roger love, andthen I hired someone else to
help me with my stage presenceand my gravitas, who is a

(02:49:17):
professional actor, speaker,producer, comedian, and I had
referred him to Mike Posner, andhe did a great job on Mike. And
then I referred him to someoneelse who prepared their TED
talk. And I was like, God, I'mworthy of this. So then I went
to work with him, you know, onthis. So in terms of extreme

(02:49:39):
preparation, 50, you know, I had15 minutes to rock this stadium
of people that are used toseeing the big guy on there, and
I got a standing, dancingovation from that audience.
Thank you. And so here. Up whenyou say it, I can see it, yeah.

(02:50:00):
I put in the work, yeah. And,and the reward from that was,
like, countless like, now, Imean, so many things are
happening. And I, as a result ofthat, I got invited to keynote
the largest Food Expo in theworld next month in Dubai. So
100,000 people go to that show.

(02:50:22):
I'm giving a master class onsprouting, and I'm on the big
stage, you know, giving akeynote. So two things are
happening, and then so all ofthese things, like, you have to
do the work, and no one saw theopportunity for sprouting. Like,
literally, no one saw it.
Sprouting has been around sincethe beginning of time, and I can
mark my words, and I could saythis when, when I wrote the

(02:50:44):
spout book, and I went to NewYork, like, you know, I got an
in with one of the largestpublishers in the world. She
took my meeting. She was like,sprouts, like, you know, there's
a few self published books onit, like, what are you going to
write that's new and different?
And I hired Oprah's recipedeveloper to create 40 recipes

(02:51:12):
with sprouts. I hired a localchef to make those recipes and
prepare them with the sprouts. Igo into the meeting, and I had
to get in the conference room anhour early for a 15 minute
meeting because I wanted toprepare everything, and I had
the editor of St Martin's Press,McMillan, eating sprouts out of

(02:51:36):
the palm of my hand one meeting,I got a book deal, and I'd never
written anything other thangraffiti on a subway train in my
life. And so the ability extremepreparation, like I did, a lot
of preparation when I decidedthat I wanted to write a book,
like I did the preparation, dothe work.

There are so many qualities that make people
successful, and one of thequalities that I know has made
you very successful is yourauthenticity and generosity.
When I started my show almostfour years ago, now, you have to
build it with certain guests,right? You have a wish list of
people, and sometimes peoplewill refer people to you where

(02:52:23):
you say, All right, you know,I'm not sure I want that guest
on the show. And I my goal was,I want very well known people
who are the most successful orand or the most successful
people in the world, what theydo. And it was really, this
isn't a business podcast. Idon't see it that way. It's an
inspirational and motivationalpodcast. I have a business
background, but we've had allkinds of people from the show,

(02:52:44):
from music, acting, athletes,entrepreneurs, venture
capitalists, public speakers,motivational speakers, and
someone introduced this guynamed Rodney Jerkins. He said,
Yeah, I talked to Rodney. He'lldo your show. I said, I've never
heard of Rodney Jerkins. He saidhe's one of the biggest music
producers of all time. He's alegend in the business, so that

(02:53:04):
I'm really looking for some morehigh profile people. And this
person said you should asksomeone in the music industry
about Rodney. And so I did, wehave friends in the music
business, and so Rodney Jerkinsis a legend. You should have him
on your show. I thought, okay,here you go. He's an interesting
guy. He heard a Michael Jacksonon a song playing in a mall in

(02:53:29):
Indianapolis when he was 10years old, and he decided right
then and there, I'm going toproduce songs from Michael
Jackson, which he was doing whenhe was 19 years old. And he's
produced everybody, RihannaBeyonce. He turned down very
famous person. I'm not gonna sayit was to do sizza and produce

(02:53:49):
her last album, which went tonumber one. Wow. And when we're
done with the show, he said tome, 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 MikeTyson on my show. And, you know,
I was mouthing that, you know,as soon as I hung out with

(02:54:12):
something like Mike Tyson. Butyou can't get too excited,
because I can't tell you. Doug,how many people have offered to
help introduce me to this personor that person, right? And sure
enough, I'm expecting nothing,right? I don't want to get too
excited, but I can't reallysleep. Mike Tyson, you know, I
met, right? Might, might, youknow, interview Mike Tyson, and

(02:54:32):
Rodney calls me back the nextday. Hey, I spoke to Mike, and
he loved to do your show. Ithought, you know this, this is
just absolutely insane. TonyRobbins was the number one guest
that I wanted on my show. When Istarted my show, I read element
of power, as I shared with you Iwas a freshman in high school.
It changed my life. I've been ahuge fan of his forever, and we

(02:54:53):
had lunch four weeks ago. Yeah,battery like that. And you were
telling me organically, fourweeks ago to the day as a four
weeks ago, January 15, because Iflew to Asia, you were telling
me organically, and not a NameDropper or nothing, it just came
out in conversation. And we'recatching up with one another.
You know, we met, I don't know,a year ago now, and this was the

(02:55:16):
first time we really sat downtogether and we shared each
other's background. Youmentioned Tony Robbins, and I
said, Well, you know, do youknow him well? Because I can't
tell you how many people I evenwhen I posted Tony was doing my
show on Instagram. Oh, I metTony here. I met Tony there. I
know Tony. And I you know allthese people, and I'll introduce

(02:55:38):
you to Tony. And you said, Yeah,I know him well. And I said, you
know he's the number one personthat I like to have on my show.
And he said, Well, I'll callhim, and I think if I recommend
you, he'll do your show. Andsure enough, Tony that night
left me a voice memo. You knowTony labman and his motion Doug

(02:55:58):
Evans. And you know, you're avery impressive guy. And
normally I you do these thingson Zoom, but he seemed like a
very special guy. And I'd, youknow, love, love to be on your
show. And sure enough,yesterday, I went and I
interviewed him at his house formy show. And is a huge thing.
And you know it, I'm so gratefulto you. You're a generous guy. I

(02:56:19):
We live in a world Doug. And bythe way, I've had 10 famous
people, some who've been on myshow, who said, Yeah, I'll
introduce shoes to Tony comethere's a mastermind. You know,
for those people who don't knowwhat a mastermind is, and I
didn't know what it was until Igot on the podcast, because

(02:56:40):
mastermind is I mastermind. Iswhere you have all these
speakers, noteworthy speakers.
Some are paid. And you go tothis conference, and, you know,
could be a $25,000 mastermind.
People pay, you know, lots ofmoney to be inspired and go. And
you do learn lots of lots ofthings. And it said, you know,
Tony's coming here to themastermind. By the way, I don't
think he even does that manymasterminds, but you know, you

(02:57:02):
could pay $40,000 and Tony willbe there, and I'll introduce
you. And I've never, I'm nevergoing to pay for an introduction
to someone who I want on myshow. 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,

(02:57:26):
and I think so many people outthere, if you're not going to
follow through with something,don't offer to do it. I think
that's such an importantingredient 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,

and look it, it takes work, right? It takes work
because, you know, everyone hasthings on the agenda. But I
believe in one of the values, Ithink afterwards, I'm going to
send you going back to BurningMan, what the principles are of
Burning Man, and one of them isimmediacy. Like, literally,
like, immediacy and action incommunity and inclusiveness. So

(02:58:07):
a lot of values that mostpeople, like, know of, but they
don't live. So for me, like, youknow, the generosity, the
inclusiveness and the immediacy,like we had that conversation.
And I think what I what I showedyou, was that I had, I was
impressed that on, you know,these months are happening on,

(02:58:28):
on october 17, I we had a bigmilestone event at the spouting
company. I keynoted for JesseItzler at Running Man,

Jesse's a stud, and was also on my show, yeah,
so Jesse's incredible.

He had me back two years in a row, and I was on the
stage 1000 people talking aboutsprouting. And then I had
introduced Mike Posner to Tony.
And so Mike is now deep intothat world, and Mike is planning
on being on the big, big stage.
And I said to myself, I said, Ithink that I'm ready to go on

(02:59:13):
the big stage and share this.
And so in 2024 I spoke at Summitat sea to 50 people. I spoke at
Rip Esselstyn plant stock to 300people. Then I did Jesse, its
1000 people. And then I jumpedto over 20,000 people at Tony
Robbins. But so I had just, Iwas very proud, and just talking

(02:59:36):
about, like, Hey, I reached outto Tony on october 17, november
17, you know, I was on the bigstage, just just crushed it, and
then, you know, I was tellingyou, and part of it was my
auditioning, you know, to beingon your podcast. But I can't
wave something out there that Ihave a relationship. But it's

(02:59:58):
only for me. So to me, I want tosay, like, Hey, I'm doing this.
And you expressed with earnestdesire that that was something
that was important to you. Andif this were your first episode,
like, if you're just some richguy that says, hey, I want to do
a podcast, and can you get Tonyon my podcast? It would be a non
starter. I'd say, Look, youknow, I'm happy to send it to

(03:00:23):
Tony, but you know, you haven'tdone the work. You're not
prepared. But I felt yourpodcast, you have done the work,
you've invested so much of yourtime and your money and your
energy and your relationshipsthat I felt like, hey, this
would be a great fit. And Ithink it was, it was a great
fit. I saw the tears in youreyes and Tony's eyes afterwards,

(03:00:43):
and it felt, it felt beautifulto me to be able to help someone
who was extremely prepared. AndI have no problem, like other
people have asked me forintroductions, and I'm like, No,
I don't feel comfortable. Myrelationships not that strong. I
don't think it's a fit. Youknow, if you ask me something

(03:01:04):
else, I can introduce you tosomeone else. But I have other
other podcast people that I'vebeen on some big podcasts where
people want to go on thepodcast, and nine out of 10
people I've referred to thisperson, they've said no, and the
other person they didn't evenrespond to. So I'm like batting
zero, right? Zero. So you justhave to know, you know, who's

(03:01:29):
got the juice, you know, all the

people out there, I don't want 100 1000
people hitting up. Doug Evans tobe introduced to Tony Robbins,
the answer as much as howamazing you are and how great
you are, the answer is 99.999%gonna be no. So I you have all
these random people are gonnahave to say after the random
people are gonna contact this isthis

is easy. You have to be more prepared, more
experienced, more credible thanRandy fucking Kaplan. So if
you've got a bigger platform,you're more prepared your
resume. Pattern matches to RandyKaplan were better. I'm happy to
introduce you to Tony, butthat's the criteria. You got to

(03:02:14):
be Randy Kaplan, or above, whichis very, very few people that
high on the mountain. But ifyou're, if you're like in there,
I'm happy to use my platform todo it. Otherwise, you know, no,
thank you, amazing.

The The ironic thing Doug is, you know, you
start your show, and I wantedTony right out of the gate, and
I'm, I'm glad I didn't get him,because I wasn't ready I go
back. I'd be horrified to listento my first six episodes, 10,
maybe even 25 I mean, Iwouldn't, that's probably too
harsh, but I become such abetter interviewer and my

(03:02:52):
relationships and my level ofcomfort. So to all people out
there, you know, it's like youstart a company, and it's the
same thing. You know, you wantto 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 tohit my fourth year. And it's, it
was a perfect time. And onceagain, it's, you remember all

(03:03:14):
the people that got you there? Iremember we were starting our
company, Akamai Technologies. Wedidn't have any money. And I
remember every person's couch Islept on. We didn't have any
money. I remember everyone whodid everything for me and and,
you know, you never forget whereyou 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 Inever thought, you know, are

(03:03:37):
would would be on my show.
Suddenly, oh, Tony's gonna be onyour show. Andy Elliot just
dropped like a hat. You know, Icouldn't get Andy, we've been
trying for you again. Andy fortwo 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 theshow. I always end the show with
before

you do that, I just want to use that, that part of
extreme preparation again, yeah,because we, you know, people are
interested in raising capital,yes. So some people may want
that immediate meeting, youknow, Intro to Sequoia, or
Andreessen Horowitz or the like.
And I would say that you want tobe immediate, but you want to

(03:04:18):
pitch a lot. You want to get thefeedback, and you want to like
not you know, in one mistakethat that entrepreneurs make is
that they think they they have alevel of entitlement that, oh, I
pitched Randy, and he gave me 30minutes, and now, after the
meeting, I expect him to comeback and give me a debrief, and

(03:04:40):
give me the the comments andtell me why he's investing or
why he's not investing, and givereferrals. No, you have 30
minutes with him. Save some timein that meeting, so you're not
talking the whole time to getthe feedback, like even five
minutes in the. What do youthink? What's your feedback?
What's the direction? Who shouldI talk to? Because you may never

(03:05:03):
speak to that person again. Theyowe you nothing. They're not
getting there, and if they don'tlike the idea, or they don't
like your presentation, youstill have time to take copious
notes and to take feedback.
Because to me, I hadn't raisedmoney before, like I was a
novice, and so every person thatsaid no to me, every nay brought

(03:05:28):
me closer to a yay. And I tookthe notes, I did the work, and I
constantly shaped myself, mypitch, my deal, my business, my
model, until it got correctlyand then when I did have the
meeting with Kleiner Perkins,even without the demo, even
without the deck, I was able tocommunicate because I had a

(03:05:49):
command of the business and Iknew, and it was literally like,
boom, shake, done.

I get a lot of proactive incoming email on
LinkedIn. Oh Randy, I'minterested in venture capital.
I'm a student. You know, quit mefor coffee? The answer,
unfortunately, is no. But if youwant to spend time with me 12
weeks a summer, you could applyfor my summer internship
program. It's 12 weeks formalInternship Program, teaching
internship. I spend 60 to 90minutes stay with the intern. We

(03:06:15):
have guest speakers every week.
CEO of Dale, Carnegie, venturecapitalist, CEO, founders of
investment banks. I love you tobe a speaker this summer,
putting on a spot.

Count me in. But here, I'll

do it, but, but it's, it's, and I'll give the
advice. You know, that's one wayto get it. And two is, now I'm
doing paid coaching. So if youwant to sit down your time with
me, you know, we can, we can doone on one session as well.
These entrepreneurs will come inand they'll pitch and I'll say,
gosh, you know, I can't evenbelieve I'm sitting here. You
know, it takes, it takessomething to get in the door.

(03:06:48):
And like you said, it's going tobe a relationship where someone
knows somebody to get a meetingwith me. It's rare, although it
happened, where I will take acold pitch meeting, but they
have to do the preparation inadvance, and it's what you said.
I mean, you can easily eliminatelow hanging fruit by going in

(03:07:08):
for practice pitch meetings. Andwhen someone comes in, and it's
the same thing, when someonecomes in and they they say,
Okay, I'm coming in for ameeting Randy to fund the
company and and I may tell themin advance, and again, if this a
friend or referral, I'll stillspend time with you, because I
want you to learn. I've donewell. I'm grateful, and I want
to give back. But what I tellpeople Doug is that if you're

(03:07:31):
coming in for a meeting with me,and that meeting is intended for
me to somehow give you adviceand benefit something that is
going to be your baby, you haveto be able to take direct
advice, and I'm going to beextraordinarily blunt, to the
point where a lot of peopledon't like it, but I've had
people come in and I just don'tbelieve and say, Oh yeah, yeah,

(03:07:54):
that's a good idea. You know,not for me. It's sort of like
Shark Tank where the judges willexplain to people briefly, why
they wouldn't fund this companyor not, but I will tell people
extraordinarily bluntly and givethem advice. I've had people
walk out dog shell shockedbefore, but I tell them, if you
don't want the blunt advice,don't come in for a meeting,

(03:08:14):
because here I am, and I'mtrying to help you, and it's
sort of same thing. You know,you have to what you said is
exactly right. You got topractice that pitch meeting
before Sequoia, and where wewere raising money for, you
know, our tech company a longtime ago. Yeah, we walked in and
we were just floundering, right.
And then we walk out of thereand we say, okay, you know what?
What went right, what wentwrong? And, you know, we could

(03:08:36):
see people's reactions. And 111,of the one of the first thing
is, I work at Sun America, Elibrothers, and our boss,
Assistant to the Chairman, is aforce, 400 guys, one of only two
people at the time. We hadstarted two Fortune 500
companies. One of only threepeople at the time. We started
two Fortune 500 companies. And,man, I was wearing three piece
suits. I had ties. Of course. Ibought them for 40% off it booms

(03:08:59):
the house when they when I wenton sale. And then you're going
to Silicon Valley. And by theway, 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 whereApple and all these other
companies are funded. I rememberwearing a suit to the first
meeting, and they looked at melike I was an alien. Yeah? And
it's like, you you learn allthis stuff. And then I remember,

(03:09:20):
you know, we're there, and Iremember where we're walking out
of a meeting with, I won't evensay what firm, and we're gonna
give you a offer to say, well,it was Sequoia, probably the
best, or one of the best VCfirms in the world. I remember
in the elevator on the way down,like,

Unknown (03:09:41):
fuck yeah, we're getting an offer from

one of the best VC firms in the world, and it
wouldn't have happened if thatwas the first meeting.

I mean, it's just you gotta do the work, and also
their no doesn't mean anythinglike the idea for me, like so
many people, like. Like, the wayI look at this is that people
are going don't see it until allof a sudden they see it. And so

(03:10:09):
it's incumbent upon theentrepreneur to have the
tenacity and have the enduranceto get through this is an
endurance game, and like a lotof people, have no idea, and you
have to choose something thatyou're really, really passionate
about, that you're willing to dothe work for free and to make
the sacrifice. So that's been acommon theme for me, that I'm

(03:10:32):
willing to do the work, delaythe gratification, and focus,
you know, on the mission first.
And that way I feel great aboutlike, literally, I went to bed
last night, you know, oneo'clock in the morning, got up
at five, exercised, did mysprouts, packed things up, got
in the car and drove four and ahalf hours and got here, you

(03:10:52):
know, right on time, yeah, so,so this is what you have to do.
This is entrepreneurship. Is anendurance game. And if you're
doing it only for the money,you'll probably quit too early.
But if you're doing it becauseyou really believe that this
will impact the world in apositive way, like it's just a

(03:11:14):
matter of you're willing it tohappen, like the will, really
will make the difference. Andthere are entrepreneurs, and we
know them that they are sosuccessful in their mindset,
that they could go, you know,and you would believe, and they
would believe that they could godo anything. If they wanted to

(03:11:36):
go do something, they could godo it. And I think there's
examples everywhere, and it'sthe self doubt, and it's the the
laziness and that that causespeople to not get up the hill.
You know, it's the syphis go upthe hill, get pushed back down.
Get up, get down. And so youhave to have the mindset like,

(03:11:59):
you know, the entrepreneurshipsa long journey, and you just
have to be in the moment and bepresent to what you can do
today. And so, what I what couldI do today? I'm doing this
podcast. I'm doing anotherpodcast. I've got two calls in
between the things. And, youknow, that's about all I could

(03:12:20):
cram into today. I appreciate

you coming during a very difficult time in
LA, where so many people aresuffering here. So another thing
we should, we should just addinto kind of where we are right
now,

nine out of, I would say nine out of nine. People I
spoke to said, Why are you goingto LA, I said, I got a meeting
with Randy Kaplan. You know, thefuck Randy Kaplan is like I'm
going on Randy's podcast. I amnot going to postpone this
podcast, and

there's no way.
And I'm grateful to you, becausewe did talk the other day, my
house was and remains at somerisk of being burned down, and
for me, it was the same thing.
You know, Doug was coming on myshow, and I was going to be here
no matter what. And we weregoing to stay in Florida to try
to pick up some more shows whilewe were there. We did Tony, and

(03:13:08):
then we got this show with thisamazing guy named Garrett White.
I'm super pumped for that showis one of the best shows I've
done. And then we said, Allright, well, we can get maybe
one or two more shows here. Andit was the same thing, nope. I
committed Doug. We're comingback for Doug, and I'm grateful
it's one of the best shows I'vedone. Yeah, thank you. At the
end of every show, I concludewith a game called fill in the

(03:13:28):
game to excellence. Are youready to play? I'm ready to
play. The biggest lesson I'velearned in my life is believe in
myself. My number oneprofessional goal is.
Professional goal is to makesprouting as ubiquitous as
coffee. My number one personalgoal is

be the best father, husband, friend that I could be.
The

one thing that everybody should say to
themselves when they wake up is,I am nature's greatest miracle.
I was gonna ask what's the onething that they should say when
they go to bed? But I thinkyou're gonna give the same give
the same answer. I think when

they go to bed, they should go to bed with gratitude,
and they should literally make alist of not one thing. And my
wife, you know, has me do this.
I have to actually post it, youknow, on her site. But all of my
successes in the course of theday. So I have to list 20 things
that I did successfully in thecourse of day. Forget about

(03:14:26):
anything I didn't do, but I haveto make a list of the 20
successes I do. I did every day.
My biggest regret is not beingkinder to my parents. But I

(03:14:48):
we can keep going. I'm on,

yeah, that's a heavy one. My biggest fear is

like, literally that. Do you know what the first
symptom? Symptom is of what thefirst consequence is for a heart
attack, like for heart disease,like a consequence first symptom
of serious heart diseases is itpressure on the chest? No, it's

(03:15:17):
called death. Like heart diseaseis a silent killer. So, like,
that's the first symptom ofserious heart disease, is death.
So I'm, like, if I'm concernedwith anything, it's just, you
know, early death, not scared ofdying. But there's things that I

(03:15:38):
want to do, you know, so I wantto make sure I live

the most prideful moment of my career is

prideful moment. I think when we shipped juicero,
the craziest

thing that ever happened to me in my career is,
God,

I think my whole life has just been crazy.
Craziest thing that everhappened, oh, craziest thing
was, you know, the board askedme to step out and I come back
and I was no longer employed.
It's like, what, like,incomprehensible. The funniest
thing that ever happened to meis, think the funniest thing

(03:16:16):
was, like when I went to thejuicero meeting without the
machine, because I had sold themon, like, Oh, you're going to
taste the best juice. You'regoing to have the best meeting,
etc. And they're like, where isit? I was like, oh, TSA,
confiscating it. We're justgoing to talk today.

The best advice I've ever received is, I think

your extreme preparation is probably about as
good as it can get.

The worst advice I've ever received is the

worst advice is, listen to the board.

10 years from now, I'm going to be oh,

I'll just be expanding, sprouting
intergalactically.

If you could pick one trait that would make
anybody successful? What wouldit be? Persistence? The most
important thing that'scontributed to my success is my
heart. The one thing I've dreamtabout doing for a long time, but
haven't, is

taking a vacation I really have not given myself
like the gift of music, ofvacation, of leisurely, like,
I'm so anxious about like timethat I other than like my time
with my daughter, like, iEverything is productive, so I

(03:17:37):
don't really watch movies, Idon't go to concerts, I don't
vacate, I don't vacation. Solike, at some point, like, I
want to get to a point where Ifeel there's such an abundance
of time that I could actuallytake some time and do a
vacation.

If I could meet one person in the world, it
would be it's

so bizarre, because I feel like everybody is
accessible. So like, I feel likeI've met the people that that I
want to meet. So I think I don'thave an answer. I have, like, no
craving to meet any, any person.
If you

could go back and give your 21 year old self
one piece of advice, what wouldit be

that you can you could achieve your dreams if you
do the work and if you plan likeanything is possible.

If you were President Trump, you're sitting
down with the desk on his firstday, the first thing you would
do is, I

would eliminate alcohol, eliminate processed
food, you know, I would put thetariffs and the taxes on like
all processed, ultra processedfood. I'd change the farm bill,
and I would get more peoplefocused on, you know, healing

(03:18:57):
themselves through a lifestyle,

the one question that you wish I had asked you
but didn't, is,

how much money do you want? Doug, Well,

it's interesting because I was thinking about
that and thinking about the timewe've gone way over the time,
yeah, and I was thinking aboutyou and your simple life that
you live, and no two you knowradio. And one of the questions
that I was going to ask you, wasyour motivation? I know you
said, if you're motivated formoney, it's not going to work
out. As a founder, I'm not sureI agree with that, but that

(03:19:29):
could be a whole nother topicfor a few hours that we could
talk about. But what are yourgoals for money? And if you if
the sprouting company sells forten billion one day, and you've
created this massive market. Areyou gonna get yourself a jet? I
am,

like, set for life.
So I work out of pure joy andpure mission. So, like, it's
very, very clear that the stuffthat I'm doing right now is.
Like because the it's comingthrough me that I feel
compelled, that I have to dothis, but I'm not doing this at

(03:20:06):
all for the money like this isjust pure, pure mission, because
I will not feel good knowingwhat I know and not doing it
will not make me feel good, so Ihave to feel good, that I have
to make a contribution and adifference.

My last question is, are there any questions that
you want to ask me? Yeah,

what? What's motivating you? You're a young
guy, what do you want toaccomplish in this next 50
years? What's your legacy?

I hope my legacy, my stated goal, and the
reason I started my podcast, wasto inspire and motivate people
to overcome the challenges thatwe all face in our lives. And my
goal, as I started thinkingabout it, is, I want to
positively influence the livesof 100 million people. I want to
do it for my podcast. I hope asmy podcast continues to grow,

(03:21:02):
people will more people willlisten and more people watch it.
I'm eventually going to be doingclasses 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 atsome point where I'm speaking in
front of 20,000 people, and Ihave a book extreme preparation

(03:21:23):
that I'm working on that's onetwo, I want to be a great dad to
my kids and great husband to myamazing wife, and be great to my
rest of my family and myfriends, and then free is I want
to give back to society. And Ithink there's a misconception

(03:21:45):
about if you have money, you cando that by giving money. I think
giving your time is a lot morevaluable than giving your money.
So and all that is kind ofencapsulated is my desire to
make a difference and make aworld

a better place.
Beautiful, beautiful. You're abeautiful man, Randy. And thank
you as I'm grateful that we'regetting to know each other.
Likewise,

this is awesome.
Excited for your future. This isgoing to be a huge hit. Yeah. I
hope this show results ineveryone going out buying a kit
from the sprouting company, thesprouting companies.com, you
could pick up Doug's book aswell the sprout book that's on
Amazon. I bought one.
Unfortunately, I didn't bringone. Doug brought one here, but
I can't get into my office rightnow because we're evacuated, but

(03:22:34):
I brought you an extra one.
Awesome. I love it. Thank you.
Thank you. Amazing. You.

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

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Doug Evans: Lessons from Steve Jobs, Raising $120M, and the Future of Food | E150