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

• 0:00
  Randall Kaplan: From tagging to graphic design to working with Steve Jobs, Apple was terrified.
• 0:06
  Doug Evans: Apple bought NeXT for $400 million and they made a preemptive move before a someone else would have bought it or they would have gotten the ample funding. I went to his house in Western Connecticut, and I became a unpaid intern, apprentice for Paul Rand for seven years till the day he died.
• 0:30
  Randall Kaplan: How many times did you actually jump out of a plane?
• 0:33
  Doug Evans: I jumped out of planes 13 times. The first time was easy, but the second time, I can't
• 0:38
  Randall Kaplan: believe a CEO of a company who's raised all this money is basically posing naked when they
• 0:43
  Doug Evans: want to come after you. It doesn't matter.
• 0:48
  Randall Kaplan: Welcome to In Search of Excellence, where we meet entrepreneurs, CEOs, entertainers, athletes, motivational speakers and trailblazers of excellence, with incredible stories from all walks of life. My name is Randall Kaplan, I'm a serial entrepreneur, venture capitalist and the host of In Search of Excellence, which I started to motivate, inspire us to achieve excellence in all areas of our lives. My guest today is my good friend Doug Evans. Doug is a serial entrepreneur and early pioneer in the health food movement, which has been a passion of his for almost four years. He is the founder of organic Avenue, the first organic cold pressed juice and raw food retailer in the United States, the founder of juicero, a high tech juicing machine that used fresh pre packaged fruit and vegetable pouches in which raised $120 million in venture capital funding from leading VC firms including Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins and thrive capital, among many others, and which famously went out of business only 17 months after its product launch. Doug is also the founder and CEO of the sprouting company, which provides products and information about the incredible nutritional and other benefits of eating sprouts, and which helps people to easily grow their own sprouts at home. He is also the author of the sprout book, tap into the power of the plants, most nutritious food.
• 2:02
  Randall Kaplan: Dog, thanks for being here. Hey, it's my
• 2:06
  Doug Evans: pleasure, Randy, let's go. Let's do it. Let's talk about your
• 2:09
  Randall Kaplan: upbringing. You grew up in New York, the Bronx queens, Harlem, and I want to talk about your parents. What did your parents do? How did they influence you? And then how did those influences lead to your juvenile delinquency. I think you said you were arrested 50 times 12 times before I was 1712. Times you arrested 12 times before you were 17. Yeah.
• 2:30
  Randall Kaplan: So,
• 2:31
  Doug Evans: I mean, my parents, may they rest in peace? You know, they had their challenges.
• 2:34
  Doug Evans: My father was a combat world war two veteran and at the time, we didn't understand PTSD and other trauma, and so he was the sweetest man in the world until he wasn't. And I don't recall my like ever seeing my father having a job because he couldn't work because of his his raging and in the trauma, so he couldn't get along with people.
• 3:03
  Doug Evans: He was very articulate and he was smart and but then he he would, like anything could trigger him. And like, now I can look back and go, Oh, that's PTSD. That's trauma, you know, that's the result of being in war. But the time we just thought like, you know, he raged. So I thought everyone raged so in in our in our household, it was a little chaotic. And for me, it was safer to be out in the street with gang members, with graffiti writers, with other delinquents, because I felt more like I could relate to them, and I felt safer there than being in the house.
• 3:43
  Doug Evans: What about your mom? My mom was sweet. My mom, like, carried the torch. She was like a secretary, and she was the one that was working, and she was always putting food on the table, and but we lived in a lot of scarcity, and we didn't have a lot of food, and everything was rationed. So for me, like, I wanted to get out, and the challenge of being in New York, where you could have the poorest people, you know, and the wealthiest, and then you wonder, like, why you can have things so without being grounded in moral virtues and guidelines, you don't think of like what's right and wrong. You want your needs, so you'll just go take them. And so a lot of what I was doing and a lot of my my crimes were all associated with writing graffiti, so stealing spray paint, breaking and entering, stealing supplies, being in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong people, so
• 4:54
  Randall Kaplan: breaking and entering. You broke into a hardware store or somebody's home to. Steal things.
• 5:00
  Doug Evans: No no more into this subway yards to write graffiti.
• 5:04
  Doug Evans: Okay? And the crime was really like stealing spray paint so that you could paint on the train. You would
• 5:10
  Randall Kaplan: run into a hardware store, kind of grab and run and grab some paint. I
• 5:15
  Doug Evans: mean, you would try not to be so obvious, putting your paint on something, putting your pants, put in a bag, just little things. But eventually what happens is, you do get caught. Like as Emerson says, Every crime will be punished, every truth will be told. So if you you know, you get beginners luck, you know, you get away with it the first time the 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 then you do it again. And so this whole madness happened, you know, until I was 17, and then I just, like, just woke up and like, God, I got to get away from these people. They're all degenerates.
• 5:58
  Randall Kaplan: What was it that led you to spray paint. And did you kind of practice on the wall, or you just wanted to deface public property? And then, how old were you when you were arrested for the first time? 13. What was that like?
• 6:12
  Randall Kaplan: You're painting at night, and some cop comes out to you, hey, put the paint down.
• 6:16
  Doug Evans: No, I think to answer the first part, in my junior high school, there were drug dealers. There were outright, like, criminals and gang members, and there were the graffiti writers, and they seemed to be, like, the coolest, like, and they were building brands, and they were creating artwork, so, you know, and there were different goals that they had. Some people were painting on the inside, some on the outside, and people wanted to express themselves creatively.
• 6:44
  Doug Evans: You
• 6:44
  Randall Kaplan: know, what's crazy is, you drive down the freeway, you see these billboards that are 3040, feet in the air. That's like a four story building, and there's a graffiti on there, and there's a little pole up there, and sometimes there's wire that you can't get through. And you see these things. And I've always wondered, I mean, they've, they're doing it at night. Some of the painting is actually good. I mean, it's, it's terrible that that they're doing, and people are risking their lives to tag all of these billboards, or whatever they're doing. Look,
• 7:14
  Doug Evans: I think for them, the the more extreme it is. It's kind of like ultra performance athletes and the rare the parts there was different angles. But when I was 13 years old, I have an original Keith Haring piece of artwork that Keith drew for me. And I look back now as I see like, you know, your kids that were 13, and I look at myself saying, when I was 13, I was in nightclubs with Basquiat and Keith Haring and Fab Five Freddie. When I was 13, these guys were 18 to 25, to 40 years old, and I was in that environment, and I felt so at home and like that's just what I did, until I decided I needed to change. I mean, what's
• 8:03
  Randall Kaplan: crazy is talking about Keith Haring Basquiat. I think there have been Basquiat paintings that have sold for between 20 and $30 million and these guys were taggers, and they started out their career that way. Yeah, taggers, drug addicts, criminals. Education, I think, is one of the most important investments we can make in ourselves. It didn't go so well for you. We were thrown out of high school, kicked out of high school, every every school I went to, every school.
• 8:26
  Randall Kaplan: So what did that look like? You sat down in the classroom. You didn't want to do it. You You said, I don't care about my education. Well,
• 8:33
  Doug Evans: you know, a just the vanity. I should have been wearing my glasses since fifth grade, and I didn't start to wear my glasses until I got into the military at 17, because you had to have them on the military because I couldn't see the target.
• 8:48
  Randall Kaplan: They give you a physical and an eye test. I get it, yeah. But
• 8:52
  Doug Evans: then, you know, part of your performance is you have to point a rifle at a target and shoot, and without wearing your glasses, like, you know, I would, I would end up having friendly fire. So not wearing the glasses meant I couldn't see what was on the blackboard. I couldn't follow what the teacher was saying, and energetically, I just did not you know, my method of education was not sitting in a classroom. So I would show up late to class. I would leave early to class. I'd be sitting in class thinking of like, how can I get out of it? I remember, like, pulling a thread out of my shirt. And, you know, I didn't floss at the time, but I flossed my teeth until they bled so I could leave the classroom, because I just couldn't sit in that room. You didn't graduate high school. I ended up graduating, but not on the most honorary way. They just, they just gave me the grades. The guidance counselor just filled stuff in, just to get me out.
• 9:54
  Doug Evans: And I went to three high schools,
• 10:50
  Randall Kaplan: and then you went into the. Us our Army as a paratrooper, correct? Did you just say to yourself, hey, I want to go jump out of airplanes? Well, my
• 11:00
  Doug Evans: 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 I went to the recruiter's office, I knew that, like I was seeking the most transformative experience I could have, and I knew that I needed discipline.
• 11:22
  Doug Evans: So I said, What is the roughest, toughest thing that you have?
• 11:26
  Doug Evans: And they said, 82nd airborne, Paratrooper, infantry, combat engineer. And I said, Where do I sign? And I was 17, so I had to go back and get my parents authorization and consent, which wasn't too hard, because they wanted me out anyway, but it was still a step in the process. I think it's
• 11:46
  Randall Kaplan: very important for successful people to always want the challenges and the biggest challenges, and it's it's cool that you did that.
• 11:51
  Randall Kaplan: What did the army teach you in terms of lessons, and what didn't it teach you? I think you said that it didn't teach a lot about morality. And I've heard a lot of people actually learn negative habits In the armed forces. I
• 12:06
  Doug Evans: mean, the army taught me, you know, that I am not my body, and that I could work through pain. And I remember going on a 20 mile, 25 mile hike, carrying a rucksack with 50 pounds, a rifle, extra munitions and water, and my feet started to blister. And I remember saying, drill sergeant, my feet are blistering. And he had the standard response, It's mind over matter, I don't mind, and you don't matter, keep going, and the blisters would pop, and I would I would stop again and say, the blister popped. It really hurts. It's mind over matter. Keep going, and then the blister would start to bleed, and then it would scab, and then the scab would come off, and then the whole body starts to ache with the weight and your knees and your back, and you just had to keep going. And if you slowed down, the rest of the troops would keep going, and then they would keep going further and further.
• 13:09
  Doug Evans: And then the drill sergeants would take all the troops and make them go back and go all the way back and all the way behind you, and now you'd have 6090, 120 people pissed at you because they had to walk twice as much as you were. So the peer pressure, what was extreme to keep people going along the way.
• 13:34
  Doug Evans: You know,
• 13:34
  Randall Kaplan: peer pressure is such a such a big thing, not only in our personal lives, but in our professional lives as well. I think there's peer pressure to do drugs, if your friends are doing drugs and if you're doing bad things, what's your message to all the people out there, either the parents who are looking for jobs or a better future, and to all the kids out there today in college, young professionals who, one way or the other are are experiencing peer pressure and in their lives, I
• 14:06
  Doug Evans: think the message is that a lot of times, parents or people think they know what's right for someone, and they try to tell them what to do. And I believe, especially now that we all know what's good for ourselves, and we need to create the trust with the people that we're communicating to that we have their best interest in mind and explain to them, not tell them what the consequences could be if they go down this path or that path. And I remember an instance where my car, I had a car like a muscle car, 1967 Camaro, GT, and it was manual. I didn't really know how to drive stick, and I flooded the carburetor. The car burst into flames. It crashed into a wall and and burned. And I called one of my friends from a pay phone, you know, to his his shop where he was working. I was 17 at the time. I said, Dude, my car just just blew up. And he's like, Hey, take the license plates off the back and take the the van off the inner door and get out of there. And I was like, Okay.
• 15:27
  Doug Evans: And then for weeks, I was obsessing on what was I going to do to get a car? And various thoughts came in to mind of like, oh, I'll just find the same car in the same color and put my license plates on it and do that. And that would keep me up at night until I had a conversation I was having. Lunch with you know, today you would call the mentor. I called it an older friend, but he was a trust fund kid who is now 40 from like the Carnegie Steel or era, and he had galleries and buildings, and he was a graffiti photographer, and I sat with him over a slice of pizza, and he's like, You look terrible. And I was like, Yeah, I'm not sleeping. My car blew up this and and then he described to me that I was experiencing anxiety, and I had no idea what that term was. And he said, I said, well, well, how do I get rid of the anxiety, you know, can I take a pill? What can I do? He said, No, you just need to make a decision that you're going to let that car go. You're going to let the license plates go. You can let the value go. You've ridden on the subway for the last 10 years. You go back on the subway and you just forget that. And that night, I went to sleep, and I slept through the night. The anxiety went away, and I started to work again, and soon after, I joined the Army, but I remember now, like I could never have had that conversation, you know, with my dad. You know, Dad, my car blew up. I'm thinking about stealing another car, or whatever, like they just would have come down on me, you know, which would have made me probably do it. And here someone held space and had love for me and compassion, and I made the right decision because I knew and so he was wise beyond his years to be able to hold that space for me, and I'll never forget that. How
• 17:36
  Randall Kaplan: many times did you actually jump out of the plane? What was it like the first time you're looking down and says, shit, I'm up 10,000 feet, and this is the coolest thing, or I'm scared shitless.
• 17:45
  Randall Kaplan: And how long were you the army for? I
• 17:48
  Doug Evans: jumped out of planes 13 times. The first time was easy because of the crazy adrenaline in airborne training, stand up, hook up. Shuffle to the door. Stand in the door.
• 18:01
  Doug Evans: First guy in the door, green light, go, go, go. And you know, guys going out. Both sides are playing, boom, boom,
• 18:08
  Randall Kaplan: boom. This was like a C carbon, 30 c1 30 c1 30,
• 18:12
  Doug Evans: non pressurized cabin, sitting one trooper with their legs in front the next, and the rucksack and the reserve parachute in the front, the main parachute in the back. No windows, either. No windows, no, just it's just crazy. Just crazy. Yeah, but the second time was the most insane, because you already know and you're not at 10,000 feet like you're you're dropping about 3000 feet, which doesn't give you a lot of time.
• 18:39
  Doug Evans: In case you know, your parachute doesn't open for the for the reserve parachute. So it's, it's very intense. And you're doing some jumps in the daytime, some at night. We also on the c1 30, they would open up the back of the plane and you would run off the back ramp off. So even further insane than on the side doors. So just insane adrenaline rush. How long were you in the armed forces for? I was in the armed forces for 13 months, and why did you leave? They asked me to leave because some of my earlier infractions of the law, which were documented to be juvenile delinquencies with a sealed record, turned out that I was such a good trooper in the military, I was so committed to excellence that I did my boot camp, my airborne training, my infantry training unit, armor training, Special Forces, explosives and demolitions, training, training, training, training that I got nominated to go to Officer Candidate School.
• 19:49
  Doug Evans: And in the process of going to Officer Candidate School, they needed a top secret security clearance, and during the course of the clearance, they found all these juvenile infractions, and even though there were no warrants out for my arrest, there wasn't the proper documentation when I joined the military that got me the appropriate waivers to go through, because now, in hindsight, the recruiter, his job was to fill boots. I had shoes, and so he wanted to fill the boots. So I disclosed everything, but I didn't know the formal protocol. So at the time, the army was unnegotiable, so any infraction to the Uniform Code of Military Justice required an immediate dismissal.
• 20:38
  Doug Evans: But the irony is, and I'm actually very proud of this, I have an honorable discharge, an army Achievement Medal and cause of discharge at fraudulent.
• 20:52
  Doug Evans: Enlistment,
• 20:52
  Randall Kaplan: even though you're perfectly honest going in, yeah, just
• 20:56
  Doug Evans: bureaucracy, red tape like the, you know, my my commanding officer thought that I would still be a great officer, and wanted me, you know, support me along the way, because I had enormous leadership. I now had the discipline, I had the intelligence, I had the leadership skills. And he was disappointed. So
• 21:15
  Randall Kaplan: you're probably getting paid nothing or close to nothing. Then you get out, and then you had a lot of odd jobs, bars, supermarkets, and wanted to make money. Obviously, you're motivated by money, and you were making money. What was the thought process there? You just were you making money to support yourself and save your future, or you just like having money for the first time.
• 21:33
  Doug Evans: Well, I wanted freedom, like I wanted to be able to eat, I wanted to be able to pay rent. I wanted to have my freedom, and so if I didn't work, and I also knew that I needed to be absolutely in integrity and honest, like there was no deviation at the time. So I thought by working so the army, there's no punching of a clock in the military, so you work a lot of hours. So because I didn't do drugs and I didn't have other vices, and I never really had a normal childhood, so I didn't really listen to music and have fun things, so I had nothing else to do but work.
• 22:12
  Doug Evans: So workaholism was actually my, you know, something that kept me sane and honest. So it was less about the money, because I never bought fancy things. I just wanted to have the freedom. And also, you know, I guess part planning for the future, when
• 22:33
  Randall Kaplan: you got out, you didn't say, I'm gonna go to college, and I think college is a good investment in my future.
• 22:38
  Randall Kaplan: No,
• 22:39
  Doug Evans: I didn't have the grades in high school. My ego didn't want me to go to a community college, and I didn't really, I couldn't imagine after what I'd been through to actually sit in the classroom and do homework. What I did do on my own was my same mentor, Henry Chalfont, gave me a list of the 100 classics. So I was reading dusty F ski and Catcher in the Rye and To Kill a Mockingbird and Hemingway and Emerson. So I was reading classic um literature, and that really, you know, is a whole, you know, new world for me, because before I was like watching, I Dream of Jeannie, you know, and the Brady Bunch, and to go from there to reading complex literature was a big shift. You're
• 23:34
  Randall Kaplan: making money, you're you're feeling good, you can pay rent, you got food. You started going to places like Peter Luger, which I remember, I was in college, and I had a girlfriend, Nicole, and I didn't know what Peter Luger was. I'd never been there. Apparently, it's a big Steakhouse in New York, very, very famous. And then there was a second one on Long Island. She lived on Long Island. That's the one that we went to. But I remember going there for the first time thinking, you know, this is great. This is a very expensive steak, and it's cool. So you started eating a lot of stuff, and today we look at our family tonight. I mean, health is just a big thing today, right? You proactively, we're going to talk about this is what your life, devotion and passion is back then no one's really thinking about it, or really talking about if you were fat, you were fat. You knew you needed to lose weight. Today, it's a whole nother thing, and at some point you had a lot of family health issues. So I think your mom, dad, aunt, uncle, uncle, other brother and so, and you gain, I think, 36 pounds very quickly, yeah, and so what was the, what was the thought process? And one of the life changing moments in your life, I
• 24:38
  Doug Evans: mean, for me, growing up in scarcity and then having money. Money was the ability 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 two diabetes, and they had a double amputation of her feet like that, was traumatic. I remember going to the hospital, and I trying to envision what it would be like not to have the the use of my toes and and my ankles.
• 25:11
  Doug Evans: And then, you know my mother and my father, you know both passed from chronic illnesses, and then my brother became overweight, obese, diabetic, and has had three strokes and three heart attacks. At what age I started when he was 35 so for the last 25 years he is his his health has just continued to degrade and really complex. But for me, when I was 33 I met a woman, and she looked me in the eye and said, because I thought I was genetically cursed, and she lost her sister and her. Mother to cancer. Are we talking about Megan right now? No, this is Denise, okay, this is Denise Mari. And Denise said to me, you're living a carcinogenic, diabetic, heart disease laden lifestyle, and that's not your genes, it's your lifestyle. And like, I couldn't imagine there was a connection, like I just thought, like, hey, we need to eat meat, chicken, fish, dairy, pizza, pasta, bread, candy, soda, like these were all nutrition. Like this was all nutrition. And what I realized was that it was actually killing me. And so once I realized that it was dangerous, I made the same leap like I did into the army, out of the airplane, and I said, I'm going to go far away from that food as possible. And literally the furthest thing away from that was to eat fresh, raw fruits, vegetables, seeds, nuts, seaweed and sprouts. We
• 27:00
  Randall Kaplan: all meet very interesting people in interesting places in our life that have huge influences on our future. One of them could be a nightclub. So you're at a nightclub 2am what happened from that point forward? And take us through the start of your first company.
• 27:15
  Doug Evans: Yeah. So I met this woman. She was there. She was with a bunch of other women, and we started to talk, you were not trying to hit on her, and I was definitely trying to hit on okay, I was definitely trying to hit on her. Did it work? I mean, we were together for years, okay? So I guess it works. It was, you know, the most important thing for me was what I learned from her, you know, and what I learned about myself.
• 27:41
  Doug Evans: But like, we're there and we're just talking, and then, instead of talking about partying and dancing, or the thing, you know, here's two sober people in a nightclub, you know, talking about death, talking about cancer, talking about loss, and we had this connection that, you know, that cut through all of the superficiality that was in that club into something really, really deep And like our first date, right? And it wasn't even necessary whether it was platonic or sexual. Like our first meetup, we went to the Big Apple Vegetarian Society to go to a battle of the diets. And just so happened, that was the next activity that she was doing, and she invited me, and we went. And I'd never even like I thought a diet is when someone doesn't eat, right? And here people were talking about the nuance of the plant based diet, so all extremes of the plant based diet. And there were speakers, people who I'm still in touch with today. And I sat through that mesmerized, because I thought it was incomprehensible that these people were functioning. Because I thought we required meat, chicken, fish, dairy, pizza, cheese, like I thought these were requirements. And there was one guy there, Paul Nissan, who was living a raw vegan lifestyle, and he was just eating fruits and vegetables raw.
• 29:16
  Randall Kaplan: So what's interesting is she was the first person who taught you or mentioned the term vegan. You'd never heard the term before. I think it's a commonly misunderstood thing. I didn't know what the difference between a vegan and a vegetarian was until I prepared for the show tell everyone what the difference
• 29:32
  Doug Evans: is. Yeah, I think a vegetarian, for predominantly moral reasons, does not eat meat or flesh, but they'll still eat dairy or eggs or honey, and a vegan consumes no animal products, and also is under the belief that they want to do no harm. So part of veganism is nothing that involves the exploitation of another sentient being. So like even the horse and carriage in Central Park, that is a non vegan activity wearing like the wool, you know, which technically, they don't have to kill the sheep to get the wool, but it's exploiting the sheep to get the wool. So there's no animal products.
• 30:25
  Doug Evans: People talk about leather being a neat byproduct, when, in fact, it's a whole industry in and of itself, so nothing that involves the exploitation of a sentient being. And then there's plant based, which is very similar to vegan on the dietary part. And a lot of people will choose to use the term plant based because they don't want to discuss the geopolitical. Political moral issues. They just want to keep it very simple and say, Hey, I eat plants where they're they're vegan. But they don't want to get into the stigmatism of a vegan in the political part,
• 31:07
  Randall Kaplan: at some point you register the domain name, still raw, and I think that sounded like you were very early in the domain name entire universe, because it was a long time ago. So what was the thought process there? What was the first time you heard about the internet and that you could actually go and buy a domain name?
• 31:25
  Doug Evans: Oh, probably in the mid 90s, like mid mid 90s, 1990 1994 I remember having, you know, access to, you know, a browser, an early Netscape. And prior to that, I was using dial up. And in 1991 I actually negotiated a deal with Apple and monotype to create typefaces for the Mac operating system that are now on iOS, and they're now in 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, and then ultimately went into the web. But I didn't like the technology as much as I liked it as a platform for for for creating things,
• 32:19
  Randall Kaplan: right? So let's go from tagging to graphic design to working with Steve Jobs. Tell everyone those stories your relationship with Steve.
• 32:29
  Doug Evans: Yeah. So you know, life is, you know, filled with synchronicities and doors open and opportunities happen. You have to make them happen. You have to make them happen. But, but think like I was having lunch with my same mentor who saved me from stealing a car, and when I was working all this time, he had said, Doug, you're working, but do you like, what any of the things that you're doing? And I said, no, like, I'm just doing it to make money. And he said, Well, did you know that you have, you know, great artistic design skills that, why don't you do something in your category? And I'd never heard of commercial art or graphic design or advertising. So I remember going to Barnes and Noble and there was like books and books of all these things. And there was one book called a designer's art by Paul Rand. And Paul Rand, almost single handedly, transformed commercial art into fine art, and he designed the logos and corporate identities for IBM ABC, UPS Westinghouse.
• 33:44
  Doug Evans: And he had a new client, who was doing a new computer company called next computer, and this was in the mid 90s, and so I saw his book. I got out of the army.
• 33:56
  Doug Evans: I'm fearless. I called him up. I went to his house in Western Connecticut, and I became a unpaid intern, apprentice for Paul Rand for seven years. Till the day he died. I was at his bedside in the hospital when he died of stomach cancer in 1994 96 and so being with Paul, I still had to earn my own keep.
• 34:24
  Doug Evans: So I was still doing my side hustles along the way, but I got to go work with this master. And so one of his clients was Steve.
• 34:34
  Doug Evans: And so I got to work on the next corporate identity, and being on late night calls, early calls, discussions about the nuance of, you know, what Steve wanted in the corporate identity and how Paul, you know, worked, and these were two people that were extremely strong willed, and I was in the middle, you know, on quite a few of the interactions.
• 35:07
  Doug Evans: So
• 35:07
  Randall Kaplan: how much time did you spend with Stephen?
• 35:10
  Randall Kaplan: What's your impression, if you could tell people listening and watching today that Steve Jobs is a Steve
• 35:17
  Doug Evans: Jobs is a visionary, and Steve had his every Steve had wounds, and Steve had clarity of what he wanted. And the thing that was really powerful about Steve is that he knew what he wanted, and he would move mountains to get what he wanted like so in the course, I had never seen anything like that before. I never experienced anything like that. So I remember being in a meeting with Steve you. And I opened my mouth, and he said, Get to the point like he didn't want to hear any stories, any digressions, and I didn't know much. Like, we didn't have the internet. You couldn't google someone before, you know these meetings with people, so you had no idea. Like, I didn't know the whole journey of Steve and Apple beforehand, I had no idea he went public. He got fired. All I knew was this was a guy. He was coming out with a new computer company. It was black and the logo was in a cube, and he wanted it a certain way, and Paul could not be manipulated by Steve. So Steve would give his feedback, and Paul would just listen, and Paul would do whatever he wanted. I
• 36:40
  Randall Kaplan: don't want to cut you all, but I we need to give context to what you're talking about, because 99% of people listening and watching the show don't have any idea what next computer was. And if you could take us through the story of what happened, a lot of people may know that he got fired. They don't know names like John Sculley and people who came in afterward, and they have no idea how he actually came back to Apple, and what Apple bought this company to bring him back to Apple. So if I mean, we could talk about this for a few hours, but let's simplify it for people. Well, what was the company called and what happened? Yeah, so
• 37:16
  Doug Evans: Steve, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak started Apple.
• 37:19
  Doug Evans: Steve Wozniak, you know, drifted into the back end after the apple two. Steve created the Macintosh. You know, after the Lisa and the Macintosh was not as big of a success as they thought it would be, right out of the bat,
• 37:37
  Randall Kaplan: right? The Lisa was a, I think, the first or second computer that Apple had, and then it was the Macintosh.
• 37:43
  Randall Kaplan: It was like a can box, like little box,
• 37:47
  Doug Evans: self integrated floppy disk, flop floppy drive, and and the Apple was a very successful company, billion dollar valuation, and the board of directors of Apple brought in John Sculley, who was the president of Pepsi Cola. And John and Steve had a love affair, and then basically John felt that Steve was too disruptive, and moved him to a side building, and then, in a board struggle, forced Steve out of the company, and Steve sold all of his Apple stock, and saw that he felt that there was a market using a graphical user interface For the education market, and decide to start a new computer company called next computer company using Linux as the operating system. And today, all of our iPhones are using the next operating system. And so Steve starts next raises $400 million from Ross Perot and cannon and other people.
• 39:00
  Randall Kaplan: But finally, back then, that'd be like raising 10 or $20 billion today.
• 39:02
  Randall Kaplan: I mean, it just people didn't really raise those kind of rounds, but it was enormous next
• 39:11
  Doug Evans: shipped product, but it ended up being more expensive, took more time to ship, and never got the adoption that they that they wanted. And Apple continued to flounder, creating more and more products without innovation. So then they brought Steve back in. Well before
• 39:31
  Randall Kaplan: 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 anything great there either no
• 39:39
  Doug Evans: and so, you know, after Steve got back into Apple, you know, that's when, you know, I lost all contact. But,
• 39:48
  Randall Kaplan: but, but explain the acquisition. Because, oh, that that's C wouldn't have come back, but for the acquisition, basically,
• 39:56
  Doug Evans: it's pretty interesting. Apple bought back, bought NeXT for $400 million and they put, you know, gave, you know, in stock. Steve worked as interim CEO for $1 a year, and then saw that the potential of everything that he wanted to do the first time, with the lessons of being fired, starting another company, the humility, and along the way, Steve bought Pixar. And so Steve was in way ahead of, like, what's happening with AI, you know, with his Renderman and computer imaging and Pixar. So it was an amazing part that here was a guy who just wanted to create excellence along the way in design and engineering and education and products. So for me, I knew not. Thing here, like I was working, like Steve was dealing with technology and I was dealing with the two dimensional aspect of design, but I had to get this design so perfect that it would meet the criteria of both Steve and Paul.
• 41:08
  Doug Evans: What's
• 41:11
  Randall Kaplan: so interesting, too? I mean, Steve was a visionary in marketing and design and color, and people look at all these matte black cars today. Next was a matte black, cool as shit looking computer on your screen.
• 41:26
  Randall Kaplan: Everyone said, you have this black thing. Does that really work? You know, black computer was, wasn't a thing back then, but it was a very cool looking computer, yeah,
• 41:34
  Doug Evans: and it functioned.
• 41:34
  Doug Evans: And literally, it's all part of, you know, the process. There would be no apple today, had Steve not have been fired, not have started next, not have had gone to India. Not have done, you know, his chips of acid, not have like walked around barefoot drinking carrot juice and raw food like this is all part of the Divine process of of where it is. The saddest part is that Steve, you know, passed away at 56 years old. He
• 42:08
  Randall Kaplan: believed too much in the raw product. No, not, no,
• 42:13
  Doug Evans: no, no. He was exposed to toxic chemicals.
• 42:17
  Randall Kaplan: No, no. Instead of getting traditional medicine that people said would have, yeah, matured him or made him healthy, he said, I'm only going west, non western medicine. I'm biting
• 42:30
  Doug Evans: my tongue on this part of the conversation because the people who say, most people who say, have no no one knows, like, what's really going on, and I don't know, so I have no opinion on that.
• 42:44
  Randall Kaplan: Okay, that's fair. One, one footnote to the next story, then we're going to move on. Next was failing and was going to go out of business.
• 42:50
  Randall Kaplan: And what's so crazy. Yes, he started Apple. He gets fired. He raises this money. He starts next. Next raises this money.
• 42:58
  Randall Kaplan: Next wasn't going to make it.
• 43:01
  Randall Kaplan: You know, they're there. Their projections weren't.
• 43:04
  Doug Evans: I have, it's so interesting. I have a totally different view of that. Okay, so what? What's your view on next?
• 43:10
  Doug Evans: I think that next was going to raise a fortune from like Larry Ellison and other people in the valley, and Apple was terrified, and they made a preemptive move to buy next before a someone else would have bought it, or they would have gotten the ample funding. So it was not like it was positioned as a position of like weakness, and they were going to go off the rails. And I think it was very strict, because $400 million acquisition at the time, also, as you were saying, was not a fire sale, like it was a very strategic acquisition. And Steve had already made the decision, you know, at next to stop making hardware. So originally, he was making hardware, and then he realized that he had this Unix kernel that could go anywhere, and that was a threat. And there were, you know, people like Vinod Khosla and Scott McNealy that had sun and Java became one. So no one really, like, it's so funny when I hear that, because, like, that's what people say. But having been there at the time, like there was a more optionality, because, as you know, there's no shortage of money in the world, but Steve knew that this would probably be the best thing to get his creation out to the most people fastest, so it was a very humbling move to sell and to be on the sidelines along the way.
• 44:52
  Randall Kaplan: You mentioned Steve's fascination with raw foods and raw juice. Tell us about Mary strong and Duke University, and then walk us through the organic Avenue creation of that and what happened in those years, doubling sales and not making any money
• 45:09
  Doug Evans: when you have really high standards and you don't have a business background, you can make decisions that are seemingly irrational. So at organic Avenue, everything that we made was made with fresh fruits, vegetables, seeds, nuts, seaweed and sprouts. We used no additives, no preservatives and everything, had a maximum shelf life of a week. So my desire was to have as many people consuming our products as possible, right?
• 45:46
  Doug Evans: So we were making a lot of products, but if we it's hard to predict when you have a. Dozen retail stores and a short shelf life. Who's going to buy what on what day? And so if you make too much product, you have a lot of waste. And if you don't make enough product, you sell out.
• 46:04
  Doug Evans: And if you sell out and Randy Kaplan comes in and his product isn't on the shelf, then you're training Randy not to come in the store. So these conflicting factors resulted in a business that at best was break even. At Best was break even, doing, you know, a lot of volume, you know, million dollars plus a month in revenue, but hard to measure.
• 46:35
  Doug Evans: Fortunately, that experience helped me today with, you know, we'll talk about sprouts later, but it helped me understand how important it was for pricing, like everything that we sold at organic Avenue, in hindsight, should have been priced the way air one prices things today, like we didn't have the audacity, or the chutzpah or the vision to charge what air one charges today, like you're going to Air One? Have you been to air one of
• 47:08
  Randall Kaplan: zero this morning for breakfast? Okay, that best store. There's people who hear about it, who come fly from New York just to go to Erewhon, that's how big of a call fell in. And by the way, it's amazing. But we
• 47:20
  Doug Evans: didn't, we didn't know, like we were just trying to price things at as the low as possible so people could afford to buy them. But we didn't realize that that what went into it, in the value of it. So those lessons didn't apply to me until year. But you look at air one, and air one is saying, you want a premium, clean store to go into. You want food that's made with conscious, organic, prepared ingredients, they'll charge $25 for for, you know, roasted vegetables per pound, because that's what it costs to run an infrastructure where you have valet parking, and you're in premium real estate, and you want workers that show up on time and they're doing things safely. And I that was beyond my comprehension at the time, so
• 48:13
  Randall Kaplan: many entrepreneurs build these businesses, and they think, all right, these private equity firms all call. Today, they have biz dev people who just call, Hey, you want to sell your business? It's not just the 100 million dollar, billion dollar companies, it's the small businesses. Now there's lots of private equity firms calling, and then they do these roll ups, and then what usually happens is the founder can stay on for a little bit, but a lot of them get screwed. Yeah, tell us about your experience with Wells north and what happened. And what's your advice to all the entrepreneurs out there listening who get calls from private equity firms and say, Hey, I'm gonna give you some cash and we'll let you keep some of it. But here's a good way to cash out.
• 48:54
  Doug Evans: I think the important thing is to really know what you want, like what's motivating you, and to really be honest with yourself, because these are all history repeats itself. There's no surprises.
• 49:05
  Doug Evans: You know, in my own world, like having seen executives and founders being fired. Like, I deluded myself to think, like, Oh, I'm different. Like, that's not going to happen to me. And I had a private equity guy who was advising me on the transaction, and he looked at me and he goes, Doug, you understand that as soon as they have control, you're going to be out. And I was like, well, there's no way I'm too valuable. I know everything, like I'm doing everything. And he just laughed right in my face. He just laughed, and he's like, You have no clue. And he was right, and I was wrong.
• 49:54
  Randall Kaplan: And what'd you do when you got fired? Yeah, when, when, when you got kicked out? I started another company, like, two weeks later, yeah, one thing that I think we should also talk about is this is a great thing. Private equity firm comes along, they pay you a ton of money, and then they mess it up, and then you can buy it back for pennies on the dollar. You look at Quicken Loans. Quicken Loans at Intuit, bought the company for, I don't know, some crazy price, billions of dollars. Dan Gilbert bought it back, I think, for $200 million got to keep the queen. He sold his mortgage company. Then they got to keep the name Quicken, which obviously is a brand name.
• 50:32
  Randall Kaplan: And at some point that company was worth I think it's the second largest mortgage company in the world. The first is national wholesale mortgage.
• 50:38
  Randall Kaplan: Mattis BIA, who owns the Phoenix Suns, Detroiter go lines, by the way, has a number one mortgage company in the United States, the most valuable. But it's amazing how many entrepreneurs sell out the. The private equity firms. Oh, we know more than you do. We got consultants who work at McKinsey, whatever, and they fuck it up, and then you get to buy back. Yeah.
• 51:00
  Doug Evans: I mean, it's all part of just the process. So I think, and you go into any business, any transaction, and you have to go with your eyes open,
• 51:11
  Randall Kaplan: let's switch gears to your next company. And I want to read something from a famous interview you gave to recode magazine at the time this happened, and you essentially got booted from your company.
• 51:24
  Randall Kaplan: You said, what happened is, I knew too much about quality, like at that point, I knew too much about quality. What did you mean by that? Well,
• 51:36
  Doug Evans: it's, you know, in the current Zeitgeist today, right with RFK coming in, the protests against the major food companies, the additives, the preservatives. I knew that all these additives, all these preservatives, all these processes, were denaturing the food, rendering it nutritionally void, and all juice that was in a bottle was pasteurized. And it's different when you're pasteurizing dairy right where you're just killing the microbes, then when you're pasteurizing fresh juice, which you're killing the phytonutrients and the vitamin C and all of the elements are shifting. So I wanted to do with with I wanted to keep things real and fresh, like I liked fresh. I'd been eating fresh, and everyone wanted a shortcut.
• 52:37
  Doug Evans: So everyone is saying, Doug, we should freeze things. We should pasteurize things. We should put them in cans and bottles. And I was like, no, no, no. If you do that, it's not going to be it's not going to taste as good, and it won't be as nutritionally viable. So that's the essence of that. That part of the interview,
• 53:03
  Randall Kaplan: 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 taking a mainframe juicer and making a personal juicer. So tell us about the impetus for juicero, and what the idea was, and the years you develop, and talk about the prototypes as well, because we have to do the research. And there's something people do not understand when they see a consumer product. How long did you take a four year so tell us about the impetus for the idea, and then the development of the product itself.
• 53:39
  Doug Evans: 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 oxidation of the juice, which rapidly causes it to perish and green will turn brown. In professional juicing environments, it's a two stage process where they dice, slice, chop, shred, the produce, but they're still keeping the water molecules inside the cytoplasm, inside of the fiber, and then they put into cheesecloth, and then they press it. So commercial juicing, which I was doing for 10 years prior, we were using a juice press. And so what does that look like? A juice press is basically two large plates, either horizontal or vertical, and you put the produce into a a mesh bag, the chopped produce, and then the press slowly extracts the the juice from the fiber. And that's a juice press. So all commercial juice presses work in that two step process. So I had started with a small juice press that did 12 quarts per hour, and then I had a commercial juice press that did 15 gallons per hour, then I bought six of those, and then I bought a commercial press that did 50 gallons per hour, and I bought six of those. And then I bought a commercial juice press, which was like a monster the size of this room, that had 24 consecutive plates that did 500 gallons an hour of juice.
• 55:23
  Doug Evans: And so that was like my vision of the mainframe, and that created really great juice. And so my thought was when I realized that people who had a home juicer were only using it once or twice a month because they had to go buy their produce, make the juice, clean up the juicer all the waste.
• 55:47
  Doug Evans: They didn't always have the ingredients, so they weren't using it. Right, and that all juice that was in a bottle was pasteurized, and all the life force, the enzymes, the vitamin C, all these things, were denatured so that it could have long shelf life and not taste very good. So I said, if I can bifurcate the juicing process as I know it, and take fresh, organic produce, slice it, chop it, keep it fresh, keep it raw, keep it unpasteurized, put it into a little pouch. And the part of the patent was having the cheese cloth inside of an outer carrier. So when you put that pouch into the machine. It didn't make a mess. All the juice went into the glass. So we built up a supply chain, and so I started off my first prototype was literally an airbrush compressor, filling up a hot water bottle, pressing two cutting boards together to make a little manual press. How big?
• 56:56
  Doug Evans: What's the size? We talked countertop size, like a little bit bigger than an espresso machine. And that thing blew up in my lap because I didn't understand, caught fire. No, no, blew up because of the psi of the 150 psi was more powerful than the structure in the frame that I built to contain the bladder that was inflating. So if you just think it up the pressure as you blow up a balloon is a lot of force. So if you blow up a balloon, you know, or blow up a bladder there, turns out that there are presses made out of bladders and moving things in and out, and they filling the bladders with air or with water. Turns out with air is the most dangerous, because it can explode water or oil is less so I built prototypes, and I wasn't a mechanical engineer, so I went and had to find mechanical engineers welding shops, and I built a prototype that worked. And I was taking this little prototype around, and I'd take my my little cooler bag, and I still travel with the cooler bag. I took my cooler bag with these homemade packs of fresh produce, and I would go show them to people and make a juice for them, and they would drink that juice, and it was like nothing that they ever experienced in their whole life, because it was fresh. And so people had fresh juice before, but they never had fresh cold pressed. So the flavor profile I have an interview, a video I could show you with Chef Jean George Michelin, star chef that I was making juice for his restaurants, and I said, Does this meet your quality standard?
• 58:44
  Doug Evans: Your excellence? Jean George, and he goes, Doug, you've exceeded my quality standards.
• 58:48
  Doug Evans: You've exceeded my excellence.
• 58:53
  Doug Evans: So I built something that was so good, and then the challenge was Y Combinator scale, the unscalable. How do you scale something where the original prototypes, I was making, every one of those packs of produce, I was building the machines locally, by hand. How can you scale that up to meet the numbers of George Foreman grill for 100 million grills?
• 59:19
  Randall Kaplan: Right? So this is a part of a story that so many people are going to be interested in. How did you approach VCs sell them on the idea, and how in the world did you raise $120 million from some of the leading, most successful firms in the world to create a juicing machine? The whole
• 59:42
  Doug Evans: thing is like, I I'm not about the money. Today, I wasn't about the money then. I was focused on the excellence on the product. So when I would go there and I would have them experience the product.
• 59:57
  Randall Kaplan: Well, take us back. Yeah, hey, Google Ventures. This is Doug Evans. I had a 10 store, juice company that didn't make any money after
• 1:00:08
  Doug Evans: certain amount. I did have a nine figure, eight figure exit with it. Okay, well, I had some credibility. Okay, we were
• 1:00:14
  Randall Kaplan: cold calling Google Ventures in Kleiner Perkins, yeah, do you pick up the phone, or you showed up in the lobby? Or No? No, I think you have to network your way through that. So yeah, and so explain it. And then what's your advice to everyone else who wants to get into Kleiner Perkins?
• 1:00:28
  Doug Evans: You need to find someone who knows, someone who either works there, or who's been funded by there, or who advises there, or who somehow does business there, like there's there's where there's a will, there's a way. My original path into Kleiner Perkins came through the universe, through a.
• 1:00:52
  Doug Evans: I'm passionate approach because I had, I was helping a young, organic vegan fashion designer who I met through Alicia Silverstone said, Hey, Doug, I'm looking at this company that's doing vegan clothing. You know, could you meet with her? So I'm meeting with her, and she's showing me her designs, and then she tells me that she has a meeting coming up with Kleiner Perkins. And I'm saying the back of my head, why is Kleiner Perkins meeting with you? And she said, Oh, well, Kleiner Perkins funded beyond meet, and Beyond Meat was started with a guy that was at the Humane Society, and I know that guy, so I got this in connection, and I said, What would you introduce me? And similar to when you asked me to introduce you to somebody, she was very open, saying, Sure. So she gives me the the name and the contact person of who she was at Kleiner Perkins, I call up, and I said, Hey, I'm going to be in San Francisco on Thursday, and I'd love to meet with so and so I was referred by so and so, were you really
• 1:02:07
  Randall Kaplan: going to be there? You just made it up. I'm going to be there. Well, no, if I had the meeting, I would be there, right? But you didn't have the meeting. Brilliant idea. I've heard this so many times. Hey, I'm going to going to be there that day. Will you been
• 1:02:18
  Doug Evans: in my mind? In my mind, just, just so, you know, we were clear. I knew this was happening, so I was going to be there. And so I was going to be there. So they set up a 15 minute meeting, and the night before I pack up my prototype, I go to the airport. I have to check it. It's in a pelican box.
• 1:02:41
  Doug Evans: I land an SFO like 11 o'clock.
• 1:02:41
  Doug Evans: I'm waiting. I'm waiting, and the thing never comes. And my meeting this next morning on Sand Hill Road at 830 in the morning. So now I have to make a decision, do I go to them? So first of all, TSA confiscated my machine because they thought was a bomb, so it never came. And I have to decide, do I postpone the meeting, or do I go anyway, without a PowerPoint and without my my demo. And so what do you think I did?
• 1:03:18
  Randall Kaplan: You went, of course, never turned down a meeting because it may not happen again. That's
• 1:03:26
  Doug Evans: right. That's right.
• 1:03:26
  Doug Evans: So I went in the meeting, and I had to describe, you know what the excellence that I had, no visuals, no visuals, no presentation. And, you know, I connected, you know, with, with the partner. There is
• 1:03:42
  Randall Kaplan: a lesson there that people fund founders, they believe in and like 100%
• 1:03:49
  Doug Evans: well, they it's not that they believe in, they like, like I was an expert on this category of juice. I knew a lot about juice, and I was able to describe the mechanical infrastructure. You know, my partner at Kleiner Perkins is the guy that funded Tony Fidel at Nest. Tony was on my show, yeah, so he was
• 1:04:13
  Randall Kaplan: the first check in. So Tony, for those people who don't know Tony, adventure of the iPad, of the
• 1:04:19
  Doug Evans: iPod, of the iPod, of the iPod. And then the architect of the iPhone and early General Magic, legendary guy. And then co founded nest computer nest, Nest Labs, the thermostat,
• 1:04:34
  Randall Kaplan: which was sold to Google for $4 billion yeah,
• 1:04:38
  Doug Evans: so. But when, when nest got funded, Randy Tony Fidel went with a hockey puck and put it up on the wall and said, This invention is going to save energy. This is going to use AI and machine learning to see the habits to make sure that the room is always optimized to the right temperature. And we're going to save trillions of of tons of CO two and lower electric bills and do all this.
• 1:05:13
  Doug Evans: And he described it that it was going to be like the iPhone and iPod of thermostats, etc, and how they'd be able to compete, you know, with all of the big thermostat companies. So he felt that they would be able to do that. And I didn't know that at the time that that meeting was but that was the power of being able to just like, I think the point of me telling that story, there's another example that the founder really has to know their stuff like, it's not about like, how. The idea it's about understanding what's involved on actually going from concept to execution. And in the case of Tony Fidel, he obviously built product and knew how to do that.
• 1:06:07
  Doug Evans: So it was low risk for me. I knew how to make juice. The big risk was, could I actually make hardware? Could I build a supply chain? Could I build a manufacturing process to fill millions of bags? And I have to say, I'm so proud that juicero shipped over 1 million packs of produce that the people who had a juicero, forget about all the haters, because there's going to be a lot of haters. The people who had the machine loved it and used it 9.2 times a week, statistically accurate data of 1000s of people using this machine 9.2 times a week and loving it. Let's
• 1:06:53
  Randall Kaplan: back up, because I were, we got to go through the VC process more. I mean, one thing, if you read about it, and this is, this is lore, and it's a famous story that a juicer. I mean, people think today of Nutribullet, right? I think that's common. You can buy one for 59 bucks. I think the fancy ones, 149, or whatever, you raise $120 million for a juicing machine. And a lot of people thought, How in the world, did that ever happen? And so walk us through the Kleiner Perkins, did they gave you a term sheet, and then how did you scale? Because one round was 14 million, then you had a $70 million round. And we will definitely get into the numbers in a little bit, because I think the numbers tell a lot of the story. So what was the business model? So
• 1:07:46
  Doug Evans: first of all, it was more than a juicer. It was a whole ecosystem and a whole platform around delivering fresh, raw nutrition, you know, at large scale. So the process was, I built a prototype, and I raised a $4 million seed round where I went, and there were checks in that seed round from$25,000
• 1:08:11
  Randall Kaplan: to $500,000 checks. What was the valuation?
• 1:08:16
  Doug Evans: 15 million, 16 million. Free
• 1:08:18
  Randall Kaplan: money, pre money. So for those people who don't know what that means, you set a valuation for a company is pie in the sky. They basically base it based on future projections of what size of the market and the profits will be in the future. It's called the pre money valuation. Then you raise money. Raise $4 million if it's 14 pre money, four is 18, post money, yeah,
• 1:08:38
  Doug Evans: some something close to that. And I had some really great people, you know, in in that round, like and, and I got those people because I heard a lot of no's. But I also when, when someone experienced the product and they saw it, they said we could see how this can become ubiquitous, how you could sell 10s of millions of the these juicers and hundreds of millions of these packs, like they just felt and saw that. So we did that, and then the next stage, and you're in the hardware business, right? Or supplying technology to hardware. Hardware is hard, like when you want to build anything hardware. And I had experts around me that mapped out the path that people think like you make a tool to make a piece of hardware, and no one understands these are all abstract terms.
• 1:09:38
  Doug Evans: And I remember teaching a class at Harvard Business School, and all of these lovely students were asking you, saying, Well, why did it cost so much, and why didn't you do this? And they have no idea. Like, if you want to make something that's custom and that's pretty and that functions, and in small quantities, it's very expensive, just very expensive. Like the to make the juicero v1 is over, like, 400 parts, and almost, you know, half of them were custom, so there was no, you couldn't just go to a McMaster catalog to get it, or the machine would have been this big. So if you want to create something that's small and that's pretty, it's, it requires a lot of engineering to to to make so, so how we got to how much money we raised was predicated on how much money we would need in order to build out the manufacturing process, the supply chain, get the team, do the quality, do the food safety, do the recipe development, do all the administrative. Managing the IP, doing the testing, like doing the app, like, this was a lot of moving pieces in order to do this. So it wasn't like, hey, I want to just raise $100 million because it's a big number. It was like, How much money do we need to execute on this business
• 1:11:10
  Randall Kaplan: and to raise money. Everyone needs a financial model, and you must have had a very complicated financial money I've gone through the numbers. So talk to us about the two part model you got, the machine and the hardware that you buy, and then you have something called SaaS.
• 1:11:28
  Randall Kaplan: And talk about what SaaS means Software as a Service, and why VC firms like that so much. And then let's go through some of the actual projections. Because no way on earth anyone can ever raise $100 million without giving some seriously complicated financial model that people believe in. Yeah.
• 1:11:46
  Doug Evans: Well, the thing is the the most important thing, like really, if you look at Tony Fidel, you look at Steve Jobs, you look at any of these entrepreneurs, they were focused on a solving a business need, right? So there's a need that was being solved, and they had something that was innovative, that could have a moat around it, that that was practical, that could scale. And there's a lot of you know nuance into that, but basically, you know, if you want to raise venture capital, right, you have to show something that could actually scale to five years, $50 million or greater in revenue, so an investor can get a 10x 20x 100x return. So there's two ways. You could just make numbers up, or you could be very rational and very practical, and having a command of every dollar required to acquire a customer, what the acquisition cost is, what the value of the customer is, what the churn, what the cost of manufacturing is, what the tooling cost is, what the scaling cost, and then what is the team in the organization need to look like in order to have it? And what kind of waste will you have? What kind of turnover? What's the taxes, administration and rent? There's so many insurance, there's so many variables that you need to have to build an organization.
• 1:13:26
  Doug Evans: But what gets funded in Silicon Valley is something that has the potential to become a multi billion dollar business.
• 1:13:35
  Doug Evans: Otherwise, you go to your rich uncle, or you go Go Fund Me, or you do a Kickstarter. But you know, there's a degree of discipline you have to have when you're raising venture capital, and there's also a process that's extremely hard, like for outsiders. So I think one of the one of the reasons I experienced so much love and so much vitriol is because I was an outsider, and what I didn't know was how treacherous it is in that world, like I'm a raw vegan yogi, you know, like I was on the product.
• 1:14:18
  Doug Evans: I had no idea of, like, what it was like in that world, like it was so beyond me, because I was an outsider to it. So I came in and it looked like I was doing really well, but I didn't have my guard up. I didn't understand the complexity. Was so far from me riding graffiti on subway trains, so far from me jumping out of planes in the army, so far from me making juice in a lemonade stand in New York City, this was like a entirely different world that was incomprehensible. So I think, for my first time, going into, you know, the into the cage, you know, in MMA, like I think I did, I think I did great. And now I could step back and I can describe it, and I see it and like, the thing is, you can go back into the ring at any point in time. Most people, when they get their their head stuff between their legs, along with their tail stuff down their throat, they don't want to go back into the arena like they want to kind of cower off. But the true entrepreneurs aren't doing it for the money. They're not doing it for what other people think, like the idea comes through them and they.
• 1:15:52
  Doug Evans: Have to do it. They just have to do it. So juicero, I had to do and what I learned was that entire process and journey was$120 million education into Doug Evans, the entrepreneur, the Father, the founder, the CEO, the philanthropist. It was just part of my journey, and it had to happen.
• 1:16:20
  Randall Kaplan: If you're a founder and you're going to seek money from somebody else, you better know every single ingredient that goes into your revenue and your expenses. You must know everything about the financial statements, the financial model. You must know things like gross margin and profits. I can't tell you, Doug, how many founders have been into my office. And you go through and you ask simple questions, what's the average salary? What are you going to make? Which is a fastball down the middle, right? You warm them up, or her up, and you say, okay, you know you're gonna raise a million dollar seed round. What are you gonna pay yourself? $200,000 All right? Well, that meeting's over, right? You're not gonna, you know, we're not paying someone $200,000 but I can't tell you how many people, even, who have revenues coming in after a while. What were your gap revenues last year? And you know what they say? I have so many blank faces. They can't tell me what their actual The only thing that matters to these companies is cash in the bank, right? So if someone talks about monthly recurring revenue and growth rates, and they talk about the projections, I don't sure that's helpful. I care about how much cash do you have in the bank? Are you profitable?
• 1:17:31
  Randall Kaplan: What your margins are? And it's shocking to me how many entrepreneurs come into the office and cannot answer these simple questions. If you're gonna raise money, you better know the answer to every single question. You are a fiduciary of my capital. That's
• 1:17:46
  Doug Evans: right. Well, the point is like, how can they possibly know when they've never done it before, and they haven't surrounded themselves with people that have done it. So in a way, the culture of Silicon Valley, especially with the incubators and the accelerators, it's really about getting something out to market quickly, minimum viable product, and seeing is it going to work, and then figuring out things along the way. And that model works sometimes, but most of the times it doesn't work. And so there's a lot of collateral damage.
• 1:18:33
  Doug Evans: There's a lot of people, you know, dead on the side of the road, and it's hard, it's just, it's just hard to do it, and most deals don't get funded, you know, for those reasons. If
• 1:18:47
  Randall Kaplan: you're a founder and you do not know what you're doing, and most founders do not know what they're doing, your first time founder, that's fine.
• 1:18:51
  Randall Kaplan: Everyone's a first time founder at some point, but it is essential to your success to go out and find either a mentor, someone who's been through it before, someone who can tell you what to do and what not to do.
• 1:19:06
  Randall Kaplan: There's there's some cardinal sins when you're trying to raise money that you don't do, and there are some essentials that you have to do to help yourself get the funding, and it's critical. Every entrepreneur out there needs a mentor or needs to go seek advice and fundraising and only fundraising once they launch, on how to keep going and how to sustain and build a profitable company. It doesn't have a phone and call somebody or
• 1:19:31
  Doug Evans: or find go out and socialize and meet people like you can hike. I think today people aren't answering their phone, so you have to go out like when you and I met, right?
• 1:19:43
  Doug Evans: I drove four hours to Vegas for that event, right? Because a friend introduced me and said, Hey, this a worthwhile thing, and I met you, and I met a bunch of other people there, but that wouldn't have happened had I not taken the initiative to go meet people in person.
• 1:20:03
  Randall Kaplan: We did the same thing. I mean, I was invited. We went to this I wasn't even sure what it was. Doug, I have a friend. He invited us. I couldn't tell if it was going to be 10 people or 100 people, or I thought we were going to 25 people dinner. Steve Wozniak was there, and some other people.
• 1:20:21
  Randall Kaplan: I'd met Steve at a conference.
• 1:20:21
  Randall Kaplan: He said he's going to do my show, which I'm excited about, but it's, it's you do meet people. And I wasn't going to network. I was going to hang out with Steve Wozniak because I want to talk to Steve about my show, and you end up hanging out with me. It wasn't hanging out with you, but I see this, you know, cool guy at the end of the room. We're standing there. Kind of people are are wandering out, and we're both successful people, right? I'm not out networking now just to meet people, but I love meeting talented. Smart, motivated, similar minded people who want to do good, want to build companies. I find it exhilarating. Yeah, yeah,
• 1:21:04
  Doug Evans: but, but you have to be out there. I mean, the thing is, you're at this apogee of success already, right? You've had exits, you've had your funds, and you're out in the world in that event, like people in two seconds, like, Oh, I did.
• 1:21:21
  Doug Evans: You said Randy Kaplan, I look, I go the bathroom while I'm doing my P mail. Randy Kaplan, founder, you know, venture capitalists, etc. I was like, Oh, this is a meaningful guy.
• 1:21:32
  Doug Evans: I'm just, you know, making that up, but, but the point is,
• 1:21:35
  Randall Kaplan: like, I do do that, by the way, so just, just to, you know, but
• 1:21:39
  Doug Evans: in that context, you know, we never separated until we separate, right? Like, I met you and Madison, and then we just hung out until we didn't.
• 1:21:45
  Doug Evans: But there were some very important opportunities there for other people, and other people were busy literally thinking how they could get another drink before the bar closed. How could they eat one more shrimp from their thing, as opposed to looking at that platform in that room to see how could this help me become a better entrepreneur, better, founder, better, whatever. Let's
• 1:22:15
  Randall Kaplan: talk about marketing, which is important to sell yourself, sell your company, sell your product. And you did. There's two things that I want to talk about on the marketing side that you did that struck out to me as I was learning more about juicero and the story and and the rise and fall. And we'll talk about some of the lessons that that we learned as well when things don't really go our way. You mentioned, as you were pitching the product, that the metal was aircraft grade aluminum. Yes, that could lift two teslas.
• 1:22:48
  Randall Kaplan: That's right, was one thing that you said, and what I love better than that was juice is so good that drinking it is like getting kissed by the juice. People drink it and all of a sudden they want it. I mean, this sounds like you should put some kind of a warning label on it for the kids.
• 1:23:10
  Doug Evans: I mean, literally, the product was so good. Like, literally, there was nothing like 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 know, some you know, lost person who need a lot of love. At Bloomberg, who's getting compensated for her click bait, is looking for some hook angle to bring somebody down. And in the world, you know, prior to, you know, the term fake news and calling things out like they're able to get spiral dynamics and get things to go so, you know.
• 1:23:58
  Doug Evans: But for me, it was always about the product, and that's what you want to you want as an entrepreneur, you want to create a product that people love, that people are obsessed over. And I could tell you, like the people who had you Sarah, were obsessed with it, the people who didn't, it's easy to hate on it if you don't, if you've never experienced it, because trying to describe something that's indescribable, so I tries to use poetic words. But some people, you know, just never got it, and it's easy to hate on. And then you have the pylon like which is really just a sad thing about society. It is and and that's what really hurt the business, was that the pylon caused some of the investors to feel shame, and they just were like, oh, you know, I don't like being associated with this. I don't even know what really happened, but I'm done, so
• 1:25:02
  Randall Kaplan: let's talk about it. Because you You skipped ahead, and let's stay there for a second. Sure, there was a Bloomberg piece that came out shortly after product was launched, yes, and it said it would basically ridicule the machine where you're spending$700 initially, and then you decrease the price of $400 then you buy these juice packs. And that was part of the SaaS model software as a service revenue.
• 1:25:24
  Randall Kaplan: You had to keep buying the packs to use the machine. And the thought there was that it's a one time purchase for the machine, so you have to determine if people really willing to pay that for espresso machine today. By the way, the one I bought was $1,200 in my home, right? And it makes pretty good out there every day. The
• 1:25:41
  Doug Evans: original one was 2500 so they went from about 2500 down to 100 and came back up for the premium value, right?
• 1:25:49
  Randall Kaplan: So this Bloomberg piece comes out, and they basically said. Could, rather than spend this you could squeeze the juice by hand almost as effectively. I think there was a point two ounce difference between squeezing the juice by hand than what the machine could actually do itself. And that ultimately was the beginning of the end. Yeah, and
• 1:26:08
  Doug Evans: 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 to Bloomberg. So then Bloomberg is like looking for something like this. These same reporters at Bloomberg had done a hit piece on a different food tech company prior, so there was like weariness around talking to them, and then they found the fact that you could squeeze the pack by hand would be like saying you could pour hot water over an espresso pod, and you don't need your $1,200 machine.
• 1:26:46
  Doug Evans: And so Bloomberg came up with this story, and then they went down the cap table, and they called 100 different investors, two investors who I don't know whether they invested $25,000 or a million dollars, but Bloomberg said to them, Hey, did you know that juicero is a fraud? Doug is a charlatan. You don't need the machine. You could squeeze the pack by hand. And we're writing an expose around about the company. And they got a quote from the investor that said, if I knew that Doug was selling bags of juice, we never would have met with him. And obviously they did meet with me. They opened up the packs. They went to the lab. People did diligence, but so they got that quote. So then Bloomberg writes an article that says, juicero feeling the squeeze investors unhappy. And I swear on my life, the reason why investors were unhappy is because Bloomberg was bullshitting to them for the click bait, and then without any challenging, without any fact based behind it, that article got then picked up by other people. No one did primary information, no one did follow through, and all of a sudden it's so easy to hate on it's like, they bring you up and then they just hate you and bring you down. I don't think anyone thought that the company was so fragile that this one article, you know, would would tear it down. Like, there there are people food companies that kill people. Like, I'm proud. We served a million servings. No one was sick, right? I'm proud that we raised the capital, we built the machine, and we sold out of v1 sold out of v1 so there were so many things to celebrate, but it's such a fragile part, because when you're moving, you know, at 500 miles an hour, the slightest deviation from plan, can you know cause you to go off the rails? And for me as the founder, My biggest mistake was not knowing that I should have stayed in the in the horse seat in the jockey seat that I should not have given up and let a new CEO come in.
• 1:29:19
  Randall Kaplan: So this guy, Jeff Dunn, comes in. He's the president of Coca Cola North America. I think he ran Campbell Soup as well, a billion dollar, several billion dollar company in getting funding from a venture capitalists, one of the questions that I always ask everyone always asks is, Are you the right person to leave the company forever, and if somebody else comes along, who's better than you to take the company to where it needs to go through an acquisition or public offering, are you willing to give up control the company to let somebody more talented than you.
• 1:29:53
  Randall Kaplan: We recently had a guy coming into the office, Doug. This guy was one of the most offensive people I've ever met in my life.
• 1:30:00
  Randall Kaplan: He's he was arrogant, conceited, and it was clear to me he was not the right person to lead any company, let alone his company.
• 1:30:08
  Randall Kaplan: I gave him some critique, some advice. You don't know You don't know enough. We're just meeting for the first time. And I said to him, I said, you have the kind of personality that is irascible. People are not going to work with you. You're not a leader. You may be the idea, but you're not going to lead this company. And I said, You are not the right person. And he said, You don't know what you're talking about, but I do know what I'm talking about, and that's a common question, yeah, what happened?
• 1:30:39
  Doug Evans: 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 founder and CEO, I raised all the capital we had. Oh. Over $100 million in the bank, and the board had a can, someone on the board had a connection to Jeff, and Jeff came in and he's like, I love the product. I love you.
• 1:31:05
  Doug Evans: This is great. We can do things.
• 1:31:05
  Doug Evans: And I'm very open, loving, trusting, and I remember, you know, every conversation, and then, you know, when the board members were like, Doug, this would be great for the business.
• 1:31:21
  Doug Evans: Like, if Jeff comes in, he knows about juice, he knows about raising capital, he knows about scaling, he knows about managing, you know, 1000s of people. And you know, we have a rocket ship, and you are doing too much. You're running sales, marketing, product development, capital raising, like this would just be great. You know, he you can design the trains, he can make them run on time. And I was like, if you guys put up all this money and you think this is the right thing to do, like, I'm not going to be, you know, obstinate. I'm not going to block what, what you guys think, because we had a strong board smart people. And I was like, like, if this is what you think.
• 1:32:07
  Doug Evans: And I was like, as committed, because when I talk about the things like, I literally organized meetings with all of my direct reports and all the teams, and made sure that everyone knew that I was 100% supportive of bringing Jeff on and doing, you know, all the parts and All the transition but it's so different running a big corporation versus running a startup that's
• 1:32:39
  Randall Kaplan: scrappy, it's huge. We had a startup in Los Angeles where it was clear the founders were not the right person. They just didn't have leadership qualities. It wasn't going to work. I went out and find someone at Accenture who was on the Management Committee, which is a big deal, was on the board, which is a big deal, who had been there 40 years. And there's a guy named George Sheehan who had left Accenture to run a company called Web van, and that was a huge hire. Made the Wall Street Journal. I remember I got this guy. I found him. He was a friend of a friend. He comes to work at the company. It was a disaster. Just because you're on the board of directors or help run a billion dollar business does not mean that you know how to build a startup with 10 people. You don't have a culture. You're in some ivy tower at this huge company. You haven't been on the front lines, you're not cold call, you're not dealing with customers. You can't deal with young employees if you're 65 years old and haven't built teams like that. It's a different culture, different people, different leadership style, and it was a company killer. It's amazing when you hire the wrong CEO, things can go that. And, you know, there's a lesson that we learned as well. You know, hire slow, fire, fast, and at some point you've committed to the wrong horse, the wrong leader, and it's too late to shift. The company is in such a downward spiral, spiral, at that point it's game over.
• 1:34:11
  Doug Evans: Yeah? I mean, it was very unfortunate, you know, the whole thing, especially the people who work there, like I worked so hard recruiting this team to build this product. And I really feel like, aside from the customers that are disappointed, they have the product, these people who came from the greatest companies, you know, in the valley and in the world, to come build a product that all of a sudden, like I realized afterwards, when I stepped down, that it was the beginning of the end for me, for them, for the company and for the clients, and that was the hard part. Like they work, and I'm still so close with so many you know, of the key juicero people, because we're, in a way, we're still in shock because the product was so good, and especially with the new administration and everything that's happening now. Like the juicer, we talk about clean ingredients. It's like you picked up the pack of juicero.
• 1:35:13
  Doug Evans: It was like orange carrot, lemon, kale, spinach, like five ingredients. We had one product that was 100% pomegranate, no additives, no preservatives. It was fresh pomegranate. And we had to create a system to open up pomegranates and knock out the individual arrows and then put them in the pouch.
• 1:35:38
  Randall Kaplan: One of the things that every venture capitalist looks for when funding any company in the technology space is proprietary technology. What intellectual property Do you have that serves as a moat to prevent competitors from coming in? Yeah. I want to talk about the Patents You filed, yeah, so we're going to go through these, and I think the details really matter. You filed, 34 applications. Six were granted. I'm just going to read them right now, because I find this incredibly fascinating and interesting. Three of the patents that you were granted were for pouches, d7 87 341, d7 89 799, d7 9361 the details matter. And I think if you're an entrepreneur, you should go look up all these patents on the USPTO website. You file two patents for food press, d7 93 820, and d7 96 272, and then you file the patent with this title, juicing methods and apparatuses for extracting juice from food matter using juicer cartridges.
• 1:36:41
  Randall Kaplan: That patent issued was d4 93 298, really patents were issued for a juicer, for pouches in a press. How did you get those patents issued, and how important was it for you to get funding?
• 1:37:02
  Doug Evans: I think that the there was a lot of novel ideas and engineering that went into this, and that created a very powerful mode,
• 1:37:15
  Randall Kaplan: pouch, a pouch, pouch. How do you patent a pouch?
• 1:37:18
  Doug Evans: Well, the pouch was actually multiple layers. We had, you know, if you were to take a normal plastic bag, zip lock bag, and put produce in it and seal it, it becomes anaerobic, because the produce is alive, so it's respiring and needs to consume oxygen and release CO two. So we had to work with creating a membrane that was like gore tex, that allowed air to come in but liquid not to go out. And then on the pouch, we had to make it so it could support the produce and then release it on demand, where it was just such a beautiful detail that, you know, originally, when I was doing my demos, I would have to take a scissor and I'd cut open the pouch, and a few drops would come out, and then you'd put it in the press, and then we created a the technical term was frangible, that the force of the press would cause just that one part of the pouch to open, and then we had a membrane inside that would contain the fiber but allow the juice to go through.
• 1:38:30
  Doug Evans: So it was all of these things that were constructed into this pouch because the the the idea was that a we needed to fill these at scale. They needed to work if, if you, if you just tried to do it manually, it just wouldn't work. And I didn't want to do all this work so that someone could easily copy it.
• 1:38:50
  Doug Evans: But I actually had the CEO of Nestle fly from Vive, Switzerland to come to my office. I had the chairman of Nespresso come to my office several times, and he said they had been working on trying to crack this code for 10 years, over a billion dollars funded, and they couldn't do it, and they were so impressed with what we had done with seemingly a fraction of the dollars that they had applied, because it was really difficult to do anything at scale. So we were on the way to, you know, on the way for success with this product. And the IP was something to support this. So all these systems were very important. And I I can tell you, I would stay up at after working a full, you know, eight hours on sales calls, four hours on investor meetings and then manufacturing meetings with China, with China and Asia, and then I'd spend the remaining time until my next call reading and working and editing on the patents.
• 1:40:07
  Randall Kaplan: One of the things that founders do when we ask them about proprietary technology, it often comes up, oh, we have a patent. There's a difference. For founders coming in explaining that you filed for a patent and a patent that's been issued a grand patent. So for founders coming in, there's a difference. They have to know the difference. Number two, they also have to hire the right attorney, a patent intellectual property law firm. I see another mistake having Doug all the time, which is, you hire someone who doesn't have the expertise, because the lawyer is too expensive to do it, and they just went with someone who's a corporate lawyer. Doesn't know what they're doing. Hiring the right IP counsel is critical.
• 1:40:45
  Randall Kaplan: And the third thing is, a lot of people don't understand when they're have a proprietary product or computer. Meeting with someone like Google or Microsoft or Apple who has billions of dollars of resources at their potential that patent lawsuits, when you go to trial are typically a minimum of ten million an Akamai situation. We had proprietary technology.
• 1:41:09
  Randall Kaplan: There was a it was a really novel way, revolutionary way to serve web traffic. Company, ultimately, I think today, still serves 30% of the world's web traffic. Another competitor copied our patents, issued patents, and Akamai spent somewhere between 200 and $400 million in lawsuits to go to trial. We won. It was appealed by the other company. We won again. It's hugely expensive to get the IP and it doesn't mean that you're done. It doesn't mean that someone's not going to come copy your product anyway.
• 1:41:46
  Randall Kaplan: Yeah,
• 1:41:48
  Doug Evans: but I think if you have something that's novel and clear and you've got good claims on it, then it's important to do and it was important part of the process. I don't think it was a requisite for the financing, because it was very hard to do what we were doing, and people would only copy you if you were very successful. And what we did, from an IP perspective, is we did make it meaningful for the large companies that were looking through our IP portfolio that they were like, wow. And we started to file those patents very, very early on, even before we had the money to do that.
• 1:42:33
  Randall Kaplan: What was the biggest mistake you made in the downfall of juicero, stepping down the CEO? What was the second biggest
• 1:42:40
  Doug Evans: 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 running this plant that had 150 employees in the fresh produce operation plant. And we were running the plant six days a week. Was 110,000 square feet.
• 1:43:03
  Doug Evans: Yeah, 100 and 110,000 square feet 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 a week, so we'll have one day of setup, one day of production, one day of cleanup, as opposed to running those extra days that would have saved hundreds of 1000s of dollars a month in payroll. Another kind of key thing was wanting to scale faster outside of, you know, like LA. We could have just stayed in LA for a while. There was so much business here, and instead we we tried to go national early, and that, you know, required resources and engineering and packaging and distribution, where it would have made more sense to stay local sooner. And then the other part was we had a subsequent design for lower cost machine.
• 1:44:19
  Doug Evans: And after we did v1 and we sold out of v1 we should have said, Okay, that's it for this.
• 1:44:26
  Doug Evans: Instead, we were we did two concurrent engineering projects.
• 1:44:32
  Doug Evans: One was trying to work on V 1.5 to cost, reduce what the v1 machine looked like. And that took resources and time and capital, as opposed to the leap frog product, the v2 product.
• 1:44:46
  Doug Evans: And that that I think, was a mistake, that that was
• 1:44:52
  Randall Kaplan: very costly, another common mistake that entrepreneurs make. There's some prevailing mentality in Silicon Valley that you have to raise these massive rounds, $100 million rounds, and that's a method of accomplishment. You've done what all these other companies are doing. And I think there's two problems with that, two big problems with that.
• 1:45:10
  Randall Kaplan: First, you feel compelled to spend the money. If it's in the bank, you almost feel the pressure to spend the money.
• 1:45:15
  Randall Kaplan: There used to be this pressure from VC. Firms grow at all speed. They don't care about the profits. Now things have tightened up a little bit as all these huge, massive failures.
• 1:45:25
  Randall Kaplan: The second thing founders raise a ton of money don't realize is you are materially shrinking the possibility and probability of you having successful exit and outcome, because at some point you've raised too much money.
• 1:45:37
  Randall Kaplan: You're raising $100 million probably gonna have a $500 million minimum acquisition, or$500 million minimum valuation.
• 1:45:43
  Randall Kaplan: And all these founders said, Oh God, I want to have a $2 billion$3 billion valuation. At some point there's more room. Boom for downside, decreased valuation, then upside appreciation, and we've seen it so many times. I mean the WeWork example, what do they have a $38 billion valuation and then ultimately had under a $1 billion valuation? How can you be the growth rate that you have to have to sustain increasing valuations. When you get to the billions and billions and billions of dollars, if you're not going public, there's only a handful of companies that can afford to buy you.
• 1:46:20
  Doug Evans: Yeah. Look, I think that, you know, there's so many.
• 1:46:25
  Doug Evans: 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 capital that you need, and not more, not less, right? And the need is a very subjective part, because you can do a lot with a little if you're creative and scrappy.
• 1:46:51
  Doug Evans: So you know the another, you know you asked about another mistake that I made was, if no one knew how much capital we raised at juicero, no one would write about it. We know like no one would care, right? So what happened is like, why is Bloomberg writing about like a juice company, like a juicer company that's not public, that's not going public anytime soon. They only wrote about it because that hook of the 100 million dollars gave them something that they figured that they could turn into click bait.
• 1:47:26
  Doug Evans: And I don't know this for a fact, but I've heard that Bloomberg incentivizes and motivates their writing and editorial staff, not only just based on clicks and traffic and volume, but if they can make a stock go up or down, or they could cause A change of control in the company, like, that's like their culture of how cut throat is. And the funny thing is about Bloomberg is, since this is a business, you know, oriented podcast, Bloomberg is software as a service. The Bloomberg terminal at $2,000 a month, where 90% of the data that's on the Bloomberg terminal is available for free on Yahoo financing and Google and AI. So you talk about like, the the pot calling the kettle black, Bloomberg is attacking someone that someone should go like doing expose a on Bloomberg, where they even forced, like the secretaries, to get the Bloomberg terminal, even though they'll never use the advanced, complex financial models, etc, because, like, that's their their their stick. But for me, if no one knew how much money we raised, no one would have cared.
• 1:48:55
  Doug Evans: We could have been happily on our way to just building building a
• 1:48:59
  Randall Kaplan: park. What is it about the human condition that you do well, and you raise all this money, and people are reading about it, and they're jealous about it, and it's amazing. When I learned is very disappointing. Akamai goes public, and there's a lot of people who you think are in your corner. People are not happy for you. I remember someone who I respect a lot, investment bank, or someone I like saying when the stock decreased in value from whatever was $345 a share to $100 a share. And he said, Yeah, it was too much money for you beforehand. And I'm thinking, What? What kind of comment is that? And then when the stock goes from 340 $5 $345 a share to 49 cents a share, I think people were happy. People were jealous. Oh, you didn't deserve it. You got lucky.
• 1:49:52
  Randall Kaplan: Whatever the case may be, why aren't people happy for others who do well,
• 1:49:57
  Doug Evans: 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 between the haves and the have nots. And when someone sees this like it's trying to that old adage of trying to keep up with the Joneses, that the media creates such an artificial perspective of what someone's life is like that it creates self hate and self contempt in someone's own life. So what happens is the media is making people feel inadequate. So if someone feels inadequate, like I celebrate your success, like I see your success. I see your beautiful family, like I see the world and like, I was like, Wow, that's beautiful. I. Love that, and so that's because, like, I'm feeding my mind with information that's about love, that's about contribution, that's about generosity, that's about the animals, the environment, like, like in my world is I want everyone to win like I'm coming from an abundant perspective.
• 1:51:20
  Doug Evans: And if people are living in scarcity and they're living in lack, then everything is about not enough. Not enough. You know, what am I going to do?
• 1:51:30
  Doug Evans: Fear based? So that comment that person, you know, basically what I would do like in that instance. And I do this all the time, and I call people, I was like, Can I ask you something like, why? What? What motivated you to say that? Like, I want to unpack, like, what wound they have that would cause them to say that, because it's like, look, I mean, I want you, I want you to know you're running the bank, you're doing this like, I celebrate your success. What would prompt you to think, like, not celebrate my success. Maybe my evaluation was 20% higher than market because I did something that you don't know about. Maybe other people know like but let's get people to support other people on their mission and journey, and not be jealous, not constrict. And I think the only way to do that is literally by giving more love to these people.
• 1:52:30
  Randall Kaplan: When this happened, I was walking through an investment bank at the time where a good friend of mine worked, who I've known most of my life I'm walking through, and one of his colleagues said to me, so and so is never going to catch up to you. And I look at the guy thinking, What on earth are you talking about? Yeah, it was such a common even today, as I as I try to unpack it, that's sad to me. I wasn't in a competition with anybody, my friend, anybody else. I couldn't be more happy or proud of my friend. He's gone on to have a massively successful career, massively I'm happy for him, but such a weird cup of no one's in competition with anybody else, yeah, or if they are, they shouldn't be. And I think it's, it's something exactly what you said. Maybe they should examine internally, what that what?
• 1:53:23
  Randall Kaplan: Where's that coming from? Let's, let's move on. Because I really want to talk about your future, yeah, and all the great things that have happened to you in your life, and talk us through the post juicero story and journey. And we'll, we'll talk about kind of how you ended up in a tent, essentially, yeah, down in Palm Springs in the middle of nowhere, yeah. So,
• 1:53:50
  Doug Evans: so it's an interesting thing. So the juicero journey for me was an incredibly interesting chapter in my life. It was like a five year journey. And so I'm 58 years old, so it's like 10% of my life was there, and it was so beautiful, like I learned so much. I made great relationships. I created things.
• 1:54:17
  Doug Evans: I my neuroplasticity of my brain expanded incredible, because I pushed in all levels. So I learned so much, so the juicero experience did not have the desired outcome, right? I won one thing, right? Because I really felt like during COVID, like juicer would have done extremely well, and it would still continue, but it was so way ahead of its time, and it was just like, okay, so what did I learn from that? And I taught my class at Harvard Business School with Len Schlesinger and Matt Higgins, and I learned a lot from there, and really being vulnerable on my blind spots, and being humble. And so how I ended up in the desert was I was doing during juicero, this New York, LA, San Francisco triangle. I called the a hole triangle, and I just going from one asshole to the next one to the next one, and then, like, all of a sudden, I didn't have to be anywhere. Like, as a matter of fact, not only did I not have to be there, certain people, when you're on the up and up, they want to hang out with you. They invite you to things, and then all of a sudden, you become radioactive.
• 1:55:37
  Randall Kaplan: I've been there, right? 49 cents, yeah. So you become radio
• 1:55:41
  Doug Evans: and so people don't want to talk to you. You're not invited to stuff. So I said I don't need to work, at least not right now. I don't need to work what I want to. Do is I really want to experience like what happened. I want to learn from this. I want to journal. I want to be in nature. I don't want TVs. I don't want people. I don't want to, you know, I don't want to chase unavailable, you know, women. I want to just be so I went to Burning Man, and in Burning Man, I saw the desert, and I saw dune and I saw the desert, and like, whoa, like you could live in the desert. And then I read the alchemist, you know, where he's on the Oasis, and with Wells and palm trees.
• 1:56:33
  Doug Evans: And I was like, I think I'm gonna find land with hot springs on an oasis in the desert. So in a typical entrepreneurial way, I hire geologists, I hire well drillers, I hire realtors, and I find Wonder Valley hot springs near Joshua Tree. And I buy a little five acre lot, you know, that had RAM shackled cabins, but it had a geothermal mineral well that the water was coming out of the ground 135 degrees Fahrenheit. So beautiful hot springs. I go to Bali to buy furniture, and I discover these 5000 pound monolithic boulders made out of granite, onyx or marble. So I buy a container of six of these, and I ship over 58,000 pounds. How much did that cost? I mean, you know, relative to you just not a not a lot of money, 15,000 pounds, yeah, to ship the containers. Like$20,000 to buy them. But there's a lot of things like, you know, finding the boulder, having it carved, transported, forklift, polished, the whole thing. But I have to say, like, I didn't even think about the money. I just thought these things are so beautiful. And my vision was I wanted to be able to soak in this in this tub, under a billion stars on a dark sky, and just see the universe and see galaxies and see the Milky Way and see sunrises and moon rising. And so that was my vision. So I I bought the tubs, I found the hot springs, I figured out the hydrofluidics. I pumped it up, and then, like there was no place for me to live, so I took my Burning Man yurt, which was a 13 foot diameter, 176 foot yurt that was a wooden lattice wrapped with an LA, recycled la billboard over the lattice that I felt like a sail. You know, when the wind would blow that it was going to blow away. But so I moved into there, and then I got a mattress, and I was so content no running water in the in the yurt. And so I'm living there, and everything is beautiful, except for one thing, that not only was I in an environmental desert, I was in a food desert.
• 1:59:16
  Doug Evans: And there was no air one, no Whole Foods, no farmers markets, no restaurants, like there was one bar in the entire 100 square miles of Wonder Valley. And so I'm now like eating out of my Yeti like cooler filled with gourmet, gourmet raw food from air one and produce from the Santa Monica farmers market. And I'm eating it. And as the cooler was going down, my cortisol levels were going up because I was wondering, What am I going to do for food? And then, while staring at the stars, I the universe like whispered in my ear and said, Doug, you know how to sprout, because I'd been sprouting for 25 years. Sprouts were part of my life. They were part of my diet, but they were always a garnish or a side dish, because I had this abundance of other food options. So before living in a food desert, I lived in LA and San Francisco and New York, and that's a food swamp.
• 2:00:29
  Doug Evans: There's more food that you could possibly eat. So when I got the insight and the download from the universe, which I ended up taking the download, and I wrote the book, right, the sprout book, I wrote the book. And there were three simple tenants in here. Was number one, sprouts are. Are vegetables. They're not just a garnish. They are full vegetables. Number two, sprouts are vitamins and minerals. And number three, sprouts are medicine like there's more than 2000 peer reviewed published studies on sulforaphane, the medicinal compound that's found in cruciferous vegetables, but at the highest degree in broccoli sprouts. So, so I saw that, and I was like, wow, how come no one knows about this? I
• 2:01:26
  Randall Kaplan: never would. I mean, I've told people about you. What is Doug doing now, sprout? What like the sprouts you eat? Yeah, nobody eats sprouts, but you're changing that. I literally you invented sprouting as a verb. I
• 2:01:43
  Doug Evans: have no idea. I have no idea. What I will tell you is, in anticipation of this podcast, I was looking for an analog of what I could compare sprouts to. And one was like, oh, like cotton candy. You take a little sugar, you go to the fair, and you get a big Lucille Ball, you know, ball of cotton, but that's all poisonous, and it's manufactured, right?
• 2:02:12
  Doug Evans: Another analog I was thinking of is like a stick. You want to move a big boulder. You need a stick. It doesn't do anything.
• 2:02:22
  Doug Evans: You add a fulcrum, and all of a sudden you have leverage, and you can move something bigger, but you're not really creating anything. And you look at all the juicers, blenders, toasters, dishwashers, they're all performing something, but they're not making something. So what makes sprouting so magical is you take, you take one quarter cup of seeds. These are broccoli seeds, one quarter cup of seeds, and you put them into the jar, and in five days, you literally fill the entire jar.
• 2:03:01
  Doug Evans: So you go from a quarter cup to six cups. So this is exponential, and these vegetables that are in here are 20 to 100 times more nutrient dense than mature vegetables than you can buy in the in the supermarket or the farmers market. And the average leaf of lettuce in the United States has traveled 2000 miles. This has traveled two feet. So this is so much fresher, so much more nutritious, and so much cheaper, because you're taking seeds, and the only outside input that you're adding to this is you're adding water, and the seeds are a complete living organism in a dormant state. And when you add the water, you trigger a germination process. And I came to the perfect analogy. It's like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly, which not only is beautiful, but can fly like it goes from this little thing into this magnificent thing with the power of flight and beauty. And so the reason why people are not sprouting, and they don't know about sprouting, they're not eating sprouts, although the sprout book, you know, is now in the 10th edition, and it's now translated into Spanish language, and we're working on Japanese next. Love it. The reason why sprouts no one knows about sprouts. John Mackey, who I introduced you to, the founder of Whole Foods, says sprouts are a shit business. And they said, What do you mean, John? He goes short shelf life. Sound familiar? Right? To Sarah organic Avenue refrigerated transportation, because everything is fresh shipping, mostly water weight and low margin. So there are no national or international sprouting companies like it's just a small niche business, except in Japan, where there's a billion dollar business focused on broccoli sprouts. Because in Japan, you know, their levels of cancer, levels of heart disease, they're tuned in that 20,000 little retailers across Japan, like 711 you can go in and buy broccoli sprouts there
• 2:05:50
  Randall Kaplan: explain to people the can. Cancer Research about broccoli spouts.
• 2:05:55
  Doug Evans: So it's very well known that cruciferous vegetables, broccoli, Clover, kale, bok choy, wasabi, have anti cancer properties to them.
• 2:06:08
  Doug Evans: They have glucosinolates in them, it turns out that broccoli had the most of this anti cancer compound called sulforaphane.
• 2:06:18
  Doug Evans: Broccoli had the most of it. And in the research they were doing at Johns Hopkins University that they were researching the all the vegetables to see which had the most of the anti cancer compounds, broccoli had the most. But you couldn't grow broccoli 365, days a year. So they were grappling with their research, so they had seeds, so they they grew broccoli sprouts just for doing the research. And that's how broccoli sprouts became a thing, right, 25 years ago, and it turns out that every seed has a finite amount of this compound, glucoraphanin, the precursor to sulforaphane. So every seed has a finite amount.
• 2:07:07
  Doug Evans: And as the seed turns into a sprout and a micro green and garden vegetable, the amount of the sulforaphane gets diluted, so the sprout has 20 to 100 times the nutrient density and the levels of sulforaphane of the mature vegetable. So what people were thinking was a trivial little garnish or side dish, turns out to be the stem cells of the plant, like this is the golden ticket, right here in the sprouts. And so I living in my tent with water from my well that I figured out how to desalinate. I start to live on sprouts. So the next 30 days, I'm living exclusively on sprouts, nothing else, nothing else, nothing else. You're sure you're taking this and you're just eating the spouts, eating it. Can we open it, of course.
• 2:08:09
  Doug Evans: So you're we want to do this at some point during the show, so I'm gonna, yeah, not gonna do that. So I think one of the issue Doug with sprouts is people look at this and say, God, that looks gnarly. And I think another issue is they think about it as parsley.
• 2:08:28
  Doug Evans: Because when you told me and we were talking about
• 2:08:31
  Randall Kaplan: sprouts, like I said, I walked away thinking, like, this guy's nuts, like he's, yeah, he's created a company. People are not proud I'm sprouts. No, I mean, we're going to talk about nuts in a second. I mean, actual nuts, and we're gonna talk about the environmental benefits of sprouts as well, which I think is huge. But I thought, gosh, you know, how can you build a company on this? And then I went back and I tasted some, I thought it doesn't have a lot of taste. I still don't think it has a lot of taste. But a lot of people eat a lot of different foods, even though it may not taste like cotton candy, because it's good for you. Yeah, kale itself, I think tastes like shit. Randy. These,
• 2:09:17
  Doug Evans: these questions, I feel like they're softball questions, but I will say, well,
• 2:09:22
  Randall Kaplan: they're softball questions. I mean, you're an expert on this, right, right?
• 2:09:24
  Randall Kaplan: And so I view myself as average consumer, right, right? I've raised this sprout company to 25 friends, and everyone looks at me the same way that I did for like, Huh? I say, Yeah, you should really check it out. My friend Ricky Horowitz is a very smart guy. I told him I was meeting you. What's his background? I told him about your kit. You just sent me this amazing sprouting kit. Everyone should go out and buy one on the sprouting company.com, it's cool. You're going at home. It's fun, and I can't wait to use it.
• 2:09:55
  Randall Kaplan: But Ricky said, Oh my god, that's amazing. I'm telling you about the benefits of surprises.
• 2:09:57
  Randall Kaplan: I'm gonna go do that. That's something that I'm going to do, yeah, but I understand too. You know, as you know, I interviewed Tony Robbins the day before yesterday, friend of yours.
• 2:10:10
  Randall Kaplan: Thank you for that. You made that happen. He loves sprouts.
• 2:10:12
  Randall Kaplan: He does. And, you know, he made some joke, yeah, dog is sprouting all the time. And he said it doesn't hurt to put some stuff on it make it taste a little better.
• 2:10:22
  Doug Evans: Yeah. So, so I am a little bit of an extremist, just a little bit, but the point that I want to make is that sprouts are vegetables. And it's well known that vegetables are good for you, right? So these are simple, single ingredients, yes.
• 2:10:40
  Doug Evans: So in my world, you can replace normal vegetables with sprouts that you grow on your own. So there's financial advantages to.
• 2:10:52
  Doug Evans: That there are freshness advantages to that, and now there's nutritional advantages to that. So you can add whatever dressing you would normally use on a salad, you can add to the sprouts. So whether it's tahini dressing, ranch dressing, balsamic, oil and vinegar, whatever you want to add to it, you can add to the sprouts. So one insight that I had was, instead of adding sprouts to a salad, was making salads out of sprouts. So that was one. The next one, which was kind of incomprehensible, but it's proving to be huge, was imagine replacing white rice, which is high glycemic, with sprouts, and you're making sushi and wraps and mixing it with beans with sprouts. It's a whole different level. You're increasing the nutrition by 1000 fold if you replace sprouts rice with sprouts. Now, when we talk about the power of sprouting for a second, lentils are the staple of the plant based diet around the world, people are eating lentils everywhere. When you sprout a lentil, you increase the vitamin C by 300% you quadruple the antioxidant levels, and you're eating something that's enzymatically alive, so it has living enzymes which make it bio available for your nutrition, for The consumption. So and you're getting soluble and insoluble fiber and in this tender form.
• 2:12:34
  Doug Evans: So another thing that you could do, and you know, we could do this as a separate thing, this is what's happening when you bring Madison and the girls over to my house. We're going to eat sprouts as the salad, as the appetizer, as the entree and as the dessert. So you're going to get a seven course sprout meal in every aspect. But when we do like the main course with sprouts, they're going to replace the pasta, but my wife will make a beautiful marinara dressing with sun dried tomato and fresh tomato and garlic and lemon. And she's just going to pour it over the spouts and mix it, and all of a sudden you're going to have something that will have texture, it'll have flavor, it'll have aroma, and it will feed your microbiome. So people don't understand the microbiome. Your gut bacteria contains 38 trillion non human micro organisms, yeast, fungus, mold, parasites living in your gut. And if you feed them healthy things, you get health if you put in refined food, processed food, you know, refined carbohydrates, artificial flavors, glyphosate pesticides, you basically get chronically ill, like you caused your whole immune system. You caused your digestive system to basically malfunction, which is why in the United States, we have 266 million people are overweight or obese, and I guarantee they're not eating sprouts, right? You have 100 million people that are diabetic or pre diabetic, and those that are eating sprouts are able to regulate their insulin levels and reverse their type two diabetes. So if you think about what's happening right now with air quality right that broccoli sprouts and just everyone here, they're all on AI. You got your your your Claude, you got your Gemini. You've got your chat, G, P, T, talk about sulforaphane and detoxification of benzene and air pollutants from the lungs by the consumption of broccoli sprouts. So whether you got the firefighters or you've got people living so that's why in Japan, they're consuming broccoli sprouts every day.
• 2:15:16
  Doug Evans: There's more than 2000 peer reviewed published studies on sulforaphane alone in there. And now we have another epidemic going on on the obesity where everyone and now, I guess we're in LA, so people aren't even obese that want to be on ozempic and the the weight loss drugs because they want to lose 15 or 20 pounds for a photo shoot for a wedding or bachelorette party.
• 2:15:42
  Doug Evans: But the fact is, they're planning on 47% of the population being on weight loss drugs for the. Rest of their life, because as soon as they get off the weight loss drugs, they will gain the weight back.
• 2:15:57
  Doug Evans: And my hallucination is, if they're eating the sprouts, sprouts are the number one weight loss food in the world, because they are high fiber, low calorie, low fat, and you can grow them. So normally you go into air one, and you would like, if we had a bowl and we pour this out, this would be an enormous bowl. These were, like, expand out if you went to air one, this would be 35 to $45 worth of sprouts, and you could grow them for like, $4 worth of seeds and a little water in your kitchen, in your kitchen. So I was living with six jars in one cubic foot, six jars, and I was generating 1000s of calories a day of the freshest, most nutrient dense food on the planet. Okay,
• 2:16:53
  Randall Kaplan: so let's talk about the sprouting company, company itself. And I want to talk about the product now, because we just talked about, you can grow this in your house.
• 2:17:02
  Randall Kaplan: We're not talking about a room of sprouts. We're talking about what you sent me was a sprouting kit. It looked to be about a foot, foot and
• 2:17:10
  Doug Evans: a half well inside when you put it, when you put it together, you know, it literally takes up, you know, five and a half inches on your countertop.
• 2:17:17
  Doug Evans: Like, that's it.
• 2:17:19
  Randall Kaplan: And then how long does it take once you put the sprouting seeds in the sprout container, how long does it take to get
• 2:17:27
  Doug Evans: it'll go from this to this in five days.
• 2:17:32
  Randall Kaplan: And how long is that container? How many meals is this going to give you? And how long is that going to take?
• 2:17:38
  Randall Kaplan: I one of my problems is when I eat Doug is it takes a while for my stomach to fill up, yeah, and so it to feel full, so I'm just chowing down. And then I chow down too much. I said, oh god.
• 2:17:50
  Randall Kaplan: Why did I eat all that? Yeah, how much of this container is it going to take to make me full
• 2:17:59
  Doug Evans: well? You know, you're a beast, right? And our mutual friend Mike Posner, he will eat a whole jar, as a whole jar. He'll put that into a bowl.
• 2:18:08
  Doug Evans: He'll make a dressing with tahini and avocado. And I'll put in some other gadgets, you know, other things into it, and they'll eat the whole jar. And he has six to eight jars growing on
• 2:18:22
  Randall Kaplan: his countertop.
• 2:18:22
  Randall Kaplan: And every time he's jacked, by the way, I mean, he looks amazing, yeah.
• 2:18:27
  Doug Evans: I mean, he walked across the country. He summited Mount Everest. He did a 50k with with Jesse Itzler, I was feeding him sprouts on the track. I was just talking to the Running Man team, because, like he noted there, I was literally gave out 600 servings of sprouts, like I was practically an obstacle on the track as people were running, as opposed to having, like, the gels, I'm giving them sprouts.
• 2:18:52
  Randall Kaplan: Okay, so tell me, how much is this gonna fill me up? Like? How much will it take for this to make me have a dinner, for
• 2:19:00
  Doug Evans: example? So if you understand how your reptilian mind works, programmed for scarcity, that you reason why you eat is because you don't know where your next meal is coming from, right? And if you add salt and oil and sweet things to the food in the form of dressings and sauces or refined food, you will tend to just eat, eat, eat.
• 2:19:28
  Randall Kaplan: No, but I do know where my next meal is coming from. Thankfully, I have the money where most people don't. Again, we're going to talk about this. You know, there's something you don't overeat. Oh, no, I do, but I know where my next meal is coming from. But
• 2:19:42
  Doug Evans: at the moment when you're over eating, yeah, you're you forget that where your next meal is coming from. I don't think about I feel you're there and you're eating, and all of a sudden, you trip into your reptilian brain that says, oh, there's food here. I better eat this right now, because if you really knew where your meal was coming from, you could have a little dose. You could chew it, eat it, and then go onward. But what happens is, it's so easy to trick your brain and get the dopamine release to say, hey, this tastes good. It feels good.
• 2:20:21
  Doug Evans: I'm going to eat and I'm going to eat and I'm going to eat. And if someone wants to like, you're in good shape, so I don't know what quality of food you're eating, terrible, right? So you're eating, but you're not overeating, and you're exercising and you're aware of what you're eating, but if you were authentically hungry, like I was hungry, I'm living in the desert. There's no other food.
• 2:20:45
  Doug Evans: I'm not going to go to 711 I'm not going to eat gas station food. I'm going to eat this.
• 2:20:51
  Doug Evans: I'm. Like it all depends on where you are. So if you were like me, and there's no other food and you want to survive, sprouts look like a Michelin star meal, right? If you have other choices and you're living here like you know, Mike Posner is a rock star, right? He could eat anything, anywhere he went to to lunch at sweet green here, and I swear he brought his own sprouts in a Tupperware, and he's sitting at the restaurant because he knows that these are fresher and more nutritious, and he wants to control everything that that he's eating. So when I look at the sprouting component of this that a revelation that I had was that sprouts contain every single amino acid to form complete protein. Sprouts contain micronutrients, phytonutrients, polyphenols, bioflavonoids, antioxidants, soluble, insoluble fiber. So this is magical food. You can decide if you want to eat any sprouts at all, or how much sprouts you want to eat. Now, I saw that you had Gary V you know, on on your podcast, Mike and I met with Gary in New York at Vayner Media. And turns out, Gary is a foremost expert on sprouts, and he went to a facility near Tony's in West Palm Beach called Hippocrates, where they treat major chronic illness with sprouts. So people are going there and they're feeding them sprouts for $500 a day to go eat sprouts. So the fact that affluent people can eat sprouts, and poor people can eat spouts, and foreign people and other cultures, all of a sudden, sprouts have not been on the map because there hasn't been any money in sprouts. So my insight was saying, Hey, I am not going to go through the juicero Organic Avenue experience again. I want fresh.
• 2:23:05
  Doug Evans: I want raw, but I don't want to be in the business of fresh and sprouts turned out to be like the magic secret, because seeds are shelf stable. Like in my book, I found seeds that were 1200 years old that still germinate. So seeds have a protective coating around them, and when you soak them in water for the five hours or the eight hours, you remove the lectins, you remove the phytic acid, you remove the enzyme inhibitors, and you trigger a germination process that causes that seed to sprout into the most nutritious food on the planet, and you can watch it happen in front of your eyes.
• 2:24:01
  Randall Kaplan: It's fun, it's fun,
• 2:24:04
  Doug Evans: it's practically free, and it is more nutritious than anything you could buy anywhere in the world,
• 2:24:12
  Randall Kaplan: and it's environmentally friendly. Let's go through some statistics on that Sure. So let's talk about nuts as well. Nuts have a lot of nutrients in nuts. I want to compare nuts for a second to sprouts today. One pound of almonds, you need 1900 gallons of water. Cashews, one pound, 1700 gallons of water per pound, pistachios, 1100 gallons of water per pound. Walnuts, 1100 peanuts, only 300 to 500 gallons. I mean, we're talking about gallons for meat. When we talk about me, you're talking about feeding the crops and feeding the cattle, beef, 1800 to 2500, gallons water per pound chicken, 500 to 750 sprouts, one gallon of water per pound. Yeah,
• 2:25:00
  Doug Evans: per pound per serving. It's just unbelievable.
• 2:25:03
  Doug Evans: Tell us
• 2:25:03
  Randall Kaplan: about your kit, and then tell us what it costs.
• 2:25:07
  Randall Kaplan: And then how much does it cost to get a jar like to grow the sprouts like this, they're buying the seeds from you
• 2:25:11
  Doug Evans: as well. Yeah, they're buying, they're buying the seeds. So what does it all cost? So the spouter itself is 6999
• 2:25:20
  Randall Kaplan: that's the one.
• 2:25:20
  Randall Kaplan: Yeah, it comes
• 2:25:22
  Doug Evans: 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 the like, right? Anything that touches the sprouts or the seeds in here, once they're activated, is glass or stainless steel, very important part. And so the the sprouter is 6999 and. And bags of seeds range from $13 to$50 so you can get a small bag of seeds for like $13 and a big bag of the ultra premium. These are the high glucoraphanin top shelf seeds. These were the seeds that I researched, that they were using for the making, basically supplements, and so I found them for the supplements that had the highest level of sulforaphane. So if someone wanted to treat some sort of chronic illness and they couldn't eat a lot, but they wanted the high concentrations of the medicine properties I got
• 2:26:31
  Randall Kaplan: those, let's say they're not going full stem, because I think it's gonna, I think it's gonna be hard to convince people to sprout like you all meals. Let's assume people are going to eat for lunch. Let's assume so I, I'm, I'm going to try to sprout one because No, you're going to sprout, and there's no try. I'm going to, I'm going to sprout, and I'm going to do whatever I can to keep eating sprouts, because I've learned through you as a great friend and through the research, this is going to be great for me. And I'm going to start with the broccoli sprouts. Number I love broccoli.
• 2:27:05
  Randall Kaplan: And number two, it seems like the most healthy kind of sprout, given the anti cancer agents in here, how many meals am I going to be able to generate from this$50 bag?
• 2:27:19
  Doug Evans: Yeah, so I would say I wouldn't think in terms of meals. I think in terms of servings, servings, right? And us, dietary guidelines recommends today between four and 13 servings of fruits and vegetables every day. So one bag of this will give you easily, 48 servings. One one pound of the seeds will give you 48 servings of the sprouts. So
• 2:27:48
  Randall Kaplan: we're doing the math $50 so under $1 serving, on$1 and
• 2:27:53
  Doug Evans: if you were to buy them, you know, like the ones you bought, you know, in the in the clamshell, $5 a serving. So you're basically saving 80% of the of the cost of buying the retail, plus you're not using the extra plastic, plus you're getting them on demand, and they're convenient and they're fresher. And
• 2:28:12
  Randall Kaplan: is the business model to keep buying the seeds from you. It's kind of similar to the juicero model, yeah.
• 2:28:18
  Doug Evans: So we have subscription seeds, but also there's many things that I did different on here with juicero.
• 2:28:24
  Doug Evans: One is we created our our app at juicero was a closed app. Our app at the sprouting company is open app, free whether you buy our seeds or buy our sprout or you can benefit from the recipes, from the alerts, from the guidelines and the scheduler. So it's a free app, just public service. I want everyone to sprout. The second thing is, you can buy the sprouter, and if you want to buy seeds elsewhere, they work in there. So it's just open.
• 2:28:50
  Doug Evans: There's no, you know, there's no digital piracy preventing you from putting things in. The reason why probably 95% of our people buy our seeds is because they're priced competitively, and our seeds are tested for pathogens. They're tested for high germination rate, and they're tested for glyphosate.
• 2:29:11
  Doug Evans: So literally, the endocrine disruptor, the number one used pesticide in Roundup, is glyphosate, and there's literally hundreds of billions of dollars of lawsuit for that.
• 2:29:26
  Doug Evans: So I wanted to make sure that here people are eating this to be healthy, I wanted to make sure that there's no residue of the toxic pesticides
• 2:29:38
  Randall Kaplan: on them, so your seeds are different than the seeds that different consumers could buy elsewhere. Sprouting seeds similar to danger coffee has taken out a lot of the mold, the mold and different things as it is to coffee.
• 2:29:51
  Doug Evans: Yeah. So this is just like this. Everything that's being sourced here is designed for sprouting top shelf, because this is what I wanted to have myself. So I was sourcing. And really this is a mission based business, because I think that sprouts create food equality, food justice, and can be the most effective defense against processed food is growing your own food, because kids will love to grow this like I love seven year olds growing their own sprout.
• 2:30:29
  Randall Kaplan: I'm excited for my kids. I showed them the kit, and by the way, I think that's genius. You get the kids sprouting early. It's like they come home from second grade, you know, you put the seed in there and they grow something. I think it's genius, yeah.
• 2:30:42
  Doug Evans: I mean, I have to say, I'm very proud of this, you know, without showing flesh, I have over 240,000 followers on Tiktok with over. Over 100 million views of my content, and it's predominantly young people.
• 2:30:55
  Doug Evans: Is
• 2:30:58
  Randall Kaplan: this device patented?
• 2:31:03
  Doug Evans: There's a design patent on it, and there's some unique parts of this that do have 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's pen it's issued in the US. So it's an issued US Patent, and it's pending in Hong Kong, Europe, EU, UK, and South Korea.
• 2:31:32
  Doug Evans: So those are the markets that I was most concerned with. In Japan,
• 2:31:41
  Randall Kaplan: I think everyone listening to this show now is convinced of the benefits of sprouts. They didn't know about it. I think they're going to learn about it. I hope a lot of people go out and buy the product. I'm excited to try it and to sprout. I want to go back to the business now of raising funding after you've had a failure, yeah, and I want to talk about things that are unfair. So there was criticism of you for posting photos at Burning Man, and people didn't like a founder posting photos of Burning Man. Burning Man is this very interesting thing that a lot of people don't understand, yes, including me, when I first heard about it. And I'll just tell you a story, a couple stories. One in particular, we have a friend who's a well respected person in the media who is in a committed relationship and will go to Burning Man, and we'll have sex with seven other guys. And that's that's what happens there. We have another friend I remember going to this self selected high octane group of founders and entrepreneurs. It was his dinner. There were 12 of us there, and this amazing woman sitting next to me said, Yeah, I'm going to Burning Man. I just fucked 10 guys in two days, and we did a lot of drugs. What is happening with that subset of Burning Man. I know it's not. I mean, you heard these stories too. Say that is happening at Burning Man, where this is a thing,
• 2:33:21
  Doug Evans: I will say I've been to Burning Man many times. I've never even had sex at Burning Man. I've never kissed anyone at Burning Man. I've kissed people and I've had sex outside of Burning Man, just to be clear, but never at Burning Man. But you know about this, it's what you're describing. Are great stories, but it is so far from like the Burning Man experience that I have like the way I look at Burning Man. It's an economy of 70,000 people where there's no exchange of money. So that's first of all, there's no exchange of money. You could have a port a potty, like everyone has to either poop in their RV or poop in a porta potty. And yes, there are people that have fancier RVs and the like. But if you're out on the playa, which is huge from, you know, four miles from one side to the next, and you got to go, you can't poop on the playa. You have to poop in a porta potty.
• 2:34:25
  Doug Evans: So I swear you have billionaires pooping next to, you know, starving artists, right? So there's a level of equality. The other thing is, the level of creative expression is beyond I have a friend who is a aerial artist who choreographed 1500 drones to create art in the sky magnificent. Took him a year to prepare the show with the most advanced keeping the drone steady to within three millimeters. It's just unbelievable. Color art show amazing as an alternative to pyrotechnics. You know, which are more dangerous and explosive in the like, and they're investing that the level of sculpture and art and color. And what I found there are people like, maybe the the people that you're talking about or who are having sex. They could have sex anywhere. They don't need to go to Burning Man to have sex with.
• 2:35:32
  Doug Evans: 10 people. I'll give you a list of seven places they could go, you know, within three miles of here to have sex with 100 people. You know, four different glory holes with the name Randy K come, you know, put it in where you don't need to go to Burning Man to have that. You have to be clear, that's something that's not gonna happen. But I get it. I get I'm just, I. Just saying that you don't need to go to Burning Man to have, you know, to have sex and play parties, and the like, the art that are there and the convergence that, let's say there's some people, and this is for real, you could walk through, and there's some that really like spanking people. And they're there out in the sun all day long, and they've got their hand and they'll ask you, would you like to be spanked? And they're not forcing you like there's, there's almost no bad activity, bad actors at Burning Man, you don't get there's not rapes happening at Burning Man.
• 2:36:26
  Doug Evans: There may be, you know, drug overdoses, but there's not, like, aggressive behavior in that community. But if you go, do you want to get spanked?
• 2:36:37
  Doug Evans: Randy? No, thank you. You just keep going. Someone else likes pickles, and they bring a van with 12 barrels of pickles, and they're just handing out their pickles for free. So if you get to the level like I go and in my camp, my gift was, I talk about sprouts, right? So they build a 5000 square foot theater, they create programming. And someone's talking about Brock Pierce is talking about crypto there, and he's in blue lightning, red thunder. And people are talking about different I'm talking about sprouting, and someone else is talking about permaculture, and someone else is talking about, you know, Animal Rescue. So people are just talking and then there's yoga classes. And unlike going to wearing your your Aloe outfit and spending $50 for class, everything's free. Can go to any class, and then, like Mike Posner, who's Grammy nominated singer songwriter, is walking around with his guitar, no one knows him from the next homeless guy, except he's playing his music and sharing.
• 2:37:44
  Doug Evans: Someone came up to him, goes, Hey, you know you got a good voice. Maybe should consider, you know, doing this for real, right, real stories. So people are going there, you know, to celebrate freedom. Now, there are people walking around naked.
• 2:37:58
  Doug Evans: There are all these different consortiums, but you find like, I never went into any, I never saw any physical engagement of activity in my Burning Man experience like I never saw any people humping on an art car.
• 2:38:20
  Doug Evans: Ever saw that? One of
• 2:38:22
  Randall Kaplan: the important lessons to founders, again, I think people just don't go through the normal, easy, common sense checks, and one of them is they don't look at their social media and understand that what they're putting out is something that every potential venture capital angel investor is going to look at. I can't tell you how many times we get these business plans, they're great, and then we do the social media research, and it's like, I can't believe you've got some photos on Instagram of flipping a double bird at somebody or they're doing smoking a joint somewhere.
• 2:38:54
  Randall Kaplan: And yeah, marijuana may be legal, but we don't want to be funding people who have the stupidity of putting a joint out. And there was a company Doug, that we were going to fund, frankly, and again, we're doing our search. At the last minute, I had the documents, they were signed on my desk, and I was just about to send them in, and someone had sent me. Oh yeah, you know this, this couple, they go to Burning Man, and the husband had a company.
• 2:39:20
  Randall Kaplan: We were interested in finding very talented people. So I look at this photo, and the woman is basically naked, where this is on Instagram, almost full nudity. You could see her breast. And again, I'm I'm a proponent of people having free expression. If she wants to be nude, she wants to be nude. I personally did not think right or wrong people are gonna make it hate comments on on my social media because of this. I did not think that that was appropriate for somebody who is going to lead a company if it struck me in the wrong way, my guess is it may strike customers in the wrong way, employees in the wrong way. And when I looked into some of the comments, the comments reinforced some of my beliefs, which were, I can't believe a CEO of a company who's raised all this money is basically posing naked on her social media, there were a lot of hate comments on that. Again, it's like I can put aside my personal judgment for the personal judgment of different people. Maybe I have a one off view, and I can be convinced.
• 2:40:25
  Randall Kaplan: All right, maybe I'm a little too conservative here, but it was the reaction from a lot of people. One and two. There was a picture of her smoking a joint.
• 2:40:32
  Randall Kaplan: And I said, you know, Elon Moss, this is before he came out and smoking a joint, and he can do what he wants to do, right? But I think if you have the CEO of, you know, GE or Ford or GM smoking a joint, that person's done.
• 2:40:47
  Doug Evans: I love this, this conversation. So, so for one what? Like, I'm pretty active on social media. I don't have any pictures on social media that I have any shame of or any fear of, period, and, you know, and like, I have hundreds of 1000s of followers across platforms, nothing that I'm ashamed of when I was at Burning Man, right? And the Tech Crunch article said, juicero founder at Burning Man, while juicero burns, I hadn't worked in the company for six months, right, right? So, so the the Tech Crunch troll who wrote that article is just looking for click bait. Now, I they, they will when, when you're in the target of the media, it doesn't matter what you do. I they took a picture of me in air one they took a picture of me, you know, I'm doing water fast, right? And today, water fasting is cool, like it's, you know, bio hackers are there. I'm doing water fast seven years ago, and they're thinking it's crazy. And, you know, vice, you know, writes about that like so no matter when they want to come after you, it doesn't matter. I go under the belief that anything that I do, I should be prepared to be on the front page of the Wall Street Journal or New York Times or anywhere. So I'm very conscious of it. The picture of me at Burning Man was walking into the dust there was a dust storm, and I took a picture of me going into the dust storm and no shame, like I have no no inappropriate part, but and like, I have a daughter, right?
• 2:42:23
  Doug Evans: Like I like, I'm concerned and aware of it. But I think that the notion of of where things are in terms of judgment, you know, and people having a community, one of the reasons I go to Burning Man is there's people that I know around the world, from Singapore, from Asia, from Australia, from Europe, that from or even in the United States that I never see except at Burning Man, like it's just the convergence of these people, where there's no place else in the world that they converge. One
• 2:43:04
  Randall Kaplan: of the common misperceptions that the average person has is that once you fail, you're not going to get funded a second time. We believe that failure sometimes is a great thing, because you learn more sometimes from your failures than your mistakes. And we happen to love second time founders, even after they failed, how hard was it for you to raise money after such a high profile financial failure, when you were raising money for a sprouting company. There's
• 2:43:34
  Doug Evans: 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 Kaplan invests, they'll want to throw money in. Doesn't matter which
• 2:43:49
  Randall Kaplan: is a stupid way to invest. By the way, never rely on someone to do your own due diligence. For you, 100% of the biggest mistakes I made in my career, but,
• 2:43:57
  Doug Evans: but, but you know that that happens. Yeah. So to answer the question, I was able to raise as much money as I needed in order to do this, and I would say my, out of my first investors, probably a third of them had were in juicero and still funded in and they take a very mature approach to saying, Hey, that was great. You know, what did you learn? What was the issue? You know, what happened?
• 2:44:26
  Doug Evans: Explain it. You don't try to hide. Like I, you know, you and I are very responsive on communication, like I'm pretty much like that. I respond so there's no hiding, and I think you have to explaining to do like that. That's real. But I think that I raised a lot less money. I raised it, oh, after I did a lot of de risking, and I also, you know, reinvested 100% of my Founder CEO salary. So I've drawn no salary from the business because I wanted it to go towards R and D or marketing or or the like. But it was the hardest thing, and this is good for the founder, was for me to feel worthy, confident, abundant, to go out and ask for the money like because that was the hard part. The money's there. And if the idea is there and the experience is there, and the vision is there, and the numbers are there. People have money that they want to invest, and some people really like this. And some people, you know, want to just do crypto, and some people just want to do, you know, AI, but there's people that really care about this, and they're like, Oh, we think that this is this is great. You. So
• 2:45:52
  Randall Kaplan: I'm not going to ask you how much you raise, for the simple reason that there's still the haters out there who are going to say, Doug, raise this much money that's already so I'm not going to ask that question or anyone else. And I would ask that question. I do want to ask the question, What's your goal for the company? I
• 2:46:08
  Doug Evans: mean, my my goal is to help mitigate the consequences of toxic environment for food, diet, nutrition and lifestyle. So my goal for here is, I believe, you know, we had a great year 120, 24 was an outstanding year.
• 2:46:32
  Doug Evans: Exceeded my expectations.
• 2:46:34
  Randall Kaplan: You beat your written projections that you gave to investors. Yes,
• 2:46:38
  Doug Evans: amazing, yes. And for year two, like now we have a whole, you know, new products that we're rolling out, new software, new upgrades, you know, new testing, new content.
• 2:46:54
  Doug Evans: Like, I cannot wait for you to go to New York and for us to sit in a Michelin restaurant and be able to order a broccoli sprout avocado toast and a sprout salad and 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 in that day were sold by one post from one doctor. We had another influencer. Health influencer sent out like a little note in their newsletter to 300,000 people generated 10s of 1000s of dollars in revenue in one thing.
• 2:47:38
  Doug Evans: So we're seeing that this awareness, my biggest challenge, literally, is to be able to define how we can articulate this so that it's really simple that you could tell someone in wondering under a minute, and then make it easy for them to have access to try it. I think it's
• 2:47:58
  Randall Kaplan: great that you are branding sprouting sprouting company. I think is a great name I branded the term extreme preparation, and extreme preparation, which means preparing 10 hours for a meeting, where the average person prepares 15 minutes for a meeting. That's shocking to me, when you think about that. How important has extreme preparation been to your success? And can you give some examples? I
• 2:48:21
  Doug Evans: literally binged listened to your podcasts, you know, with Dave Asprey and Gary V 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 I understand, like, how deep you go and how much you care and how much research you you do. So preparing for a podcast, because this is a major thing, like, this isn't just, you know, for me, I drove four and a half hours each way to come here. I'm grateful to do beyond grateful.
• 2:48:59
  Doug Evans: And how much better is this than like I wouldn't do it on Zoom, like I'm the guy gets on the plane, gets in the car, goes wherever. So in terms of preparation, you know, I keynoted Tony Robbins unleashed the power within in New York, his largest live event that he does all year. I was the closing keynote speaker. What an honor.
• 2:49:20
  Doug Evans: Yeah, it was incredible. It was incredible. I spent easily, and I only had two weeks to prepare for that. So I easily in the two weeks, 168 hours per week. I was easily spending 80 hours a week to the equivalent to full time jobs, writing my speech, rehearsing the speech, thinking about it, incorporating jokes into it, and then bringing in a voice coach. So I reached out to Tony's voice coach, Roger love, came to LA, had a one on one session with Roger love, and then I hired someone else to help me with my stage presence and my gravitas, who is a professional actor, speaker, producer, comedian, and I had referred him to Mike Posner, and he did a great job on Mike. And then I referred him to someone else who prepared their TED talk. And I was like, God, I'm worthy of this. So then I went to work with him, you know, on this. So in terms of extreme preparation, 50, you know, I had 15 minutes to rock this stadium of people that are used to seeing the big guy on there, and I got a standing, dancing ovation from that audience.
• 2:50:46
  Doug Evans: Thank you. And so here. Up when you say it, I can see it, yeah.
• 2:50:52
  Doug Evans: I put in the work, yeah. And, and the reward from that was, like, countless like, now, I mean, so many things are happening. And I, as a result of that, I got invited to keynote the largest Food Expo in the world next month in Dubai. So 100,000 people go to that show.
• 2:51:15
  Doug Evans: I'm giving a master class on sprouting, and I'm on the big stage, you know, giving a keynote. So two things are happening, and then so all of these things, like, you have to do the work, and no one saw the opportunity for sprouting. Like, literally, no one saw it.
• 2:51:29
  Doug Evans: Sprouting has been around since the beginning of time, and I can mark my words, and I could say this when, when I wrote the spout book, and I went to New York, like, you know, I got an in with one of the largest publishers in the world. She took my meeting. She was like, sprouts, like, you know, there's a few self published books on it, like, what are you going to write that's new and different?
• 2:51:56
  Doug Evans: And I hired Oprah's recipe developer to create 40 recipes with sprouts. I hired a local chef to make those recipes and prepare them with the sprouts. I go into the meeting, and I had to get in the conference room an hour early for a 15 minute meeting because I wanted to prepare everything, and I had the editor of St Martin's Press, McMillan, eating sprouts out of the palm of my hand one meeting, I got a book deal, and I'd never written anything other than graffiti on a subway train in my life. And so the ability extreme preparation, like I did, a lot of preparation when I decided that I wanted to write a book, like I did the preparation, do the work.
• 2:52:51
  Randall Kaplan: There are so many qualities that make people successful, and one of the qualities that I know has made you very successful is your authenticity and generosity.
• 2:53:02
  Randall Kaplan: When I started my show almost four years ago, now, you have to build it with certain guests, right? You have a wish list of people, and sometimes people will refer people to you where 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 or and or the most successful people in the world, what they do. And it was really, this isn't a business podcast. I don't see it that way. It's an inspirational and motivational podcast. I have a business background, but we've had all kinds of people from the show, from music, acting, athletes, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, public speakers, motivational speakers, and someone introduced this guy named Rodney Jerkins. He said, Yeah, I talked to Rodney. He'll do your show. I said, I've never heard of Rodney Jerkins. He said he's one of the biggest music producers of all time. He's a legend in the business, so that I'm really looking for some more high profile people. And this person said you should ask someone in the music industry about Rodney. And so I did, we have friends in the music business, and so Rodney Jerkins is a legend. You should have him on your show. I thought, okay, here you go. He's an interesting guy. He heard a Michael Jackson on a song playing in a mall in Indianapolis when he was 10 years old, and he decided right then and there, I'm going to produce songs from Michael Jackson, which he was doing when he was 19 years old. And he's produced everybody, Rihanna Beyonce. He turned down very famous person. I'm not gonna say it was to do sizza and produce her last album, which went to number one. Wow. And when we're done with the show, he said to me, would you like to would you like Mike Tyson on your show?
• 2:54:50
  Randall Kaplan: And I said, obviously, you know, yes, I'm and I'm saying to myself, and this is on a zoom, because it was during COVID, I'm like, fuck yeah, I want Mike Tyson on my show. And, you know, I was mouthing that, you know, as soon as I hung out with something like Mike Tyson. But you can't get too excited, because I can't tell you. Doug, how many people have offered to help introduce me to this person or that person, right? And sure enough, I'm expecting nothing, right? I don't want to get too excited, but I can't really sleep. Mike Tyson, you know, I met, right? Might, might, you know, interview Mike Tyson, and Rodney calls me back the next day. Hey, I spoke to Mike, and he loved to do your show. I thought, you know this, this is just absolutely insane. Tony Robbins was the number one guest that I wanted on my show. When I started my show, I read element of power, as I shared with you I was a freshman in high school.
• 2:55:43
  Randall Kaplan: It changed my life. I've been a huge fan of his forever, and we had lunch four weeks ago. Yeah, battery like that. And you were telling me organically, four weeks ago to the day as a four weeks ago, January 15, because I flew to Asia, you were telling me organically, and not a Name Dropper or nothing, it just came out in conversation. And we're catching up with one another.
• 2:56:06
  Randall Kaplan: You know, we met, I don't know, a year ago now, and this was the first time we really sat down together and we shared each other's background. You mentioned Tony Robbins, and I said, Well, you know, do you know him well? Because I can't tell you how many people I even when I posted Tony was doing my show on Instagram. Oh, I met Tony here. I met Tony there. I know Tony. And I you know all these people, and I'll introduce you to Tony. And you said, Yeah, I know him well. And I said, you know he's the number one person that I like to have on my show.
• 2:56:37
  Randall Kaplan: And he said, Well, I'll call him, and I think if I recommend you, he'll do your show. And sure enough, Tony that night left me a voice memo. You know Tony labman and his motion Doug Evans. And you know, you're a very impressive guy. And normally I you do these things on Zoom, but he seemed like a very special guy. And I'd, you know, love, love to be on your show. And sure enough, yesterday, I went and I interviewed him at his house for my show. And is a huge thing.
• 2:57:07
  Randall Kaplan: And you know it, I'm so grateful to you. You're a generous guy. I We live in a world Doug. And by the way, I've had 10 famous people, some who've been on my show, who said, Yeah, I'll introduce shoes to Tony come there's a mastermind. You know, for those people who don't know what a mastermind is, and I didn't know what it was until I got on the podcast, because mastermind is I mastermind. Is where you have all these speakers, noteworthy speakers.
• 2:57:38
  Randall Kaplan: Some are paid. And you go to this conference, and, you know, could be a $25,000 mastermind.
• 2:57:42
  Randall Kaplan: People pay, you know, lots of money to be inspired and go. And you do learn lots of lots of things. And it said, you know, Tony's coming here to the mastermind. By the way, I don't think he even does that many masterminds, but you know, you could pay $40,000 and Tony will be there, and I'll introduce you. And I've never, I'm never going to pay for an introduction to someone who I want on my show. I'm never going to pay a single person to be on my show, and I'm not going to pay it's just something that I won't do.
• 2:58:12
  Randall Kaplan: But you said you could do it, you did it. I'm grateful to you, and I think so many people out there, if you're not going to follow through with something, don't offer to do it. I think that's such an important ingredient of our success. Do What You Say, say what you do, and follow through on on what you're going to offer to people, yeah,
• 2:58:34
  Doug Evans: and look it, it takes work, right? It takes work because, you know, everyone has things on the agenda. But I believe in one of the values, I think afterwards, I'm going to send you going back to Burning Man, what the principles are of Burning Man, and one of them is immediacy. Like, literally, like, immediacy and action in community and inclusiveness. So a lot of values that most people, like, know of, but they don't live. So for me, like, you know, the generosity, the inclusiveness and the immediacy, like we had that conversation.
• 2:59:13
  Doug Evans: And I think what I what I showed you, was that I had, I was impressed that on, you know, these months are happening on, on october 17, I we had a big milestone event at the spouting company. I keynoted for Jesse Itzler at Running Man,
• 2:59:33
  Randall Kaplan: Jesse's a stud, and was also on my show, yeah, so Jesse's incredible.
• 2:59:38
  Doug Evans: He had me back two years in a row, and I was on the stage 1000 people talking about sprouting. And then I had introduced Mike Posner to Tony.
• 2:59:46
  Doug Evans: And so Mike is now deep into that world, and Mike is planning on being on the big, big stage.
• 2:59:58
  Doug Evans: And I said to myself, I said, I think that I'm ready to go on the big stage and share this.
• 3:00:05
  Doug Evans: And so in 2024 I spoke at Summit at sea to 50 people. I spoke at Rip Esselstyn plant stock to 300 people. Then I did Jesse, its 1000 people. And then I jumped to over 20,000 people at Tony Robbins. But so I had just, I was very proud, and just talking about, like, Hey, I reached out to Tony on october 17, november 17, you know, I was on the big stage, just just crushed it, and then, you know, I was telling you, and part of it was my auditioning, you know, to being on your podcast. But I can't wave something out there that I have a relationship. But it's only for me. So to me, I want to say, like, Hey, I'm doing this.
• 3:00:55
  Doug Evans: And you expressed with earnest desire that that was something that was important to you. And if this were your first episode, like, if you're just some rich guy that says, hey, I want to do a podcast, and can you get Tony on my podcast? It would be a non starter. I'd say, Look, you know, I'm happy to send it to Tony, but you know, you haven't done the work. You're not prepared. But I felt your podcast, you have done the work, you've invested so much of your time and your money and your energy and your relationships that I felt like, hey, this would be a great fit. And I think it was, it was a great fit. I saw the tears in your eyes and Tony's eyes afterwards, and it felt, it felt beautiful to me to be able to help someone who was extremely prepared. And I have no problem, like other people have asked me for introductions, and I'm like, No, I don't feel comfortable. My relationships not that strong. I don't think it's a fit. You know, if you ask me something else, I can introduce you to someone else. But I have other other podcast people that I've been on some big podcasts where people want to go on the podcast, and nine out of 10 people I've referred to this person, they've said no, and the other person they didn't even respond to. So I'm like batting zero, right? Zero. So you just have to know, you know, who's got the juice, you know, all the
• 3:02:25
  Randall Kaplan: people out there, I don't want 100 1000 people hitting up. Doug Evans to be introduced to Tony Robbins, the answer as much as how amazing you are and how great you are, the answer is 99.999% gonna be no. So I you have all these random people are gonna have to say after the random people are gonna contact this is this
• 3:02:46
  Doug Evans: is easy. You have to be more prepared, more experienced, more credible than Randy fucking Kaplan. So if you've got a bigger platform, you're more prepared your resume. Pattern matches to Randy Kaplan were better. I'm happy to introduce you to Tony, but that's the criteria. You got to be Randy Kaplan, or above, which is very, very few people that high on the mountain. But if you're, if you're like in there, I'm happy to use my platform to do it. Otherwise, you know, no, thank you, amazing.
• 3:03:22
  Randall Kaplan: The The ironic thing Doug is, you know, you start your show, and I wanted Tony 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 listen to my first six episodes, 10, maybe even 25 I mean, I wouldn't, that's probably too harsh, but I become such a better interviewer and my relationships and my level of comfort. So to all people out there, you know, it's like you start a company, and it's the same thing. You know, you want to get right out of the gate.
• 3:03:55
  Randall Kaplan: You want Costco as a customer.
• 3:03:55
  Randall Kaplan: That's, that's not a good idea, yeah. And for me, I'm very grateful that I'm just about to hit my fourth year. And it's, it was a perfect time. And once again, it's, you remember all the people that got you there? I remember we were starting our company, Akamai Technologies. We didn't have any money. And I remember every person's couch I slept on. We didn't have any money. I remember everyone who did everything for me and and, you know, you never forget where you came from. And I And that's a huge moment for me with Tony, and I've already seen on my social media, and people who I never thought, you know, are would would be on my show.
• 3:04:33
  Randall Kaplan: Suddenly, oh, Tony's gonna be on your show. Andy Elliot just dropped like a hat. You know, I couldn't get Andy, we've been trying for you again. Andy for two years. I think the quote was, he's excited to hear show, and it's, and it's, it's, it's great. Let's, let's end the show. I always end the show with before
• 3:04:49
  Doug Evans: 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, you know, Intro to Sequoia, or Andreessen Horowitz or the like.
• 3:05:03
  Doug Evans: And I would say that you want to be immediate, but you want to pitch a lot. You want to get the feedback, and you want to like not you know, in one mistake that that entrepreneurs make is that they think they they have a level of entitlement that, oh, I pitched Randy, and he gave me 30 minutes, and now, after the meeting, I expect him to come back and give me a debrief, and give me the the comments and tell me why he's investing or why he's not investing, and give referrals. No, you have 30 minutes with him. Save some time in that meeting, so you're not talking the whole time to get the feedback, like even five minutes in the. What do you think? What's your feedback?
• 3:05:52
  Doug Evans: What's the direction? Who should I talk to? Because you may never speak to that person again. They owe you nothing. They're not getting there, and if they don't like the idea, or they don't like your presentation, you still have time to take copious notes and to take feedback.
• 3:06:10
  Doug Evans: Because to me, I hadn't raised money before, like I was a novice, and so every person that said no to me, every nay brought me closer to a yay. And I took the notes, I did the work, and I constantly shaped myself, my pitch, my deal, my business, my model, until it got correctly and then when I did have the meeting with Kleiner Perkins, even without the demo, even without the deck, I was able to communicate because I had a command of the business and I knew, and it was literally like, boom, shake, done.
• 3:06:47
  Randall Kaplan: I get a lot of proactive incoming email on LinkedIn. Oh Randy, I'm interested in venture capital.
• 3:06:54
  Randall Kaplan: I'm a student. You know, quit me for coffee? The answer, unfortunately, is no. But if you want to spend time with me 12 weeks a summer, you could apply for my summer internship program. It's 12 weeks formal Internship Program, teaching internship. I spend 60 to 90 minutes stay with the intern. We have guest speakers every week.
• 3:07:08
  Randall Kaplan: CEO of Dale, Carnegie, venture capitalist, CEO, founders of investment banks. I love you to be a speaker this summer, putting on a spot.
• 3:07:18
  Doug Evans: Count me in. But here, I'll
• 3:07:19
  Randall Kaplan: do it, but, but it's, it's, and I'll give the advice. You know, that's one way to get it. And two is, now I'm doing paid coaching. So if you want to sit down your time with me, you know, we can, we can do one on one session as well.
• 3:07:31
  Randall Kaplan: These entrepreneurs will come in and they'll pitch and I'll say, gosh, you know, I can't even believe I'm sitting here. You know, it takes, it takes something to get in the door.
• 3:07:40
  Randall Kaplan: And like you said, it's going to be a relationship where someone knows somebody to get a meeting with me. It's rare, although it happened, where I will take a cold pitch meeting, but they have to do the preparation in advance, and it's what you said.
• 3:07:55
  Randall Kaplan: I mean, you can easily eliminate low hanging fruit by going in for practice pitch meetings. And when someone comes in, and it's the same thing, when someone comes in and they they say, Okay, I'm coming in for a meeting Randy to fund the company and and I may tell them in advance, and again, if this a friend or referral, I'll still spend time with you, because I want you to learn. I've done well. I'm grateful, and I want to give back. But what I tell people Doug is that if you're coming in for a meeting with me, and that meeting is intended for me to somehow give you advice and benefit something that is going to be your baby, you have to be able to take direct advice, and I'm going to be extraordinarily blunt, to the point where a lot of people don't like it, but I've had people come in and I just don't believe and say, Oh yeah, yeah, that's a good idea. You know, not for me. It's sort of like Shark Tank where the judges will explain to people briefly, why they wouldn't fund this company or not, but I will tell people extraordinarily bluntly and give them advice. I've had people walk out dog shell shocked before, but I tell them, if you don't want the blunt advice, don't come in for a meeting, because here I am, and I'm trying to help you, and it's sort of same thing. You know, you have to what you said is exactly right. You got to practice that pitch meeting before Sequoia, and where we were raising money for, you know, our tech company a long time ago. Yeah, we walked in and we were just floundering, right.
• 3:09:22
  Randall Kaplan: And then we walk out of there and we say, okay, you know what?
• 3:09:26
  Randall Kaplan: What went right, what went wrong? And, you know, we could see people's reactions. And 111, of the one of the first thing is, I work at Sun America, Eli brothers, and our boss, Assistant to the Chairman, is a force, 400 guys, one of only two people at the time. We had started two Fortune 500 companies. One of only three people at the time. We started two Fortune 500 companies. And, man, I was wearing three piece suits. I had ties. Of course. I bought them for 40% off it booms the house when they when I went on sale. And then you're going to Silicon Valley. And by the way, you're in awe, right?
• 3:09:58
  Randall Kaplan: Silicon Valley, Sand Hill Road, you're there. You're like, oh my god, I can't believe it is where Apple and all these other companies are funded. I remember wearing a suit to the first meeting, and they looked at me like I was an alien. Yeah? And it's like, you you learn all this stuff. And then I remember, you know, we're there, and I remember where we're walking out of a meeting with, I won't even say what firm, and we're gonna give you a offer to say, well, it was Sequoia, probably the best, or one of the best VC firms in the world. I remember in the elevator on the way down, like,
• 3:10:33
  Unknown: fuck yeah, we're getting an offer from
• 3:10:36
  Randall Kaplan: one of the best VC firms in the world, and it wouldn't have happened if that was the first meeting.
• 3:10:41
  Doug Evans: I mean, it's just you gotta do the work, and also their no doesn't mean anything like the idea for me, like so many people, like. Like, the way I look at this is that people are going don't see it until all of a sudden they see it. And so it's incumbent upon the entrepreneur to have the tenacity and have the endurance to get through this is an endurance game, and like a lot of people, have no idea, and you have to choose something that you're really, really passionate about, that you're willing to do the work for free and to make the sacrifice. So that's been a common theme for me, that I'm willing to do the work, delay the gratification, and focus, you know, on the mission first.
• 3:11:28
  Doug Evans: And that way I feel great about like, literally, I went to bed last night, you know, one o'clock in the morning, got up at five, exercised, did my sprouts, packed things up, got in the car and drove four and a half hours and got here, you know, right on time, yeah, so, so this is what you have to do.
• 3:11:48
  Doug Evans: This is entrepreneurship. Is an endurance game. And if you're doing it only for the money, you'll probably quit too early.
• 3:11:56
  Doug Evans: But if you're doing it because you really believe that this will impact the world in a positive way, like it's just a matter of you're willing it to happen, like the will, really will make the difference. And there are entrepreneurs, and we know them that they are so successful in their mindset, that they could go, you know, and you would believe, and they would believe that they could go do anything. If they wanted to go do something, they could go do it. And I think there's examples everywhere, and it's the self doubt, and it's the the laziness and that that causes people to not get up the hill.
• 3:12:43
  Doug Evans: You know, it's the syphis go up the hill, get pushed back down.
• 3:12:48
  Doug Evans: Get up, get down. And so you have to have the mindset like, you know, the entrepreneurships a long journey, and you just have to be in the moment and be present to what you can do today. And so, what I what could I do today? I'm doing this podcast. I'm doing another podcast. I've got two calls in between the things. And, you know, that's about all I could cram into today. I appreciate
• 3:13:15
  Randall Kaplan: you coming during a very difficult time in LA, where so many people are suffering here. So another thing we should, we should just add into kind of where we are right now,
• 3:13:25
  Doug Evans: nine out of, I would say nine out of nine. People I spoke to said, Why are you going to LA, I said, I got a meeting with Randy Kaplan. You know, the fuck Randy Kaplan is like I'm going on Randy's podcast. I am not going to postpone this podcast, and
• 3:13:39
  Randall Kaplan: there's no way.
• 3:13:39
  Randall Kaplan: And I'm grateful to you, because we did talk the other day, my house was and remains at some risk of being burned down, and for me, it was the same thing.
• 3:13:49
  Randall Kaplan: You know, Doug was coming on my show, and I was going to be here no matter what. And we were going to stay in Florida to try to pick up some more shows while we were there. We did Tony, and then we got this show with this amazing guy named Garrett White.
• 3:14:04
  Randall Kaplan: I'm super pumped for that show is one of the best shows I've done. And then we said, All right, well, we can get maybe one or two more shows here. And it was the same thing, nope. I committed Doug. We're coming back for Doug, and I'm grateful it's one of the best shows I've done. Yeah, thank you. At the end of every show, I conclude with a game called fill in the game to excellence. Are you ready to play? I'm ready to play. The biggest lesson I've learned in my life is believe in myself. My number one professional goal is.
• 3:14:30
  Randall Kaplan: Professional goal is to make sprouting as ubiquitous as coffee. My number one personal goal is
• 3:14:39
  Doug Evans: be the best father, husband, friend that I could be.
• 3:14:44
  Doug Evans: The
• 3:14:45
  Randall Kaplan: one thing that everybody should say to themselves when they wake up is, I am nature's greatest miracle.
• 3:14:50
  Randall Kaplan: I was gonna ask what's the one thing that they should say when they go to bed? But I think you're gonna give the same give the same answer. I think when
• 3:14:56
  Doug Evans: they go to bed, they should go to bed with gratitude, and they should literally make a list of not one thing. And my wife, you know, has me do this.
• 3:15:07
  Doug Evans: I have to actually post it, you know, on her site. But all of my successes in the course of the day. So I have to list 20 things that I did successfully in the course of day. Forget about anything I didn't do, but I have to make a list of the 20 successes I do. I did every day.
• 3:15:26
  Doug Evans: My biggest regret is not being kinder to my parents. But I we can keep going. I'm on,
• 3:15:43
  Randall Kaplan: yeah, that's a heavy one. My biggest fear is
• 3:15:48
  Doug Evans: like, literally that. Do you know what the first symptom? Symptom is of what the first consequence is for a heart attack, like for heart disease, like a consequence first symptom of serious heart diseases is it pressure on the chest? No, it's called death. Like heart disease is a silent killer. So, like, that's the first symptom of serious heart disease, is death.
• 3:16:21
  Doug Evans: So I'm, like, if I'm concerned with anything, it's just, you know, early death, not scared of dying. But there's things that I want to do, you know, so I want to make sure I live
• 3:16:36
  Randall Kaplan: the most prideful moment of my career is
• 3:16:39
  Doug Evans: prideful moment. I think when we shipped juicero, the craziest
• 3:16:43
  Randall Kaplan: thing that ever happened to me in my career is, God,
• 3:16:47
  Doug Evans: I think my whole life has just been crazy.
• 3:16:50
  Doug Evans: Craziest thing that ever happened, oh, craziest thing was, you know, the board asked me to step out and I come back and I was no longer employed.
• 3:16:59
  Doug Evans: It's like, what, like, incomprehensible. The funniest thing that ever happened to me is, think the funniest thing was, like when I went to the juicero meeting without the machine, because I had sold them on, like, Oh, you're going to taste the best juice. You're going to have the best meeting, etc. And they're like, where is it? I was like, oh, TSA, confiscating it. We're just going to talk today.
• 3:17:28
  Randall Kaplan: The best advice I've ever received is, I think
• 3:17:31
  Doug Evans: your extreme preparation is probably about as good as it can get.
• 3:17:35
  Randall Kaplan: The worst advice I've ever received is the
• 3:17:38
  Doug Evans: worst advice is, listen to the board.
• 3:17:42
  Randall Kaplan: 10 years from now, I'm going to be oh,
• 3:17:45
  Doug Evans: I'll just be expanding, sprouting intergalactically.
• 3:17:51
  Randall Kaplan: If you could pick one trait that would make anybody successful? What would it be? Persistence? The most important thing that's contributed to my success is my heart. The one thing I've dreamt about doing for a long time, but haven't, is
• 3:18:06
  Doug Evans: taking a vacation I really have not given myself like the gift of music, of vacation, of leisurely, like, I'm so anxious about like time that I other than like my time with my daughter, like, i Everything is productive, so I don't really watch movies, I don't go to concerts, I don't vacate, I don't vacation. So like, at some point, like, I want to get to a point where I feel there's such an abundance of time that I could actually take some time and do a vacation.
• 3:18:46
  Randall Kaplan: If I could meet one person in the world, it would be it's
• 3:18:49
  Doug Evans: so bizarre, because I feel like everybody is accessible. So like, I feel like I've met the people that that I want to meet. So I think I don't have an answer. I have, like, no craving to meet any, any person.
• 3:19:02
  Doug Evans: If you
• 3:19:07
  Randall Kaplan: could go back and give your 21 year old self one piece of advice, what would it be
• 3:19:10
  Doug Evans: that you can you could achieve your dreams if you do the work and if you plan like anything is possible.
• 3:19:20
  Randall Kaplan: If you were President Trump, you're sitting down with the desk on his first day, the first thing you would do is, I
• 3:19:28
  Doug Evans: would eliminate alcohol, eliminate processed food, you know, I would put the tariffs and the taxes on like all processed, ultra processed food. I'd change the farm bill, and I would get more people focused on, you know, healing themselves through a lifestyle,
• 3:19:52
  Randall Kaplan: the one question that you wish I had asked you but didn't, is,
• 3:19:56
  Doug Evans: how much money do you want? Doug, Well,
• 3:20:00
  Randall Kaplan: it's interesting because I was thinking about that and thinking about the time we've gone way over the time, yeah, and I was thinking about you and your simple life that you live, and no two you know radio. And one of the questions that I was going to ask you, was your motivation? I know you said, if you're motivated for money, it's not going to work out. As a founder, I'm not sure I agree with that, but that could be a whole nother topic for a few hours that we could talk about. But what are your goals for money? And if you if the sprouting company sells for ten billion one day, and you've created this massive market. Are you gonna get yourself a jet? I am,
• 3:20:38
  Doug Evans: like, set for life.
• 3:20:38
  Doug Evans: So I work out of pure joy and pure mission. So, like, it's very, very clear that the stuff that I'm doing right now is.
• 3:20:50
  Doug Evans: Like because the it's coming through me that I feel compelled, that I have to do this, but I'm not doing this at all for the money like this is just pure, pure mission, because I will not feel good knowing what I know and not doing it will not make me feel good, so I have to feel good, that I have to make a contribution and a difference.
• 3:21:18
  Randall Kaplan: My last question is, are there any questions that you want to ask me? Yeah,
• 3:21:24
  Doug Evans: what? What's motivating you? You're a young guy, what do you want to accomplish in this next 50 years? What's your legacy?
• 3:21:33
  Randall Kaplan: I hope my legacy, my stated goal, and the reason I started my podcast, was to inspire and motivate people to overcome the challenges that we all face in our lives. And my goal, as I started thinking about it, is, I want to positively influence the lives of 100 million people. I want to do it for my podcast. I hope as my podcast continues to grow, people will more people will listen and more people watch it.
• 3:22:00
  Randall Kaplan: I'm eventually going to be doing classes online. I'm going to be doing public speaking large.
• 3:22:03
  Randall Kaplan: I'll start small, like you do, like Tony did, and hopefully I'll I'll get to a level now at some point where I'm speaking in front of 20,000 people, and I have a book extreme preparation that I'm working on that's one two, I want to be a great dad to my kids and great husband to my amazing wife, and be great to my rest of my family and my friends, and then free is I want to give back to society. And I think there's a misconception about if you have money, you can do that by giving money. I think giving your time is a lot more valuable than giving your money.
• 3:22:44
  Randall Kaplan: So and all that is kind of encapsulated is my desire to make a difference and make a world
• 3:22:55
  Doug Evans: a better place.
• 3:22:55
  Doug Evans: Beautiful, beautiful. You're a beautiful man, Randy. And thank you as I'm grateful that we're getting to know each other.
• 3:23:00
  Doug Evans: Likewise,
• 3:23:03
  Randall Kaplan: this is awesome.
• 3:23:03
  Randall Kaplan: Excited for your future. This is going to be a huge hit. Yeah. I hope this show results in everyone going out buying a kit from the sprouting company, the sprouting companies.com, you could pick up Doug's book as well the sprout book that's on Amazon. I bought one.
• 3:23:18
  Randall Kaplan: Unfortunately, I didn't bring one. Doug brought one here, but I can't get into my office right now because we're evacuated, but I brought you an extra one.
• 3:23:26
  Randall Kaplan: Awesome. I love it. Thank you.
• 3:23:29
  Randall Kaplan: Thank you. Amazing. You.