Transcript of the interview with Peter Rahal, Co-Founder or RXBAR and Co-Founder of David Protein for The Failure Factor Podcast.

Megan Bruneau: Peter, welcome to the show. It is so great to connect with you. For those of our listeners who aren’t familiar with who you are, what would they know you for?

Peter Rahal: I’m known for starting a brand called RXBar, which is in the protein bar space, and their newest creation, David, which is another protein bar.

Megan Bruneau: And RXBar, how did that begin?

The Genesis of RXBar

Peter Rahal: I grew up in the food business. Both sides of my family had been in the food business. On my father’s side, they were ingredient suppliers, traders, and brokers. My mother’s side were a series of juice entrepreneurs. They made a finished product called Home Juice puddings. That’s actually how my family met—my father’s side supplied my mother’s side.

RXBar and protein bars are a convergence of my personal interest and intrinsic knowledge. Protein bars have been my quirk a bit because they have tremendous utility. They’re very portable, valuable, convenient, and nutritious, so I was always very attracted to the format. In 2012, I was basically looking for a job and was pretty frustrated in my career.

Megan Bruneau: What were you doing at the time in 2012?

Peter Rahal: I was working for a transportation brokerage. It was a startup, and I was attracted to startups. I wanted to be an early employee at a company. Through that experience, I learned exactly how not to run a company. The company’s values, if they were written, would have been: “Make money for the owner. Money over morality and ethics.”

From that, I was like, “Alright, I have to go on my own.” What is something I know? I know food. I also know fitness culture because I was doing CrossFit a lot. This was when CrossFit was just about to explode.

Megan Bruneau: What was your connection to CrossFit, and how did your relationship to protein bars play into that? It sounds like those were important to you.

Peter Rahal: I just liked doing hard things. I love physical exertion. It was a great way to meet people and get into really good shape. It was very easy to start a CrossFit gym. Their nutrition philosophy was very tied to it, which was the paleo diet. I remember a very specific moment: I’d go to my CrossFit gym, and there was a box of Clif Bars. Some sales rep had dropped them off, and it just sat there. It was almost like it was poison. Everyone had an aversion to it, and no one touched it. It was pretty easy to connect. I thought, “If I can make one that is paleo, this group of people, this group of consumers, would love it.” That was sort of the genesis of RXBar.

Megan Bruneau: Where were you living at the time?

Peter Rahal: I was in Chicago.

Megan Bruneau: Okay, so you’re in Chicago. You’d been working for this startup that sounds like it was so antithetical to the values you wanted to uphold. You’re doing CrossFit, and because of your experience and history in the food business, perhaps you’re looking at this through a different lens, where you see the opportunity when there’s an untouched box of Clif Bars.

Peter Rahal: Yeah, that strategy was basically, “What’s the best bar for CrossFit?” Let’s just prioritize that distribution and then eventually figure out how to address a bigger market.

Megan Bruneau: What did that look like? Granularly, what did you do?

Building the Business

Peter Rahal: This is where having a background in food helped. Most entrepreneurs just go to the grocery store and buy the ingredients. I knew about the supply chain; my dad was in that business. I knew I needed to buy raw materials that were scalable. It was figuring out, “Okay, where do I get egg whites? Where can I get dates? Where can I get almonds or cashews?” And then I just started tinkering in the kitchen with the formula.

I actually have a good story about my partner. Prior to RXBar, I was going to start a sleep shop with my brother, and we started taking steps towards it. It totally didn’t work. Another idea was going to start a coffee shop called Cream and Sugar with some buddies. We started making stops. It didn’t work. In both scenarios, I just felt like we were misaligned, and I was going to do all the work, and we didn’t have complementary skill sets. This is really important for our work. So, those two examples, the sleep shop and the coffee shop, were both failures.

I spent some time and left a job, and it just didn’t work. The reason why it didn’t work is because my partners at the time were not aligned on vision, values, and our culture. In the beginning with my brother, we started fighting right away. It was like a political thing; there’s some baggage being brothers and birth order we underestimated, so that just didn’t work. It was like oil and water.

Then with the other one, I would say, opening up a donut shop or a coffee shop, you have to be up at 5 AM. I started doing that, and no one else did. It might be a romantic idea to start a startup, and it might be easy to overlook what it takes. But as soon as you start, you begin to see what it takes. It was very clear that I was going to be the only one in the kitchen at 5 AM. Just two months in, I was like, “I’m not going to just put all of this on my back while you can go sleep.” It was all sort of like, “Well, no, we should talk to investors and get money.” There were no actions towards actually making it happen. These were the actions that felt good, which were like the sexy parts, which is like, “Oh, talking about the business.” And I was just like, “No, we need to make the products.”

Megan Bruneau: And what had you invested at that time? Had you gotten the space? Were you already building up the brand? What did that look like?

Peter Rahal: I mostly invested time, and I didn’t have any money. We were in the planning phase. I think we needed to present the product to investors, whereas the other group was like, “Nah, let’s just go hang out with investors.” This is where the night joined this company that was miserable, with terrible leadership. The big one was, “Okay, I don’t ever want to do a company alone.”

Even today, I have resources, and my partner Zach is amazing. I don’t want to do it alone. It’s hard. I’m more of a visionary, creative type. I want someone to help me make sure I don’t lose the detail. Then I got together with my childhood best friend, Jared, who was very organized and a great balance to me.

So, those two failures were so essential in figuring out what the right team design is. And I take that today: a company is just a group of people, and it’s a group of teams. You have to be very, very intentional about how you design teams to be the most productive and effective.

Motivation Through Misery

Megan Bruneau: What was that like for you at the time? Were you in a place where you’re like, “F***, nothing is working, just one thing after another is so hard?” Or where were you mentally at that time?

Peter Rahal: Mentally, I was pretty angry, I’d say, because I felt like I got baited and switched. So I just took that emotion and drove it towards solving the problem. I didn’t really complain. I was like, “F***, I just got to fix this.” I remember spending time at night and on the weekends, sort of mapping out my plan to get out of there, and it was actually just good motivation. I was driven, and I wanted to be successful. Successful in my sense was having a job, having a company, or just having a success, and I just had to do it myself.

Megan Bruneau: Yeah, it’s the opposite of the kind of golden handcuffs so many people get stuck in these roles where they’re like, “I don’t love this, but it’s not too bad, and I’m getting paid pretty well. And the lifestyle is not terrible, but they’re not passionate.” So for you, it sounds like being miserable really motivated you to be like, “I’ve got to fix this. I’ve got to get out of here.” And that’s how RXBar was born.

Peter Rahal: Starting a protein bar in Chicago in 2012 and 2013 was a low-status thing. You know, it wasn’t like you’d see the outcome of RXBar and think, “Oh, that’s what I want.” But at the time, it was a super low-status thing. All my friends were in investment banking or good-paying pharmaceutical sales or whatever, and going home on the weekends to make protein bars—the market’s always competitive. I remember even today, it’s always competitive. So that’s an important context for looking back; at the time, it wasn’t cool and required a lot of humility.

Megan Bruneau: Were you doing it as a side hustle to begin with? Were you still at the startup, or did you quit and go all in?

Peter Rahal: Yeah, it was a side hustle. I remember saying, I never told my dad, who’s really influential and supportive. As soon as I had a product to sell and I could start making revenue, my dad gave me cover. I had his safety blanket in a way where I wasn’t going to be homeless. But I remember as soon as I was able to sell the product, I slept when Jared did show up.

Megan Bruneau: Okay, so you recruit Jared, he’s on board. It sounds like it was aligned, and you knew that. And then what did that look like? You said you went out and started getting the ingredients in a scalable fashion, as opposed to just going to the grocery store. You were aware of the supply chain from the get-go. And then what did the formulation look like?

From Basement to Big Business

Peter Rahal: Yeah. So this was all done in my parents’ basement. We just started making the product. It was a little different than the current formula. We used figs and dates, but it was the same idea and concept of a minimal ingredient protein bar. We just started making it and figuring out the packaging, which is actually quite typical.

Megan Bruneau: What did that look like, the packaging piece?

Peter Rahal: The proper way to package the product is through a horizontal flow wrapper, but that would require a lot of CapEx. We didn’t have any money to invest, so we just bought pre-packaged foil-lined gusseted pouches. So, individual packaging, and then we could put the bars in the pre-assembled ones and then seal it. We made 100 bars. We designed the label on PowerPoint. I wasn’t good at graphic design. We went to FedEx Kinko’s, printed them out, and then made the bars individually. Then we just drove them to my local CrossFit gym, and a couple of convenience stores in Chicago. The first week, it just worked. They all sold. So, we took those proceeds and we made 150 bars. Our second batch, we sold them again. Next thing you know, we’re making 500 bars, and then 2,000. Once we had 2,000, that’s when we were like, “Alright, we need to get out of my parents’ basement. This is like, we have the traction.” We flipped about the business quickly. Then we secured a very small month-to-month lease in Chicago for $2,000 a month. We got a pizza dough roller. Jared and I just went there every day and started making bars.

Megan Bruneau: So you guys were still making them by hand at this point. And then what did the genesis of that look like? As you were getting traction and it was being proven in the market, I imagine you were like, “Okay, we’ve got to scale this and not just be making this by hand at this point.”

Peter Rahal: So at that facility, Allison Flavors, it was called, we’d sell. So say your manufacturing capacity was like 2,000. Then you’d figure out your bottleneck, and you had to break through that. We just constantly pushed our production capacity up. The capacity we had was about 5,000 bars a day, maybe if we ran pretty late, we could do 10,000 a day, which we never really did, but we could have. And there was just so much organic demand. Our focus was manufacturing, actually. The core goal was to get our production or volume up to a certain point where we could transition to a commercial contract manufacturer, to actually rent someone else’s equipment and commercialize it in a more professional way. Yeah, and it was…

Megan Bruneau: Brutal. I mean, the monotony, right? Was it just you and Jared, like side by side? Were you talking? Were you hanging out? Were you listening to a podcast? I’m trying to get the visual of you guys.

Peter Rahal: No, we had a team of girls that would help us. We would just listen to Mexican music. I would do the mixing, and Jared would do the slapping. Then they would do the forming and cutting with Jared. I reflect back, and that was actually the most fun period of the company’s history because it was like the only thing only he and I were inside and knew about it. But it was just fun. I don’t know why, but I have very fond memories of that phase because it was working, and it was just exciting. We were touching every part of the business, supplements, every…

Megan Bruneau: Yeah, it sounds like it was before there was a lot of expectation. That’s the phase where it’s just exciting, and you’re being creative, and you’re building, and you’re getting the traction, and it’s like, “Wow, the possibilities are endless.”

Peter Rahal: I would say we had pretty low expectations. Our goal was, “If we can build a $10 million revenue business, that would be awesome.” It was just working from the product markets that you knew.

Megan Bruneau: Yeah, you didn’t have to do much marketing. It sounds like it was all very organic.

Peter Rahal: It was all word of mouth.

Megan Bruneau: At what point did you then decide, “Okay, we should put some resources behind marketing?”

Peter Rahal: We never did.

Megan Bruneau: Never? It was all, wow, that’s incredible.

Peter Rahal: Our marketing was, we just used the product. So we would sample the products. We didn’t do advertising; we didn’t have cash. We needed all our profits to go into raw materials to make more product. So we were just like, “Sampling is the most important thing.” And that’s what we did.

Megan Bruneau: And then did you guys raise money at any point?

Peter Rahal: No. We did some debt, but that’s really it. Debt from my mom and his dad, which was all just working capital for inventory. And that’s the thing with consumer good businesses; it’s kind of where it should be. If you’re depending on marketing, something’s wrong. I still maintain that philosophy today. The product should work. And if the product doesn’t work, then you should go fix the product. So it was…

Megan Bruneau: When I first moved to New York, I’m Canadian, so I needed to get my visa sponsored. Even though I was a therapist in Canada, I was like, “Well, I’ll just work wherever somebody is going to sponsor me.” So I worked at a startup that actually made protein powders and protein bars. I won’t name which one it was, but I remember not knowing much about marketing and sitting in a marketing meeting. I remember them saying, “Yeah, like we had $500,000 in revenue this month. This is amazing.” But they’d spent a million on marketing to be able to get their $500,000 in revenue. I was like, “This doesn’t make sense. I don’t understand.” And they’re like, “No, this is just the way that it is. You’ve got to spend double.” And I think it’s just so incredible that it sounds like you guys were never spending any money, and the product was just the proof right there.

Megan Bruneau: At what point were you like, “This is really working. This is taking off.” What did your life look like at that point?

Peter Rahal: The first week of launch, I knew it was working. I knew that if it worked in one gym, it would work in every gym on the CrossFit profile, so I knew it was going to work in CrossFit, that specific channel. The question then was, “Okay, so outside of CrossFit, a convenience store, a grocery store, would it work?”

In Chicago, we put it on the shelf with the rest of the competitive set, and it didn’t work. So we just doubled down on CrossFit. I’d rather sell to a CrossFit gym than at Whole Foods because at Whole Foods, in that grocery store, it was too competitive, and we didn’t demonstrate that it worked.

Megan Bruneau: I imagine you knew that the CrossFit demographic is very much aligned with paleo. They’re your customer. Whereas, I mean, Whole Foods, you have people who are maybe vegan or following some other kind of dietary guideline or aren’t as interested in or don’t see the value in a paleo product.

Peter Rahal: Yeah, exactly. So really stick to your early adopters, the people that love your product. People are forgiving if you make a mistake. So we did that. And then once we sort of saturated that market, say around $6 million in sales, the question was, “Alright, I’m pretty sure Americans at $2.49 would appreciate our offering,” which was a whole, real food protein bar with quantifiable, open ingredients.

The question was, “How do we cross that bridge? How do we communicate our offering in a way that would resonate with people outside of our early onset of CrossFit?” It was very clear that the name “RXBar” was kind of confusing. It meant something in CrossFit; it didn’t mean something to normal consumers. Our packaging design was just a very basic architecture of your logo and some statement of identity, and then your flavor.

The space is competitive for attention. We just had to be bold. We made a pretty bold move of rebranding and focusing on the value proposition, which was, “What is RXBar? It’s like eating three eggs, two dates, six almonds, four cashews.” It was kind of contrarian at the time because any marketer, any conventionally, classically trained marketer, would be like, “Your brand’s everything, your view is so important.” And we just took the other way. We were just saying, “Actually, our brand name is not that important. Actually, the only thing people care about is the ingredient list.” So we looked forward to that rebranding. And then once that rebranding was finished, we went into grocery and went out to the broader market. We started our second phase of product-market fit, which really worked.

That’s when I was like, “Oh sh**, this is going to be way better than I thought.” I was confident we could build a great business, but I was just so focused on the problems at hand that I didn’t really reflect. It’s hard for me to describe what I was feeling. I was just so in the business and focused on winning. And probably one of my flaws is I don’t celebrate. So there’s not like a period of patting each other on the back. It was like, just keep charging ahead, keep driving, keep solving problems and riddles and puzzles. Totally.

Megan Bruneau: It’s tough to be in our feelings when we’re focused on the future, right? That requires presence. You mentioned that perhaps being one of your flaws. Can you say a bit more about that?

Peter Rahal: Yeah, I don’t celebrate. I don’t know why, but I just keep charging forward. It’s certainly served me. I just focus. I’m very results-oriented, so I like utility and results, and therefore I don’t really understand or appreciate celebrating because it kind of doesn’t matter to me.

Megan Bruneau: Or maybe there’s a fear that if you celebrate, you’re going to get left behind or get caught up in the joy and not keep charging forward like you said?

Peter Rahal: Probably that. Yeah. When things are going well, I get paranoid. Celebrating doesn’t do anything to move you forward.

Megan Bruneau: Takes your eye off the ball, is perhaps the idea there. Like, you’ve got to keep moving.

Peter Rahal: Yeah, that’s probably the reasoning. Well, I…

Megan Bruneau: I wonder if this is maybe a time to mention some of the quote-unquote failures that you experienced prior to starting RXBar. Some of the things you just mentioned there made me think, “Oh, I wonder if knowing the little bit that I know about Peter’s childhood experience might have contributed to, like, ‘Hey, I’m not going to let myself celebrate. I’ve got to just keep focusing on charging forward.'” Would you be able to go there?

Childhood Challenges and Their Impact

Peter Rahal: Yeah, yeah. So, I’m no stranger to failure. When you’re a kid, when you first enter education, your status at the time is measured by sort of two things: one, your marks, your grades, and then second, athletics or something like that. Perhaps the third would be your peers, like, are you able to socialize?

For me, I’m dyslexic and I guess also have attention deficit. It’s common now, but the whole system was not designed for my brain. I just remember very specifically feeling pretty inadequate as a kid, different, and unable to do anything about it.

Megan Bruneau: What age did you become aware of that?

Peter Rahal: First grade.

Megan Bruneau: Did you receive a dyslexia diagnosis, or was it like, “Oh, he’s just not doing well in school?”

Peter Rahal: It was sort of like, “He’s not putting in effort.” It was something wrong with me, is how I interpreted it. And there wasn’t much awareness of it. This was in the ’90s. The strategy at the time for the educators was like, “Let’s put him in special education.” And special education where I grew up was for people who struggled. So I was in a class with actually disabled people. I was labeled as disabled.

I just remember some of the consequences of that, like, “Who was a good teacher for you growing up?” And I have an aversion to every teacher there. To have self-confidence at that age, I had to sort of hate and dismiss the authority or the system. I think some of my contrarian nature is rooted in that, where I just question and am skeptical of things. That was the way to protect myself. I just had a lot of anger back then. Yeah.

Megan Bruneau: That makes sense. Especially given that time, they just didn’t appreciate your neurodiversity and recognize some of these things in kids. They just saw it as a lack of effort or laziness or a lack of motivation or not being able to sit still or disrespect. It sounds like for you, you felt super unsupported at school, and not only unsupported but ostracized and alienated into this group of, “Hey, he’s disabled,” which I can only imagine how that affected your social life or your peer group.

Peter Rahal: Yeah, well, luckily, I mean, I got teased. Luckily, I was social. The two things that saved me, I think, are actually athletics, and I could socialize.

Megan Bruneau: What’s it like talking about it now, just reflecting on it?

Peter Rahal: It’s painful, actually.

Megan Bruneau: Yeah, I can imagine. That sounds like it was a really lonely, painful time. Thank you for being so open about it. I think a lot of people can relate to this. We think that all trauma comes from parents, which sometimes it does, or a lot of times it does. But so many people go through traumatizing experiences in school because you have to be there eight hours a day, five days a week, for your entire childhood, and there’s no escape. I can understand why today you’re like, “F*** these people. I can’t believe what I had to go through.”

Peter Rahal: Yeah, yeah, but I actually had to sit in a good way, so I’m happy I went through it. It makes me harder to kill. So yeah.

Megan Bruneau: It sounds like you can connect your aversion to authority and thereby probably your entrepreneurial nature, and like you said, “makes you harder to kill,” your resilience, your perseverance. All of that makes so much sense given your childhood and what you went through in school. That’s the beautiful part of you that can recognize that in some ways was a gift, as painful as it was. Going back to that piece, like, “I don’t allow myself to celebrate,” how do you think your relationship to working really hard developed in response to everything in school?

Peter Rahal: Two factors. One is my father has a tremendous work ethic, an immigrant’s mindset. I just observed him never stopping and always working, so he was a huge role model for me. It takes me longer to process linear or sequential summation. So I just had to work harder. My work ethic is more from just trying to prove that I’m not disabled, really. So it’s more in spite of some dyslexia. It’s like, “Go to work harder and try to figure out the system.” But I sort of said, “F*** the system, and I’ll show the system’s wrong.”

Megan Bruneau: “I’ll show that the system’s wrong. I’ll create my own. I’ll be more successful than everybody else doing it my way.” Fast forward to today. You’ve started David Protein. From my understanding, a different co-founder sold RXBar to Kellogg’s for $600 million. Is that the right number? So, wild success. The dream that so many entrepreneurs have. And then there was a part that was like, “I’m not done.”

Can you make any connections there, just based on what we talked about? Did it feel like, “Hey, I’ve got to keep working? That’s just the only part of me that I know. I feel this urgency?” Or tell me more about that.

Beyond RXBar: The Drive to Create Again

Peter Rahal: I really enjoy work. My dad taught me to love labor, so I love being productive and useful, and it goes back to my value of utility. I like to be productive, and that feedback feels good. I don’t think I’ll ever stop working. It was just a question of where I was going to spend my time. The positive feedback loop of doing something you’re good at is motivating. Starting, investing, dabbling around that. But I always wanted to go back into the arena. It was just a matter of figuring out what to do. And once the horizon of my non-compete was there, I started planning. I could clearly see a gap in the market.

Megan Bruneau: What was the gap you saw?

Peter Rahal: We thought that you can optimize a protein bar. We thought you could make a better protein-to-calorie ratio. The question was, if you’re going to make a protein bar from first principles, you would want as much protein with as little other things. So the biophysics limit would be 120 calories, 30 grams of protein, that would be the best protein bar with the subjective part of taste and texture, which is really important. We thought with that approach and that way of thinking, we could be pretty successful compared to what’s on the market.

Megan Bruneau: Did you have a thought of considering your previous co-founder at all, or were you like, “No, I want a new relationship?”

Peter Rahal: I wanted a new one. I remember being young and knowing what to do, but then not being listened to because age is status in a lot of places. So I just have this respect for youth or thinking, and you naturally question things differently, whereas experience can be a burden. So I really value youth, and yeah, Jared already did it.

Megan Bruneau: So I love what you shared there about the youth piece. Oftentimes entrepreneurs will say it’s naivete, and maybe that’s part of it. I prefer to look at it as idealism. We’re more idealistic when we’re younger. Unfortunately, life, for whatever reason, causes us to be more negative or jaded, or maybe “realistic” is how we would frame it. It sounds like that was something that you really wanted to harness: “Hey, these things are possible,” as opposed to saying all the reasons things won’t work.

Peter Rahal: Yeah. And it’s also energizing. I’m 39 now, working with a 27-year-old who’s in that grind phase is good for me.

Megan Bruneau: Yeah. Different life phases, as you said, where you were when you started compared to where you are now. I would imagine even in your personal life you have kids, it sounds like.

Peter Rahal: I have a son.

Megan Bruneau: And how has the transition been into fatherhood while you’re in this next phase of entrepreneurship?

Peter Rahal: It’s been great. There are a lot of parallels between leadership and fatherhood, so I really like it. I like voluntary responsibility. I want to be a good father.

Megan Bruneau: For those listening who are navigating both building a business and also building a family, any advice you have or things that are working for you?

Peter Rahal: Your 20s are the time to go all in and take risks. Do it in your 20s because when you have a kid, your risk profile just totally changes. If you do have kids, I just think be very, very efficient with time. Time is a resource; it’s the most important thing. Do not mess around. You have to be super, super focused on how you allocate your time. I would be ruthless with time allocation: family, business, friends, health, and sleep.

Megan Bruneau: Do you have moments of joy in your life between all of that?

Peter Rahal: Yeah, joy through spending time with my loved ones. I love my colleagues. Working with them, winning with them, it’s fun. Solving problems with my colleagues, spending time with my family and friends. But my definition of fun is not… I don’t need experiences. I’m pretty simple. I’m happy if I have some physical exertion and I sleep well, and that’s really it. I’m not high-maintenance in that way.

Megan Bruneau: Oh, it sounds like connection with loved ones, like you said, and accomplishment, moving forward in this way, is satisfying for you.

Peter Rahal: Because of my dyslexic experience, my definition of fun is learning, actually. So I spend all my time studying and learning. If I had unfettered time and 12 hours, I would just learn about how to live out my curiosity.

Megan Bruneau: What modality does that take? Are you more of an audio learner, just knowing that the dyslexia exists in your life?

Peter Rahal: Yeah.

Megan Bruneau: Thinking of your son, if he were to go through similar experiences to what you went through, let’s say he gets labeled as dyslexic and ADHD or neurodivergent, what would you want to tell him that maybe you didn’t get told yourself?

Peter Rahal: It’s tricky because suffering and failure and humility are actually really important. Where I would help him is I know how that brain works, so I can help steer him. It’s just important that you taste success or get some wins. So I would just help him. I could help steer him towards things that he’d be successful at. I don’t mind if he gets bad grades; it’s more about him putting effort in, I think. That’s what I see, effort.

Megan Bruneau: Well, I think that’s a great start, focusing on effort versus outcome and recognizing, “Hey, he might learn in a different way.” But getting a taste of those wins and then metabolizing failures or humiliation into that thirst for success or doing things a different way, or questioning authority in the way that it worked for you. For people who are listening, who I think a lot of people had failures, or they look back on their childhood and they’re like in this more victim mindset of like, “Why did that happen to me?” Or, “If only this hadn’t happened, I would be successful.”

What advice do you have for people to kind of, as I said, metabolize those more challenging experiences into that winning mindset that you have? How did you do that?

Peter Rahal: Self-pity doesn’t get you anywhere. So I would just direct any energy or emotion towards something that moves you forward and progresses you.

Megan Bruneau: I guess if you are working on David, first of all, how are you feeling about everything so far with it?

Peter Rahal: It’s great. We have an amazing team, and we’ve been able to organize very talented people. We have an awesome product, very thoughtful positioning and vision. It’s exceeded my expectations.

Lessons Learned: From RXBar to David

Megan Bruneau: What do you think you learned through the building of RXBar that you were able to implement right off the bat with David that has made it more seamless?

Peter Rahal: I think the big one is my understanding of nutrition has changed. Nutrition in our society is pretty confused, right? Nutrition is individual, it’s emotional, cultural. In that confusion, it becomes an emotional discussion, a tribal discussion, not an intellectual one. So the position of David is one that’s factual or intellectual. It’s around nutrition facts, protein to calories.

RXBar had an emotional position. It was like, “We believe this is the right way to do it” for a processed food. That position was actually quite vulnerable because our early adopters, for example, who were into paleo, that was sort of a tribal belief system. Two years in, they moved to keto. We designed a product with egg whites and dates and sugar. But then all of a sudden, the next “religion” came, and it was about anti-snacking, anti-breakfast, no sugar, no carbs. Our main occasion was breakfast; it’s a snack, and it has… that consumer group of early adopters, their nutrition beliefs shifted. They went to fasting, and they went to carnivore. They just moved to different beliefs. There’s some merit to it in the sense that they’re usually restriction diets, which, if you restrict certain things, it turns out you can kind of get the results you want. And it’s body composition-oriented. So David is agnostic to all those things. We look at ingredients as their objective effect on the human body. Our position is around optimizing for protein, calories, and sugar. That position long-term is resilient and anti-fragile. So that’s on the product piece. And obviously, brand-wise, our name is much better. It has great meaning.

Megan Bruneau: Is that like a David and Goliath reference, or what’s the reference there with David?

Peter Rahal: Our namesake is Michelangelo’s masterpiece, David. Our symbol is the chisel. The chisel symbolizes intelligence and discipline. When an artist applies that to their work, they create a masterpiece, something beautiful. There’s a lot of great meaning in our name and our symbols, and our mission is to create tools that help you increase muscle and decrease fat. This contrasts with RXBar, which in CrossFit language means “as prescribed,” symbolizing status and doing something at a high standard.

So again, at a CrossFit gym, it would be like, “Did you do it RX? Can you do it RX?” It had a different meaning in CrossFit than it did in American English, where “RX” means prescription. The way we solved that problem was to make the branding, the name, small. So I learned a lot about naming and positioning, and we applied all of that to David. Having name problems sucks. You know, a common name problem, like Chipotle, is arguably a bad name for Chipotle. You can’t pronounce it; nobody knows what it is. They’ve overcome it. Nike, same thing. But it’s expensive and it takes time. But with David, the only hurdle you have to get over is that it’s not the founder’s name; it’s actually the sculpture.

Megan Bruneau: Knowing though, that this time it sounds like you didn’t have the same organic marketing strategy.

What did your marketing strategy for David look like, or what is it looking like currently?

Peter Rahal: It’s pretty similar, actually. We are doing ads in a big way, but when we launched it, we just built hype in a good way. I had a pedigree, so that helped get awareness, like people waiting for the next move. We have great investors who are amazing partners that have big platforms that help drive awareness, but really that’s just gas on the fire.

Peter Rahal: But the merit of our products, I think, deserves the most credit for the great questions like, “How are you differentiated?” It’s like, “Alright, well, the market’s at 20 grams of protein, we’re at 28. The market’s at 200 calories, we’re at 150 calories.” Those are meaningful differentiations, particularly when protein bars are really scrutinized. If you have a sandwich and there’s a calorie difference, you don’t really think about it, but with a protein bar, every little fact matters. So that’s in our advantage. And then on top of it, everyone’s expectation for protein bars is they taste like sh**. So when your expectations are pretty low and then you get a good result, that delta is an amazing thing. I think that’s a good definition of happiness: expectation versus what you get.

Megan Bruneau: Exactly. Yeah, the macros are pretty impressive. I found them hard to believe. I was like, “There’s got to be something that’s not adding up here.” Super impressive, and they taste great.

How about now in terms of any challenges you guys are facing? What does the next step look like as you build forward?

Peter Rahal: We really focus on the fundamentals. So, making the best product possible, serving the customer in the best way, continuing to innovate, and pushing boundaries on the product side. In general, our company culture is rooted in optimizing every aspect of it, from customer service to quality to food safety to our supply chain and manufacturing. So every day we’re just driving that, and it just compounds over time. It’s beautiful to see. You can look back and think, “Oh wow. We used to be here, and now we’re all the way over here.”

Megan Bruneau: Do you intend to just stick with protein bars, or do you have any aspirations to expand to other products?

Peter Rahal: Yeah, I mean, we want to make a bunch of stuff and be useful, but our focus is on the bar format. We’ll prioritize bars until we get to some scale, and then once we get to scale, we can sort of address different problems out there.

Megan Bruneau: What size is your team now?

Peter Rahal: 30, 35, maybe.

Megan Bruneau: How has that been for you? That whole experience of going from just really being in charge of your own responsibilities to now managing a significant team?

Peter Rahal: I mean, I take the responsibility of leadership very seriously. I feel very protective of our people. I feel tremendous responsibility to serve their interest, to make sure they’re successful and happy. It takes me a while to feel emotions, I guess. I don’t know how I feel. It’s just… it’s a duty. I’m very aware of the duty I have, and I define it and take it seriously.

Megan Bruneau: Do you have any advice for people who might be going from solo entrepreneur to leading a team? What have you learned along the way, and what do you advise people to do?

Peter Rahal: When you’re a founder, an entrepreneur, an owner, you have to manage yourself. You want to be successful. Don’t make it your playground. You’re an employee too. So really decouple the fact that you started it and you’re a founder and owner, whatever that status is. Put it over here. Now that “over here” person is hiring the CEO. You have a job. You’re an employee too. Define it and understand it, and do not commingle and abuse your power across those two different tasks.

Megan Bruneau: I love that; that’s so powerful. Really seeing that you have a responsibility to the company, you’re an employee. To take away the ego, take away that authority that you believe you have, and channel it into your duties.

Peter Rahal: Yeah, don’t abuse your power. You see it all the time. Founders, they think they can do what they want, and it’s just terrible. You won’t be successful. So you’re an employee, and you want to be a good one, or you want to be a bad one.

Megan Bruneau: Yeah. It sounds like through your experience at that transportation startup, you really learned what not to do.

Peter Rahal: Yeah. Totally. Like an anti-reverse role model for sure.

Final Thoughts for Aspiring Entrepreneurs

Megan Bruneau: Well, Peter, thank you so much for sharing your story today. Before we wrap, is there anything else you want to share for aspiring entrepreneurs, those who are in the trenches, those who are ready to scale, wisdom, advice?

Peter Rahal: The study of humility and the study of yourself are things that you should keep practicing and keep doing. I think you want to be a student of yourself, not from an ego perspective. The more self-aware you are, the more you understand and are introspective. If you keep studying yourself, the more effective you’ll be and the more you’ll put yourself in a position to be successful.

Humility is freedom from pride and arrogance. It’s misunderstood. It doesn’t mean you’re quiet, it doesn’t mean you’re passive. It just means you are objective and you’re aware of your biases, and you make the best decisions possible.

Megan Bruneau: Yeah, I think that’s brilliant advice. Are there any practices that you engage in to increase self-awareness and humility?

Peter Rahal: Seek criticism, seek feedback. I think having good people around you that hold you accountable, especially if you get successful, your feedback loop gets broken like anything you say goes. So just making sure you have a feedback loop of people keeping you honest, I think is very, very important. Because you do lose it once you start to win. Every business is successful. So preserving and being self-aware of the feedback loop and making sure those are protected and functioning.

Megan Bruneau: I think that’s excellent advice. Thank you, Peter, so much for all of your openness today, for sharing your story. So inspiring and I can’t wait to see where David goes.

Megan Bruneau, M.A. Psych is a therapist, executive coach, and the founder of Off The Field Executive & Personal Coaching. She hosts The Failure Factor podcast featuring conversations with entrepreneurs about the setbacks that led to their success.