You know, for a living. Now I talk to some very ambitious people and I find that ambition comes in a lot of different forms. Everyone wants a different thing and a different industry, and they all come from different places, but almost every ambitious person I talk to seems to agree on one thing that they want it all. Now, apparently ambition comes in a lot of different shapes and sizes, but it doesn't come in a lot of different speeds. It's to the degree that in our public imagination, we almost treat ambition. It's being synonymous with this type of impatience about your life, and that's why recently I've been looking for someone that's ambitious, but just has a very different relationship with time is okay waiting for things. That's how I met Todd. Todd Masani is the founder of Dandelion Chocolate. In his previous life as a college student at Stanford, Todd started a tech company with none other than the Sean Parker, as in Justin Timberlake in the social network, Sean Parker. And today, together, Sean and Todd grew that company to hundreds of millions of dollars and they sold it the height of the era. And all of a sudden, in the aftermath of all his great success, Todd was left figuring out what to do with his life. So Todd did what anyone would do and he started making chocolate in his garage. And he would take this chocolate around to food meetups all over the country. And at some point he got so good that his garage chocolate won best Chocolate in America Award. That kicked off this thing where Todd built a company around this chocolate, dandelion chocolate. When you come to San Francisco. Is a cornerstone of the city. It's an entire city block. It defines the landscape of the city. And when you talk to Todd now, he has a very different relationship with his work and with the time that it takes to do things than anyone I've ever met. Todd has done the fast thing, but now he wants to do the slow thing. Todd doesn't think in months or years, Todd thinks in decades, even centuries at times. Todd doesn't look at the big success stories of businesses in America. Todd looks at the success of businesses in Japan when companies can sometimes be around for a thousand plus years. Todd has all the ambition, the most ambitious people I've met have, but he has a very different sense of the time that it takes to do great things. Todd has a deeply interesting and thoughtful person. And he is doing something really amazing with Dandelion chocolate. I could not be more excited to have Todd on the podcast. And with that, I bring you Todd Masana from wefunder's office on Mission Street in San Francisco. This is warm intro. So Todd, in preparing for this, we did a lot of research, it's very creepy, but Gwan and I basically spend,, two to three days figuring out everything we could find out about a person just to try to prepare for this. And I was surprised by, I, I found out a lot about your, your, your career and, and, even your, your life. Now. I didn't find a lot about your childhood. Oh, really? Yeah. And maybe, maybe we need to be creepier and do better research, but, tell me a little bit about that. Tell me about kind of the universe that you, you grew up in. Sure. So I grew up in Connecticut. I grew up in sort of the not fancy part of Connecticut. Mm-hmm. In West Hartford, which is a suburb of Hartford. My parents were both teachers. My mother was a high school teacher. My father taught also high school and community college. My mother taught math. My father taught sort of business and yeah, just normal, classic, suburban childhood. It was nice, very idyllic like Connecticut. My mom's also was for 25, 30 years a, a teacher. And I think it I think you can tell from the everything about me. Do you, do you find that it's still a part of your personality being the, being the son of two teachers? Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think they really liked knowledge and learning, and that definitely informed how I think about things. My mother actually taught at my high school. Oh, really? Yeah. I didn't, didn't, I didn't have her but my siblings did. But so I, I didn't have her, but I, you know, she was, I already knew all the teachers and she was very friendly, so it was very comfortable. So yeah, I think it like really informed my upbringing. And so you're, you're grown up in Connecticut, son of two teachers. This is the what, what general era without having to give away age, we would you welcome to, but what, what general era are we talking here? Is this the, the eighties, the early eighties? Yeah. I mean, I graduated high school in 97, so, Hmm. It was sort of like eighties, nineties. Yeah. Yeah. And what was in that era for somebody growing up in that part of the world with your sort of background? Like what was your, what, what's the first sort of ambition you remember having around that time? I mean, I was a classic nerd. Yeah. Before, before that was cool. Yeah. I mean, I was on the, we had BBSs, we, you know, had our own, I remember when I got my first dial up modem, 2,400 bot, and it was before a OL, it was a Delphi, so I was just normal into computers when that was thing into adventure games back then. So just like normal kind of nerdy things. I also, you know, as a, as a kid, I did a lot of exchange programs. Mm-hmm. So I went to like Spain for a month, went to Russia for a month, went to Mexico for a month. So I got to kind of, experience life had I been born somewhere else, which I think was really fun and instructive. But I don't know if I had a lot of ambition per se back then. Just I was a good student. Yeah. What was the first that you remember thinking you want to go to Stanford? When, when does that. A pop up on the radar for you? So for most of my life I actually, I wanted to go to MIT really? And then I met some people and I said, oh, I wanna go to Caltech. Yeah. And then eventually I met some actually some people who went to Stanford and they said, oh, you know, your computers, but you're also into mm-hmm. Languages and arts and all those things. So maybe Stanford's a better fit. You still get the sort of California weather, but it's a little bit more diverse than Caltech. Did it feel at the time, like now, I, because every once in a while somebody will ask me you know, they're helping their kid get into school and they'll ask me like, Hey, you know, I'm wondering like, what should they they do to get into Stanford? And I kind of the same response every time, which is, oh, if I knew I wouldn't be here if, if I knew what goes into getting into diverse, especially now, just what it has become. But back when, when back when you were applying, did it feel like a, like a long shot? Did it feel like Yeah. How confident were you that this was gonna happen for you? Honestly, I was probably overly confident. Really? Yeah. I, so I only applied to Stanford and I applied early and I remember, I think we had to apply like the day after Halloween, I think it was something like that. And I stayed up all night for Halloween and the next day I told my parents I was gonna take the day off, and then I wrote my college essays and we got'em in at 5 0 1 at the post office. Just got it in and the thing, and then it worked out. So in retrospect, I think that was kind of gutsy, but yeah, it all worked out. Like I think doubt's incredibly competitive. But I got pretty lucky. I think. It, it's very, it's very humble for you to say that you got lucky, but it, that is, that's one of the most gangster things I've ever heard. It's to only apply to one school for that to be Stanford to, to get in just at the deadline and to get in is, is incredible. Well, I applied early, so if it didn't work out, oh, you applied early. Okay. Yeah. If it didn't work out, I could still scramble and make it work, but I was very efficient. I was always procrastinator. I'd always yeah. Do my homework at the last minute. Do you remember in that, you know, like what was your expectation of, of Stanford. What was the expectation of, of the valley coming out here? You, you know, you're interested in, in in computer science and you've kind of like, you know, you're like an early one, one of the original early hobbyists in that world. What did you think this world was gonna be like when you showed up in Palo Alto? You know, I think once I showed up at Stanford, it was a really interesting time. That was kind of before or kind of right around the first internet bubble. Mm-hmm. So I remember that was kind of around when Yahoo was getting started. I remember Excite was the big success story at the time, and people were talking about it. People were trying to start companies. I remember there'd be flyers on the wall about Join my startup. So it was just kind of like the energy at that time was all of Stanford, I think was starting to get really into, into entrepreneurship and computers and computer science. And so, like those were some of my interests, but certainly coming to Stanford at that particular moment in time was just kind of really perfect timing. Do you so I, I got here a little bit later than you, but I am. I find I'm very nostalgic for how the Valley felt even in, I got here in the early 2010s and you know, it just, it felt still like a very optimistic place. Do you, you might be more you might have a different take on this. I'm, I'm curious how, how do you think about the difference between how the Valley felt when you first show up here versus how it feels now? I think it felt a little bit smaller and a little bit less professionalized, a little bit less financialized. But I also think like everyone kind of keys off on their particular moment in time and everything's changed. And I, it's different in many ways, but I mean, I think also at the time, you know, we had to, there were a lot, there was a lot less infrastructure back then. I remember we started my first company, we had to like, buy internet servers and find a co-location facility and put them in and build our own boxes. And now there's a lot of like, you know, ways and things for people to help you. So it was a little bit more DIY, a little bit scrappier. But I think the like optimism of entrepreneurship and, you know, California and San Francisco being sort of a gold rush town and people coming here to, to explore new ideas and meet people. Like, I think that's all still true today, even if it's gotten a little bit bigger and more professional. I'm, I'm curious to get your take in particular in one thing, which is. This.'cause that's been my experience too. I remember even when I was starting the company, Berkeley had one accelerator on, and that wasn't even, it wasn't even really a, a thing yet. It was just a few people in a room. And it, but now when I go back to the university and I talk, it's, there is this massive startup industrial complex. Mm. The thing, the one thing I do wonder about,'cause I'll meet students now that, you know, want advice or whatever, and they will ask or they, they'll tell me that they're deciding between going and taking a job at Google or starting a company, which to me, that would, if you had said that to me in the early 2010, that would've sounded like you're deciding between being an atheist and joining the papacy or, you know, joining the priesthood. I guess my, my question is just what do you think that does to the quality of companies we're making? The quality of products we're making having all this infrastructure around it, because. I can kind of see both sides of it. I can see it being a good thing, but I can also see it hurting the actual quality of output that we're putting out as an industry in terms of startups. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. I, I mean, I feel like startups are really hard. I feel like they're not for everyone. And I think it's kind of a personal choice you have to make, like you're definitely gonna have to struggle and you know, may not go the way you want. So like, I don't think it's negative if someone wants to join a big company or a startup or do it themselves. It's kind of anyone's personal decision. I do feel though, that like entrepreneurship or being an entrepreneur is the lowest barrier to entry job there is. Yeah. You literally just decide you wanna be an entrepreneur and you do it. And I think in many ways, like the more options you have, the less likely you are to, to be an entrepreneur just because it's like the more like established you are, the more you have to lose the less likely you are to go for it. And so coming out outta school is a very good time to be an entrepreneur because. You kind of probably don't have a lot of money. You're not really set up. You're used to living frugally. So it just kind of can align with that start. Yeah. Do you remember who the, the, the people were that you I mean, I guess the, the first question would be how quickly into being here into being in the valley, do you start to think of entrepreneurship as a path for yourself? Pretty much immediately. I mean, the summer after freshman year, we, my friend and I started a small little company. Yeah. And we built a product. We put it out there and we got some press for it. And definitely there was like people talking about entrepreneurship. Like, it was a really exciting time. People were either doing internships or like, said there were flyers all over the walls with people saying, join my startup. So I think it was kind of, if you were kind of there then in computer science or symbolic systems, you kind of, you couldn't, you couldn't avoid it. Yeah. And you on the very first day of Stanford, you meet your now wife. And did you also meet your, your later co-founder there on the first day? Yeah. We were all in the same dorm together first day freshman year. Oh my god. What a, what an icon. What an incredible first day to have that is. Wow. I had a lot of good people. Yeah. So you one year in, you started working on this company and is this the company that becomes Pleo? I think, no. We had tried a couple different things. Mm-hmm. And it actually was like an embedded browser extension for Internet Explorer that you could chat with people mm-hmm. On other sites as you like navigated the internet. Yeah. So it was. Way back in the day. And so you yeah. Actually chart that journey for me. Please. Just, just tell me about how you go from, from that to eventually having a company, having Axo that's running and raising money and, and all that. Yeah, so I mean, originally with some of these startups we were trying, we kind of did it for a summer and then we had to decide are we going to quit? And do this full time or are we going to go back to school? And we had said, you know what? We're gonna keep, we're gonna stay in school. Although at the time we actually had people interested in funding us and things like that, but we sort of stuck in school, we're doing things. And one of my friends was Cameron Ring eventual co-founder and he was friends with Sean Parker from High School. Sean Parker as you may know, was the in the, just in the Facebook movie mm-hmm. Was the Justin Timberlake character. So, he hadn't gone to college. He had sort of said he went to like Napster University'cause he helped perform Napster. And so Sean had gotten into touch with, cam had gotten a bunch of people together and we were all talking about ideas. Mm-hmm. And you know, he, cam and other people knew I was really into entrepreneurship and wanted to start something. And so we started meeting and talking and then eventually, this was in 2001, we graduated and we had this idea for this company and we're gonna start building it. But I think what happens in startups is, at first you get a lot of people interested. We probably at some point had like 10 people who wanted to start this, but as the months go on and there's no money and you're working nights and weekends and you know, people like hobbies and jobs and things like that, it's kind of, you know, petered out to just a couple of us. And then September 11th happened and the internet bubble burst. And so all that excitement around startups was kind of dormant for months. And so we were kind of Sean and me and a little bit Cam, we were just kind of slogging it out for months. And, you know, Sean had thought that because he had co-founded Napster, that we'd be able to raise money instantly, but the environment was so bad then that we kind of just for months and months we're working, meeting, talking to people and everyone, everything was kind of dead for a while, investment wise. And then kind of in early, what was this? 2002 we had a meeting with Michael Moritz at Sequoia and he gave us our first check for$2 million, which you know, now sounds like a small amount of money, but back then that was like a huge, a huge round. Yeah. And we started building and started making this company. I think to, to someone that might be listening from outside of San Francisco, they might not realize how many of the San Francisco landmarks you hit a company co-founding a company in 2001, which Sean Parker, and then raising your first round from Sequoia led by Michael Moritz is, I mean, that, that if I told Chad G Petit to generate an incredible Silicon Valley story, Uhhuh, that, that's legend. I truly have in my time doing this. And, you know, talking to founders, I've never come across one that rings that many bells. That's, that's unbelievable. What was, I, I, I wanna actually talk about Sean for a second. Who was the CEO? He was CEO. Yeah. And was it a learning experience? Was it difficult? Were starting this company with this not just experienced co-founder, but actually kind of famous co-founder. What was that experience like? It was fun. Yeah, that's for sure. Sean and I were, were very good friends for a few years, I'd say not as good friends later'cause we had some company turmoil, but yeah, I mean, but you know, we went through a lot together because we had no money. I mean, Elaine was the only one who had a job. And she supported us and Sean would sleep on our couch and we would like, we would literally go to in and out and we would check our couch cushions for the quarters and get enough money to go there. And yeah, it was pretty, it was pretty lean times. But he was pretty confident this could work and I was definitely in it. And but yeah, I mean there was a lot of learning to do. You know, I think that maybe one of Sean's superpowers is raising money and getting people involved and excited and I think a little bit later we had to get a little more professional and it got a little harder. And so we had some, some challenges there. But he was a great guy. Really, really smart guy and certainly got us off the ground. How accurately, and we can cut this out if you don't want this but how accurate in terms of just mannerisms. It. Did Justin Timberlake get him? Not, I don't dunno. I wouldn't say super accurate. Yeah. I mean, kind of, but not really. I mean, think Sean is, is really, really smart. But is a unique individual and you probably haven't met someone like him. So yeah, I think that's hard to capture. Yeah. I that movie, I forget when it comes out. It's not, I want to come back to your story, but a, I think it was like 20 10, 20 11, whenever it came out. It was around the time that I was getting to the Valley and I found it to be, it informed probably in mostly in bad ways, what I thought The Valley was a meant to be an entrepreneur and Sean's character stuck with me forever. And it just, but. But but, but back to this. And so you and what was the final version? What was the final iteration of Plao that you arrived at? Yeah, so Plao back in the day was I think pretty popular and sort of ancient history now. And it kind of complicated because if you roll the clock back 20 something years, this was before social networking was a thing. There was no. Facebook. There was no LinkedIn. There was no MySpace. There wasn't even Friendster yet. So we were way, way early and now we kind of know we were sort of in the social networking space before it existed. And so Plaquea was this idea of a self updating address book. And really it was a way of getting your offline contacts online.'cause that didn't really exist. And so we had kind of this plugin for Microsoft Outlook, which was the only address books that kind of existed at the time. We had this viral network that you would join the service and would email people on your behalf and they would join, but then they'd join the network and you'd have these network effects. So it was kind of combining viral. Effects with network effects. And so, we like pioneered a lot of sort of like viral networking. And at the time we got into a lot of trouble for it. A lot of people weren't used to getting emailed for their contacts. They thought it was very spa. There was a Wall Street Journal article, first one that came out, said plaque, so is it spam? And there was a lot of, yeah, it was a lot of questions about like, is this the right way to do things? And now this is just like standard practices and how people would grow. But we were kind of at the forefront of social networking before it was a thing. And you know, it eventually evolved in something a little bit different. Yeah. What did the experience of, so in total, how many years did you end up spending with plaque? So from like the first day you start working on it, you're talking to Cam and Sean about it to the, the day that you sell it. What was that period? So we kind of started end of maybe 2000. Mm-hmm. And sold the company in mid 2008. So it was about a good 8, 8, 9 years. And that would've been most of your right? Oh yeah, for sure. What did that do to you? What, what did, does that, how does that because I had a similar experience with less, much less success, but I spent my entire twenties running a company from the day that I got outta Berkeley to just running a company. And I, when I exchanged notes about my twenties with my friends who maybe just went and got a job or, you know, just even did other creative things it's like we're from different universes. Did you when you think back to that era of your life, do you, is, is it mostly fond memories you have a fit? Is it, do you have regrets? What, how do you feel about it now? I feel good. I mean, it was a lot of work. I wouldn't say I had a lot of free time and lot, not a lot of nights and weekends, but we were working really hard on something we believed in. We were very, very fortunate. There are people who wanted to support us investors. We had really great team members. Some have gone on to, found all sorts of new companies and been very successful in their own right. So yeah, I mean, it was a great way to spend my twenties and, you know, I think with a lot of companies, I've seen this with Plaxo, but other companies that I that I know where the line between it being a success and a failure is really kind of really thin. And even in our case, we sold Plao in 2008 and about a month later, the whole world economy had cratered. And had we not sold it, we probably would've gone under. And so there's sort of this fine line between, you know, oh, it's, you're successful and you're a genius, all this to, oh, like, you know, you spent nine years on this thing and it didn't pan out. And I've seen a lot of companies where it's gone either way. And so you're really kind of just wa walking that fine line of it could have been either way. And then once it happens, you kind of, everyone I think cleans up their narrative later. But it's always, it's not certain until that last moment that really strikes a nerve with me. You're a hundred percent right. I've had, I personally had that experience and I think. You don't realize until you go through it. How much this kind of adage about market dynamics, Trump individual performance. I, it's so true. I, I started an e-commerce company in in the mid 2010s. And we were, and it was the greatest time in the world to start an e-commerce company. We were coming outta yc. We were, this is a crazy sign of the times that we were the hottest company. And it's, it's hard to imagine how much the universe around it shifted and we'd only ever gotten better as a company, but the world around it shifted. It totally changed what, what was possible for us. And I, I've had these kind of dinners now I'm sure you've had millions of them. With, you'll meet a friend, a founder, friend, and you know, they were supposed to go into an acquisition like the final meeting the week before For sure. And you don't know when you're talking to them, if they are now$10 million richer or if they have to shut the company down for sure. It's a wild experience that I think exists kind of only in San Francisco. But you tell me actually about the experience of selling the company. Like what is that? Both how did it come to be, sort of, logistically, but also just what that was like emotionally after you know, eight and a half years of building this thing or like seven and a half years of building this thing. What, what was that experience like of selling Plao? Well, I think even before selling it, you know, plao was kind of a wild ride. Yeah. In the sense that we had raised this money from arguably the world's best venture capitalist. We started rewriting the code base'cause we're now a Sequoia company and we launched it and we said it's gonna immediately, you know, go exponential. And we launched it and I think we got like. A couple hundred users the first day and that was like our best day. And then we were down to like four users, five users, and I'm thinking we could just pay each of these users like a thousand dollars and we'd be doing better than, yeah. You know, it was really just like was not working. And it was sort of almost embarrassing. We'd raised all this money and the company was just not working, but we had sort of believed in the viral equation. In our case it was number of emails sent times conversion rate. So we really kind of broke down the problem and we said, okay, it's, he's got these very specific metrics we need to hit in terms of emails sent. We did added certain features around building address books for people based on their email conversions rates. We did tons of AB testing. We had a whole framework where anyone in the company could come up with what we thought was a converting email, and then the ones that won would win and keep propagating and then. Basically what happened is we were about to run outta money and then like right then we got it right and that viral equation just went above one. Wow. And the way the viral stuff works, it's like if you're below, you know, convert basically a virality factor of one, you basically die, but anything slightly above one just explodes. Yeah. And so one day it exploded and then a few weeks later we raised some money and then we kind of rode that wave for a while. And then there was all other social networking and other stuff happened in the market. And then finally in 2008, we had some offers to sell the company from a couple different companies. And ultimately we met with Comcast. We had worked with them on a few projects and they offered us the most money and it was a good alignment and we ended up selling the company in 2008, and it felt pretty good to have worked on something for so long and have it worked out. I, I appreciate that you started with they offered us the most money. I mean, I, you know, I mean, honestly they, you know, I think Comcast, sometimes people say bad things about them, but they actually were, the leaders of the company were very, very nice, very smart, very, very sharp. And you know, maybe it's not like your traditional fit, but economically worked out best. And then I think what happened is we kind of were required for one reason, but then immediately they sort of saw the potential of having a Silicon Valley development team and kind of rebranded as the Silicon Valley Innovation Center and completely changed what they did with it. You know, they thought they'd get into social network and they completely changed it. So it's not kind of what we expected, but worked out for us, worked out for our investors, worked out for them. So I think ultimately everyone was very happy. Yeah. I. This is something that I, I think unfortunately my sort of fellow star founders only really come in contact with when we go to sell our companies, Uhhuh, is to, to be in San Francisco. And to be a founder is at some level, to be a young founder is to believe that everybody in industry, everybody at a big company is just an animal of bureaucracy and doesn't understand anything. And then you come in contact with these people and you realize, oh no, they're not, they're not as dumb as I thought they are, and I'm not as smart as I thought I am. And you sort of like, it's, you know, you gain a, an a respect for, for these folks. And did you then end up working at Comcast? So I stayed on for a year. Yeah, that was kinda the minimum. And that was actually really fun. I mean, not like traditionally, but like Instructively.'Cause plaques at the time was about a hundred people and Comcast at the time I think was a hundred thousand people. Geez. So learned a little, a lot more about company politics and how things work. And it's funny, there were projects that I worked on that shipped maybe like four years after I left. Wow. So the pace was very different, you know,'cause they have all, they have to roll it out to various markets and they'd be very careful and they have legal stuff. So just a completely different experience which I'd never seen before.'cause everything I'd always done sort of myself. So was, it was very useful and instructive to see how a bigger company operates. It seems like you were pretty mature about this, but was it hard at all to see this product and this, even this code base that you've, you know, has your fingerprints all over it start to get contorted and applied to this much bigger company in a different use case? Was that a emotionally hard experience or were you very kind of grown up about it? Maybe a little bit, but I mean, I think all things evolve. All things change. Yeah. You know, it's like, had it not been Comcast, something else was changed. I mean, also social networking and the internet was changing so fast anyway, that in fact, if you didn't change you like the whole market would've changed. So I just think it's part of the natural evolution that you're always innovating and you're always changing, and so it's just part of the natural order. Hmm. So you come out of this, you do a year, and did you, did you know growing, going into mcast it was gonna be a year? Or did you kind of find that out on week one? No, I kind, I mean, I, I think it would've been more lucrative to say for four years for sure. But it was sort of like, I've already been at this for a long time. You know, a year would be a nice transition, so let's, let's give it a try. And then after a year it was like, okay, it's time to, it's time to head out. I am always blown away by how. How many founders have that experience? Right? Yeah.'Cause they al they offer you the, the the one in four deal, right. And it's a cliff and then the vest and you know, it's a standard for like any sort of start employee. And the, you know, you agree to four thinking you'll do two and then you do one. It's kind of the, the thing, part of the process. Yeah. But so you come out of this and then you go on this traveling sabbatical, I think is, is what you called it in one of the interviews I read. did you have any idea, the day you leave Comcast, did you have any idea of what you're gonna do next Or you just kind of very intentionally didn't let yourself think about that? Well, it's funny'cause this isn't any of the articles and I don't know if you should put it in, but for the next year, cam and I actually wrote the Meebo iPhone app. Really? Yeah.'cause Elaine, my wife had started meebo, which is a company that got acquired by Google. Mm-hmm. They needed an iPhone app. We're like, we like writing apps. And so we just spent like a year handcrafting the app and then launched that just kind of to help them. This is a, a lot of this podcast has been me mentioning things that people don't realize about San Francisco. A common hot take to have is that developers should not be called engineers. And a lot of people in my, I I study mechanical engineering feel that way. And I think emotionally, no one is more of an engineer than a developer because the fact that you took that year to, and I'm sure it was to help your wife out, but to just that in your free time, you like to build things is a, is the most engineered thing in the world. And so you, you do that and when did, when did Mebo end up selling? They sold a couple years later. That must have been 2012 maybe. Mm, so this was like 2009 ish. Got it. And at what point in this sort of. Two-ish year journey, do you start to think about chocolate? Yeah. So, we kind of worked on the iPhone thing. It was a fun project. We wanted to get it all wrapped up in a bow. Yeah. And put it out in the world and it was really nice. At the time it was considered a very well put together iPhone app. We spent a lot of time custom rendering all the pixels to make'em super fat. Like we spent, we really went deep on it. It was really fun. But then you know, I think when you're in startups, you don't get nights, weekends, free time, vacation. And so did get to travel a little bit. Maybe not as much as I'd like because Elaine was still very busy with work. But, you know, I went on like a month long archeological dig with Stanford Adrian's wall, and that was super fun. And we got to dig up in the dirt and find Roman coins. And it was just like all the things I never got to do. And, you know, when I had some free time and a little bit more money, also ate a lot of chocolate. Went on some chocolate tours. Met, met some cool people tried making a really bad short film. Like just, it was just whatever. Can it be found anywhere online? I really hope not. I really, really hope not. We'll dig it up in our Yeah, I, I really hope not. No, but it was just, it was really just for fun. It was like, Hey, didn't, you know, like gave up a decade of nights and weekends? So it'd fun to work on some other projects and try some things. And then I'd always loved chocolate. I always loved chocolate. But more, I wouldn't say I had a very sophisticated palate growing up. Love Reese's Peanut Butter Cups in Connecticut. There was friend's, which was the local ice extreme shop, and they had the Reese's Peanut Butter Cup sundae. And so it was very kind of more sort of kid chocolate in a way. But we started seeing if it's possible to make chocolate from the cocoa bean. So most people don't realize that most chocolate shops or most chocolate companies don't make chocolate. They buy chocolate as their first ingredient and they do something with it. And so we really started getting chocolate and realized no one's really making chocolate. No ones roasting beans. In fact, at that time there was maybe fewer than 10 companies in America making chocolate from the cocoa bean. So we set up a small chocolate factory in our friend's garage. Our friends were starting this company called Hip Chat and it was their garage. So we took that over and we started building a little winer, which is a machine with like a hair dryer and duct tape to get the shells off. We got mini ungers with little machines that grind the chocolate down. And we started making this small little chocolate factory just to see if it was possible. And then very quickly we tried the chocolate and thought it was really good, and we shared it with friends and family, and they thought it was really good. And that's where this kind of took off. Warm intro is brought to you by Wefunder. Wefunder created this thing called the Community Round that lets you raise money directly from your community. So instead of going to VCs and rich people, angel investors, you can go straight to your friends and your family and your customers. And you know, this is not a traditional ad read. I used Wefunder for my company three times. We ran three rounds in Wefunder. We raised over a million dollars, and I found that it completely changed how everybody felt about our business. Our customers all of a sudden didn't feel like they were just customers. They felt like they were owners in the business. They shopped with us more. They told their friends about us. My team felt like what we were doing was important because our community had shown up to invest in us. I tell every founder I can find to go raise a we fund around, especially for companies that care about community. There is nothing greater you can do than letting that community invest. Go to wefunder.com/join to check it out. So the, the very first. Thought that you have about chocolate and that, that this could be a life happens on a, sounds like on a chocolate tour. Right? I did a chocolate tour at David Leitz. Yeah. In France and got to see in France, they still had the tradition of the family chocolate maker, sort of these family chocolate chops that have been around over a century, century and a half where they'd have a small sort of cafe patisserie in front, and then in the back they'd actually be roasting up beans. And that was very new to me. And I saw, oh, it is possible on a small scale, but a lot of that's been lost. And so we saw that, we saw that it was possible. We saw it was interesting. We said, well, we could, we, we could we recreate that in a garage. I'm, I'm really fascinated by this part of the story. Okay. Because to me, I, I do think that the kind of confidence that goes into, having really good chocolate and then deciding, I think I can make this is the same kind of confidence that only applies to Stanford. I do, I do think that there is a and it's obviously rooted in talent because both of those things worked out very well. But what was your, what was the that when you start setting up this factory in the hip chat garage what was your biggest aspiration for that factory or for what you were doing? Was it, was it as simple as we're gonna mess around and maybe we make a couple good bars for our friends? Or was there a sense of like, maybe we'll do well at a trade show? What was. Yeah. Help me calibrate that. What were you thinking about chocolate at the time and your world? You know, I don't think I was so concerned with where it could go. I think it's just sort of, we're having fun, we're experimenting. It's sort of like when I went on an archeological dig or try to short film, you're just kind of experimenting and seeing what's possible and seeing what you're good at, what you're bad at what people like. And so, you know, it was really fun because we got to build machines. You know, in the software world you're always typing. Mm-hmm. And you could build things. But like, I remember trying to like make my. The first little machine, and it was really just like we'd go to Home Depot and get duct tape and it was, it was pretty bad. But it was like, you could see what's possible. And then, you know, San Francisco used to have the tech shop, which was a place with all these machines where you could learn to like cut wood and metal and use CNC and water jet. And so we'd get to go there and try machines and learn. And so at first it really was just to see what was possible and really just to see if we could make good chocolate and if our friends would like it. And it really at that point we brought our chocolate to the underground market, so this doesn't exist anymore, but it was a farmer's market that you didn't need health permits. So the organizers set it up where they invited people to come in with their experimental food. Every participant, every customer walked in the door, signed a waiver. Stating that they knew how dangerous this was. It's the most San Francisco thing. Yeah. And it was actually really interesting. A lot of people turned into big companies who went there and a lot of people would try baking cupcakes and say, this is a lot of work and I don't wanna do this. And so it was almost like a food incubator in a way.'cause normally to start a food company, you have to spend so much money in permits. That they just helped us get going. We went there and the first the first market we sold out, we didn't make a lot of chocolate, but we sold out. And so we said, oh, there's, there's something, there's something happening here. Was, was that the first moment that you felt like you, what you were doing was good? That, what, was that the first moment that we were like, no, we're actually making good chocolate. This isn't just us messing around anymore. This is actually good. I would say that we always liked the chocolate we were making and we thought it we thought it was good for our palette. But it was nice to know that what we liked was also other people liked it as well. So it's not that we thought it was bad or good, we weren't looking to for other people to say it's bad or good, but we're looking to see if there was broader appeal beyond just our own personal tastes. If I could somehow magically get one of those bars of chocolate that you made, one of the first ones off the, the garage factory line. And somehow I've preserved it to the point where it tastes the same. You, you, you get the, the hypothetical here. How do you feel, how do you think you would feel about that chocolate, that bar of chocolate Now knowing all, you know, it's really funny'cause I think like we're known for single origin, but our, our first bar we ever made was a mix of Panamanian and Dominican beans. And we just did like a random roast and we tried it and we thought it was amazing. And I was like, this is so easy. Anyone can do this. And I know later that actually we just got very, very lucky with that first bar. And so, I think that first bar would've liked, but you know, there's a lot of experimentation after that to learn what went into it and what makes a good bar and what our technique is and our style. But I mean, I think even from the very beginning we were very just like very rigorous about going through and experimenting. So I feel good about those bars. So. Tell me, you know, give me the, the highlights of course, of the, the last 15 years with now with chocolate, with dandelion, but in particular, I'm, I think the one thing I'm really fascinated by is the evolution of your taste, the evolution of your palette through those 15 years. So yeah, you know, please tell, tell me about the last 15 years, but especially, I'd love to hear about how your sense of what is good chocolate, what you wanna be making has sort of evolved over those years. Okay. Well, I think that's, I think there's a couple points to that. So one is just like. The different universe of chocolate and which niche we occupy. Yeah. And then within that, within that niche, how do I feel about it? So like within the broader bean de bar craft chocolate movement? Well I'd say like we actually make our own chocolates. So we're Bean de Bar. Most chocolate companies don't make their own chocolate. They buy chocolate and they make chocolates. So we're part of this bean de bar craft movement. But even within super high end chocolate, you've added cocoa butter, vanilla lectin, and other additives and flavorings. We don't do all that. We're just very purist. So we get the beans, we roast them, we add sugar, nothing else. If we make a hundred percent bar, it's just ground up beans. So we're kind of like, just from a whole like evolution of palate, we kind of started with the most minimal perspective, which was like, what is the sort of platonic ideal of a chocolate bar? It's just like beans and a little bit of sugar and that's it. And so even within the new American craft chocolate movement, we're kind of sort of narrow in that we have very specific point of view about what we like. And then I'd say for me personally and my sort of taste palette, I would say that. You know, I, I go to, I've been to wine tastings and they bring out all the wine and you know, I'm like, I don't know which one I like, or it's very, you know, not I'm wouldn't say I'm like the first person to pick out all the notes, but we, we sort of found is that whenever we do our chocolate tasting, we always do blind ab tests just like we did with software. And so I think it's very hard to pick up one bar of chocolate, take one bite and say, I've taste all these notes. And I do know some chocolate experts who have such a hone palate that they can do that. But I'd say most people instead what we do is we put the bars out, we do ab tests, we try it multiple times, we score them. And if you're trying them back to back, you can very much any person, even without a super sophisticated palate, can tell the difference and can have a preference. And over time you can learn the flavors and the notes. And so I would say that I've kind of evolved over time just because I've had a lot of exposure, but also because we always do controlled tests that allow you to pick it out and not just, you know, try a system where you taste something and you say something, you don't get real feedback. Hmm. I. I wanna try out a hot take, and I want to, I want to get your perspective. I'm, I'm almost a little concerned bringing this take up in front of an actual expert because I brought it up in front of my other idiot friends before. Okay. Never in front of somebody that actually owes something. My hot take is, so, and this comes, I come at this from coffee. I spent some time working for a coffee company before I started my company. And this is, you know, coffee's had a very pronounced, of course, third wave and all that. And I, I started to see a lot of people around me that had never really kind of cared much about coffee before start to really obsess about how they would only drink single origin and how single origin it was the only coffee worth drinking. And and you know, you hear versions of that with like a, a blended wine is, is a bad wine almost in like common understanding, but my sort of hot take is I, I agree that a single urgent product is objectively better. Or it's objectively of higher value, let's say. But to me the one thing that I think I always kind of took issue with was people would say, oh, this tastes bad because it's blended. This tastes bad because it's not single origin with a coffee or wine. And I always felt like that was the dumbest take because they didn't blend it to taste bad. They blended it to taste good and maybe to save some money, but they blended it. It's blended by somebody that knows a lot more about coffee than I do a lot more about wine than I do to balance out and produce a more palatable product for daily use for a non for a non-expert like myself. And so, I, I see a lot of value. You know, we had a Michelin star chef on. And it's the, the distinction between you know, to be able to appreciate the level of cooking that he's doing. I don't then need to say that. I don't need to pretend like I don't love dominoes, you know, they're just very different things. And I think that the one thing that's happened, and I wonder if you've experienced this with chocolate or, or if you even agree that this sort of there, the move in the expert world I think has been great and the move in industry has been great, but then this kind of sort of public understanding of it, where I think people they kind of intellectually understand that you're supposed to like single origin. But what they've taken that, what they've, I think very often taken that to mean is that anything that's blended must be bad or it, it, it probably doesn't taste good without really thinking about the fact that like, no, it's, it's engineered to taste good. Single origin really is for when you have that kind of level. It's to be able to do a different thing. It's to be able to understand how a you know, a, a Dominican bean tastes different from a you know, Colombian bean. Something like that. That's my take. That blended still has value in the world. Blend still have value in the world, and that for a lot of people, the blended option might be the right option. You react? What, what do you think of that take? I don't, I don't disagree with that. Not anti blend. This is a huge win for me. No, we just, we make what we make because we like it. Yeah. We like single origin. We like the way it shows people what chocolate can be. Yeah. We have bars that are very polarizing. People come in and they taste samples. Some bars of bars they like, some they don't like. We actually really like that people can see all the possibilities. But I think there's room for blending. And in fact I think like people say to us like, are you ever gonna do milk chocolate or Why don't do blends? And I think for us it's really like an evolution of the craft and could we really pull that off? Like if we were to do milk chocolate mapping, anti milk chocolate, but if you really wanted to do that right, you probably have to have your own herd of goats that only eats alfalfa and you'd have to cook it under vacuum and all these, like, all these things to do it right. And we're like not there yet. And so, we make what we like,'cause we like it and we're not snobs about it. You know, the universe of possibility within craft chocolate is, it's really big. Lots of people doing interesting things, raw chocolate, super dark milks, things like that. And we're friends with all those people, but we just have our own style. The part where I'd start to say we do kind of, where we kind of object a little bit is, you know, mass industrial chocolate is really about consistency and low cost. Yeah. It's really about you get beans from all over the world. They're commodity, they're all paid the same amount. Questionable labor practices, questionable quality. Doesn't matter if the quality's better because they're getting the same price. And then the way that you make them all sort of taste the same and be consistent is you burn them and you burn them and you add lots of ingredients to them to cover over that. And like, to me that feels a lot worse than a high quality craft chocolate bar. That's one ingredient where you know that someone cared about the beans and the farms and what went into it. And those are kind of two different universes. Absolutely. Yeah. I, I, I couldn't agree more. I, all of this was to set up the fact that. I much prefer single origin. I think Dan Light's the best chocolate in the world so that a hot takes aside. I do think that if you're looking for something you know, if, if you're, if you're trying to extinguish your sweet tooth, by all means, grab the bar. Whatever you can get. But I do think that there's a, to anybody that hasn't really experienced it that might be listening to this, I think you owe it to yourself to truly experience good single origin chocolate one time. And it just, the depth of it and the complexity and how many notes can exist you, and you don't even, I mean, the thing that I would say about it,'cause I think a lot of people are intimidated by I'm, I feel intimidated by it is, oh, you don't need to understand it, to appreciate it. And, but anyway, so go buy some dandelion would be my, my thing for everyone. But so coming back to your story and not my, my silly hot takes, you know, you have at this point experienced doing these two very different things. And the more I've been really sort of, you know, I've been in Todd world for the last couple days and, and thinking about this, I find that there it's, I can't imagine two more different experiences. One, scaling this tech company and of all tech companies a social media network, which scale is life. And if you don't get scale, and if you don't get growth, there is no life. Right. And then this at some level, the exact opposite thing, right? Where scale, and you just made this point very beautifully. Scale kills the product. How has your brain adapted to that? How has you do you do, how intentional was that, I guess, to go do something that operates in the exact opposite sort of mechanics? Were you just kind of sick of hockey stick curves and, and, and growth being like your, the be all end all. Yeah. How intentional was that, number one and number two, like, how have you felt those two experiences differ running something that needs growth all the time to something that you actually very intentionally wanna avoid growth? So I think for me it's less about growth and more about, I think traditional internet companies are really about scrambling to find product market fit. Yeah. So I've talked to a lot of people who've been, you know, multiple time entrepreneurs and they always talk about, you know, I'm just trying to find product market fit, and then the market changes and then two years later everybody's gonna fire and I'm gonna pivot this way and pop pivot this way. And it seems like their end goal really is just to like maximize shareholder value, right? And so it's less about doing thing, doing the thing they want or doing things for the right reason and more about searching the space in a very in a very quick way to kind of have a financial impact. And I think, so for me, chocolate is more aligned with my values because. You know, we have this thing that we want to build in the world. You know, the closest competitor is Valona and they just turned 102 years old. So the youngest company's a century old, most are 150 years old. And so we have time to figure it out. And I think, like, I tend to be like a little bit early, like even like Axo was like quite a bit early and even like the bean department's a little bit early, but we have time to wait it out and do things for the right reasons. And so, I would say like in many ways having a company that's like a little bit more. Physical and real, like is more aligned with what I like to do, which is not just search the space. But with that said, like we would like to grow we would like to continue to grow, but I think the thing we worry about a lot is how do we scale thoughtfully? How do you scale craft? You know, there's so many people in the world and in America who've never tried a good chocolate bar. Yeah. Never even have been exposed to it. And so I think that's a loss. And we would like to get this bigger so that people can experience and have good chocolate. But if all we do is become industrial or mini industrial chocolate, then we will have accomplished nothing. So the question is always for us, like, well there are chocolate factories where beans come in one thing and they're no humans, and out the side come chocolate bars and they have all these challenges and they're very well run, but that's not for us. And the question is like, how do we be thoughtful about the process and how do we make sure that we automate the parts that are just manual labor and a lot of work, and how do we really. You know, extract the craft parts and make sure we're doing those. And how do we stay honest and true to ourselves? How do we do our blind taste tests and make sure that we continue to uphold our values and our chocolate still tastes good and we're doing right by our farmers and our team members and our investors. And so it's just like a different thing, but it's kind of nice to have the ability to work on something for literally decades or the rest of my life. That's quite nice. Man, that's beautiful. I, I'll, I'll put out a take and you tell me what you think about this. I think that once you start to notice that pattern of the financialization the kind of the, the mechanization, the mass production of, of of taste or of of craft you kind of start to see it everywhere. Once you, once you just become aware of it, I think you see, you see it in coffee and you see it in chocolate, and then you start to see it in every single part of our society. What, what kind of impact do you think that has had, like, on our culture? What do you think that this sort of obsession with the with figuring out a repeatable model for growth and then just banging that nail every day. Like, do you think that, that, because I, I get the sense and I'm, I'm kind of showing my hand here. I feel like we're, we've lost something in our culture especially around the quality of products, the quality of experiences we have. We've lost something by focusing so much on growth and scale. Do you what do you think of that? I think there are different approaches and I think there's nothing wrong with people making money and being successful. Like certainly I benefited greatly from these experiences. What I would say though is I think a different lens is short term versus long term. Yeah. So I think that. Especially with something like chocolate, if you were just to optimize based on what makes the most sense, you will be forced on a certain path and I think you'll hit a local maximum and that is industrial or mini industrial chocolate. You will very quickly say, I should buy less expensive beans. If I add these additives, it's less expensive and people like it more. If I change the way I roast, if I change my packaging to be flow wrapped plastic in a cardboard box, I can mechanize it. So you sort of make all of these compromises that kind of put you down a path where eventually you just, you know, you hit that local maximum where you're just that same thing. I kind of feel like we started with a different approach, which is say this is the thing that we want to exist in the world. And when we first started, we hand wrapped every single bar. Economics were not great in San Francisco Paper source, right? Well, first paper source, then we went to India and got our own paper. But even then we had to wrap it and then we got one machine and another. But you know, it took years to get a machine or work with a company in the Netherlands to make a machine that worked for our very specific things that we wanted. And so, I sort of feel like if you start from what you want, and then the question is how do you make the economics work? I would hope that at some point we are not going for the local maximum, we're going for the global maximum, which is this much harder, bigger thing to get to. And I think like Apple did this when they came out with smartphones, you know, everyone else was just kind of like optimizing the same thing and they just came out of here with like the thing and they killed the market. And same thing with chocolate. Like, I mean, the other people have been around literally for more than a century, very hard to disrupt lots of entrenched interest money all these things. And so I think that we are optimizing something else that we believe will have a side effect of having a very nice financial outcome, but we're not sort of directly and obviously going towards it and climbing that hill to the wrong local maximum. You just solved a 15 year struggle for me, truly that is, this is something that it's a, an on loop conversation that all my friends and I have been having. Around.'Cause we are and it would be a lie to pretend like we're not as ambitious as we are. We're all very ambitious, we're all entrepreneurs and you know, in between companies have sold a company or in the first one and wanna start a second one. All of that. And it's a constant struggle because we all sort of came up in this version of Silicon Valley and this version of startups where you start something and the very first question that whether we understood it correctly or not, is a separate thing. But the very first thing you do is try to figure out how you get it in front of everybody. And how that just doesn't apply to every product, a business. And this is when, when I say that I think people, and this is I think of symptom of the problem. Which is people in Silicon Valley hear that is like, oh, you wanna start a lifestyle business? But no, no, no. I am every bit as ambitious as anybody else, and I wanna start a big company and create a great financial outcome for everybody. But I just think the path there is not for this product is just not to focus immediately on growth and, and mass production and scale and all of that. And I think, yeah, I guess the, you know, if we could sort of make this a little bit more universal let's say you're starting a company tomorrow and it's in a totally new space. A lot of entrepreneurs listen to this. How do you think about what the right time is to scale? What are the sort of the soft or hard indicators you're looking for, for when you know, okay, you know, I have a product I feel good about and now it my attention can sw can switch from product to scaling. How, how, how do you think about that? How should entrepreneurs think about that? I mean, I think there are different types of companies and there are different types of industries, so it's hard to answer. Like, I think for us, like we were always sold out of chocolate. You know, we were literally, we opened our Valencia Street location. We literally had to ration chocolate bars. We wouldn't let customers buy more than nine a day. So like that is an indication that maybe we could scale a little bit more. But I, like, I don't think there's a right answer or wrong answer about how to scale. It's just like, what are your values? I think that Silicon Valley in particular has, you know, has the VC industry and the VC industry has a very specific portfolio theory and IRR they have to make. And so it just forces you to fund a certain type of company. And the type of company that with Alion is, it doesn't fit that profile. I think there's a lot of companies like think about Blue Bottle. You know, they took 10 years to really build a brand before they started a scale. And you know, I think it took us 10 years just to even really get going. And you know, like I think arguably some of the most valuable companies in the world are ones like LVMH that took a really long time to build. So it feels like a different thing. And it's not all the funding, you know, like the normal Silicon Valley VCs are not necessarily the right funding source for that type of company. But that's not to say that they don't have, you know, that these companies don't have value or don't have a path. It's just a different path with different investors and a different strategy. I'll say for regardless of what anybody else thinks about this in San Francisco, I feel so strongly, and I said this to you last time we met, that if there was a Diego Rivera, and there are many, but if there was a Diego Rivera mural of all of San Francisco. To me a prominent feature of it is, is dandelion. And I think Thank you. But I think it's related to what you're saying.'cause I think a beautiful thing that you have done is, is to take this approach of really, and it, I'm, I'm, I don't know to what degree you were aware of this, of what you were doing for the city and the kind of the user experience of this, but man, you've done a beautiful thing for that corner of San Francisco. I love passing by dandelion. I love going in, I love the, the cacao fruit smoothie. I just, I, I think that it is. And if the only type of business we built as a city is that other type, which is, again, I did that, I probably gonna do it again. All my friends do it. I think that's great. But I think we need more more approaches to building business and more approaches to building product. And I, I just, I love the one that you've done but. Come bringing this back to you and not to my sort of, you know, love of Dandelion. One of the most incredible, impressive things you've done in this sort of already very impressive career is work. So, fruitfully with your wife. Hmm. Which is an incredible accomplishment to be able to work with your partner and produce so much. Have these two, like in parallel very productive and successful careers, and then to work together.'cause I read somewhere she said that she, when she got to Dandelion, she thought she would be there for, is it three months? And now she's been there for, is it 15 years? 10 more. 10 years or more? Yeah. Give us kind of just to the degree possible, just give us like a couple of tips and tricks for how, how do you make that happen? How do you make that work? I don't, that's a good question. It's just come natural to us. I mean, we met, we met at school, we always worked on projects together. So it's not so weird to go from working on projects at school to starting companies together or helping each other start companies or working together on a problem. And, you know, I spend a lot of time at Dandelion. You know, I get there super early and I leave super late and I think about it nights and weekends. And so it's nice that my partner is also there super early and super late and nights and weekends, and we can talk about the same problems. And but, you know, I think that only works because we have a lot of history and we have a lot of trust and we know each other. And I don't know, like, I, I don't know how that it, like extends to other people's relationships, but it seems to work for us. Yeah, you, you make it saying beautifully. But it's, I I think that you, you found so much beauty in that sort of unique setup. I don't think most people are able to get there. I'm I'm fascinated by this one very specific thing in my research the idea of the kidnap vacation. Oh, can you, can you talk about this a little bit? Sure. What's the yeah. How, how did this come to, to be a thing in your life and are you still doing them, are you still doing kidnapped vacations? Occasionally, but it, it try not to do it all the time. I mean, a kidnapped vacation, I mean, it started one time, it was Elaine's birthday and, it's like, it'd be really fun just to kidnap her for vacation. So, she, her friends, my friends that her co-founders told her she had a meeting kind of near the airport and then, you know, she's like, oh, that's weird. The meeting's in the airport in Mill Break. And yeah. And then I'm just like, okay, here's my backpack. She's backpack. And we went and then and so I just kidnapped her, I think for that one. We went to Hawaii for a little bit of time and but it was really fun'cause she didn't expect it and she had to cancel all of her meetings and then it sort of became a thing. Well I did it, then she did to me, and then I did it to her and it kept like becoming an arms race and then we had to kind of stop it. How many have there been so far? Maybe like 10. I don't know. I mean, wow. Yeah, I mean it's I mean you literally are like, I remember one time I was just on the freeway, I was actually taking a class and I was driving up to get there and she was in the car and she said, oh, take this exit. And I was like, what do you mean? I'm like, we still 10 more miles to go, she to take this exit. We took the exit, it was the airport and we went. And it's really nice to get kidnapped because I think like in your, no, but I, I think on a day-to-day basis you're always making decisions. You're always responsible for do things go right and planning and hotels. And this is one case where it's just like, I just have to show up. I dunno where I'm going. I have no decisions I have to make. All of my meetings have been canceled or I just have to tell people, sorry, I've been kidnapped, like I can't come to your meeting. And so it just it's just a very different way to travel and it's really fun, but it's gotten a lot harder now that everything's connected and we have cameras and, you know, all the, the apps for the flights and whatnot. But it's using kidnappings become a harder business. It's a lot harder than was 10 years ago by far. Yeah. What's the craziest kid advocation either of you has done? I like that time I mentioned where she just said, pull over and we we ended up going, she organized a bike trip in southern China. Wow. And we were just, you know, and she didn't like, pack a lot of clothes for me and not warm clothes. And so that was like, I had to make do like, you know, you're getting kidnapped. You just have to, you have to roll with it. But that was super fun. Buying buying clothes in China is also an, an incredible experience. We were kind of out in the fields and whatnot. Yeah. So, yeah. Because you, it's a very humbling experience in, in my, oh. Because I am in American large. Yeah. And I'm a Chinese triple Excel. Oh, yes. Yeah. It's very different. Yeah. But but, but coming, coming back to this how do you actually split now between you and Elaine? Like, how do you how, how do you think of the things that she takes on what you take on? Like, is it just organically based off of interest? Is it just so, well somebody's gotta deal with it so. So whoever's has more time, how do you actually come up with that layout? Yeah, so I'd say for the most part, traditionally she's been really involved in the brand and the design and really defining our brand attributes and making sure that all of the packaging and all of our spaces and everything look a certain way. And, you know, having a really strong point of view there and really trying to get everyone on board with that point of view. So that's always been kind of her sphere, but honestly like as an entrepreneur, we kind of work on whatever needs the most help at the time. So every year I think we work on different things. So in fact this year she's running the chocolate production team.'cause we had some people leave and change and she really wanted get into that and she hadn't been really doing that for many years. And I've been having to do a lot more like retail store design. And previously I was doing a lot of actually the tech work, but then we hired some really good CTOs and then they do that. So I don't have to do that. So it's just kind of like whatever the business needs whatever no one's doing, that's kind of what we work on. That, that kind of brings me to, to, to something I. I heard you said, and it really resonated with me. He said, running dandelion is like running nine businesses at the same time, or some, something to that end. And I, I think this is another component of it. Just running a food business is already twice as hard as running any other business. Then running a physical store makes it four times as hard and you just kinda keep going. I'm genuinely impressed, but also I guess a little concerned always anytime I see somebody running such a how are you doing? How, how does that how have you found,'cause you seem the, the three or four times that I met you, you always seem so at ease and you, you move through this to the world with this comfort and I can't imagine the things that must be going on in your head and like, sort of actually with the business at all times. What have you found to be the, I don't wanna call it a secret, but how have you found a way to be not stressed out all the time? You know, I feel like I just lost my ability to get overly stressed out. I don't know what, what gland it is just broke, that's broken. No,'cause it's like every day, there's some, you know, crisis. I mean, we've had small fires, we had machines break, we've had FD like all sorts of things that could go wrong or you could worry about. Happens not on a daily basis, but a lot. So if you really kind of freak out about everything, it's just like, you would just be, you'd be stressed out all the time. But, so we just kind of take every day, one day as it comes, we sort of see what is the crisis today. And you know, but we also, we have a really good team. We've got some really amazing people at all levels of the company. We worked really hard also to have a lot of data infrastructure. It's kind of funny, we have like a full on tech data stack.'cause I don't think you could run a business like this without having, we have so many different tools and businesses that it all has to flow into one place and then get all sort of in a, you know, put in front and center where it's almost like. I almost think like there's so much stuff that has to happen every day that it's almost like exception based management, whereas we have to assume that everything is kind of working, but then every day we need to instantly know what's not working so we can jump on that thing. And so we sort of tried to tune our data warehouse where it's just like, if something goes awry, we know immediately if it's production, if it's confections, it's kitchen, if it's retail, if it's online, if it's wholesale, if it's logistics operations, like we need to know right away. Yeah. I, I think that, that, that's a very rich thought right there. Like, I remember I heard one time it was president's Clinton and Bush, and they were doing like a, a, some, some kind of event and president Clinton made this point, just that, and he looks at President Bush and he goes, you know, he was running on education. That was his whole big thing. And you have this agenda as president and you get in and then nine months in the country's attacked. And what nobody asked him at any of the Republican debates was, what are you gonna do if nine months into your presidency the US is attacked? Right. And I mean, that's a very grand example to, to take for the point I'm trying to make, which is that for these types of businesses, you can have an agenda and you can have a plan for the day, but what hits you in the face when you walk in the door is much more what'll dictate the, the rest of, you know, the, the next 24 hours. Right? That's like that Mike Tyson quote. Oh yeah. Everybody has a plan to, they can punch, punch in the face. Yeah. I mean, that's honestly true. Like, there's what you wanna accomplish, but then there's all the things you need to just handle and, and take care of. I actually, this is a total sidebar. I like Mike Tyson as an, as an analogy for, for Tendee line. Just one other point being the, just I like that. I, I like the minimalism of, of his, entire being? No. In no other way. Just, just that. Sure. Yeah. Because every other boxer would have this like very ornate robe and would get all this and there'd be brand deals and it would say Monster Energy ring on the back, whatever. And he would just take the hotel robe and just, just sort of put it on. And it was just all about the boxing. It was all technique and it would just, all, just being an incredible boxer. And I like dandelion is I'm sure no brand expert, whatever wants you to say this, but Dandelion is the Mike Tyson of, of chocolates. You know, that is the first time I've heard that and I, I will I have a lot to think about, but Yeah. But we can, we can cut that out. That's fine. So that's all good. But I, let's, we'll, we'll, we'll bring this back. How do you, today, 15 years in second massively successful company, how do you think about success for yourself? How do you think about success for, for Dandelion today? What is that for you? I really go back to, the fact that our competitors have been around for over a century. And I think about what would it be like to build a company that could be around in a hundred years and how do you think differently about the timescale and the structures you want and the spaces you build, and really long-term thinking. And so, you know, every day we're building the company kind of with that mindset of kind of. You know, I like to think that Europe had the last a hundred years for chocolate, and hopefully America has the next hundred years, and they say it's America, but it was actually California and it was actually San Francisco, and it was the mission, it was dandelion. And that's kind of like something we're marching towards every day, but it's hard, you know, every day we, like I said, things can go wrong and, you know, are we being true to our values? Are we making good chocolate? Are we sourcing the right beans? Are we doing right by the farmers? Are we being right to our team members? Are we having great retail experiences? Are we building good stores? Are we keeping them up? Are we building a good online business? Are we communicating with our customers? There's like a lot to do every day, so trying to just keep it all going it's challenging, but you know, everyone loves chocolate. It's a fun problem to work on. And so I kind of have no complaints. You know, a lot of people say, I'd love, you know, I'm in tech, but I'd love to sell my company and then I could do this other thing. And I kind of feel like I get to live the dream, and that's really nice. Yeah. This is the, the smallest takeaway from that, but how, what is your daily chocolate consumption like right now? Too much. Yeah, I have to go to the gym. You look great. Honestly, it's not the chocolate. You know, the chocolate, chocolate, the type of chocolate make is very healthy and very good for you. But. We have a full kitchen operation. We have a whole confections operation. We are always taste testing cakes. We are taste testing confections. I think after this I have to go try like 10 different bonbons have to, is an amazing word. No, we do the advent calendar. We're trying to make it like the Oscars of chocolate where every chocolate here in America sends in their chocolates and then we taste them and the 25 best end up in the calendar. And so for three days we take all the chocolates and try them. And not only that, we do like cake testing. It's like we do our normal AB testing where it's like, here are 10 pieces of cake. This one has three layers of frosting. This has two, this is one, this has a buttercream. And so it's like the amount that's a, it's a tough job, but someone's someone's gotta do it. No. Thank you for taking a bullet for all of us. By the way, if you ever are looking for not even unpaid volunteers Yeah. People that will pay you to volunteer. Oh yeah. That's not a new revenue stream. Oh, I would, dude, I would love nothing more than to AB test. We can, we can make that happen for sure. But you know, a line that, that you, I read in an interview and you kind of just alluded to right there, that I, I really, really like is you said I wanna build the most respected chocolate company in the world. Is that still this interview was a couple years old? Is that still how you think about it? I think so. I mean, I think that like, I think I used to think a lot about kind of like achieving some outcome or doing the right thing that was very important to me, doing the right thing. But I think, like, as I've grown as a person, I feel like I'd like to do the right thing for the right reasons, which is like extra hard. And so, like, I think we wanna be a big company, we wanna be respected, we wanna be the best or one of the best. But we all, we also wanna get there by doing the right, the right things in the right way. Which is, like I said, it's very hard. So Dandelion is currently available in how many countries? It's. So mostly you should come into our stores in San Francisco. Mm-hmm. Or Las Vegas. You can buy our chocolate online. We're also in some stores across the country, but mostly you should buy it online. And we also have a small joint venture in Japan. Yeah. And then not too much beyond that, kind of more, more our sphere. Well, so I, I was thinking about the, the Japanese connection that actually brings me to my last question of the day. You know, Japan is pretty much the only place in the world you'll find where you know, anytime you look at the list of the oldest businesses in the world, it's, you know, an American company started it 120 years ago. Mm-hmm. And then they'll be a 1200 year old Japanese business. Right. Or an 800 year old Japanese business. I, and I've been thinking about that a lot in the context of, of dandelion 200 years from now. When when Dandelion has, you know, permanently changed the world of chocolate and all that. What do you hope it will be? A couple of centuries from now four or 500 years from now, whatever timeframe you wanna take, what do you hope it will be? What do you hope it will be doing for the world? How do you hope people will feel about it? Yeah. Well, I dunno what the world's gonna be like in 500 years, so that might be, especially with everything happening in an ai. But I would say maybe in the next 30 years I would say that. I would hope that by this time in the future, people have tried good chocolate and it is a new category that people actually like. And kind of what happened to coffee, like third wave coffee, you know, I feel like we're in the chocolate world. We're still in the Folgers crystals, Sanka days. And so, there's just so much more that can happen in the world of chocolate and it actually can have more flavor complexity than wine or coffee. But that was all lost as part of this industrialization. So we'd like to bring that back. And so if in 30 years people have an appreciation for chocolate and there's the a hundred dollars chocolate bar and there's, you know, chocolate, there's coffee houses, but there's also chocolate houses around the world, then I think we'll have succeeded. That's a, that's a beautiful place to end. I hope I live long enough to see that. Me too. Me too. Thanks so much for being on the podcast Todd. Thanks for having me. This is great. Beautiful. Thank you. Thank you. We good? Awesome. Alright. Todd, you were, oh, I hope, I hope it's interesting. I hope it's not too boring. Yeah. I hope Warm Intro is produced by G one Moon Audio and video by Jin Han, production help by Danielle Ibarra, hosted by me.