Tom Bilyeu - From Zero Drive to a Net Worth of $400m
Guests: Tom Bilyeu
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The thing I think about most, especially when I'm on the go, but also when I'm sat here in the Diary of a CEO studio, is the Wi-Fi and internet that we have to work with. In fact, anytime I'm filming away from the studio, one of the first things I do is, when I arrive, I open up an app and do a speed test to see how strong the signal is.
And the number of screenshots I've sent to my team about Wi-Fi signals at different locations is actually pretty crazy. It matters that much to me because it's such a competitive advantage to have fast Wi-Fi. Because on any given day, if I'm recording, let's say, hours and hours of footage with a podcast guest, I then often have to have my team send that across to our London team who then do the edit.
So fast Wi-Fi and internet is not a nice to have; it is absolutely business-mission critical. So, when it came to finding the best provider who could supply internet and Wi-Fi to our new LA studio which I'm sat in right now, we looked at every single option.
And of all the providers, the one that came back with the steadiest connection, as well as being the cheapest, was today's sponsor, Spectrum Business. Spectrum Business keeps businesses of all sizes connected with fast, reliable internet, advanced Wi-Fi, phone, TV, and mobile services. Millions of business owners already rely on Spectrum to keep their operations connected. So, if you want to join them, head to spectrum.com/business to learn more. That's spectrum.com/business. Restrictions apply; service not available in all areas.
Entrepreneurs are born. They're born naturally talented. They're the brightest people in the room. They're naturally self-driven. They're motivated by money. No. Wrong. Tom Bilyeu is the 42-year-old American entrepreneur best known for founding the second fastest-growing private company in North America in 2014, Quest Nutrition.
Tom started Quest Nutrition with his mother and sister in mind, who both suffered from obesity. He wanted to help them find food that was good and healthy for you while still being delicious. After multiple rejections, his company took off, growing 57,000% in the first three years. And in 2014, they hit $105 million in sales.
Tom's story enormously changed my perception on the notion that entrepreneurs and CEOs are born. He didn't want to be an entrepreneur. He also wasn't driven in his twenties. He tells me how he shamefully laid around the house for hours during the day without the drive to get out of bed. What changed him?
How did he go from there to an estimated net worth of $400 million? How did he save himself from depression? Is it really possible to rewrite your own brain? Tom invited me to his beautiful, beautiful home in the Los Angeles hills, and we spoke honestly about his remarkable journey.
And because of that honesty, I can honestly say I learned so, so much. This is a really smart guy. Because of that conversation, I know that I'll be a better, happier entrepreneur in the future. This is just a great story, and a story I can't wait to share with you.
His latest venture, Impact Theory, is a for-profit media company that has the aim to end the poverty of a poor mindset. He's already amassed millions of followers online, and a lot of you will already know him. And his ambitions for Impact Theory will seem unthinkable to some, but to those that know Tom, and when you get to know Tom, you'll realize that those ambitions are just a matter of time.
So, without further ado, this is The Diary of a CEO, season two. And I'm Steven Bartlett. I hope nobody is listening, but if you are, then please keep this to yourself.
Tom, thank you so much for inviting us into your amazing home. It’s an absolute pleasure to be here and to meet yourself. You’re a huge inspiration to a lot of entrepreneurs all over the world, and your content as well is hugely inspiring.
I was just talking to some of your team here about Impact Theory and the work that’s doing as well, and it’s real, it’s refreshing to see someone like yourself give back in the way of inspiration and knowledge, because I’m sure there’s other things that you could be doing. My first question that I wanted to know is—we're in this amazing home in LA, you’re a very, very successful self-made person—I’m guessing it didn’t always start this way. So, my question, I guess, is: where did you come from?
Where did I come from? Well, I grew up in Tacoma, Washington. So, it was really a pretty simple beginning. My parents taught me to be a good employee, so to keep my head down, do as little work as possible, and avoid punishment at all costs.
And that really was the beginning for me. I didn't think about being an entrepreneur from the time that I was a little kid. I wanted to be a filmmaker. And that really was my beginning—I wanted to be an artist. I wanted to be a stand-up comic at one point; that was really like the driving force in my life. I thought I was, and I think that everybody sort of fills a role in their family.
And I'm not even sure how I became the funny one in the family, but that really ended up being the role that I played. And then I began to see that that was a potential career. And then—it's really—did you read Malcolm Gladwell’s *Outliers*?
Yes, yes, one of my favorite books.
So, a really fascinating thing where he talks about how he grew up in this really small town in Canada, and it just so happened that one of the people in his town happened to be, I think they won like a Nobel Prize or something crazy like that. So he’s like, "I ended up having this teacher that was really extraordinary, and you know, what are sort of the odds that living in this really small town I have this person?"
It goes on to have this huge impact on my life. Bill Gates ends up going to a high school that had access to a mainframe computer when basically nobody in the country had access to a computer. So you get these weird moments where it ends up being really transformational in their lives.
And that moment for me was my dad’s company happened to have access to a video camera. And so they would let the employees take it home, and my dad brought it home, and for whatever reason, I was just stoked on it. And my dad and I, I think, bonded over film more than anything. Like, my dad was really into cars, and I hate cars in a way that I can’t tell you.
Really? What car do you drive, can I ask?
Sure. I drive a Mercedes, but like, I don’t even remember what the letter combination is. So, like, definitely not a car guy. My dad was into classic cars, but we bonded over film. And so, between that being a way to connect with my dad, and then he brings the camera home, so I start playing with it because I already have this love for film.
And then my dad literally makes an offhand comment when I'm 12 that, "Oh, I think you're actually better behind the camera than you are in front of the camera." And that one comment ends up pushing me on a path that, now I’ll say, in the beginning, it was definitely the law of accident, but now has become something that I really have a deep and profound connection to.
You talk about how—one question I get asked all the time is: are entrepreneurs made or are they born an entrepreneur? And you spoke there that you weren't entrepreneurial when you were younger, which kind of goes against what a lot of people, I think, believe. They expect entrepreneurs to be these charismatic risk-takers that, you know, were selling candy bars at school when they were young. Is that not the case?
Not certainly not for me, and I’m sure that some people are born entrepreneurs, I just don't happen to be one of them. So, yeah, when I hear stories like that, I'm actually a little jealous, if I'm honest. Like, that would be really cool. I really wish I were a born entrepreneur; that sounds amazing.
And it's funny how humans really have a bias towards natural talent. Like, even I, and I rail against it, and I talk about in my content—you don't need to be born anything. Whatever it is that you want to become extraordinary at, if you’re willing to put in the work, if you’re willing to push far outside your comfort zone, get into an adaptation response, you can get great at anything.
But I still get stoked on natural talent. It's really—it’s a really weird bias that humans have, and I don't even understand what the fundamental root cause of that is. But no, I'm not a born entrepreneur. I had a paper route when I was a kid, and they paid you in two ways.
One, there was like a standard payment that you got just for like having the route, and then there was—but if you go collect the money, you get like double your money essentially. And I was so terrified to knock on their doors that I never collected any of the extra money. So I literally did the paper route for like two years for half the money that I could have been making because I was too afraid to go knock on the doors.
Is it—sometimes when you look back, and I think Steve Jobs talked about it in hindsight where you look back and you connect the dots and you say, "Well, it’s you know, as you said, that one comment from your dad." What are the other things when you look back on your childhood or your early upbringing where you think, "That’s the reason why I am who I am today. That’s the reason why, you know, you’ve had this success you’ve had"?
Are there key things? To me, I can look back and I think, you know, if my mom and dad were ever around, I wouldn’t have been a 10-year-old that just—that could just leave the house for three days and do whatever he wanted, which led to independence, which led to creating a business. So it was almost the flaws in my upbringing that made me who I was. Are there things like that in your story, I guess?
Yeah, for sure. So, when I think about the things that really, I think of as defining me, it's my work ethic certainly is one of the biggest things. And I definitely would not have developed the way that I did if it wasn't for my wife, who—I had ambition when I met her, but I didn't have drive.
So I had these big dreams, but I couldn't get out of bed. So I would lay in bed for three or four hours at a time. And it's really interesting, like even judging by your face, people see the "after" photo of me as an entrepreneur, and so they completely ignore what I'm saying about who I really was into my twenties, into my mid-twenties.
I had big dreams, but absolutely no follow-through. I'm not the brightest person you’re ever going to meet. So anything that people misinterpret as raw intelligence, I’ll just say is the sheer willingness to read an unimaginable amount of books, to ask a lot of questions, to not be afraid to look stupid. Like, that's—I’m the combination of all those things.
So, asking my father-in-law for his blessing to marry his daughter and being told "No" that I didn't have his blessing—that was certainly a big moment for me. Being ashamed of myself because my then-girlfriend was working and I was staying at home, and I would lay in bed for three or four hours until the threat of her coming home at lunch. Because I had one job at the time, and that was to make her a sandwich for lunch when she came home.
This is your current wife, Lisa?
Yeah, yeah, my current wife, Lisa. At the time, she was my girlfriend. So when Lisa was coming home from working, I would be just awash in shame because I had wasted the entire morning. And now I was in danger that if I didn’t get up and brush my teeth and all of that, like immediately, I wasn't going to even be ready for her at her lunchtime.
So, like, that period of finally not running from the shame, but really letting myself feel it—that was transitional. Going to film school and really falling in love and taking myself seriously for the first time—that was a huge transition for me. Because up to that point, I wanted to be a stand-up comic, and my style of comedy was all self-deprecating, so I was just making fun of myself all the time. And it was funny, and it got big laughs, and I actually really enjoyed it, but it was definitely diminishing my sense of self.
Why did you choose to produce self-deprecating comedy?
Um, I don't—I think that it’s—I'm very empathetic, I have a lot of compassion for people, so it just never sat well with me to make fun of other people to tear them down. So, but it’s really funny to tear someone down, to point at the absurd things, you know, to have somebody who’s the butt of the joke. So if you don't resonate with making fun of other people, that leaves society or yourself, right? Society so you can just make fun of it at like a general level, but I wasn't smart enough to pull off jokes like that, so that left myself.
When you—when I think of an entrepreneur, like the stereotype, if I was to draw a picture, you think of someone that has always been driven, as we said, like selling candy bars on the playground. You think of someone that’s always been super high confidence, that’s always kind of been, you know, the charismatic person in the room. What you're describing sounds the opposite in many respects.
I've never—I’ve never sat down with an entrepreneur and interviewed them and them and them said to me that through like the early twenties or a period of their life they they didn't have drive. And so that's—that's really fascinating to me, because in—for some people, that’ll be really liberating in a sense, because people will see them—themselves in their current situation and think, "I can never achieve the success that you have because of how I feel right now."
But so, the combination of your wife, the combination of going to to school—what else, what else, what else changed that for you? Was there a break, a big break you got, or? Um, I think that it it really is misleading to look for any one moment. It's really going to be a combination of things that begin to change your identity. And that was what—so, another big one for me was I went to film school, I was doing very well at the beginning of film school and was sort of the the person to watch coming into my senior thesis film.
So, statistically speaking, you're more likely to get into Harvard Law than you are USC Film School. I got in; that's a whole story unto itself because I almost didn't get in. And then, out of the people who finally get into film school, only four get to direct a senior thesis, and I was one of the four chosen to direct a senior thesis.
So it was like just a big deal, and I really felt like, man, my life is going in the right direction, I'm going to crush this senior thesis, I'm going to graduate, I'm going to get a three-picture deal, man, this is set, I'm ready to rock. And then I completely ruined my senior thesis. And it was—it was an embarrassing shambles. It was just a catastrophe in every conceivable way.
And it was a catastrophe because I had gotten arrogant and insecure at the same time, which is really weird. Like, using the—like, I wanted to be the person that I was pretending to be, like really badly. I wanted to believe that I was naturally talented—coming back to that—that I was a naturally talented filmmaker. And what I found in my—and so I was acting like it, right?
I was acting like I didn't have to prepare, that I could just roll up and shine, that I didn't have to like put any preparation into it. And so, that's how I showed up, and I had the very harsh realization, which is: I am not naturally talented. Certainly not at filmmaking. And so I—I just got my ass handed to me. And people were like cutting little reels of my film together to make fun of it, to show how bad it was. It was really, really emotionally a pretty brutal time.
And so, coming out of that, I needed something to save me from depression, because my life just felt completely broken. And I went from thinking I was going to get the three-picture deal when I graduated to realizing I had no idea how to break into the industry. And this is back in the late nineties, so there's no YouTube, there's no—nobody's making films with video cameras. I mean, that was, you know, way into the future.
And so, to even make a no-budget film, you were going to have to raise $100,000. And that might as well have been $100 million. I didn't know anybody that had $100,000. I never grew up with people that had money. So, like, that was so foreign to me. So, coming out of that, the sort of turning moment—if, you know, we're going to narrow my life down to these these key moments—was reading about brain plasticity and realizing that I had a choice to make.
And I could choose to believe—because it was really debated in the late nineties. Now people just take it as fact that your brain can change and develop even as you're aging. But in the late nineties, it was: one camp was saying that you could, that you could learn anything at any time, and the other camp was like, "Are you out of your mind? Like by the time you're 13, like you're not going to be able to learn new things and that the the brain is actually in pruning mode and you're removing connections, not making new connections."
And so I just said, "Look, I choose to believe that brain plasticity is real and that just because I'm bad today doesn't mean I have to be bad tomorrow." And that decision really changed the direction of my life. And then another one was, once I was in an entrepreneurial space and working in my first startup, I realized that I was telling everybody I wanted to be rich, but I was acting like I just wanted to be right.
And so I'd gotten in this huge fight with the guys who would become my business partners—at the time they were just my employers—and I was arguing for this idea because they were so much smarter than me. And that really sucks. Like, if you value yourself for being smart, being around people who are smarter than you, like obviously smarter than you, really hurts.
And I think this where people get in a lot of trouble because they don't understand what's really driving their behavior. So, my behavior was being driven by being smart. I was the smart kid. And so I was constantly putting myself in smaller and smaller rooms so that I could be the smartest person in the room. And here's the really terrifying news: that's an amazingly good strategy if you just want to feel good about yourself.
It's a terrible strategy if you want to be successful. But it's a great strategy if you want to feel good about yourself. If you want to feel good for being smart, surround yourself by dumb people. It will work every fucking time. Good for the ego, right? A thousand percent. And so that was the loop that I was in, was: I want to be the smart guy.
And so I was putting myself in these ridiculous rooms where I was the smartest person. And then I found myself, because I really believed that I wanted to be rich and that was the driving force in my life, so I met these two entrepreneurs. They're like, "Hey, come with us, learn to get rich." And I was like, "This is amazing, I’ll be able to build my own film studio, this is going to be fantastic, I'm going to go with them, get rich, take about 18 months." That was like—everybody agreed, "Take about 18 months."
And so I'm in this business now with these two guys that are much smarter than me, much farther ahead on their entrepreneurial journey than me, and I just felt stupid. And it was absolutely crushing my self-esteem. And so one day I was arguing and arguing and arguing for this idea, and I knew that it was wrong. I knew that it would move the business backwards. But I needed to win. I needed my idea to move forward. I needed people to say, "Yeah, this kid’s really smart."
And when they finally agreed—and I'm going to guess that they agreed because I just wore them down, not because I actually convinced them that I had the right idea—I had this moment of crisis where I realized that I'm saying I want to be rich, but I'm not acting like it. And so the one sort of piece of credit I will give myself—and I don't know where this insight came from—but I said, "Look, don't judge yourself. If what you really want is to just feel good about being smart, that's absolutely fine. And if that's the life you want to live, that's absolutely fine. But you need to get out of this company, because you'll never be smarter than these two."
Doesn't mean that I can’t add value, doesn't mean that I can’t add more value, but I’ll define intelligence as the ability to process raw data quickly, which I can’t do. That is not—like, we all have our superpower—that is not my superpower. And so I knew that if I stayed there, it was just going to keep eroding my sense of self.
So I was like, "I either need to leave, or I need to build my self-esteem around something new." And that insight—that—that's the one like sort of lightning rod moment, line in the sand—my life can be delineated into before and after—was I didn't want to leave, so I decided that to stay, I had to start building my self-esteem around being the learner. I had to stop valuing myself for being right, I had to stop valuing myself for being smart, and I had to start valuing myself for learning and being willing to admit when I was wrong faster than anyone else.
And shifting my identity to that then began to drive behaviors like the voracious reading, like being willing to admit that I was wrong, like asking questions, never being afraid to look stupid—all the things that ended up being my superpower.
You talk about your superpower there and you talk about understanding why you act in the way you act. And part of me, just from meeting you for a couple of minutes, thinks that one of your superpowers is a pretty deep sort of sense of self-awareness and being able to like analyze your—yourself in hindsight: why you performed X action, what part of your ego or your, you know, heart or whatever, your mind, that came from. Is that a fair assessment? Because I've never met someone that’s so good at talking about why they behave the way they do and what the motivations were in their past. You're either writing a lot of stuff down or you're very sort of self-analytical.
I'm very self-analytical. So I won't say that the—the awareness is something that came naturally, because I spent decades playing the fool because I couldn't see that I was playing the fool. So, I—I—my behavior in my entire life, certainly up into my mid-twenties, just embarrasses me to no end because I couldn't see myself as others saw me.
Um, so that came—that awareness came from—I have a—I obsessively think about things. So that may be a mutation, that may be in somebody else—in somebody else’s hands a negative thing because they’ll let themselves loop over negativity, which I certainly spent years doing. But I’ve leveraged that natural inclination to loop over things, to loop over things that move me forward. Not always necessarily that are warm and fuzzy, but that they move me forward, that they force me to face an inadequacy, that they force me to face something ugly or petty about myself.
And if I really had to say the thing that like sets me apart, it's my willingness to stare nakedly at the things about myself that are ugly. And if you're willing to do that—which I could not do until I finally stopped valuing myself for being good—and I started—and not like good, like "Oh, he’s a good kid," like being talented or gifted at something. Once I let go of that, then it was okay to say, "Oh, you're really shit at that."
Like, it was okay—like, there—10 years ago, 15 years ago—more. Let's say 20 years ago now, because I probably started my transformation when I was about 24 in earnest. Before that, the questions that you’re asking me, I would have answered in ways that made me look cool. Right? That would have been so important to me. I would have been absolutely terrified to look stupid. So I would have tried to—to look cool. But getting on the other side of that and shifting what I valued myself for, it just made it really easy. Then once I could stare nakedly at my inadequacies, then you can let go of a need to be a certain way and you can just see how you actually are.
Then, if you're goal-oriented, then—and you believe in brain plasticity and that you can change—and that's a big thing for me because I don't believe that any negative thing about me is a permanent state of affairs. It's like, "Oh, well I can change that." So there's no reason to lie about it.
And I guess changing it starts with that honesty, which is, you know, yeah, really interesting. It all feels kind of interlinked. You talked as well about money and about you being young and thinking that the thing you wanted was to get really rich. I wrote in my diary at 18 years old when I was living in a very rough area, shoplifting, that by the age of 25 I’d be—and everybody's seen my diary—a millionaire. I’d have a Range Rover Sport, which would be my first class my dream car, and a few other things about my body and having a girlfriend.
But um, upon getting to 25 and someone offering to buy our business, 18-year-old Steve showed up, who was motivated by money because my family never had it. And I literally went online and looked at a mansion in the countryside and a Lamborghini, and I just—by looking at those things, I felt a sense of emptiness. Because for me—I don't know if you've read a book called *A Guide to a Good Life*, which talks about like hedonistic adaptation and chasing pleasure thinking it's happiness, and that’s a never-ending cycle. Of then, you know, a week later, you're no longer impressed by the thing you've bought.
My question is: what role does money play in your—as a motivator for you in your career, but also as a—in terms of your happiness? And this is a question I’m asking because I want to know the answer. I’m hoping you're, you know, ahead of me so you can maybe reach back down and let me know the truth.
Yeah, so I wasted years of my life chasing money. Now, what I want people to understand is: the reason that people chase money is because money's real. Money is powerful. Money is more powerful than you realize. It's just not at all what you’ve been told. So, here's what I thought about money. This is why I was chasing it so hard. When I looked at somebody who had a big house and I looked at somebody with a fast car and I looked at somebody that was wealthy, I admired them. I was in awe of them. I just thought, "Oh my god, like that would be so cool to be that person."
And I thought I would feel about myself that same way if I just had those things. And I’ve had the very good fortune of—the way that our wealth came is it was all in the company. So for a long time, I had a good salary, but for a long time it was—I was just another guy with a good salary. You know what I mean? So I wasn't like really wealthy. Even though on paper I was worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
In my real life, I was living in a normal house, I was driving a normal car—it was like there wasn't anything really fancy about my life. And then, because we took an investment, we sold a small piece of the company, but the company was valued over a billion dollars, it's like all of a sudden the raw number of dollars is so crazy that you go from a normal guy with like a good salary to like hitting refresh on your bank account a few times because they're like, "The money's been wired," and all of a sudden you've got a lot of fucking commas and a lot of zeros in your account.
And it's so crazy. And you have this moment of like, "Whoa, my life is never going to be the same, this is so bananas." But wait a second—I don't feel any differently about myself. Every insecurity that I had before the money hit, I still have. Like, I feel exactly the same about myself that I did a year ago, five years ago—I won't say 20 years ago because it’s like you're doing all the work. But it's like—the money didn't change anything.
One thousand percent. It—and it won't. It never will, because you're not—you're not going to feel differently about who you are. Now, here's the good thing: I didn't feel badly about myself, I felt really fucking good. I felt like I was a beast. But the money didn't change anything. What changed something was: I showed up at the gym every day. I put in the work. I did things I didn't want to do. I was willing to suffer in service of a goal.
And once you're willing to do that, once you're willing to be disciplined, earn credibility with yourself, have a "why" and push towards it, serve other people—like, all of those things build your sense of self. And it's never going to be the money. Now the irony of ironies is that the money is going to be an outcropping of those things anyway in this world, right?
Because in this social age, baby, like the number one marketing vehicle is to be a good person and to do amazing things for people and to add a crushing amount of value to people’s lives. Like the greatest marketing vehicle of all time now is to be a good person. Which is amazing, right? And I think, like getting into my story, in fact here's another moment that was utterly transformational.
So, I'm working in this tech startup with the guys—they hired me as a copywriter, they said, "Don't think of yourself as a copywriter, you can have any job you want in the company, you just have to become the right person for the job." I spent six and a half years all in to a level that most people just simply cannot comprehend, like only letting my wife pick an apartment that I could get to the guys who were my employers—just my employers at the time—that I could get to their house in seven minutes or less.
So she would find a place she would like, and then we would get in the car, motherfucker, with a stopwatch, and we would drive, time it, drive back, go to the other one and time that. And if it was seven minutes or less, then yep, we can—whatever apartment you want at that point. Because I wanted, if they called me at 2:00 a.m. on a Saturday, I wanted to be there in 10 minutes or less. So like that was my obsession.
Like I was just all in, round the clock, for six and a half years I didn't actually take a vacation. I would leave the state, but I would have my phone, I'd be watching the business on a camera—like it was crazy. And finally my wife had to pull me aside and say, "Look, you're now damaging the marriage, like this is just too much, you you literally can’t work—you can’t sustain 90-hour weeks for seven years. You just—it's crazy."
But that's where I was. And I was just hell-bent to become something, I was hell-bent to get rich. That was my focus at the time. And it, for the first three years, I won't lie, it was awesome. And I was learning so much and I was growing so much, it was fucking rad. And there's nothing anybody could have said to me to make me back off. And then it started to take from me. And it just was too much because I didn't believe in what I was building.
And so, at about six and a half years, I was like, "Okay, I'm a multi-millionaire on paper," and which I hope everybody listening: there's a difference between paper money and cash money. So, but I was paper—I was multi-millionaire on paper. And I was so profoundly unhappy that I was like, "This can’t be real. I'm living the cliché of 'money can’t buy happiness.' Like, this is such a joke. Like, I’ve heard this a thousand times, so how am I being caught off guard by this?"
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Tom, diving back into—as deep as you want, don't be tense. When, after that moment where you talked about sitting with your business partners and saying we need to build a new business, was that business Quest Nutrition?
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, Quest was born out of misery, man, in no uncertain terms. So I told my partners what I needed to be emotionally excited, and they were like, "Actually, we agree, we feel the same way, like let's really do something that we can believe in." And like the—the really like non-sort of condensed story is, they said, "All right, look, we’ve spent a lot of time on this company, give us six months. If we can get revenue to a certain point in six months, then we'll keep going, and if we can't, we'll sell the company."
And I said, "Okay, fine." So if we can build it to that point and we get out of this rut that we're in and it's exploding, then great. At the six-month mark, we were still treading water because we didn't believe in it. So we didn't have those passion-based insights, we didn't have that passion-based energy and enthusiasm and creativity that comes when you really believe in something. And that—and then you created Quest Nutrition, all three of you together?
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And how long ago was that?
That was—we started conceptualizing of it in 2009. So it's probably 2008 roughly that I went in and said, "All right, I can’t do this anymore," maybe early 2009. And then we started thinking, "Okay, what's going to be the next thing?" For three very different reasons, and I will definitely speak only for myself, for three very different reasons we founded Quest. And for me, I’d grown up in a morbidly obese family.
And so I wanted to find a way to make food that they could choose based on taste and it happened to be good for them so that they would be around long enough for me to enjoy. And I was really afraid to lose people that I love too early just because they couldn't do the "eat less and exercise more." It just wasn't a winning combination for them.
So, that was my passion. And I knew that there were obviously hundreds of millions of people, maybe a billion plus people that struggled with food in the same way. So I knew there was a sound business model there. Um, but there's an awesome quote often attributed to Mother Teresa—whether she actually said it or not—that says, "No one will act for the many, but people will act for the one."
And that really resonated with me. So, I showed up every day in the times that it was hard and I was exhausted and all of that, because we were running the software company by day and building Quest at nights and weekends. So it was just—I mean, you're just working round the clock. Um, and in those moments where I was just so fatigued, dude, you—I'm thinking about my mom and my sister, right? That's super easy. Those are people that I know and love, and and you can show up and fight for them in a way that you won't for that sort of amorphous "they."
Amazing. You built such a tremendous business with Quest Nutrition that—I almost don't want to spend too much time on that, even though it's a huge accomplishment and it’s probably what most people want to know most about. But I know there's more. So where is Quest today as a business? You said you took investment and sold part of the business.
Yeah, so I exited almost exactly two years ago. So I can give you a snapshot when I left. Um, we were doing hundreds of millions in revenue, valued at over a billion dollars. We had about 1,400 full-time employees when I left. Just before I left, we also had another roughly 1,500 part-time employees. So at the height, we had almost 3,000 employees. So it was pretty bananas.
Why was Quest a success? Other than your motivations and the reason why you showed up every day and in the hard times, what was the, you know—it's easy to narrow it down to—well, it's not easy to condense—I want to know why Quest succeeded.
Yeah, hell yeah. So, first of all, the most important thing to take away from me is: there's always room for the best. And just because you're not the best today doesn't mean you can’t become the best. So people fall into the same trap that I fell into: you think, "Well, I'm either good at that or I'm not, I'm either extraordinary or I'm not."
We didn't know anything about food. We didn't know anything about manufacturing. So, of course, we were clumsy, we were terrible, but we had the will to see it through. So when everybody else asked the same question, "Hey, I want to make a bar that doesn't have sugar in it, how do I go about it?" they ran into the same roadblock we did, which is: all of the equipment that was made over the last, like, 70 years was made in lock-step with the use of high-fructose corn syrup, which is not only delicious, it's not only subsidized by the government, but it gives products this amazing texture and allows you to run it through machines.
And then, on top of that, they're designing the machines to use high-fructose corn syrup-based products. So you get this industry that—they're just in lock-step. So the moment you take out the high-fructose corn syrup, all of the commercially available equipment no longer works, which means you have to make your product by hand, which means you can’t scale.
So when we ran into that, instead of saying, "Oh, well I guess we have to change the formula," which is what everybody else did—and they felt morally okay with it because they were like, "Well, there's no equipment that exists." So even though they really wanted to help people, and they wanted to make a protein bar, and they didn't have any ill intent, they put sugar in it just to make it viable from a production standpoint.
We didn't. We became our own manufacturers. We designed our own equipment. Dude, it was pure insanity. Everyone was like, "Are you out of your mind? Like, you can’t do that!" We didn't know what we were doing, and the naïveté of being the beginner, but knowing we had the will to see it through... so we didn't quite know how daunting it was going to be, and we knew, but no matter what comes our way, we're going to keep fighting.
So as that madness began to unfold and we realized just how hard it was going to be, and that the equipment really wasn't going to work, and what everybody said was true—that we were never going to be able to produce that bar, and if we could produce it, not at a cost that would make any sense—like all those things began to come true.
And then one of my business partners who actually grew up on an Iowa farm was like, "I can re-engineer this equipment," and literally cut the shit apart and put it back together, and it worked. And we were like, "Whoa!" So right as we had a product that nobody else had created, we had a manufacturing line that nobody else had made, and then we were marketing in a way that was entirely social-based before social was even a name.
So we—we were the perfect storm of: out of suffering and frustration of the way that business was typically done, we had completely abandoned all of that and said—again, we weren't using these words—but the words people would use now today: "We're going to be authentic, we're going to be transparent, we're going to be all about value creation, we're going to be about community, we're not going to try to sell product, we're going to try to improve people’s lives." And if improving people’s lives builds a business, then we have a business, and if it doesn't, then we don't. We are not going to do anything that doesn't add value to people’s lives. Period.
It seems that—that like delusional self-belief, a bit of naïveté and determination are a pretty potent combination, I think in many respects. The arrogance of belief, I think, is absolutely critical. It’s incredible. So you exit about two years ago. At what point do you make the decision that, you know, you're going to focus on Impact Theory predominantly full-time, I’m guessing?
Oh, yeah, 100% full-time. That was why I exited. So, going back to the beginning of my story, you’ve got this kid graduates from film school, he’s teaching filmmaking, he meets these two entrepreneurs, and they said the magic words—that this became a really important thing for me.
So the timeline doesn't quite add up—it's so much easier to tell the story this way, but in truth I’d already started on my entrepreneurial journey and was trying to be a filmmaker at the same time, and I had a film turned into—or a script turned into a film—and I was just absolutely mortified with how it turned out and I was crestfallen.
And then the words that they had said to me at the very beginning, which were: "You're coming to the world with your hand out, and if you want to control the art, you have to control the resources." Which was originally why I decided to get into being an entrepreneur, which was: if I could control the art—or excuse me, if I could control the resources, then I could build my own studio.
So that became my obsession, was I was going to leapfrog not knowing where to get the $100,000 by getting rich, right? So that was what started it in the beginning. So when I had taken all—when we had taken the money into the company and suddenly I had, you know, enough money to buy an island and do whatever I wanted, it was like—well I knew what I wanted. I wanted to build a studio.
But now it was infused with: I wanted to build a studio that was going to change the way that people thought, that changed their entire lens through which they viewed the world. And this gets into a very long story about working in the inner cities and seeing how very extraordinary people will end up doing nothing with their lives because they don't believe in themselves.
But that became the driving force behind Impact Theory. So I had the capital finally to create the studio that I wanted to have the impact in the world that I wanted to have. And what is Impact Theory now? So Impact Theory is—it’s a studio. So we make—if you think of us as the next Disney, it’s the easiest way to wrap your head around what we do.
So, just like Disney owns Marvel, we start in comics—it's a great way to build intellectual property—and then we translate the comics into film and TV. Now, the reason that I want to do this is because—if you know Yuval Noah Harari, he has three books essentially where largely the punchline is humans are meaning-making machines and narrative drives all of our beliefs and decision-making.
So, anyway, that's his thesis. I totally believe in that to the core of my being. It’s the same thing that Joseph Campbell was saying, it’s the same thing Jordan Peterson is saying, and I think that they're right. Like, what drives the way that culture builds itself up is through the narratives that we tell.
And Daniel Coyle wrote a book called *The Culture Code* and randomly enough, in that book, he’s got this whole section where he talks about the number one way to impact somebody’s decision-making and the beliefs by which they guide their life is through narrative. It just is the way people are. We tell stories. We tell stories to ourselves about ourselves; we tell ourselves stories about the world and the way that it works; we tell stories about our role in the family, our role in the job, our role in society—what society is, what our friends are.
Like, all of this is this narrative, this story that we tell about things. And so, if you really want to change—and this was a direct quote from Joseph Campbell—if you want to change the world, change the metaphor. And that played out in my life twice. So, the first time was Star Wars. So Yoda led me to Taoism because basically Yoda is just a sort of Buddhist-stroke-Taoist, right? And Taoism led me to a growth mindset, and a growth mindset is what made me successful.
And then again with *The Matrix*. And *The Matrix* made me realize that the thing that will determine what you're capable of is simply belief. That's it. And in the movie, once he believes in himself, he doesn't gain new skills, but he’s able to do new things because he believes that he can. Now, I don't think that we're actually living in a computer simulation, but the reality is once you understand that your brain is encased in total darkness, light never touches your brain, sound never touches your brain, what your brain gets are electrical and chemical signals that it interprets and creates this world that you see around you.
And it creates it well enough that you can walk around without bumping into too much shit, but the reality is it’s—it's all a construct. It’s all fake. It's just your brain cobbling things together in a way that allows you to move around without getting eaten by a lion.
It’s so funny. I would get my laptop out, but my laptop is in that bag over there and it’s got a sticker on it, and the sticker says "Rewrite." And it’s the name of the organization we started, and the whole objective of it is, as what it says on the tin: it’s aiming to help rewrite the stories that are holding young disadvantaged kids back. So every month I go to a number of schools with the "Rewrite" banner and we speak to kids and try and help them rewrite those stories that we think might hold them back. So you're speaking right to my heart there.
Listen, I could talk to you for hours and hours, but I feel like I've got so much value from you that I'm so deeply appreciative and you've been even more of an inspiration than I thought you were when I sat down, and that was pretty hard to beat. So I wanted to thank you for your time today, Tom.
Thanks for having me.
Where do people find you?
@TomBilyeu across all socials. I wish my name weren't spelled weird—it is, but my last name is B as in Bravo, I-L-Y-E-U. I'm super active, so by all means, come on. Instagram and YouTube are probably my two most, what I consider, important platforms. So if you're trying to get a message to me, DM me on IG, and then our hub of our content is YouTube.
Amazing. Thank you so much for your time today, Tom. I really, really appreciate it.
My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
My pleasure. Thanks, mate. Thanks.
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