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This week is about clarity. How you think, and how clearly you say it, decides more than most founders expect.

Worth Watching is my conversation with Sam McBride. He was one of the first employees at RXBAR, which went from $2 million to $130 million in three years and sold to Kellogg for $600 million, without raising a dollar.

Then in the Practical Edge, the free page I have been going back to for ten years, and the reason forecasters who think this way beat analysts with classified information. Let's get into it.

$2M to $130M in Three Years, Then a $600M Exit to Kellogg

The Advantage · Mike Wystrach × Sam McBride · ~63 min

This week's Worth Watching is episode 3 of The Advantage with Sam McBride. Sam was one of the first employees at RXBAR, which grew from $2 million to $130 million in three years and sold to Kellogg for $600 million. They never raised a dollar of outside money. Today he is the CEO of Kettle & Fire. If you have ever wondered how a bar company beats fifty other bar companies, he tells you exactly how.

The packaging story alone is worth the hour. RXBAR was winning with CrossFit and paleo customers, and the challenge was crossing over to everyone else without losing the people who got them there. Their answer was to put the ingredients on the front. Egg whites, almonds, dates, cashews. Paleo customers read it and knew they could eat it. Everyone else read it and knew it was clean.

What they took off the front matters just as much. Gluten free, non-GMO, and paleo all moved to the back. Sam calls the alternative a race car, a package covered in badges. One clear message beats ten good ones every time.

He is just as specific on hiring. The final interview at RXBAR was purely about values, looking for self-awareness, humility, and the confidence to act anyway. Every new hire spent their first two weeks in customer service. Their attrition was almost nothing.