CMO who went from chasing money to pursuing his passion shares tips to success

This article is part of Tech in Asia’s partnership with The Jay Kim Show where we publish the revised transcripts from the show’s podcast interviews with top entrepreneurs. This is heavily revised from the original show transcripts. For the full interview, go here.

Tom Bilyeu is the co-founder of the powerhouse food company, Quest Nutrition.

He’s one of the smartest entrepreneurs I have ever met. He and his partners chose to work in nutrition, one of the hardest and most over saturated markets in the world. They decided from the start that they would chase passion over money even if that ended in failure. In just six years he turned a startup in an overcrowded, declining market into a US$1 billion unicorn company.

How did he manage to do this? Well, he shares a lot of his secrets to success here.

Could you tell us how you became such a successful entrepreneur?

“Yeah, for sure, man. Quest Nutrition was a company that my partners and I founded back in 2010. It was really born of misery, and I’ll go into detail on exactly what I mean by that in a minute, but the company itself just had explosive growth. Founded in 2010 and 2014, we are named as the second fastest private growing company in North America. We built the company from nothing to being valued at over a billion dollars. Just an absolutely meteoric rise.

“I say that it was born out of misery because it really was. My partners and I had worked in a company before, which was a technology company called Awareness Technologies. It really was about chasing money and it was about doing the classic entrepreneurs job of finding a niche in the market that’s underserved, building a product for that market, and then trying to develop that product out through clever marketing.

“What we found was we really didn’t believe in the product; we didn’t have a lot of passion for it. It was fine, it was good, it met a need, but it wasn’t a need that was really core and central to who we were as human beings. So, eight and a half years into building that company and, for all intents and purposes, just chasing money, we realized that there had to be a better way to do things. And so, we decided that we were going to sell that company and build something that was entirely based on value creation. It was going to be something that we would believe in and have a passion for, whether we were winning or losing.

“[We asked ourselves] a new question, and the new question very pointedly was, ‘What would we do and love even if we were failing?’ The answer to that question was […] nutrition. That was what we decided to do, and we went all in and didn’t know if it was going to build a big business or if it was just going to be something that we were passionate about and that we loved.

“When you lead with asking the question of what delivers the most value to the customer, especially in today’s hyper-connected, very social era that we live in, you really can build a massive business. […] Quest ended up making more in a single day than our previous technology company made annually.”

Could you tell us about your experience with the tech company you originally joined?

“I was joining a business that was just getting off the ground; they didn’t have a product yet. I met these two guys and they were serial entrepreneurs […]. Because I was pursuing a career in film, they said, ‘You’re coming to the world with your hand out. You need to stop doing that. You need to learn to be an entrepreneur. You need to learn to control your own destiny.’ Their pitch was [that I] needed to get rich.

“I thought that made a lot of sense. […] I took them very seriously and really just went crazy acquiring new skills and trying to learn more valuable skills within the company so that I could rise. By the time we sold the company, I had worked my way into 10 percent ownership and was the chief marketing officer.

“It was just a grueling slog because […] it wasn’t something that I was passionate about; I didn’t believe in it. Ultimately, when we decided to found Quest, […] I just said, ‘Guys, I quit. I can’t do this anymore.’

“[…] I [just thought], ‘I’m not willing to be unhappy and I want to build something that I really believe in.’ They felt the same way and it was a big enough moment that we all really stopped and took stock of our lives and said, ‘What are we doing this for? If it’s not about the money, what is it about?’ That’s when we began to really conceptualize—not just about our own company […]—but really thinking about entrepreneurship as something that was bigger than the money, and the rest is history.”

What made your company different? There’re so many nutrition companies, how did you guys pull this off?

How does a company or an entrepreneur stand out from the noise on social media? How do you make your mark?

What advice would you give to someone that’s stuck in a job they hate?