YouSaid · the spoken record

Dan Schorr

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62
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2017-07-31
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2017-07-31
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1
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  1. “I wish I could think of something witty here, but what advice will I give you today? Make sure you eat all the way to the bottom of the pint. That's a metaphor for both life and my current business”

    2017-07-31 · Capital Allocators · Dan Schorr – Death, Ice Cream, and Entrepreneurship (Capital Allocators, EP.19) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “I know. Really? Now winging again? Well, you're going to live a long time. You beat this thing. You'll beat it again if it comes up. But we're in our 90s. We're watching people run around the track because we're not really doing that anymore.”

    2017-07-31 · Capital Allocators · Dan Schorr – Death, Ice Cream, and Entrepreneurship (Capital Allocators, EP.19) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Probably as honest as I could be, is probably it takes a village. You know, what I learned through both cancer and building this business is that it takes a village of doctors and nurses to keep me alive and it takes a village of people that want to see ice cream succeed in terms of introductions to someone who could do packaging or design for us or in terms of a retailer that takes a chance on us. It takes a village. You can't be the loneliness and long distance runner.”

    2017-07-31 · Capital Allocators · Dan Schorr – Death, Ice Cream, and Entrepreneurship (Capital Allocators, EP.19) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “I absolutely love Phil Knight's first book, a latest book, Shoe Dog, which is really his first book. I have 136 pairs of sneakers. I collect shoes. I am a diehard Nike guy. I've had a pleasure of meeting Mr. Knight. And that book in the Nike story influences us here.”

    2017-07-31 · Capital Allocators · Dan Schorr – Death, Ice Cream, and Entrepreneurship (Capital Allocators, EP.19) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Give you one for my mom that's topical and one for my grandfather. My mom said, you really deserve a break. Maybe this is our break. And maybe this is my break, ice cream. The second one is a good question. My grandfather said, even at Pepsi, when you come in every day to the office and you flip the lights on, treat it like your own office and your own company and treat their money like your own money and pretend you're running your own business.”

    2017-07-31 · Capital Allocators · Dan Schorr – Death, Ice Cream, and Entrepreneurship (Capital Allocators, EP.19) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “In Boston, we're having this conversation. As a participant, maybe the Tufts University where I went to school, Williams cross-country meet way back when was the only race I won in four years of college and I had been out all night long the night before drinking and hooking up with some girl and didn't sleep. My coach told me do whatever you did last night every week. I said, I only wish.”

    2017-07-31 · Capital Allocators · Dan Schorr – Death, Ice Cream, and Entrepreneurship (Capital Allocators, EP.19) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Oh, well, fantasy. I'm a fantasy baseball addict with my league. Fantasy sports is probably a favorite thing that's a waste of time.”

    2017-07-31 · Capital Allocators · Dan Schorr – Death, Ice Cream, and Entrepreneurship (Capital Allocators, EP.19) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “If you want to find us and learn about the brand, you can reach us at our website is eat vice cream v-c-e-c-re-m, facebook's eatvice cream, same for Instagram. If you want to find us there, if you want to fund us, my phone number is 20. That's a separate issue. We'll be raising around another round of capital. You know, we'll be looking at something in early 18, but you can find us. So follow us on our social media channels. I think we do a really good job now.”

    2017-07-31 · Capital Allocators · Dan Schorr – Death, Ice Cream, and Entrepreneurship (Capital Allocators, EP.19) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “That everyone's an athlete, but you find that some of these household penetration numbers are 3%, 4%. So my point is that our awareness right now, our distribution is less than 5% of America, and our awareness is probably less than that. So we still go out every day and even in our hometown of Boston, we have marketing for a year. We did the July 4th celebration this weekend and the Esplanade and heard from my team that was there. Hardly anyone heard of us. You know, I think it's good for them. It's good for them to hear, wow, not everyone knows us because we all live in our own little world.”

    2017-07-31 · Capital Allocators · Dan Schorr – Death, Ice Cream, and Entrepreneurship (Capital Allocators, EP.19) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Our goal is to over the next five years is to build a national brand that has significant revenue and is a major player out there to be a third brand to Ben and Jerry's and Hagenaz in the super premium space. And we really believe that indulgence is where things are going. The next three to six months, you know, we continue to focus on sell-through number one, on opening up new markets. Number two, building out the team effectively and finding things in the right place. But we still have, you know, it's still about awareness also. You know, I remember being at Pepsi and finding out the key metric in consumer package because it's household penetration. And I think it was about 10 years ago, the number may have been this low, but I found out the Gatorade had not awareness, but in terms of numbers that consumers simply that have Gatorade in their household was 12% of America. And you're thinking Gatorade, this has been around 40 years and like, you know, not.”

    2017-07-31 · Capital Allocators · Dan Schorr – Death, Ice Cream, and Entrepreneurship (Capital Allocators, EP.19) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “That says chromotherapy. So, like, with our cancer patients, that we talk to, and obviously they can identify to my story, we don't go in there and say, oh, I'm so sorry with what's going on. We go in there with the same kind of attitude and say, let's just celebrate life. So we're still learning. We have a huge video that many of you by the time this comes out, we're coming forward with a groundbreaking video and ad campaign that is unlike anything out there that really talks about our brand. For God's sakes, we're a brand that has a flavor called the Range A Trois, which is vanilla ice cream with orange wrapped around three kinds of chocolate. So we try to say as we say here, we take our business seriously and we take the brand seriously. We try not to take ourselves so seriously every day because we have to have fun with things.”

    2017-07-31 · Capital Allocators · Dan Schorr – Death, Ice Cream, and Entrepreneurship (Capital Allocators, EP.19) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “One of the things I think is the brand voice. We talk about vice cream being unapologetic indulgence, but we do it and we're still learning the line there in this over-the-top way. So our ad campaign for last fall and coming back this September is Vice Cream Proud sponsor of the freshman 15. Like you're 18 years old. Eat F and Ice Cream. We've done things where on 420, obviously you know 420 day, April 20th, legalized marijuana day. We actually took higher grounds, which is our nod to cannabis. We actually made some pints into bongs. And you could actually smoke out of the pint. Whatever the president says, non-deniable denial, whatever it is, I had nothing to do with this. People were like, dude, I can't believe I'm actually smoking a pint of ice cream and other people were like, dude, I can't believe I've coffee ice cream in my bong. They didn't know what to make of it. But our t-shirts say, don't be such a vanilla. Even with our cancer efforts that we've done to help support cancer patients and their families, we have t-shirts.”

    2017-07-31 · Capital Allocators · Dan Schorr – Death, Ice Cream, and Entrepreneurship (Capital Allocators, EP.19) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Chocolate, sea salt truffles, and cookie dough, and our vanilla was flat and we said, all right, we'll dial up the inclusions no one will notice. They noticed. I've gotten emails and say afternoons like this vanilla is not strong enough. Consumers don't miss anything today, and that's okay. They didn't miss anything in the 50s or the 60s or the seventies either, but today they have outlets to voice it on Instagram and on Facebook in particular and Twitter. So consumers give you the feedback. They don't miss anything and they share it.”

    2017-07-31 · Capital Allocators · Dan Schorr – Death, Ice Cream, and Entrepreneurship (Capital Allocators, EP.19) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Hearing feedback on social media. I take it very personally. I respond to everybody. I respond to everybody on social media personally if I can, pretty much everybody. And we just had a couple posts today that came up on Twitter that were the first ever that were sort of negative. But everything's either positive or it's feedback, which may not be positive, but it comes from a place of being constructive or I think you could do this flavor better or the brand didn't appeal to me. And we do a lot for the cancer community and I have a shirt that says ice cream cures cancer. And there was a whole Twitter war that broke out saying it doesn't cure cancer, but they donate money and I cancer patients that can wade in and said, I wish I had this end of chemotherapy to come up to a pint of ice cream. So I listen to consumers a lot more than ever. I will tell you one thing to kind of wrap up this question. They don't miss anything. So when we produce one day and our vanilla wasn't at the speck of our vanilla should be and we produced afternoon delight, which is vanilla with carmel.”

    2017-07-31 · Capital Allocators · Dan Schorr – Death, Ice Cream, and Entrepreneurship (Capital Allocators, EP.19) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Really good question. One, my wife has no trouble giving me feedback on the business. Not always constructive, sometimes constructive, sometimes constructive, and I like to hear it. I think number one, you get feedback from the consumer. I keep mentioning this as a theme. So if you're selling, you're getting feedback. If you're not selling, sometimes it's hard to identify what that feedback is. It could be something simple as awareness. It could be something renew and Ben and Jerry's is 40 years old. So number one, you need consumer feedback. The second thing, there's a big difference between feedback on me and feedback as a brand and as a company. I really believe, again, I keep saying about being at retail. I'm at stores as much as I possibly can be. Like my wife sends me out to go get milk and it takes me two hours and she knows it because I'm going to hit four stores. I was on vacation in Charleston, South Carolina this weekend for July 4th and I had to hit a Harris teeter and she knows it. She's like only one. You know, I tried to sneak in four, but I never car. So I like to be a retail hearing from consumers.”

    2017-07-31 · Capital Allocators · Dan Schorr – Death, Ice Cream, and Entrepreneurship (Capital Allocators, EP.19) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Justin Gold from Justin has been incredible to me. People want to still meet the founder, even if it's not named after me like Justin's. So there's some founders FaceTime. So how do you bring salespeople on that can sell the vision almost as well as you can? That's something that's something I'm processing right now.”

    2017-07-31 · Capital Allocators · Dan Schorr – Death, Ice Cream, and Entrepreneurship (Capital Allocators, EP.19) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “There is this, it's a very hot decision for us right now. I've been doing the sales role myself, and something I think you'll find is interesting is that we've presented to approximately 17 accounts and we're 14 for 17 getting in. The only three are the ones I didn't go to. So I'm 14 for 14 presenting to account. Some accounts are going to listen out there and turn me down just to make me humble. So the sales function is how do I staff up and have like a mini me? How do I have somebody who can tell the vision almost as well as I can? There's still a lot of value out there in people in what's called founders FaceTime. And that's not just ice cream. You know, you think about business and great brands. I know I'm a little bit of a different interview, but Jim Cook here in Boston from Sam Adams. I don't mean to pretend to position myself as any of these people, but everyone wants to meet Phil Knight from Nike. You know, Travis and Ubers had his own challenges lately. I don't know about that. But there's people in the consumer world. I can't speak to tech at all.”

    2017-07-31 · Capital Allocators · Dan Schorr – Death, Ice Cream, and Entrepreneurship (Capital Allocators, EP.19) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “To lay out the vision and the strategy and where people are taking things. And I don't think this is something any company does our size.”

    2017-07-31 · Capital Allocators · Dan Schorr – Death, Ice Cream, and Entrepreneurship (Capital Allocators, EP.19) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Because I'll eliminate that hurdle if I'm your hurdle. The second thing that's big picture I think you'll find fascinating is I'm managing this like a 30 or 40, 50 million dollar company. We do an annual offsite that we did in December for next year's planning and then we religiously religiously being a year and a half two years have a quarterly one-day session to do check-ins on that annual off-site and where we're tracking. So we actually set up KPIs for the company. We have quarterly rocks if you've read anything about Rockefeller habits or Steven Covey or anything, but we have quarterly rocks on what are the five priorities that we have to do as a company for the quarter. And then we have what's called sort of WWW, which is not World Wide Web, but who is doing it what and when. So there's real accountabilities in the organization. It's been a big deal. So we have quarterly meetings that I actually need to follow up on our last quarterly meeting, but we have quarterly meetings.”

    2017-07-31 · Capital Allocators · Dan Schorr – Death, Ice Cream, and Entrepreneurship (Capital Allocators, EP.19) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “That's a challenge. I'm sure they feel that way. Actually, you know, I have some mechanisms, which is something that's not always popular. It wasn't here, but it's really kind of simple, which is I ask everybody on a Thursday to do a project list and to break it into two pieces. It's the simplest template, and I don't even know if they follow it, but it is status update, which means update me on what's going on. And the second part is input needed. What am I holding up or anyone holding up that's a barrier from doing your job? And I asked them to do it for a couple reasons at the end of the week. It was usually Friday, but I've asked, I just moved it back to Thursday. I asked them to do it number one for themselves. I want them to sit down and you ask about how do they know they're on track. I want them to come to that own conclusion that they're on track or off track by doing this weekly list of here's a status update and they can go back and look at it themselves. So it's sort of self-policing, if you want, if that's the right word. The second thing is where are they who's am I holding you back in any way?”

    2017-07-31 · Capital Allocators · Dan Schorr – Death, Ice Cream, and Entrepreneurship (Capital Allocators, EP.19) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Show. I'm smiling. I saw some friends that were giving me a lot of grief, and that's not the word I'd use about being very intense and B, everyone in the industry knowing that I write emails at two or three in the morning. So look, you don't have to answer them on my team. I tell people I want your time Monday through Friday and that may be 11 and 2 in the morning and on weekends you're on your own for the most part unless you're working event. But my time split between, look, we're still a small company. We're still at the startup stage. A CEO, one of my main jobs is raise capital. The second is the sales function, driving revenue and anything related to driving revenue. The third is that I think I'm a mile wide and maybe three inches deep in each functional area. So I have an operations meeting yesterday and one understand what's going on with their inventory and forecast. I have a marketing meeting that follows right after this. I have a finance call that I have to be aware of. So I really move between a lot of disciplines.”

    2017-07-31 · Capital Allocators · Dan Schorr – Death, Ice Cream, and Entrepreneurship (Capital Allocators, EP.19) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Well, it's funny to answer your question just a bit of a different way. The biggest change in my work lifestyle is I'm never at a computer. Yesterday and today we're like scheduled days to like do financial operations, contracts agreements. I am either out at investors, out at retail, media, PR, a lot of account visits on the road, presenting to accounts because I have that sales function right now. The biggest change in my lifestyle is that I am never at a desk and never at a computer. Everything on the phone. For that reason, I am notoriously and horribly hate email. And the reason why hate email is that I go home at night and I have a daughter and my wife and I have dinner with them when I'm home and then I have to answer emails at 10, 11, 12 at night into the wee hours in the morning and it's just a reoccurring stream that comes back to me again. I evidently coming from the fancy food.”

    2017-07-31 · Capital Allocators · Dan Schorr – Death, Ice Cream, and Entrepreneurship (Capital Allocators, EP.19) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “We've got great distribution. We have a lot of people that really have a rooting interest for us. So I think those things, I think those are probably the number one things if you wanted to define anything as a curveball.”

    2017-07-31 · Capital Allocators · Dan Schorr – Death, Ice Cream, and Entrepreneurship (Capital Allocators, EP.19) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “I'd probably say number one is we have a competitor out there that is a low fat, high protein ice cream that has changed the category dramatically. So super premium ice cream is flat or down as a whole. Pints are doing really well. Private labels taking some hits, but a market trend, consumer trend was something that we all missed a little bit and it's having an impact. So it's sort of a quote unquote healthier ice cream. It's not, but it's being positioned that way. And no one, people saw it, but no one, including myself, saw how big it was going to be. So I think we have some headwinds there. I think, as I mentioned before, curveball was making our product. We didn't realize how hard it was to make our product initially. But, you know, when I talk about going from 20 grocery stores a year ago to 3,000, there's a lot of things that we've done right too. So we have an incredible product, incredible brand.”

    2017-07-31 · Capital Allocators · Dan Schorr – Death, Ice Cream, and Entrepreneurship (Capital Allocators, EP.19) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Drive sell through. So from an allocation standpoint, we have to put money into marketing, we have to put money into trade spending, making sure we're price competitively and we've had a couple little learnings there. So anything that drives sell-through to build that effective selling story is where we have to put the money against. I think probably talking you and I not having a microphone in front of us, I think the hard thing sometimes is how scrappy we should be. You know, there's a lot of entrepreneurs I know that sleep on friends' beds everywhere and sometimes I feel like we're spending too much money, but we're pretty good about the dollars that we spend. We're very careful about things, but we're also not, you know, I also don't want to be like, wow, we should have invested more. I have some entrepreneurial friends, even ones that have sold companies that say looking back, they've sold companies for a lot of money, they're like, we wish we invested even more in marketing, we would have been able to get a greater return. So it's from an allocation standpoint, number one, obviously with the make the product.”

    2017-07-31 · Capital Allocators · Dan Schorr – Death, Ice Cream, and Entrepreneurship (Capital Allocators, EP.19) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “There's a bunch of different theories right now in consumer packaged goods. There's a theory that people are taking, so when we initially started, people were talking about margin and saying you have to be at X percent, 50%, 40%, 60%, whatever that number is, I know what that number is, but you have to be at X percent margins to be able to compete effectively. There's a philosophy right now that's going on where people are taking 15, 12, maybe 18% margin to drive top line revenue. It's just a very, it can be a dangerous philosophy, but there's a lot of people that are doing that. There's companies that are grossing $150, $200 million that aren't profitable and are selling at 5x for a billion dollars. So there's, you know, we do have a plan to exit this business. So that's number one is what is our vision and our plan and how many years is that? From a resource allocation standpoint, our number one thing is to brand build, as I was talking about, PowerBars, to brand build and”

    2017-07-31 · Capital Allocators · Dan Schorr – Death, Ice Cream, and Entrepreneurship (Capital Allocators, EP.19) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “So, I got to get on a plane because I don't have anyone that can fix this. And he goes, You got to fix this problem, find somebody to fix this problem because you can't begin on a plane either to fix it. So go fix it. So that drove us hiring our operations person. So that's what the team looks like. We're tiny. We're four. We're making two new hires, two or three new hires in the next six months in marketing, sales roles, merchandising roles in the field. But, you know, investors going back to sort of your audience, you know, watching revenue per employee, watching headcount, you know, that's something we want to be really careful of. I kind of steal an expression from an old boss the day I hire an HR department, I quit. So I have no intentions of being that big.”

    2017-07-31 · Capital Allocators · Dan Schorr – Death, Ice Cream, and Entrepreneurship (Capital Allocators, EP.19) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Case of ice cream is packaged one pineapple, one pint down, one pint up, one pint down, eight in a case. Well, and shrink wrapped. When we produce for the first time, really for the first two times, all of our mixins, our inclusions, when the pint was face up, so to speak, all fell to the bottom. And when it was down, everything fell to the top. So either had people complaining, they opened the lid and said, oh my God, I got a pint, just a vanilla ice cream. There's nothing in it and everything was at the bottom. Or maybe worse, they opened up a pint of bourbon mash and all the caramel got all over them and they're like, I'm covered in this stuff. So I had an investor say to us, he's in the apparel manufacturing business and he has a thousand employees. And he said to me one day he picked up a pint, a couple pints, had some problems, called me, and said, I'm going on a plane to Asian. You know why? And he said, because I got a problem. And he goes, I got 997 effing people in this company that tell me I have a problem and I have three who know how to fix it. And all three of them are here in Boston, unfortunately.”

    2017-07-31 · Capital Allocators · Dan Schorr – Death, Ice Cream, and Entrepreneurship (Capital Allocators, EP.19) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “There's a lot of things that are proprietary about our product that I can go into and can't go into, but our base is made unlike anyone else's. It is the best tasting ice cream you'll ever have. And the base is very complicated, and we've always found a way to have a lot of inclusions, and they're mixed evenly across the pint. We didn't know, and I didn't know how hard it was to make our product. When we first ran at the first plant that we ran in for product for consumption by consumers, retail product, we”

    2017-07-31 · Capital Allocators · Dan Schorr – Death, Ice Cream, and Entrepreneurship (Capital Allocators, EP.19) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “Event here in Boston that you pay $15 for all you can eat ice cream and it benefits Deana Farber Cancer Center, 30,000 people come to try out ice cream. That's where I got a stack of resumes in from people who wanted this job in marketing. And again, going back to the theme, one of the people in the stack of resumes, Molly, had been a triathlete. And she was on my triathlon team, although I'd never met her before, and it made her stick out. And we were sort of in a little bit of a urgency time crunch to hire someone. So got lucky that she's been very, very good. And then another member of our team, Cam was at Gordon Seafood and handling supply chain and logistics. And great find also for us there, you know, through LinkedIn and through some connections, managed to find her. And I was actually recruiting a couple of her colleagues as well. And I think the interesting thing about Cam is kind of somebody to get into and I don't mind sharing is our product is incredibly difficult to make.”

    2017-07-31 · Capital Allocators · Dan Schorr – Death, Ice Cream, and Entrepreneurship (Capital Allocators, EP.19) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “You know, they say, I had sorry to give you another story, but I was drinking, I believe, one of my number one philosophies, everything begins in a bar. So you meet a spouse in a bar, you meet investors in a bar. I was in a bar, and this is not necessarily somebody. I was in a bar in New York recently. And it's a young guy there, and he was talking about his company and, you know, I think pros and cons of a CEO. I'm not sure how highly he thought of his CEO. And he said, you know what, the only thing this guy's good at is he's really good at sales and he's really good at sales and he's really good at hiring people. But otherwise he's useless. And I was kind of like, you know, a CEO, those are actually pretty good things to be good at. So our team came together in a couple of different ways. Nadine came in through, you know, Ice Cream University and meeting her and with her came Renee, who works with her closely. And then I was looking for somebody to help execute our first Scooper Bowl, a Marquis.”

    2017-07-31 · Capital Allocators · Dan Schorr – Death, Ice Cream, and Entrepreneurship (Capital Allocators, EP.19) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “He finished the entire pint, which is a really good sign if you're pitching an investor. We went to see him three times and he never came into the deal. So it is as hard to raise money as advertised. And I think in the first round, we really sold on the dream. We raised two rounds of capital. And selling on the dream was this is a lot about the entrepreneur. So people took a bet on me, which I really, really appreciate. The second was the brand and the concept. And really what we outlined is the data and the opportunity in the marketplace. And that round arguably was easier in some ways than the second round. You think the second round would be easier because you have proof of concept. The first round we just sold on product samples in some cases.”

    2017-07-31 · Capital Allocators · Dan Schorr – Death, Ice Cream, and Entrepreneurship (Capital Allocators, EP.19) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “Oh, we love this. Want to talk about investing. Never called again. So, like, you know, we basically walked around New York City and I said initially I was literally selling iced Eskimos. It was January. I was freezing, taking ice cream to people. And then I quickly learned that I was just basically the snack truck. And then, you know, but then there really was no way to learn and that we went to see some investors, a very peculiar gentleman. And maybe he's a listener and a subscriber. And he ate the ice cream very slowly. And we met.”

    2017-07-31 · Capital Allocators · Dan Schorr – Death, Ice Cream, and Entrepreneurship (Capital Allocators, EP.19) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “It's funny, just kind of like sitting down with you for 30 seconds in preparation. A lot of what I've shared with you today is part of our brahman story and my story, and I've shared this story regularly. I kid around a CEO, or I call myself CIO, Chief Ice Cream Officer. All I do is get paid to tell the same story. I haven't talked about the money part before, which obviously your audience is probably the most relevant, and they may hopefully enjoy the first part. So one thing I say, and keeping my sense of humor, is I quickly learned not to sample any venture capital affirms or an angel investors before don't sample anyone after 9 a.m. Because people in particular is a guy in New York who is a famous entrepreneur, maybe running some kind of jet company in New York right now, you can figure it out. And he had me come into his office and he brought 22 people in there at one o'clock. And basically I just fed the office. They had never returned another phone call again as an investor. Oh, the greatest ice cream ever. You gotta come in here, Tony, come in here. Jimmy, come in here, Lisa, come in here and taste this. And all I did.”

    2017-07-31 · Capital Allocators · Dan Schorr – Death, Ice Cream, and Entrepreneurship (Capital Allocators, EP.19) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “Things like that. So, as I mentioned with the good humor truck, I've always been an ice cream fan, and I'm a big fan. I'm a business person. I believe in higher calling of the power of ice cream to make people smile unlike any other food, beats the hell out of pizza. But, you know, I am not a food scientist per se, although I kind of kid around with everyone here. I don't really kid around. I know our ice cream better than anyone. So I don't know how to make it. I don't know how to compose it as well as other people on the team. I don't know necessarily how to develop it or how to co-pack it, but I taste our ice cream sometimes on the line. I'm like, there's something wrong. There's not enough this in it. And I know our ice cream. I can taste it very well. They say Ben Cohen had no taste buds at Ben and Jerry's, and he couldn't really taste anything. and so forth. I'm sort of the opposite. I can tell good ice cream right away.”

    2017-07-31 · Capital Allocators · Dan Schorr – Death, Ice Cream, and Entrepreneurship (Capital Allocators, EP.19) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “Up a scoop shop, an ice cream store. And there was a few crazy of us that wanted to start our own brand. And we're locked in. I remember it was like one degree freezing cold in state college for a week. And there were like exams at night and their finals. And I like bought tickets to the hockey game or basketball game. I was going to go drinking. I thought it was going to be fun. And they were like, they were like, we'll give you your money back to go home. And I eventually did go back about two years later, but it was the best thing I got out of it was meeting Nadine, but also other contacts at other ice cream companies, flavor houses.”

    2017-07-31 · Capital Allocators · Dan Schorr – Death, Ice Cream, and Entrepreneurship (Capital Allocators, EP.19) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “The official name is actually there's the short course and the long course, but Penn State University has been running an ice cream course that God, it probably goes more than 50 years, but Dr. Robert Roberts was there and I believe his dad was there as a professor and there's about people come from 30 different countries in January or more, 130 people and it's sold out every year. I think it's sold out already. And then they also run a weekend course which is just sort of for very elementary course around ice cream. And I went and I was the worst student there. Literally, I came and thought I'd do margins, business, copac operations, procurement maybe had to buy ingredients. And it was hardcore food science, freezing temperatures and all this other stuff. One third of the room were food science is and they had been like this was their profession, masters and so forth from all the major ice cream companies. The middle group of the audience was plant managers, third shift guy sanitation, one-third were entrepreneurs. But of those entrepreneurs, most of them wanted to open up.”

    2017-07-31 · Capital Allocators · Dan Schorr – Death, Ice Cream, and Entrepreneurship (Capital Allocators, EP.19) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “Because I haven't really, you know, we're so focused on the future that we just came through our year anniversary and took a pause to actually look back and kind of remind ourselves of the fun stories and remind ourselves of things that happened. But March of when we were working on packaging 18 months ago seems like another century. So I think step one was in some ways, step one was just to take a step was to produce some product to actually get product that was like that you could taste that made it real. Step two is get the package.”

    2017-07-31 · Capital Allocators · Dan Schorr – Death, Ice Cream, and Entrepreneurship (Capital Allocators, EP.19) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “Not to be so big picture And I didn't start this because I was afraid. I don't know what to do. I don't know, even with my experience, I'm not sure what to do, this and that. I kid around that it took me, I set myself back a year or two because I didn't know how to do a UPC code, which actually takes like one second on the computer. So there was those initial days which weren't long ago that fear was setting me back a little bit. One of the big things was I actually hooked up with somebody in my Penn State Ice Cream University class and Nadine had been a Dino DeLuca in New York and she is sort of the wizard behind the flavors. And when we knocked off those initial flavors, we had some advisors. I had some consultants. We knocked off the initial flavors and got the initial pint out of the kitchen. It made it real. And even when things were, we worked on, I went to a packaging agency and we developed packaging and the initial packaging, we ran just some comps of just five. But it became more real and you had a product and a white pint and you had a black package. It became more real as a whole.”

    2017-07-31 · Capital Allocators · Dan Schorr – Death, Ice Cream, and Entrepreneurship (Capital Allocators, EP.19) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “You can find ice cream all throughout New England at stop and shop, Roach Brothers, Big Y, and Star Market down in New York you can find it at Key Foods and Food Emporium. You can find it from Maryland all the way down to Florida at Harris Teter locations. You can find it at Publix, which ranges all throughout the southeast and obviously in Florida. You'll find it at Shopright, New Jersey, come fall. And we're going to be moving out to the Midwest Plum Markets in Chicago and Michigan. And soon to be many other locations out there and independence that we may or may not know about that are out there in the marketplace. I don't want to forget about King Cullen out on the east end of Long Island and the Hamptons. And I am probably, this is like why the Academy Awards, you don't thank anyone because you always forget everyone. But I want to thank all of our other retailers out there that are supporting us at Vice Cream.”

    2017-07-31 · Capital Allocators · Dan Schorr – Death, Ice Cream, and Entrepreneurship (Capital Allocators, EP.19) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “Through chemotherapy, six rounds of chemotherapy over seven months. And she said, go back to work. So when we came back to work to kind of wrap this all up on the overview, our tagline was live life, dig in. That's what it always was about, is life short dig into ice cream. You know, eat kale, go to soul cycle when it comes to ice cream, eat ice cream. And it took on more of a mantra, more of a movement. And now our hashtag is EFIC, life short, eat fucking ice cream. So I know life's short. I know life short. But the thing I'm most proud of is our larger P, our larger purpose is that we do provide product and cash, so to speak, monetary donations, and even just smiles to cancer patients to help them get through their journey. We do things we just raised close to a million dollars with other brands for Dana Farber Cancer Institute in New York at the Scooper Bowl in Boston as well. So that is a very busy two year.”

    2017-07-31 · Capital Allocators · Dan Schorr – Death, Ice Cream, and Entrepreneurship (Capital Allocators, EP.19) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “Entrepreneur, I'm itching, it's eczema. I was about to leave that day, and I went back in and I said, I'm sorry to be an ass, but why can't you test me? And 24 hours later, I got bad news where everybody gets bad news. I was at Target picking up toilet paper, and I was in toothpaste or something, and I was sitting in the parking lot. They called and they gave you those three words and no one likes to hear, we found something. And it was cancer. They said it was 95% cancer, 5% of chance of infection. I needed to get a biopsy right away, but it was very aggressive. I had diffused large B cell lymphoma, and they had said if it had not been treated, they later told me I had 12 weeks to live. So how the hell is that to do anything with ice cream? Well, I shut down the business for a couple months and started up again a couple months later. I went to my oncologist at Stan LaCase, who's incredible, and said Dana Farber Cancer Institute and said, hey, I ran this weekend. I threw up afterward, but can I go out and I had gone.”

    2017-07-31 · Capital Allocators · Dan Schorr – Death, Ice Cream, and Entrepreneurship (Capital Allocators, EP.19) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “There is. We're going to have Shopright down in the Jersey area is going to be carrying it. Roach Brothers carries it here, but it's called the Range Attois. It is vanilla with orange creamsicle wrapped around three kinds of chocolate, milk, dark, white, and it's our sleeper flavor. But a key part of our DNA to kind of wrap up the overview was that I had been this runner to go back to where I started on this story. I've been completely healthy. I run 37 half marathons. I'm running five or six New York marathons and San Francisco marathons and done half Iron Man's and in April I'm wearing a bracelet on my hand April 1st April Fool's 2014 I was not feeling well and I went to the doctor's office and they ushered me out saying just before this saying you're the healthiest guy we know you're the healthiest guy we know and I went to a new doctor here in Boston I never saw this doctor before and the doctor has never called again and I went in and she said I told her all my symptoms I've got nausea and she said oh you're just a man”

    2017-07-31 · Capital Allocators · Dan Schorr – Death, Ice Cream, and Entrepreneurship (Capital Allocators, EP.19) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “Very popular right now is Toffee Wife, like trophy wife, which maybe some of you or listeners may have. It's toffee ice, peanut butter ice cream, peanut butter dough, toffee, ripple, and heath bar pieces.”

    2017-07-31 · Capital Allocators · Dan Schorr – Death, Ice Cream, and Entrepreneurship (Capital Allocators, EP.19) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “We saw this insight that the younger audience was looking for a brand that spoke to them. So that was a key part of the research that we did to be able to get where we are. And then to kind of finish off the story, we launched at Vice Cream 14 months ago at 20 Boston stores, 20 Boston Roach Brothers stores were the first people to take a chance at us with these overly indulgent flavors like breakfast and bed, maple ice cream, maple syrup, French toast, and pecans, higher grounds, everything's a vice that's our nod to cannabis.”

    2017-07-31 · Capital Allocators · Dan Schorr – Death, Ice Cream, and Entrepreneurship (Capital Allocators, EP.19) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “Wow, you make it sound really daunting, like I should have probably thought against it than I actually did. Oh my God, I'm gonna pursue the rest of my life. You know, a lot of things are driven by passion, but hopefully there's enough of an insight there that you just don't fall in love with your own idea. But we saw some research, the amount we could share is that the millennial audience, the 18th to 30s that everybody wants, really had seen Hagenaz as your older brand, you know, as 60 plus. And the real surprise was that people in that age group, the millennials saw Ben and Jerry's as sort of a counterculture hippie tie-dye brand. And that's fine for Bernie Sanders, but not necessarily for food. So we saw this insight.”

    2017-07-31 · Capital Allocators · Dan Schorr – Death, Ice Cream, and Entrepreneurship (Capital Allocators, EP.19) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “His work every day So you had the name and the interest and the idea. At what point? So you start doing research. Yes. You mentioned some consumer brand research. What was the research you did to decide, hey, I'm going to spend my life pursuing Next stage of my life pursuing this opportunity”

    2017-07-31 · Capital Allocators · Dan Schorr – Death, Ice Cream, and Entrepreneurship (Capital Allocators, EP.19) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “We could talk around it, but it was, I think, in general, when you look at things in life, you can end up saying sometimes you want to bet on being successful and sort of cutting deals early. It was, I think we got rejected by the patent and trademark office the first time just because they said this is too obvious. We don't have any research anyone owns it, but someone has to own it. Or you can't own the word vice. You can't own the word cream. We're like, we want both of them. So it was two years in my lawyer, Aaron Silverstein. I should give a big shout out to him because he tells me that I don't appreciate his work, but we do appreciate his work every day. He then know Aaron calls going, God, you don't ever listen to me. You're always on the go. Do you ever listen to me? So it's usually fed up with me all the time.”

    2017-07-31 · Capital Allocators · Dan Schorr – Death, Ice Cream, and Entrepreneurship (Capital Allocators, EP.19) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “Billion dollars in sales between Ben and Jerry's and Hagenah's, and they dominate everything, sometimes everything that scared people away from frozen were things that interest me. So some people say in the frozen aisle, you've got deep pockets. It's true. Unilever and Nestle are deep pockets, but they also have command each of them, an entire door and an entire door, they have 40 flavors, each of them on shelf. Arguably, there is nowhere else in the supermarket that one brand, not even Coke, not even Pepsi, water, chips, frito lay, no one has forty different flavors and dominates a door. And part of the insight on this was that they were what we call consumer package goods overskewed.”

    2017-07-31 · Capital Allocators · Dan Schorr – Death, Ice Cream, and Entrepreneurship (Capital Allocators, EP.19) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “We did some research afterward, but there's something that's a phrase actually like New York magazine uses it, which is like, I do believe in sort of the backlash to the backlash and saw a while ago a couple of things that have come true. One was saw indulgence coming back. Initially a couple years ago, you know, I'm a combination of a gut marketer, but also data, and saw things like confections on the rise. Now, dark chocolate was partly due to health and wellness, but I saw confections on the rise. Right now, and I think we're in the right place at the right time, the commodity that's going through the roof and the commodity markets is butter, if it's what call it a market. So butter is through the roof. So, you know, there's things that are pointing to indulgence and people treating themselves for this healthy lifestyle. And I think we're in the right spot with ice cream as a whole. There are some low fat ice creams or they're not really ice creams that are doing very well in the marketplace right now. But also the second thing was that you had 1.2.”

    2017-07-31 · Capital Allocators · Dan Schorr – Death, Ice Cream, and Entrepreneurship (Capital Allocators, EP.19) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source