YouSaid · the spoken record

Krishna Kaliannan

lines on the record: 88
first: 2026-07-06
most recent: 2026-07-06
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And so that's when I realized, oh, that could be exciting. And I think finally I had come to realize that the obesity rate in the country and the rate of diabetes in America were both through the roof. And when you start to think about all the money we're spending on healthcare and the negative repercussions that can have for our country, I got really excited about it is like, hey, there's a big challenge here, but a big opportunity to help a lot of people.”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, when I saw that my friend was not diabetic, yet he was also trying to eat a lot of protein for breakfast. I kind of put two and two together and realized, oh, there's not really many options in the grocery store that are a good fit for people that are trying to achieve this. And so that's when I realized, oh, there's actually a big need here that no one really seems to be meeting. And so I walked through the grocery store, Cereal Isle, which I hadn't been to in probably a decade. And it was exactly the same as I think I had found it when I was a teenager and had last been there. And it struck me that there's a lot of different cereals in the grocery store, but they're all sort of the same cereal with different branding.”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or $8.99, but he venmoed me a price that it wasn't like, oh, here's $10, or here's $5 for this stuff. Here's like what looks like a grocery store price. And that's when it kind of struck me, oh, you could actually make food and sell it to people. Now it's obvious to people that there are big companies that do this. I'd not really considered that. I had just been thinking about, hey, I know how to make apps, I know how to make websites. I'm going to do something with that. And I reflected back and realized, oh, I've been actually working on making a quote product or a cereal product, but that was not the intention of it going forward.”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I got it to the point after meticulous trial and error to where it tasted pretty good. I was eating it with almond milk in the morning for breakfast. It didn't send my blood sugar through the roof like cocoa puffs would, but it still tasted good. I happened to meet a friend in Central Park, and he was not diabetic, but he had gotten interested in getting more protein for breakfast, and he was sick of eating eggs. And we were just, we just happened to be talking about this. I don't think we had really planned to talk about it. And I had told him that I'd been trying out the cereal I was making, and he could try some if he wanted. So the next time I saw him, I gave him a bag of it. And then he Venmoed me for it. And I hadn't asked him to pay me for it. So I wasn't expecting it, but it was nice. It was a nice gesture of goodwill on his part. And I think he Venmoed me like $7.99.”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Again, it was an evolution. It went from really bad to better over time. I think the first one I made was as hard as a rock. You could not eat it. It only tastes like chocolate when you add the sweetness to it, and those two things come together. So I think the first iterations I made were hard rocks that tasted like soil.”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then, yeah, you take those ingredients, you mix them together, you form it into a dough just like you're making crackers, right? Roll the dough out into a thin sheet on a baking pan, cut it into squares, and then bake it in the oven.”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah. The simplest form, exactly. It was those three ingredients. But if you mix these three things together with water, you're not going to get a dough that sticks together very well. And it's also going to be very hard and very flat. And it's not going to have a lot of crispiness to it. So you're also adding, or I was also adding at the time baking powder. Baking powder, as you know, helps things rise, right? And then when they rise, And so there's kind of air pockets inside and then set with the air pockets inside them. That's where you then have that structure that enables the crispiness or the crunchiness, right?”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I was trying to make something, you know, first of all, I was rolling the ingredients into a dough. I was cutting the dough into squares.”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes And I just became enthralled with the whole subject. You know, it's kind of like opening a door to a whole new world. When you think of cooking as just follow the recipe and you get your food, and then all of a sudden you open this door to this whole new world of, oh, wait a minute, there are all these ingredients that, you know, I would even go so far as to say humanity itself is not a spent a lot of time thinking about or trying out. And so it almost felt like exploring something totally new.”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, everything that you just mentioned is all, you know, if you break it down scientifically, it's all glucose, fructose, sucrose, which are three of the most common sugars in food. So a lot of people, I think, think that sugar and sweetness are the same thing, but they're actually not. And there are actually other things beyond sugar which give your brain the sweet sensation, right? I mean, what we perceive as sweetness is really kind of neurochemical changes in the brain. And so, yeah, monk fruit has seeds. The seeds are extremely sweet, but they are not sugar, and so they do not spike your blood sugar.”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, yeah. I was thinking in particular about Coco Puffs. That was my favorite cereal growing up, and I realized that the chocolatiness from Coco Puffs is coming from a combination of cocoa powder and sugar. And if you can take the sugar and replace it with something like monk fruit, keep the cocoa powder, you now have this zero sugar or low sugar chocolate taste.”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Eggy taste with that same edgy texture, right? It's not crispy, it's not crunchy, and I've just gotten really, really bored of it.”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I had eaten a lot of cereals growing up cinnamon, toast crunch, cocoa puffs, golden grams. It was one of the classic American staples, so to speak, that I think a lot of kids in the 90s ate a lot of. I also had really fond memories of going to the grocery store with my mom when I was a kid and kind of picking out the new stuff, right? I mean, it's like 60 feet worth of cereal in the grocery store. So you can eat and try a lot of different things. And so I had craved that variety in my life and I had just gotten sick of eating eggs for breakfast. I had been eating it for such a long time. I'd eaten it with over 100 different hot sauces and other sorts of sauces to try to make it taste different every morning. But ultimately, it's that same”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I guess at a certain point you decide that you want to try to make breakfast cereal. A ketogenic, like something that you could eat, which, I mean, I don't even know where you would start. Tell me what you were thinking, like, how did that even that idea even come to you?”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How the protein powder hydrates when you mix it with water. If you're trying to make a dough, you need something that's sticky. So when you add water to protein powder, it doesn't necessarily get sticky. Now you need to replace that with something else, which is going to get sticky so you can form a dough in the first place. So it was very intellectually challenging to try to figure that out and try to make these things taste from awful to decent to pretty good to really good.”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In baking as well. And so the whole concept here is if you have a typical cookie recipe, as an example, the idea is take that recipe, go out to GNC and buy some protein powder and put that in place of the wheat flour. Go out to Amazon and get some alternative sweetener. Use that instead of sugar. Add some cocoa powder and try to make cookies that taste halfway decent. It's difficult. There's actually a whole science behind baking. And so”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so me, I think along with a lot of other type 1 diabetics, start eating the same thing every day because it's very predictable. And so it kind of takes the mental load off of managing diabetes. So I think I had mentioned that I had started eating eggs every day for breakfast, snacking on nothing but nuts, and then eat chicken breast every day for lunch. And then I get some spinach and some other things like that as well. But it was largely the same food over and over and over again. Living in New York, New York's like the food capital of the world, maybe, or one of the food caps of the world. All the new fun, exciting stuff tends to come to New York first, and it's very exciting, right? So I'm looking at all this stuff and I can't eat any of it. So to your point, I got really interested in the opposite, which was just meal prepping. And it was just the same thing every day. But along with the grilling of chicken breasts, I actually got interested in”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I was just trying to. I was trying to get a lot of people using it and then think about that afterwards, right? So I got a lot of press and a lot of people signed up for it. Then the news media moves on and there's not as much talk around the bubble and the social media algorithm problem. And I kind of went into this valley where the number of new people that were signing up every day had dropped way down. And I was trying to figure out what's the future of this thing.”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, so one of the more, quote, successful projects that I worked on was Trump had been elected president in 2016. And one of the things that came out of it was this kind of increasing polarization in the country and the idea that in social media you were being fed information that confirmed your pre-existing beliefs. And so I had started and built this Chrome extension. It was called Escape My Bubble. Very straightforward. And it would insert into your Facebook news feed articles that challenged your beliefs. That got widely covered in the media at the time. I think it was written about or mentioned in the New York Times. And that drove close to 100,000 signups for the free.”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I knew how to write software and build fully functioning apps and websites. And you can do that without spending any money other than your time. And so I was very interested in that path. I actually. Be frank, probably didn't spend as much time as I should have or could have thinking about hey, well, what industry might I want to go into? What I might want to do. I just knew I wanted to help people and I thought that if I could come forward with a product or service that helped people and made their lives better, that they would pay me for it and I could worry, you know, and the rest of it would fall into line after that.”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yep. I think there's just kind of this night and day difference in my mind at least as it relates to owning your own destiny. And so I was all in on making something happen. So I spent some time. I was working on a number of different projects. I can't tell you or even remember 20 plus different apps, websites, services products that I'd probably launched in the course of this. And I had tried certain things that I was very familiar with and I felt more strongly about and I'd found other things where it's like, huh, it seems like there's a group of people that have this challenge. Let me just go try to solve it. And so I quickly realized if you're going to have the motivation to succeed, you're going to have to really believe deeply in what it is that you're doing. I think that was a good lesson that I learned early on because otherwise when the going gets tough, you just want to throw in the towel and move on to the next idea rather than double down and really figure out how to overcome the challenge.”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, definitely. Yep. It was strange and it could be a bit expensive as well, but it worked for me, and so I stuck with it.”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so once I learned kind of how my body responded to different types of foods, I started eating basically eggs every day for breakfast and snacking on nothing but nuts. And so I started eating a lot of that and it reduced how much insulin I had to take by a lot.”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah. At first, I was still eating a lot of Philly cheesesteaks and things like that and all the bread that comes along with it. One of the reasons I actually went to Penn was when I was visiting a friend there, I noticed all the great food trucks in Philadelphia. And so I was very excited about all the different options for eating on campus. But yeah, with diabetes, it's challenging, right? And then you start to learn, you know, as a diabetic type one diabetic, you're taught to take insulin in ratio to how many carbs you eat. And so if you eat more carbs, you take more insulin. If you eat fewer carbs, you take less insulin. The challenge, or I think the opportunity is, is if you eat more carbs and therefore have to take more insulin, if you get it wrong in terms of the number of amount of insulin you're supposed to take, you can end up easily taking too much or too little. And then obviously insulin is or was relatively expensive. So less insulin is less money.”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's an amazing. I've done it. I did it for about a year, and it's amazing. It's really hard because you have to really be careful about keeping your carbohydrates to under 30 grams a day or 40 grams a day. And this diet, as you say, was introduced in the 20s to help people treat epilepsy and was found to be really successful. Even though you were diagnosed with diabetes, you were still eating a lot of carbohydrates, which no one told you was not a good idea.”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, the idea is that your brain is using sugar or glucose to power itself. And so the idea is can you starve the brain of sugar and kind of reduce the, I'd say the electrical signaling inside the brain so that you don't have a seizure or reduce the chances of having a seizure?”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's different types of epilepsy, but to your point, the ketogenic diet was first invented, quote-unquote, in the early 1900s, and it was for the purpose of treating epileptic patients.”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I was diagnosed with epilepsy as well. I had woken up in the morning. I was taking a shower, and then I had a seizure. My mom heard me, and then she called the ambulance, and I went to the hospital and was diagnosed.”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, luckily, you know, UPen's got a great health system, so I got an endocrinologist there. You get a dietician that specializes in diabetes care as well. But yeah, it was a lot. My parents were always calling and checking in. What's your blood sugar? What's your A1C? How are you feeling? That sort of thing.”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's wild. And so now you are diagnosed with this condition that you have to manage and you're about to start college and your parents are going to go back to California. Man, that's a lot. That's heavy. It's like you are now going to have to completely change your diet and do all these, and you're on your own.”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, probably 17 at the time. Yep. They don't have, or we don't have a full complete understanding of type 1 diabetes. But what we know is that something happens in the body. It triggers your white blood cells to attack the insulin producing cells in your pancreas, leaving you without the ability to produce insulin.”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, yep. Go to the emergency room. And one of the first things they do is test my blood sugar, find that it's over a thousand, and that's when they diagnose me with type 1 diabetes.”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So I was actually to step back, right? So a couple months before visiting Penn, I was starting to feel thirsty a lot. And so I got to the point where I couldn't go through a whole hour-long class without having to leave go get some water from the water fountain and come back. And then it got to the point that I couldn't drive from school back home without stopping at a convenience store to buy a gallon of water and drink it on the way back. And so I'm getting more and more thirsty. I don't know why I'm getting thirsty. And to me, drinking water is a good thing, so I wasn't too concerned about it. And then I got accepted into Penn. And so I went to Penn for this kind of new student day. And I got there with my family. We're staying in a hotel the night before this whole thing scheduled to start. We walk around campus and I pass out as we're walking around campus.”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. Okay. A very sort of life changing thing happens to you in the senior year of high school. And I think it happens during a visit to Penn. Tell me the story. You're a senior in high school. It's 2009 and you're in Philadelphia visiting Penn. Why are you there? You're visiting because you're presumably because you want to go there. Tell me the story.”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I did not know. I did not do any of that stuff. I don't think I really contemplated starting a business, nor do I think I thought of my dad as an entrepreneur to your point, even though he is.”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My parents were big on education, but they were also big on you deciding what you want to do with your life as opposed to us telling you what you should do with your life. So my mom, I think, hoped for a while that I'd become a veterinarian because it'd be easy to take over my dad's practice and then run that practice myself. But both of them were very hands off and didn't really say, oh, become a doctor or become a lawyer or anything like that.”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A few years ago, I tried the ketogenic diet, and for about a year I ate no bread, no pasta, almost no sugar at all, and I will tell you, it is brutally hard, because once you start paying attention, you realize that carbs and sugar are in nearly everything. A bagel with cream cheese can blow the whole day, so can a plate of pasta, or for that matter, a bowl of cereal. Americans spend somewhere around twenty billion dollars a year on cereal alone. There's sixty feet of it in almost any grocery store, dozens and dozens of brands. But for decades, it was basically the same stuff. Corn or rice, a lot of sugar, a little bit of color, and a different name on the box. Today's guest, Krishna Kalian wanted to make something different, a high protein, low sugar, low carb breakfast cereal that actually tasted good.”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I happen to meet a friend in Central Park, and I had told him that I'd been trying out the cereal I was making, and he could try some if he wanted. And then he Venmoed me for it. And I think he Venmoed me like $7.99 or $8.99, what looks like a grocery store price. And that's when it kind of struck me, oh, you could actually make food and sell it to people.”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT