After 40 years as an entrepreneur, Keith Belling says one of his biggest secrets to success is to “surround yourself with smart people.” As co-founder of popchips, a brand of low-fat potato chips, Belling hangs out with the likes of Katy Perry, inventor of the new katy’s kettle korn flavor, and Ashton Kutcher, who is the company’s president of pop culture. (Seriously, he has his own business cards.)
Belling's passion for entrepreneurship started when he was a 10-year-old salesman in his father’s furniture store and later drove him to co-found AllBusiness.com, a business advice site that he sold to NBC for a reported $225 million.
In a somewhat unexpected move, Belling entered the snack food industry in 2007, co-founding popchips. Since then, his success has impressed many—in just about six years, the San Francisco-based company has built a 90-person team and revenues have reportedly skyrocketed from around $6 million in 2008 to around $90 million in 2012.
“You can’t underestimate the importance of having passion," Belling says. "Being an entrepreneur takes you on a roller coaster of emotions and you need passion to get through.”
It’s a little random to go from running a business content site to a snack food company. What’s the connection?
There really isn’t a connection [laughs]. I took time off after the AllBusiness sale and tinkered around for a bit, helping other companies and figuring out what I wanted to do. I’m not the type of entrepreneur who can just flip an internal switch and start my next venture. Something really has to grab me.
What grabbed you about the snack food industry?
Almost every day that I was at my San Francisco office, I’d go to my neighborhood deli and grab a sandwich and a bag of chips. I’ve always prided myself on being healthy and I’d get embarrassed about buying such fatty chips, so I’d hide them under my sandwich while in the checkout line just in case someone saw me. One day I realized how ridiculous that was and decided to see if there were healthier snack options. There weren’t, so I looked into creating a new option.
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How did you get things going with popchips?
I called up a few friends and they were interested, so we looked into healthy ways to make potato chips. The topic of rice cakes came up, so we looked into buying a rice cake plant and making chips with little or no oil. We found a plant in Southern California in 2005 and purchased it. It was an awesome move because it was a functioning plant. We continued to make rice cakes for private labels and then incorporated our product as time went on. Today, the plant makes popchips almost exclusively.
What about funding? Did you hit any roadblocks?
Funding wasn’t much of a problem. I put in some money and we’ve been able to attract investors that are really passionate about our product. We did hit a roadblock early on when we realized that the accounting practices around our manufacturing business were out of sync. It wasn’t anything horrible, but our bookkeeper had made some pretty serious mistakes. We had to stop everything at that point and sort through our financial statements. It took about three or four months and was a big headache.
Tell me about Ashton Kutcher. How did you get him involved in your brand?
Originally, Ashton was simply an investor. Over time, though, he became more interested in the product and in late 2010 I went down to his office with Rohan [Oza, an adviser,] to chat. He told us that he wanted to be what 50 Cent was to vitaminwater. Ashton was so excited. I remember him jumping up from his chair, waving his hands and talking about all the things he could do to help the brand, like be the president of pop culture and help us with our social media.
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What did you think of Ashton’s ideas?
Honestly, I thought I was being Punk’d. I thought that there was no way popchips would be so lucky to have him onboard. But he was serious. We made him business cards and now he is a strategic partner with us. It’s pretty great. As part of his appointment, we put an ad out for a vice president of pop culture and ended up receiving 300 submissions. We hired a woman named Diane to work for one year with Ashton. She was great and is still with the company.
What is it like to work at popchips? Do you have any fun perks for employees?
I’d say that we have a work hard, play hard culture. I don’t know if I’d call it a perk, but at our monthly all-hands meetings we pick a "pop star of the month." They get recognized on the call and given $1,000 to contribute to a charity of their choice. Our employees love it, and we talk about the charity and what the money went toward on the next month’s call.
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Katie Morell is an independent journalist based in San Francisco. She regularly contributes to Hemispheres, USA Today, Consumers Digest, Destination Weddings & Honeymoons, Crain’s Chicago Business and others.
Photos from top: iStockphoto, Courtesy of Popchips
