This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
What's up my friends? Welcome to Side Hustle School. And by the way, Happy Thanksgiving. This episode is going out on Thanksgiving Day, at least the US Thanksgiving in the fall or autumn of 2020. I am thankful for you, whether you are in the United States and celebrate Thanksgiving, or if you had your Thanksgiving already for our Canadians, or if you don't care about Thanksgiving at all, I'm still thankful for you.
I'm looking forward to having some pie today. So wherever you are in the world, I hope you work on getting some pie. Nothing wrong with that. Pie is a good thing. All right, this is our segment we call Throwback Thursday, also known as Where Are They Now, where we take an in-depth look at someone whose story has evolved considerably since we first featured them.
This has been one of my favorite segments of the year. Last week we heard from a personal trainer who pumps up pancakes. Today, in our latest feature, and to continue the food theme, we'll hear from the co-founder of Regrained, which churns upcycled grains from breweries into delicious snacks. What started as a collegiate adventure in getting around the legal drinking age led to a 10-year journey, and it's now a full-time business. Pretty incredible story, pretty incredible product.
And a lot has happened since we first featured Regrained, I don't know, back in episode 606, I think, 606. So yeah, it's been a while. Let's hear directly from Dan, the co-founder. I'll be back at the end to wrap us up. [Music]
My name's Dan Kurzrock.
I am the co-founder and chief grain officer of Regrained, and we were on episode 606. My side hustle is actually currently my full-time hustle. The company is called Regrained. We are a sustainable food company. We're primarily an ingredient company, actually.
We have a patent around this technology we developed to rescue food. We work with breweries. We take the grain that they've already used to make beer. We make a really cool, nutritious, alternative flower from that that can be used in a wide range of applications. We've got consumer products that are on the shelves at places like Whole Foods.
So definitely it's a hustle hustle. I got started with the business actually as an underage, undergraduate home brewer. I was making beer at age 19 when I was at UCLA. Every time I made a batch, which was about every week, we made sure to not have class on Fridays, and every Friday we'd make a batch of beer. And five gallons at a time, about a third of a keg.
Every time we made beer, we'd have all this grain left over, like a whole cooler full of it. It was like enough oatmeal to feed a middle school that would be hauled to the curb and didn't have much to do with it. So I started making loaves of bread with that grain, and we'd actually sell those loaves of bread to friends. So my side hustle had a side hustle to begin with while I was a college student that would then generate the proceeds in order to buy more ingredients to brew more beer for free. And that really sent me down this line of inquiry asking about what the industry at large was doing, and really identified that there was this huge opportunity to close the loop in a really meaningful way, well beyond my own home brewing hobby, well beyond my aspirations to have a brewery that was also a bakery, to actually work with commercial breweries and commercial food producers and kind of help connect the dots in a new way to create better for you and better for the planet food products.
So much has happened since regrained was on the show. Around that time we were in really active R&D on developing the technology that ultimately has become the main driver of the business. One of the reasons why no one had figured this out before is because there's actually some technical hurdles around safely and efficiently taking the grain from breweries and creating food products out of it. We worked directly with USDA. We actually have a patent on this process and one of the things that we've discovered over the last few years, after we've kind of engineered and built and deployed this, is that it actually works really well for other ingredient streams.
So we can work with the oats, for example, for the milking process and create similar ingredients from that. In terms of advice, one of the things that I always like to share with aspiring entrepreneurs, be it a side hustle or a full-time hustle, is to make sure that you don't burn out. And I've been building this business now for, you could argue 10 years, right? It hasn't been full-time, that amount of time, but it's an endurance sport and not burning out requires that you take care of yourself. If you want to build a sustainable business, you've got to be personally sustainable too.
And so while you might not be able to take huge vacations and things like that to reset, I think you can really find these micro moments of finding perspective. For me, that's been a lot of mountain bike riding and skiing and things like that that kind of clear your head. They're really physical and that's where you do your best thinking. Another thing for me that helps me not burn out and so inspired is reading a lot, especially a lot of fiction, actually. You think of a lot of, you might think, oh, I got to do all my reading time on business books and on nonfiction, but actually I find personally that I get more energized and actually more inspired.
And I think I learned more, frankly, a lot of times from reading fiction and the alternative perspectives that can come up from that. And taking a bigger step back, just like practical advice, when you're building a business, you can't control your luck, right? But you can control how many opportunities you have to be lucky. Like there is a numbers game that you're facing every day with the business. And the more conversations you have, the more you put yourself out there to kind of get lucky, that's what really makes a difference.
For example, with fundraising, you're going to get more no's than yes's and you might only need one yes in order to get what you need. And that might be true for sales and distribution too. And so you don't get what you don't ask for and you really want to be generating as many of these opportunities to earn that yes as you can. - Thanks so much, Dan, really appreciate that. Not burning out means taking care of yourself.
Look for those micro moments, I love that advice. And I also read a lot of fiction, more fiction than nonfiction, just like Dan. Go and take more chances to be lucky. That's some great advice to close us out. 2020 has been our year of interaction.
If you have a question, if you'd like to update us about your side hustle, whatever it is, come to sidehustleschool.com/questions. If you'd like to learn about regrained, just head to regrained.com. That's R-E-G-R-A-I-N-E-D.com. Last but not least, our show notes for today are at sidehustleschool.com/1426. Thank you so much for joining me today.
I hope you'll continue to listen. Be sure you're subscribed, tell your friends, and once more, Happy Thanksgiving. My name is Chris Guillebeau, this is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
from the Onward Project.
