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“You can't control your luck, but you can control how many opportunities you have to be lucky.”
In this week's Throwback Thursday segment, we hear from Dan Kurzrock, co-founder and Chief Grain Officer of Regrained—a sustainable food company that turns spent grain from breweries into a nutritious alternative flour. Their products are on shelves at Whole Foods, and the company holds a patent on its process.
What started as a college home-brewing hobby at UCLA (at age 19, making sure Fridays were class-free) led to a 10-year journey. Dan noticed that every batch of beer left behind a cooler full of spent grain—enough oatmeal to feed a middle school—and started baking bread with it to sell to friends. That side hustle had a side hustle.
Since the original episode, Regrained has developed and deployed patented technology that also works with other ingredient streams—including oats from the oat-milking process. The technology has evolved far beyond the original consumer snack line.
Dan's advice for staying the course: find micro-moments of perspective. For him that's mountain biking, skiing—and reading fiction. "I get more energized and more inspired, frankly, a lot of times from fiction than from business books."
And on putting yourself out there: "You can't control your luck, but you can control how many opportunities you have to be lucky. You don't get what you don't ask for."
This story was originally featured as Episode 606.
