Will Nitze

A neuroscientist walks into the snack aisle.

Will Nitze runs IQBAR, a brain-and-body nutrition company that has sold more than 100 million bars and now sits in over 10,000 retail doors, Costco included. The part worth pausing on: he formulated the first ones himself, with no food-science background, learning the chemistry as he went.

Most founder stories open with a credential. This one opens with a contradiction. Nitze has a Harvard degree in psychology and neuroscience, and his first job out of that education was selling software to oil-and-gas companies at Wood Mackenzie, the energy-insights firm. Cognitive science to crude oil. It is not the resume you would draw up for someone about to reinvent the protein bar.

What connected the two was a private experiment. Working in software, Nitze noticed he felt terrible, and traced it to a diet built on carbs and coffee. He changed what he ate, felt the difference, and landed on a question that turned into a company: what if you could fuel a brain the way an athlete fuels a body? IQBAR is the long answer.

Start before you are ready

IQBAR did not begin with a factory or a food scientist. It began on Kickstarter, which Nitze treated less as a fundraiser and more as a sales tool. Roughly half the backers came from direct outreach: email, LinkedIn, friends and family. He raised the campaign, then chased venture capital only once the numbers demanded it, deliberately keeping rounds small to hold onto control.

His own framing of the hardest part is unsentimental. The toughest component of any startup, he has said, is just starting, and you should assume that whatever you launch with is not where you will finish. IQBAR proved him right on its own product. It started as a brain-health story and gradually repositioned as a clean-label food with broader shelf appeal, because the customers told him to.

The messy middle

The lab and the loading dock are different planets. The real world, in his words, is vastly messier than the theoretical one, with never-ending fires to put out across every part of the company. His growth playbook reads more hands-on than glamorous: direct-to-consumer feedback loops to learn fast, and Costco roadshows where he stood next to the product and watched people decide.

IQBAR even reached the final round of Shark Tank consideration before being passed over. The reason was almost a compliment. The brand had grown too large to make for interesting television. Somewhere between zero revenue in 2018 and a projected $50 million in 2024, the underdog got too big to play one.

The reset button is a sauna

For a man building a performance-nutrition brand, Nitze is refreshingly blunt about what actually moves the needle. He calls sleep the most effective performance-enhancing drug known to man. His non-negotiables are daily exercise and a sauna session he uses to segment the day and keep burnout from creeping in. Over time he rewrote his own scorecard, trading financial outcomes, accolades, and status for something he describes as building a great life across work, home, and health.

These days he also asks the questions. Nitze hosts Eating Glass, a podcast he co-created to interview founders about what it is genuinely like to start, scale, and exit a company. The title is the joke and the thesis. Building a company feels like eating glass, and he would rather talk about that honestly than sell the highlight reel.

Trace it back and the through-line is consistent. A competitive Jersey kid who sold Linsanity t-shirts in college, a neuroscience grad who got curious about his own diet, an operator who would rather hold control than chase a headline valuation. IQBAR is the brand. The product, really, is a way of paying attention, to the brain, to the customer, and to the unglamorous fires that running a company actually involves.