From Rejection to Reinvention: How PATH WATER Became a Movement
The Tony Robbins Channel
Tony Robbins
4.3 • 6.9K Ratings
🗓️ 14 January 2026
⏱️ 54 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Ever wonder what it actually takes to turn hundreds of "no's" into a category-defining business?
From rejection after rejection to building the fastest-growing water company in the world, Shadi Bakour's journey is the ultimate story of perseverance, focus, and execution. Recorded live at 2025 Business Mastery, this episode features Shadi, Co-founder and CEO of PATHWATER, sharing with Tony how a simple idea became a category-defining brand.
Discover how Shadi navigated massive challenges—selling water door-to-door, scaling into over 60,000 stores, and eliminating more than 500 million plastic bottles—by staying resourceful, mission-driven, and authentic. This conversation dives deep into the mindset, resilience, and strategies that separate founders who quit from those who redefine their industries.
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Tony Robbins is a #1 New York Times best-selling author, entrepreneur, philanthropist, and the nation's #1 Life and Business Strategist. For more than four and a half decades, more than 100 million people from 195 countries have enjoyed the warmth, humor, and transformational power of his business and personal development events.
Mr. Robbins is the author of seven internationally bestselling books, including three #1 New York Times bestsellers: Money: Master the Game, Unshakeable, and Life Force. He created the #1 personal and professional development program of all time, and more than 10 million people have attended his live seminars.
Anthony Robbins is the chairman of a holding company comprising more than 110 privately held businesses with combined sales exceeding $7 billion a year. He has been named in the top 50 of Worth Magazine's 100 most powerful people in global finance for three consecutive years, honored by Accenture as one of the "Top 50 Business Intellectuals in the World''; by Harvard Business Press as one of the "Top 200 Business Gurus"; and by American Express as one of the "Top Six Business Leaders in the World" to coach its entrepreneurial clients. Fortune's recent cover article named him the "CEO Whisperer."
He is a leader called upon by leaders, and has worked with four US presidents, top entertainers -- from Aerosmith to Green Day, to Usher and Pitbull, as well as athletes like Serena Williams, Andre Agassi, and the 2022 NBA Champion Golden State Warriors. Billionaire business leaders seek his advice as well; casino magnate Steve Wynn, and Salesforce.com founder Marc Benioff are among those grateful for his coaching.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, thanks for listening to the Tony Robbins podcast. This is just a quick note about this episode |
| 0:07.2 | in case you'd rather watch and see the video of this conversation, and that's found at |
| 0:12.9 | YouTube.com backslash Tony Robbins Live. You'd like to listen. You're in the right place. Okay, |
| 0:19.9 | here's Tony. Most of the innovation in the water space had been focused on the liquid inside of the bottle, |
| 0:28.6 | but not on the actual container, the packaging itself. |
| 0:31.6 | Complexity is the ending of execution. |
| 0:33.6 | Everyone else is trying to change what's inside. |
| 0:35.6 | They changed what was outside. |
| 0:38.3 | We hired someone overseas to create a list of every single manufacturer in the United States |
| 0:44.3 | when we just started calling them. |
| 0:46.3 | And it was a list of 500 names. |
| 0:48.3 | We were down to the last three on the list. |
| 0:51.3 | You know, we're sitting on the curb. |
| 0:53.3 | Our product wasn't moving. It was collecting dust on the shelf. We're like we're sitting on the curb. Our product wasn't moving. |
| 0:54.5 | It was collecting dust on the shelf. We're like, what are we going to do? We have at this point |
| 0:58.7 | negative $400 in our bank account. There's no replacement, the relentlessness, period. |
| 1:04.1 | We're the water company that doesn't want to sell you any more water. |
| 1:10.1 | Tell us a little bit. |
| 1:11.6 | You started out at a very young age, being pretty advanced as I was doing some homework |
| 1:15.9 | on you in terms of like you were going to college, doing college courses when you were like |
| 1:20.5 | 13 or 14 years old. |
| 1:21.7 | Yeah, I was blessed. |
... |
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