4.6 • 4.4K Ratings
🗓️ 2 October 2025
⏱️ 37 minutes
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Chomps co-founders Rashid Ali and Pete Maldonado had an unusual side hustle: selling meat sticks online. The co-founders join host Jeff Berman to reveal the phone call from Trader Joe’s that changed everything, how they used lessons from failed startups, and how they built Chomps into a snack empire.
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| 0:00.0 | Scaling a business in the US can feel like a maze. Each state has its own payroll, benefits, and compliance rules, pulling your focus away from growth, which is why founders use Deal. |
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| 0:57.1 | My dad always kind of gave me a hard time saying, you know, you're the only son that doesn't |
| 1:01.5 | have a master's degree. I never saw a point to get an MBA. And so this to me was like a living |
| 1:07.0 | case study. Like, let's do this. Let's see if I can get it off the ground. That business Rashid Ali wanted to use as a living case study. Like, let's do this. Let's see if I can get it off the ground. |
| 1:17.0 | That business Rashid Ali wanted to use as a living case study, chumps, the wildly popular meat sticks that live in my and countless other travelers snack bags. It's safe to say the company |
| 1:23.2 | has paid off more than an MBA for Rashid at this point. He'll sell about a billion dollars of |
| 1:29.4 | chomps just this year, but it hasn't always been that easy. It was a bad situation, but we could |
| 1:37.2 | always see on the other side. Pete and I do our best work when stress is high, win our backs against |
| 1:43.3 | the wall. Like we both kind of have a bit of a chip on our shoulder where if you want to see us |
| 1:48.0 | work really hard, tell us something's not possible. |
| 1:52.8 | You've got to have incredible talent at every position. |
| 1:55.6 | It's like this huge push. |
| 1:57.3 | There are fires burning when you're going home. |
| 1:59.1 | Can you believe it? |
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