Meet the engineer who sold his company for almost $200 million and used the money to open a chocolate factory
The smell of freshly shelled cacao nibs hits you upon entering Dandelion Chocolate — part café, part chocolate factory in San Francisco’s Mission District. It's hard to imagine cofounder Todd Masonis can get anything done here.
"I eat chocolate every day," Masonis told me when we first met in fall 2014. He's a modern-day Willy Wonka who dreams of disrupting the chocolate industry through small-batch production and simple ingredients.
Masonis is no stranger to startups. After graduating from Stanford in 2001, he and friend Cameron Ring set out to make something new. They launched Plaxo, an online address-book service, with help from serial entrepreneur Sean Parker.
Parker, who cofounded Napster, dreamt up a software that auto-updated users’ address books when one of their contacts moved, changed companies, or got a new phone. Masonis called it “the precursor to social networking.”
At its peak, Plaxo had 20 million users, employed 80 people, and raised $28 million in funding. In 2008, Masonis and Ring sold the company to Comcast for between $150 and $170 million.
Source: TechCrunch
Masonis and Ring stayed at Comcast for a year before taking off to have some fun. Masonis went on an archaeological dig in England, biked across Scotland, and toured family-run chocolate factories in France. That’s when he got hooked.
When Masonis returned, he and Ring bought a toaster oven and a coffee roaster and built a mechanism out of PVC pipes that removed cocoa nibs from their husks. The pair started making chocolate in a friend’s garage.
With family and techie friends serving as taste-testers, Masonis and Ring ran with it. They leased a former auto-repair shop on Valencia Street in the Mission and transformed the space into a chocolate factory.
Doors opened in 2012 and a café was added a couple of months later. Every seat in the house provides a view of the chocolate-making.
Dandelion’s chocolate tastes different than Hershey's or Ghirardelli's bars. "It doesn't taste like candy," Masonis says. Each bar has just two ingredients: cacao and sugar.
Without added cocoa butter, vanilla, or lecithin to hide behind, each cacao bean needs to be perfect. Staff meticulously sorts beans in the burlap sacks they receive, weeding out the ones that are cracked or otherwise defective.
They roast, crack, and grind the beans in-house, and package each bar by hand. Dandelion products can be purchased in-store and online.
Should you happen to be in San Francisco, a visit to the factory is worth the trip. You can sip on European-style hot chocolate, which is thick like fondue and served warm.
Or try the Brownie Bite Flight, three cupcake-size brownies. Each contains a chocolate of a different origin and offers a unique flavor.
This S'more looks almost too beautiful to eat. A homemade graham cracker cradles a chocolate square and marshmallow. It's toasted to order.
Ring works in an advisory role at Dandelion while pursuing other ventures. Masonis, like any tech entrepreneur, is never finished perfecting his product ...
He applies best practices in research and development that he learned at Plaxo in the test kitchen, in search of the purest chocolate recipe. It's a sweet gig.
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