- Gen X founder and CEO of That’s It Nutrition walked away from a stable career path in medicine to instead get his MBA and build an over $100-million-a-year fruit snack empire. Now, even with three degrees to his name, Lior Lewensztain tells Fortune that he doesn’t even look at degrees when hiring. His message to Gen Z: Effort and adaptability matter more for success than what you study in school.
For many young workers, today’s job market makes a straight career path feel like a luxury. Luckily, health care related fields have little to worry about, with AI experts saying robotic nurses are not in the picture anytime soon, and unemployment rates among college graduates reaching just 3% for biology majors and 1.5% for nursing, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. It’s no surprise then that Gen Z are flocking to these “more secure” health care jobs.
But for Lior Lewensztain, there was an even bigger problem that overshadowed job security: He was struggling to believe in the profession altogether. As a medical school graduate, he was in part put off by insurance companies that have made medicine less of a public service. And while a traditional medical career promised financial stability, the 46-year-old took stock that he could have far more impact—and even more wealth—by skipping residency and heading back to school for his MBA.
“I realized I could make a bigger, scalable impact by using food as preventative medicine, a concept few were talking about when we launched 13 years ago,” Lewensztain, now the founder and CEO of That’s It Nutrition, tells Fortune.
“Pivoting to business school and starting the company quickly became the only path that made sense.”
And make sense it did: Today his company brings in over $100 million a year selling healthy fruit bars and snacks at 85,000 retail locations, including Walmart, Target, and Costco. For Gen Z starting out, whether in health care or entrepreneurship, Lewensztain’s advice is clear: Success comes down to effort.
“If you’re hesitant, somebody else will take your spot in a heartbeat,” he says.
Despite holding three degrees, this founder tells Gen Z learning on the job matters more than a diploma
With three degrees to his name, Lewensztain is seemingly a poster child for higher education.
However, as a business leader, when he’s hiring for a role, someone’s educational background is the least of his worries. In fact, when looking at résumés, he skips over degrees and instead is focused on candidates’ skills.
“I really try to look at what kind of thinking you can do on the fly,” Lewensztain lists the green flags he’s looking for instead. “Can you think out of the box? Do you feel like you can handle situations? Because for us at least on a day-to-day basis, there are always challenges that come across all different whether it’s operations, sales, you have to be able to pivot very, very quickly.”
And while he adds that going to business school opened doors “a little,” as well as his mind to different ways of thinking, he admits the best training comes from being on the job—especially now that the average MBA student takes out over $80,000 in student loans. “The last 13 years provided way more experience and insight into how to operate than the 15 months did for getting the degree.”
Peter Thiel and Reid Hoffman have echoed similar sentiments
The immense value of getting your hands dirty and being adaptive to the job is a mindset shared by many business leaders.
For example, billionaire Peter Thiel’s fellowship encourages entrepreneurs to skip or leave college in favor of going all-in on their business idea, and he hands out $200,000 to help make it a reality. And while not every idea is successful, the program’s fellows, including Figma cofounder Dylan Field and Scale AI creator Lucy Guo, have started businesses with a combined worth of over $100 billion.
Billionaire LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman echoed this sentiment: “What you should take forward from your college degree isn’t necessarily the thing you learned in X-101,” Hoffman said in a video posted to YouTube in June. “It isn’t specific degrees, specific courses, [or] even necessarily specific skills that are relevant to you.”
Rather, he said, “it’s your capacity to say, ‘Hey, here is the new tool set, here’s the new challenge.’”
