Stacy Madison, co-founder of Stacy’s Pita Chips, recounts how she got funding to start her company in 1997, which was later acquired by PepsiCo/Frito Lay for $250 million, on the How I Built This podcast with Guy Raz.

Madison and her then-boyfriend Mark Andrus founded the company after a period where they were selling pita sandwiches from a converted hot dog cart in Boston. The couple decided to bake the leftover pita into chips, adding spices for taste.

From the podcast:

“I started working with the neighborhood development center and they helped me write a business plan. I really networked with everybody I could possibly draw information from. So there was the neighborhood center, there was, I think, Jewish Vocational Services in downtown Boston and there was this one girl that used to eat at the cart and she said to me, ‘How do you know if you have enough bread? And she’d ask all these weird questions, and one day I said, ‘Why are you asking me these weird questions?’ She said, ‘Well, I teach a business plan boot camp and I use your cart as an example all the time. And I said, ‘Really?’ I’m like, ‘Can I take that class?’ She’s like, ‘Yeah, you want to take, you come on over.’ And I went and I took an eight week business plan boot camp.”