How did the founder of Freshly go from $15 and debt to a $1.5 billion exit?

The Freshly founder, Michael Weistrach, started the business at 35 with $15 in his bank account, after an earlier company had gone bankrupt and left him about a million dollars in debt. He said that pressure gave him urgency: he had three years to pay the debt off, and he saw that the business already had some product-market fit, so he went all in. He grew it to $550 million in sales in a little over five years, almost all of it through Meta ads. He took on many investors and started with full ownership, but when he sold for $1.5 billion he owned about 10%. He argued that giving up that 90% was what made the exit possible, because it brought in the people who helped build it. He credited relentless data focus, asking questions rather than pitching, and simply working harder than everyone else.