via grw

A former bakery owner and professional bicyclist, he was choking down PowerBars for energy in the middle of a daylong 175-mile ride. "I couldn't make the last one go down, and that's when I had an epiphany -- make a product that actually tasted good."

-- Gary Erickson, founder and CEO of Clif Bar. Quoted in Fortune Small Business, October 2003.

Notice in it the three key elements of a founding story:

* A quest which is romantically appealing to the target market,
* An epiphany,
* A trivial and obvious idea claimed as original.