HOME / ENTERTAINMENT / TV

Kevin O'Leary booed by fellow 'Shark Tank' judges for hating on a contestant's product: 'You're still...'

"Let me give you something that is not encouraging. I hate this very very much and I’m out," Kevin O'Leary said.

'Shark Tank' judge Kevin O'Leary doesn't beat around the bush and is blunt when it comes to sharing his thoughts on the pitches made by contestants on the ABC business program. During an episode of 'Shark Tank' Season 13, aspiring entrepreneurs Mark Lareau and Mark Apelt pitched their product, Blowzee, a device created for blowing out the birthday candles without spreading germs to Sharks Mark Cuban, Lori Greiner, Daymond John, Robert Herjavec, and O'Leary. However, from the get-go, the latter hated Lareau and Apelt's idea. 

In the episode, Lareau and Apelt asked the Sharks for $100,000 in exchange for 15% of their company. During their pitch, Lareau explained, "I always thought it was gross that people blow all over a cake before serving it. Would you let me kid blow all over your cheeseburger, of course not, and it's not just that it seems gross, the science actually proved it. Journal of Food Research found that blowing out the candles on a cake can increase the bacteria by more than fourteen hundred percent."

Apelt added, "So with recent events, societal norms around hygiene have changed forever, and that's why we invented Blowzee. When you blow into the open end of the Blowzee, the air pressure activates a battery-powered fan, clean air blows out the candles, and your germy breath is directed away from the cake." However, the company had abysmal sales numbers, which had all the Sharks refusing to invest in Blowzee.

At the time of recording, Lareau and Apelt had done only $12,000 in sales. As per Market Realist, O'Leary argued, “Why doesn’t anybody care? $12,000 is actually nothing. So you're really bad marketers.” The founders explained that they paid only the engineers and consultants $2,000 before launching the product in the market. An impressed Herjavec quipped, "What a great lesson for everyone at home." 

O'Leary continued to not show any interest and replied, “What’s the great lesson? Don’t have sales?” Cuban chimed, "Nobody starts with a million dollars of sales in one day," to which O'Leary replied, “That’s very encouraging." O'Leary further told the entrepreneurs, "Let me give you something that is not encouraging. I hate this very very much and I’m out.” Following O'Leary's harsh criticism, the rest of the Sharks booed him.

Cuban praised the duo by saying, “Look, guys, I give you a ton of credit because you are what 'Shark Tank' is all about. You have an idea, you sort it out with all your friends so they like the idea, will it work…then you go through the whole hassle of getting it done. That’s the American dream." But he also noted the drawbacks of their product. "The challenge, though, is that you're still not a company or a product and that's just not enough for me to make an investment right now, so for those reasons I'm out." At the end of the day, not a single Shark made an offer to Lareau and Apelt.