INQUISITR.COM / Entertainment

Kevin O’Leary Has More Scathing Words For Pavlok Entrepreneur When ‘Shark Tank’ Season Finale Airs

By Sarah Field
Published on: 15:51 PST, May 22, 2016

Fans who watched the promo for Friday night’s season finale of Shark Tank knew things would get personal. It was revealed one entrepreneur would expressly take a deal from any of the sharks — except one. It turned out that the entrepreneur was Maneesh Sethi of Pavlok, a device that emits an electric shock when someone indulges in a bad habit. The shark was Kevin O’Leary. When the program aired, O’Leary didn’t hold back on Twitter, adding some extra words of contempt for the businessman who refused his offer when all the other sharks were out.

For those who missed it, the powers that be at Shark Tank posted nearly two minutes of the encounter on social media. In the clip, Sethi is seen rejecting O’Leary’s offer. It took a bit of prodding from Barbara Corcoran to get to the reason why. When it’s revealed that the entrepreneur would just rather not do a deal with “Mr. Wonderful,” he’s greeted with an expletive (actually, two) and sent out the door. The other sharks comforted O’Leary after Sethi left, with Mark Cuban calling the businessman a “con artist” and Herjavec telling his fellow panelist not to feel bad.

When the show aired, O’Leary did not hesitate to criticize the pitch on Twitter. In one tweet, O’Leary seemed to explain why he originally offered Sethi a deal — the product was making money — without spoiling the dramatic end of the program. Pavlok and Sethi did not directly address the incident, or the Shark Tank appearance at all, on social media after the show was broadcast.

While it’s not uncommon — in fact it’s often promoted as a “shark fight” when it happens — for the investors to get testy over a deal, entrepreneurs very rarely say things that are personal affronts to the sharks. It would seem to be a deal-killer. That was certainly the case for Pavlok, although Sethi made the remarks to O’Leary after everyone else on the panel had decided not to invest.

Carter Matt said that O’Leary dodged a bullet because the product might not actually turn out to have long-term success. The site called the Pavlok pitch “a weird way to close the season.” Ironically, Sethi himself said on the program he liked the structure of O’Leary’s proposed deal; he just didn’t want to partner with that particular shark.

Maneesh Sethi is also the man behind the website Hack the System. The “About” page describes Sethi’s background as a student at Stanford University and book author. A blog post from September, 2014, about one year before his Shark Tank appearance was taped, says Pavlok is based on “proprietary behavior change technology” that the company had spent two years developing.

If O’Leary has any lingering hurt feelings, he can take comfort in the words of his fellow sharks.

Reruns of Shark Tank air on ABC and CNBC.

[Photo by Andrew Burton/Getty Images]

Share this article: Kevin O’Leary Has More Scathing Words For Pavlok Entrepreneur When ‘Shark Tank’ Season Finale Airs
shark tank Kevin O'Leary
More from Inquisitr