Building a Brand and Marriage: | COO of Hint Inc., Theo Goldin (Podcast 139)

But Kara and I have always had a relationship where we help each other with our careers. We have very complementary skills. You know, when she was doing sales at aol, you know, I'd help her put together spreadsheets and, and think about, you know, how to structure things. And, you know, when I was doing stuff and Netscape, you know, if there was weird, like, political stuff going on, Carol would always see right through to understand what was going on with people. And I think we've learned a lot from one another. We're both a lot better, more rounded people than we were when we first met in 92. So we've known each other a hell of a long time. It just didn't seem like a big thing starting a company together. I know that might sound crazy, but it just seems like that's kind of what we do. Why don't we like, actually make that a job?

Theo Golden, COO of Hint Inc. Manages sales operations and R and D. Prior to Hint, Theo served as lead technology counsel for Netscape's online services business and as CEO of Zed Medics, an AI based medical startup acquired by the Robert Bosch Foundation. His earlier career included work in molecular biology research and it. Theo holds a JD from NYU School of Law and is a graduate of Amherst College where he majored in English with significant coursework in chemistry. So, Theo, welcome to the Second in Command podcast.

Well, thanks for having me on.

I've got a couple things that I wanted to ask you about really quickly, and the first one was, what year were you at NYU for law?

Well, I graduated in 94, so I started in the fall of 91.

Do you remember a guy in your class, Monty Beyer? Monte Byer. He was like Jewish kid from Dartmouth, had just come back from backpacking through Southeast Asia. He's now the chief legal counsel for Panda.

No, I don't think I knew him. Although I probably knew a lot of people who meet that description.

Yeah, right.

Working for Panda.

He might have been there. Well, it was, it was because I came back. He and I backpacked through Southeast Asia together for seven months and I showed up in nyu. He was living in NYU residence and started law school that September. Dropped out for about six months because of like Epstein Barr, whatever that thing is, and then went back in again. But he was there right around when you were there. It was my first time ever being in New York City and I actually found NYU and then found the law school and was sitting in the lobby at the dorm and this guy walks in as I'm asking If Monty Byer lives there and he goes, cami, I turned around, he was just walking in from playing squash.

I wasn't that connected to the school when I was there. Maybe that sounds weird, but, you know, in college, I think everyone immerses themselves in the social life of the school. And, you know, it's like your whole life is at school. Then I worked for a couple years. I really don't even remember why I decided to go to law school. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

Well, it's because that's what the smart people did prior to the dot com era.

Yeah, I guess that might be right. And I thought, well, you know, it's useful. And I run into young people all the time, you know, who tell me they're going to law school. And I ask them, why are you going more? Because I want to kind of figure out why I went. They're always like, it's never, I want to be a lawyer. It's like, well, you know, I want to be a sports agent. And it's really like, there are a lot of lawyers who are sports agents. And I always encourage them to not do that. It's expensive. It takes a lot of time, and there are easier ways to become a sports agent. But, you know, I had fun there. I met Kara actually early on during school, and my life just didn't really revolve around school. I probably did, like, you know, there were 15 hours of classes. I probably went to about 10 or 12 of them and did like four or five hours of homework, worked about 25 hours a week, and then did whatever I wanted to. And it wasn't that hard, but it was just kind of a way to get a legal degree and get started.

Wow, I can't believe you're, like, graduating NYU Law School and telling me it wasn't hard. I went to. I did my own. The only undergraduate degree in Canada that had a law major. I went to school in Ottawa at Carleton University. And so I did four years of undergrad law, and I studied my ass off to get a solid 2.0, 2.2 grade point average.

So, you know, it's like there's like a zeitgeist to it. There's kind of like. Like a way people think, like the way they talk about cases. It's like once you kind of see the pattern to it.

I love that. I just didn't study. I didn't study hard enough. I was also starting a fraternity and race, ski racing for the university. And so I was all over the map. But I loved contract law. I liked employment law. I like the international import, export stuff. Like, I was fascinating. So do you do take a lot of your skills from law and carry it with you in business today, do you think?

I mean, it's definitely useful to us on a regular basis. I mean, multiple times a week. I think I'm pretty dialed into the kind of legal issues that could become important. You know, we're relatively organized about the paperwork and all that stuff. You know, when someone starts working, we have all the agreements in place, and when we do a deal for whether it's marketing or production, it's like, I don't really need to ask a lawyer, what does this mean? What, how should we structure it? So, I mean, yeah, it's useful. A lot of what I use, though, isn't stuff I learned in law school. It's stuff that I learned when I was practicing. So I spent a few years at a big firm in San Francisco and then I went to Netscape and was their lead technology council for their online services business.

So what years were you at Netscape?

It was 97 until then.

So, like Marc Andreessen, Jim Clark, Jim Barksdale.

Yeah.

Were they as crazy as. As I've read? Like the ADD bipolar, Manic, I think by today's standards.

No, no. Like back then maybe they seemed kind of crazy, but then no one had met Elon Musk yet. You know, it's like they. There's like a whole new level of crazy. I think it sort of ratchets up every couple of years.

Yeah, it does. I had met Elon Musk back then. I was a reference for Elon in his first round of funding in January of 1995 for Zip2. And because his. Yeah, Kimball, his brother worked for me in 93 at college pro Painters up in Canada. And then his cousin who built Solar City worked for me as well, Peter Reeve. But yeah, there is a whole new level of. Of crazy now.

They wouldn't back, by the way, they.

Wouldn'T back Elon Musk back then because he hadn't done anything and he was unproven and he was too crazy. They wanted to back Kimball based on his operations experience at having run a house painting business.

Well, I'm always amazed at the thinking that goes into, you know, whether you decide to back someone new, you know, someone who hasn't done something big before. Because if you really look at it like the biggest things tend to be done by the people who've never done anything before, you know, not that People can't have a repeat, you know, win. There definitely are serial entrepreneurs out there. But if you had a fund and you only invested in serial entrepreneurs, you would probably not make that much money.

Yeah, give you bankrupt, you'd be in a lot of trouble for sure. So what did you see in Netscape? I mean, it's like extraordinary that you got involved with them at such an early stage now. I mean, you look back and you go, of course I'd work work there. But you got there when 97, the Internet was still evolving.

Yeah, well, I mean, I, you know, I went to law school in New York and I love technology. I had worked in IT for a couple years before law school and came to tech kind of late in life because my parents were not engineers or anything. When I went to law school, I had in my mind that I would want to be like in house attorney at some tech company. And I didn't really know that much about tech companies, but I knew I'd like technology and I wanted to, you know, work at it because I wasn't an engineer. Although looking back on it, I guess I probably could have done done that. But, you know, I thought when I got out of school, you know, I need to probably get a little experience at a big firm and make sure I know what I'm doing, because I didn't learn any of that in law school. And so I found a great job in the business and technology group at Proback, Flager and Harrison, which was a great firm that is since gone. You know, we did worked with all these tech guys. I did it for a few years and I felt like I really learned what I needed to know to be able to do deals in Silicon Valley. And it was time to go. And I thought, I'll go to a startup. And unexpectedly I got a call from a recruiter from Netscape. I thought, this is such a dumb idea because it's already public. I'm not going to make that much money going there. But what I saw in them was, you know, it's this still fairly small company that created the first really commercially viable browser.

Yeah.

And they're up against this phenomenal threat from Microsoft that has all this power to exclude them from the operating system. You know, they were starting to bundle their own thing and it seemed like they were really going to have to scramble if they were going to survive. And I thought, you know, I'm going to learn more in a couple years at a company like that than I'll ever learn in a startup in a Startup, I'll deliver value, I'll know how to do deals, I'll help them succeed. And I might make a lot of money, but if I go to Netscape, I'll see what does it take to take on the big guys. I couldn't have been more satisfied with that aspect of it. Oh, for sure. I mean, the first week I was there, I did a deal with Amazon and it was like an 80 or 90 hour week and I was like sleeping in the office stealing like Cap' n Crunch out of the developer's desk for dinner. I mean, it was.

And Amazon hadn't even started, really. Amazon was like a spec in 97 store.

Yeah, they were Amazon, it was a bookstore. They were up against Barnes and Noble. The question was, were they going to be able to beat Barnes and Noble, right? Even think about that. They were really tough negotiators. And there were a series of deals that I did. I was working 70, 80 hours a week for a couple years until that merger. I don't know where I could have possibly.

And I know this is, this is a hypothetical question, but do you think that your few years at Netscape would have given you more experience than ever? Having done an mba, like knowing what law school was, do you think you got the MBA equivalent just working there?

Yes and no. I think the most valuable thing you get with an MBA from a top school is access to the network. You know, you're plugging into some amazing business people who can help you get shit done. So, you know, I met a lot of great people at Netscape and I have relationships with a few of them still that are helpful and I learned a lot. But I think there's some business things I really didn't learn until we started Hint.

And I want to talk about, I want to switch gears into talking about Hint. Also curious. One, one other thing about. You said that you have an incredible network of people that you can plug into that can help you get things done. When we went to school, like when you were in law school and when I'm about the same age, we had to be the smartest people in the room or you at least had to memorize everything because there was just the library. Like we didn't have the Internet, like I didn't have a computer in, in undergrad, right. Like you couldn't look anything up because there was nowhere to go to look anything up. And now it's no longer about being the smartest person in the room. It's like, how do you know who they are? Did you have to learn that as a skill. Do you think, to scale the company that you no longer have to be the one to know it all? Or when did you. How did you and Kara kind of.

Kara often says, you know, when you're hiring, you should hire people who are better than you are at the thing that they do. And I think we've had some good success doing that. Like Julio Picarevic, who's our cfo, is someone who we brought in early on as a board member and then later as cfo and he ran sales finance at Google. And he's, you know, he's got a lot of skills that an experience that we didn't have. So he's a great member of the management team. But, you know, in running a beverage company, you kind of do have to be the smartest person. I love our team. They're amazing at what they do. We've put together one of the best teams in the beverage industry. But they're, they're not necessarily each like the smartest person. They're smart. I mean, we don't hire stupid people. But there's a lot of management that you really have to do. There's, there's stuff you're going to see as a founder and a senior member of the team that other people aren't going to see.

Right. They're not going to recognize it.

You know, like I was in the entrepreneurs organization. You know, we talked about that earlier. You know, they always talk about how you need to find your way from working in the business to working on the business. That's, that's what it is to scale. It is like you have to get to where you're managing other people who are doing the bulk of the work. And of course, you know, we've had to do that. We have about 200 people in the business, so we can't do everything. But there's still some things that are really important to, to do.

So let's go back to, to you and, and Kara started the, the company. When did you start hint starting home.

I still think about this. Yeah. In 2004, we had had three kids. You know, I felt like we had sort of had a handle on the family. Kara had really had some personal struggles with her weight and her health. Each time we had a kid, she gained a little weight and didn't lose it afterwards. I didn't think she looked bad, but she, she really looked in the mirror and didn't recognize herself. You know, she'd seen doctors and nutritionists and no one really Gave her a very clear answer. One day. She just realized, you know, I have all these Diet Cokes all day, like eight or 10 of them a day. And after each one, I feel, like, a little hungry. And so I'll have, like, a cookie or, like a piece of a muffin or something. And I think it just adds up throughout the day. I think I'm, like, addicted to diet soda. She said, I'm going to try just drinking water for two weeks, only water, and maybe some coffee in the morning. And I didn't think she could do it because she was, you know, she had this, like, Big Gulp in her hand. Like it was glued to her hand. But she did, like, she did it. She came over to me after a couple weeks and she said, I just stepped off the scale. I lost over £20, like, two and a half weeks. She said, you know, it is just so insane how big a difference this makes. But it is also, mind numbingly boring to drink water all day.

Yeah.

So I've got to figure this out. And she started slicing fruit and putting it in the water, letting it sit in the fridge overnight, you know, different variations of that. And it kind of got her over the hump. It wasn't fantastic, but it was better than plain water. Yeah. And this idea started to form in her mind that maybe there's a business there, because she looked around and she didn't find any product that seemed like that in the store. And I really, honestly, I was working on Z Medics. I wasn't really paying any attention to what she was doing other than we would work out together every day. I didn't know she was thinking about starting a beverage company until one day I walked in after playing with the kids in the backyard. And Kara says, theo, sit down. You know, that's never a good thing. Every guy knows that's just not going to be a good conversation. She's like, no, no, it's okay. Just sit down. I have to talk to you. And she said, so you know, this thing with the unsweetened flavored water and I've been playing around with all summer. I think it's going to be a business. I think I can launch this business in less than nine months, which is right around when we're having our fourth kid, so I might need your help.

That's how she told you she was pregnant?

That's how she told me she was pregnant.

That's ridiculous.

I was just like, that's the classic.

Entrepreneurial seizure if there ever was one.

I was like, what? Are you talking about? She said, you know, like the flavored water. I'm like, no kid. The kid. We weren't going to have any more kids. And she said, well, you know how I had that cold like a couple weeks ago and it was a really bad cough and I was taking antibiotics and. Well, it turns out antibiotics and birth control pills are not really, like compatible, which is. I verified that with the doctor right away. Evidently a true thing. But neither of us knew that at that time. You should put a big label on there. You know, Justin's a great kid and the water thing is working out nicely.

It's working out nice.

That's how we got into it. So she was like, look, I'm going to be pregnant. I'm not going to be able to do a bunch of stuff, but I really want to get this thing out there quickly, see if it's something people like and then, you know, if it is, we'll make it.

So you really were the classic second in command because here's your wife who's got the entrepreneurial seizure. She's got the idea, she wants to start the company. You're sitting there going, oh, shit. So then what did you do? You kept your job with Zemedics and funded it until we got it up and running or. At what point did you.

Yeah, well, we were kind of in the process of winding that down. Not really winding it down, but like selling it off. The founder and I really didn't see eye to eye on how to commercialize it. It was an AI driven patient interview that really got much better info out of the patient and enabled the doctor to care for their patient more proactively and better. And it's a great idea. It works really well. But I wanted to do a consumer app and you know, he wanted to sell it through doctors. And I said, I don't have.

It was probably 10 years, 15 years too early. It probably would have done great this year.

Yeah, well, so we, we gave it a good home. The Robert Bosch foundation owns a whole bunch of hospitals in Europe and, and they bought it. They're presumably still working on it. I thought about what Cara was saying and I realized, you know, the reason I wanted to helped my business partner with Z Medics is that I wanted to be able to help make America healthier. But if we could get even a small number of people to fall in love with water instead of sugary drinks or diet drinks, that might make a much bigger difference in their health. And so it just seemed like the next logical step. It was sitting right there in front of me. I didn't even have to think anything up. Kara had already kind of come up with the perfect idea, and we just didn't know whether we could do it or not. So I said, sure, try to do it.

All right. So in the business world, it's already tough enough to, you know, have partners or work with other entrepreneurial kind of leaders in that startup stage. So you've gone through that together. And then also, marriage is historically pretty tough. I mean, I don't know what it is. 50% of marriages fail and 85% of businesses fail. And what the hell? Like, again, you guys have overcome some serious odds. But so what's worked? How have you gotten through it? I mean, I can't say it's been easy or has it been easy?

No, I mean, there have been, you know, enough challenges to fill a book and more. Kara just launched her new book, Undaunted Overcoming Doubts and Doubters.

I saw it came out.

I wrote a good chunk of that with her. You know, so if you want to see all the different challenges you could run into, you could read the book, and then you could probably still talk to me for eight or 10 hours and there'd be more challenges. So, yeah, not that easy. But Kara and I have always had a relationship where we help each other with our careers. We have very complimentary skills. You know, when she was doing sales at aol, you know, I'd help her put together spreadsheets and. And think about, you know, how to structure things. And, you know, when I was doing stuff at Netscape, you know, if there was weird, like, political stuff going on, Carol would always see right through to understand what was going on with people. And I think we've learned a lot from one another. We're both a lot better, more rounded people than we were when we first met in 92. So we've known each other a hell of a long time. It just didn't seem like a big thing starting a company together. I know that might sound crazy, but it just seems like that's kind of what we do. Why don't we, like, actually make that a job? And there is a good reason not to. And the good reason not to is you don't have any money. You're both, you know, trying to start something. There's no one who has a stable job. But. And we had, you know, traded off, you know, having one of us having a stable job while the other took a chance, you know, back and forth a few times. But we'd done pretty well with AOL and Netscape and we figured we could afford to take a chance.

Well, it's kind of working out. There's so many stories of people that have tried to, to start up the beverages and, and get destroyed by the Cokes or the Pepsis or the Whomever's. What do you think has allowed you to be successful space?

Well, you know, from day one, we've been all about the product and the proposition for the consumer. And we've been guided by, you know, making the consumer happier and happier. And we've been patient brand builders. You know, we didn't try to make this thing take off in two years and sell it to somebody. We did things that always made sense for the brand never to look good to investors. And that was hard sometimes. Like in 0809 when everyone thought the sky was falling, there was a lot of pressure on young brands to still be able to show growth. And we saw lots of beverage companies going out and doing buy one get one free deals just to get into stores. We were asked to do that too. And we, we said to the stores, you know, we can't do that because we want to be here tomorrow. We're not going to do it by just making stupid deals, losing a lot of money and then going to investors and saying we have no money, but we have momentum, we'll get destroyed, we'll lose the whole company. So we had a flat year in 08 from 08 to 09. We did not grow, but we did have plenty of same store sales growth. We just didn't have any new accounts. And we were able to get the company funded and keep going and double in 2010 and lots of success, you know, ever since then. Definitely tough times that you run into.

How many rounds of funding have you done?

You know, that's a complicated question. We self funded originally, which was really a continuous round of writing checks into the company as needed until we were confident that we had something that people weren't going to lose their money on. So we had lots of friends and family in the first three years who thought it was a great idea and wanted to invest. And we didn't take a dime from any of them. So we wrote every check ourselves until we solved the one big problem of how do we make this a shelf, stable product that we know we can scale up through regular distribution? And there's a whole story about that. That's a good story in the book. So we did a common round because we'd put all this money in, we didn't really need to have a traditional preferred and common structure, and we wanted everyone to have the same incentive. So our initial thought was, let's just do common stock. You're not giving employees, like, a big discount on their options, but who cares? That's not critical. And we never had trouble hiring anyone because of that. So we did, oh, eight. Then we did in the middle of the crisis in 09, and then we did, I think, one more common round and 10. So those were all very tiny rounds, like you might not even call them around. Then we had. We were in pretty tough financial situation and had agreed to some very complicated things that I wish we hadn't done. That made it hard to bring in outside investors other than, you know, our existing outside investors. So we cleaned up the cap table and basically went to a preferred stock structure that's much more traditional. So we did our Series A and then we had a B and a C. None of them have been that big. I mean, we've raised about $100 million over 15 years.

What was the stuff that you wish you hadn't agreed to or the stuff.

That was, you know, we were, like, obsessed that we didn't want to do a down round. There are a lot of reasons to try to avoid doing a down round, but if there's a global economic crisis, just do what you have to do.

And for anybody who doesn't know, a down round is that you raise money at a valuation that's lower than the valuation you probably raised out, right?

Yeah. You know, we didn't want to do that. We thought we had good reasons. I think in hindsight it was. We were making things too complicated. And so we came up with this complicated warrant structure where, you know, upon liquidity, investors in that round in 09 would have gotten additional shares for free. But, like, right before a liquidity event, so it wouldn't change control of the company. The problem is because they were all contingent on what the valuation was at the time of a liquidity event. They were very complicated. And anyone looking at the company and trying to value it would just assume that they all would be issued. And so it was kind of like if you went for an outside investment, they will just treat it like you did a down round anyway. But it was so complicated, it just confused people. You know, is the one thing we did that I would probably do differently. In the end, it really hasn't changed. There's just a lot of mental anguish that could have been avoided in terms.

Of the rest of the growth so from like 2010 till, you know, now last, over the last 10 years, what do you think have been the real keys to your success now? Has it been distribution? Is it brand? Is it the marketing? Is it customer?

You know, for a beverage company, we really always focused on improving same store sales by just basically strengthening the brand every year rather than increasing distribution. So we, we grew distribution a lot slower than most beverage companies. And as a result, like if you look at our sales per store every single year for 15 years, they go, it goes up, up, up. And almost nobody who's growing fast can say that they're increasing their sales per store at the same time. And we've had like our CAGR something like almost 50% the last five years. You know, we're still growing same store sales. I think we hit a point about three years ago where we were missing an opportunity to grow the footprint a little bit faster. And so we really expanded the sales team at that point. And then at the same time we have direct to consumer. So drinking.com, you know, that's our site, we ship those cases. And during the pandemic, that March, April time frame when things were really, really scary, we had over 50% of our sales via E. Commerce.

Wow.

I'm pretty damn sure there's no other beverage company that did that.

Yeah, that's crazy because you're right. There was a bit of a water thing. It's interesting. Like I'm not your target client. I'm either, you know, drinking water out of the tap when I'm in Vancouver, or I guess I'm probably still drinking out of a filtered water instead of the, the fridge or whatever. And then. Or it's wine, like if I'm going to, but. And I haven't drank soda forever. One of my kids who's 19, hasn't had anything but water in nine years. So he's excited to try this because he just decided nine years ago just to drink water. I'm like, all right. He's like, nothing else could be good for you. I'm like, it was actually because a friend of mine, this 80 year old guy named Joel Weldon, I think it was about 35 years ago, was on a plane and was drinking Diet Coke, Diet Coke, diet. And said this can't be good for me and I want to live a long time. And he said I'm not going to drink anything except water starting now. Like no coffee, no juice, no nothing. Just water. And Joel's Joel water skis the same number of times in A year as his age. So this year he did 80 days water skiing. And I'm talking like, like hardcore slalom cuts like crazy. He was up on one of those new things that they're doing with like, like the hydroplaning. He's hydroplaning. He's 80 years old on a hydroplane. Like, but he's like, it's water, man. It's water. It's good for you. I'm like, yeah. So how are people finding out about this stuff? Like, why is it. Because I heard about it first about two years ago from Alison Maslin. And then my sister bumps into your wife at some Mastermind events of JJ's and she can't stop talking about Hint. And then my girlfriend's talking about Hint now. It's like everywhere I go, people are, what's going on?

Well, it's, you know, it depends who the people are. I mean, Silicon Valley really embraced Hint very early on. So one of the, or I guess the first chef at Google had discovered Hint and served it in their cafeteria. And then when they had these micro kitchens, break rooms, modern break rooms, they started putting it in there. And then as people have moved from Google to other ventures, they've been asking, well, do you guys have Hint water? So we actually got calls from recruiters saying, how do we get Hint water? Because, like, that's the number one question that trips me up when I'm trying to get a candidate in here. So we got all these food service distributors in the Valley, and then a lot of the financial companies, like the VCs, and then some of the banks started carrying Hint. You know, like, if you go, Deloitte has a big training center down in Texas and they have Hint water there.

It makes perfect sense. I remember back in like 99, 2000, when I was working in Seattle in the dot com era, and it was, darn if I can remember the name of the company, Starbucks funded them and they were delivering stuff to my house, to my office. They used to deliver my Fiji water. I'd get like a case of. Fiji Water was the big thing 25 years ago. Right. If you're in the dot com era, it was always, but it's just water, no good flavoring.

So.

Okay, so what's. So that was one sales said. You really invested in sales?

Yeah. So we got into Target a few years ago and we really built a big business with Target. They've had a hard year this year with the pandemic with a lot fewer customers going in there. But we've Continued to, to do well there and then, you know, really grocery. We've built out most major grocery accounts and are still growing very fast. And all of them really, even the ones we've been in the longest, you know, there's the direct to consumer business, which we launched in a serious way, I think about six or seven years ago. And so we've found that, you know, even though it's expensive to ship a heavy product like water, we've figured out how to make that work for us. And we spend a lot of money in advertising. That advertising often leads to sale on drinking.com but it also leads to sales on Amazon, Walmart.com and then in grocery stores as well, because a lot, most people don't buy beverages online. They buy them in grocery stores.

Still, when you're measuring your, you know, your acquisition cost, your cost for acquisition against your lifetime value of a customer, are you. Are you considering that then that if I spend a dollar and make a dollar direct to consumer, I'm also making 3x because of where they're buying at the rest of the year?

We are pretty conservative, so we don't factor in that big halo effect, even though, you know, there's reason to believe it's actually bigger than the direct effect. But our cost of acquisition is right around $50 and our lifetime value online is close to 300. We really don't. To justify what we're doing, we don't really need to factor in. We want to be really conservative about that because, you know, it's a changing world and you know, we want to make sure it's stand. That business can stand on its own, even though we know it isn't just that, you know.

Right.

Growth in grocery stores.

What's not working for you guys now with marketing? Like what. What used to work five, six years ago. And are you moving away from avoiding the P word?

I think we've gradually evolved our marketing and, and it's working very well. We never did, like, a lot of celebrity stuff back in the day. Used to like go get a basketball player and then put them on a billboard holding up the bottle saying like, drink this even though he didn't drink that. And everyone eventually figured out that they don't. Most of those celebrities don't drink the things that they're pimping. You know, we have one celebrity investor, actually, we have multiple celebrity investors, but we don't talk about them because we don't. We're not using them for marketing. You know, advertising works. We did a lot of radio Last year that worked great. We did some TV as well.

You're saying. So radio works for a product, like a consumer packaged goods product. Yeah, radio is amazing. Like, like 1-800-God junk has. Has gone from 100 million to 450 million because of radio. And they'll continue to scale, but it's a different kind of service. But to, to market water via radio is amazing.

I mean, it's not like the main way that we market water, but it's in the mix. People respond to it. There are companies that have built beverage businesses largely on radio, like Nantucket Nectars. If you talk to Tom first, who, who built that along with another Tom who's partners with. They did radio ads. It was just them on the radio. Now you won't hear me on the radio. I don't think that's my thing. But. But, you know, we do, we do radio ads. They work. We did some really fun TV ads and we put one of them on the super bowl in San Francisco and New York last year. I think it worked. It's always hard to measure that stuff.

Why did you do the super bowl ad? That intrigues me. It doesn't seem like your target demo. Yeah.

You know, and you were like partly a vanity thing.

Well, I was going to say.

And you were, you know, San Francisco company. And it's like we waited till the last minute and we had three. Three commercials we shot in over two days that were really kind of funny, engaging commercials. One of them was like a classic super bowl commercial. And we said, you know, we're not going to spend millions of dollars on a Super bowl commercial. But if at the last minute, you know, there's. The San Francisco market is cheap enough, we'll buy some airtime. And that's what we did. And then New York happened to be.

Oh, you didn't buy North America Wide. You bought a couple of markets.

Oh, Smart bought key markets because, you know, we wanted to see, like, what would that do? Would we get a lot of phone calls? Would we. People notice that we did it. They liked it.

Well, and I like that you did it in the Bay Area as well, which is kind of where you're actually kind of placing your flag and then growing off that influencer base too. It's funny, I've gone to the main TED conference for the last 11 years, and I keep wondering, now we got to get the hint water to be at ted, because every time I go to ted, some new consumer product is. Is launching that. Remember the Justin's peanut butter cups?

Yeah. Well, the crazy thing is we are at Ted. Are you have been? Yeah.

I haven't seen.

Was that this year?

No, they had to cancel it this year, so I rolled my ticket into next year. But they've already canceled next year now, too.

So the problem is they only will let us send, like, three or four pallets of product because they. They, like, want to be, like, fair to people.

I know. It's stupid. They got, like, six bottles, six types of water. It's dumb.

So everybody who knows him, who goes to Ted, like, they'll get there early and grab it out the fridge.

Yeah.

And you're going to walk by the fridge and there's no hint? No.

I end up with this, like, something out of a box. I'm like, I don't want water out of my box. This is terrible. It's a horrible idea.

And I think they got convinced that there was some Canadian firm up there that says, that's more eco, but it really isn't. It's. It's actually way, way, way worse. You know, recyclable bottles are. Are. They're good. I mean, they're. Nothing's perfect, but they're. They're pretty good environmentally.

Yeah.

And box has, like, plastic, paper, aluminum laminated together. How are you going to turn that into anything?

It doesn't even feel good drinking water out of a box or something. It just feels really weird. It's like wine out of the box, too. It's just like. It's not supposed to be. All right. If you were to go back to give Theo some advice, you're kind of graduating from, let's go from your undergrad, you know, you're graduating law school, and you're going to give yourself some advice that you know to be true today, but you didn't know back then. What would you tell yourself? What advice would you give yourself?

I would just tell myself, you're a great problem solver. You're there to solve problems. Don't get upset about problems. That's what you do. Because I think early in my career and even, like, probably into the middle of my career, you know, there, I'd run into a problem. You know, most problems are because someone did something stupid or careless or both. I'd be like, you know, I just cleaned up this place. Now you're messing it all up. It's not the right attitude to have. It just. All it does is it hurts yourself. You know, it's like it can become a real health problem. It hadn't for me, thankfully, but I've seen people who, like, really destroy their health, you know, having anxiety. And so that's like, I have a second in command on ops, like my VP Operations, who's kind of grown up at the company, and there's a lot going on at int, and sometimes they'll get really stressed, and I just. I take them aside and I always tell them, like, remember, you wouldn't have a job if there weren't so many stupid people in the world.

So many stresses, right?

And so many problems. That's what you do. Don't get upset. It's just, that's what you do. You're there to fix those problems.

I love that.

Hopefully before they become a big issue, become bigger ones.

My old business partner, we were building an auto body chain, and he used to have this one guy, Joel, who pissed him off every day. And so Terry finally one day wrote on his to do list, get pissed off by Joel. And then by 10:30 in the morning, Joel pissed him off. And he crossed it off as accomplished. I'm like, that's brilliant, Theo. Thank you so much for sharing with us. Theo golden, the COO for Hint Water. Thanks for being on the Second Command podcast.

Thank you very much. It was great.

The thing that stays consistent would be we are still really excited about marketing our product. And this is something I think that we try to teach. We do a lot of education, a lot of teaching, and try to get people excited about marketing because we believe that if. If you're the person who's the most excited about marketing your product, that you'll be successful.