The Biggest Crowdfunded Food Product Ever – with John Coogan

If you're in a scenario where you're trying to cut back expenses but remain healthy, you can do that with a something that is like a Soylent, but maybe not even affiliated with the brand. Maybe it's your own thing, but you're just thinking about the nutrients that you're putting in your body and then optimizing those for cost and time. That's really the vision and the ethos of the company. And I hope that that's something that people can benefit from in this moment more than ever.

That's John Coogan, co founder of Sorlint, the Silicon Valley meal replacement company. John served as the Chief Technology officer and helped raise the largest crowdfunded food product in history. $3 million. Join us as we learn about how Sorlint was founded and how John and his team of Silicon Valley engineers hacked food. Oh, and for all you who watched the movie Soylent Green, it's not made out of people.

An engineer, banker, and dancer go on a hike.

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Hi, I'm Jedi the banker.

I'm Shikhar the engineer.

And I'm Adrian the dancer. And we are thc.

We break down topics, meet pioneers, and share ideas.

Welcome to Things have changed in 2015, when I moved to the United States, was in New York doing my grad school in Manhattan. I did not know Jed or Adrian. Right. Jed and Adrian are at Berkeley, roommates. But I guess we had one thing in common. We were both in school and we both were on Soylent. So that's kind of what I'm trying to point out to how culturally significant the drink that you, John, created with founders that you worked with. But it was. It was just incredible to think that, oh yeah, this was something I was consuming to get through school, to get through. I couldn't afford a $10 meal at Chipotle back then, so I needed to optimize my workload because lab was so busy and I found that white bottle. So, no, it's. It's just so exciting to have you on John, so that we can just kind of go through that whole process because, I mean, you were in your mid-20s back then too, so you guys were figuring out this whole thing, ingredients, branding, virality of a consumer product.

Good.

Yeah. No, I'm super excited to talk to you guys. It's super funny you mentioned Chipotle because that was about maybe six, nine months before Soylent even was conceived. That was one of the biggest co founder fights I've ever had with. With one of the co founders of Soylent and my current business partner, David. We had $17,000 for our first venture. We had just graduated and had gotten into a incubator program. And so the money was the only thing that was keeping us going. We had no savings, no income, just this $17,000 to last us indefinitely until we could raise money or do something which is not a lot of money for, you know, a modern venture. And we would go to Chipotle as a treat every once in a while. And when we were there, I was always like, we need to save money. Let's just get the normal thing.

And did you get the guac?

The fight was over the guac. The fight was over the guac. So David, my business partner, he's a big guy, I'm a big guy, like, and he just, you know, when he's enjoying Chipotle, wants the double meat, wants the guacamole, as most people do. It's the best thing when you, when you, when you're there. But it, you know, quickly the $8 excursion turns into $12. And you extrapolate that, that's an extra week of Runway right there. So we were so, so eventually, after a couple of these, like, you know, me trying to nickel and dime him into not, not upgrading his Chipotle order, finally the, the resolution that we came to was just that I would just get whatever he got and then I would be equally responsible and, and like, to this day, when we go out to eat, I'll often just be like, yeah, I'll just have whatever he have he's having, because I know it's going to be a lot. And then when the bill comes, I don't feel like I got screwed or anything. So it's become kind of a, a running a run. Running joke between us that, that's the only way to keep it fair is just for. Because I'll never talk him down from a larger order.

Yeah, yeah.

David and you have been friends for a while, it seems.

So. I mean, yeah, that's kind of the, the beginning, at least to my side of the story. We actually went to preschool together, but I don't have a real memory of that, but we went to preschool in Altadena, kind of out here in la, but wound up going to middle school together, did our math homework together. We were in actually rival counter strike clans. And then in high school, that's where friendships were broken. Yeah. Back in the day, there's always been a little bit of rivalry between us, which I think is what makes us Good business partners. And then in high school, I was playing football, he was playing soccer, but then we both played rugby together. So that was another good opportunity to kind of get to know each other more. And then we both went to college in Boston. He went to Harvard, I went to Northeastern. And we were both kind of interested in finance, economics. He studied bio, but was doing internships at startups. I had an internship at a startup in Cambridge. So we would get lunch and hang out and kind of share, you know, what our experience was like at the various companies. And then northeastern is a five year program. He was doing a fifth year at USC, doing a PostBAC to prepare for med school. And we both had this summer that was the kind of the fifth year. And we already had all of our other high school friends who had graduated in four years. They had already been in the workforce for a year and could basically tell us how terrible, you know, entry level finance and consulting jobs were. So it took a little bit of the, you know, the, the illustrious nature, the allure of those roles kind of out and, and kind of gave us some perspective. So we started talking. We, you know, started reading Paul Graham's blog, learning about what was going on in Silicon Valley. There was a lot of entrepreneurship going on in, in Boston, but I feel like it was still at that time a little bit less receptive to the, you're 21, you know, nothing, here's a bunch of money to go do something crazy. And whereas Silicon Valley, that's like, you know, like every day you see rounds like that. So we were like, okay, well if we don't have the experience to go and, you know, talk to some, you know, super professional DC in Boston and just, you know, build, build something that way, let's go out to Silicon Valley, do one of these crazy incubators and see what happens. So we applied, got in, move out to Silicon Valley. We're looking for housing. Of course, we only have this $17,000, so we're trying to keep it as cheap as possible. We, we go on. I think it was like padmapper this thing that was like, it took Craigslist postings and put them on a map so you could see where they were. And they had just broken their API integration with Craigslist or something. So all they had was Airbnb listings. And there was another Y Combinator team that had posted like, hey, we're this house. We're this startup house. It's amazing. It has a pool, we have an extra room. And it's only like $1,000 a month or something like that. So we go and tour and we're like, yeah, this will be perfect. They're working really hard. They have a demo day coming up. We have a demo day coming up as well. We were actually part of Imagine K12, which later was absorbed into YC. So, so we show up to this, to this house and of course it's in complete disrepair. The pool is filled with algae, just completely green and there's holes in the floor. The toilets don't work, it's just a mess. So naturally we're like, this is perfect. When can we move in? And they're like, whatever. And so we're like, okay, we'll go get everything that we have in the car and move in right now. Because we're not moving from anywhere, we're moving from our car. So. So we immediately bring in his mattress, I think a box of books, like some O'Reilly technical manuals, and I found bread on Craigslist and we set up shop. So at that point both teams are working on different ideas. We're working on something in education technology since that's imagine K12's focus. They're working on wireless networking, trying to build kind of a new mesh network over the tv, the TV spectrum. So they're doing hardware, they're a bunch of Georgia Tech engineers and we're doing education technology, just trying to learn how to code and build kind of consumer facing apps. Both companies don't do very well. No money raised after YC demo day or imagine K12 demo day. And so then the kind of reality sets in of like there's just, you know, less and less money available. Do we want to go get jobs? Is this a failure? Where do we stand? And so a couple team members from Georgia, from the Georgia Tech team go back to. They were, they actually needed to finish school, so they went back to Georgia Tech to finish their degrees. Smart idea. Because we had nothing going on. Like it was not a runaway success. So why would you drop out? And then David went to go do a PhD at Caltech in bio, thought he was going to pursue that route and so forth. For a while it was just me and Rob and Matt, two of the other founders, and we were just kind of working on all sorts of stuff. We had a sticky note wall of ideas. We would try and build things in like a week or two, release them. Nothing really ever got traction. But we got pretty good at prototyping very quickly and then just coming up with an idea, architecting it. Matt picked up Front end. I was doing all the backend stuff. Rob was doing a bunch of crazy experiments. He built a of bunch like a virtual desktop platform where you could go in and use a really powerful computer through your web browser. And a lot of these ideas have actually become good startups with the right resources and the right teams, but we just were never able to get any of those working. So while these ideas are failing and failing, we start looking at the numbers. And that team, they had about 170k from YC at the beginning. This was when I think YC gave 20. And then there was a safe that came along with it that was 150. So they had 170. It was lasting a lot longer. And they were much, they were very good about managing it very judiciously. So we start looking, yeah, so we start looking at our costs. And we paid our rent a year in advance. We had our laptops, we had an Internet bill that was maybe 30, 50 bucks a month. And the real only, the only cost that we had that was really dragging us down was food. And in San Francisco, it's really hard to get affordable food easily that's convenient. You can go out to a great restaurant. It's super expensive, but it'll be healthy and convenient. You can grow your own food, but that takes a long time. And it's really hard to do that in a studio apartment in San Francisco in the Tenderloin. And then of course, you can go and eat fast food, but that's, you know, a fast track to killing your health. And then eventually, you know, you'll, you'll be less productive and you won't be able to actually, you know, you know, work long hours coding on the dream of building the, you know, the ultimate app, which was still the goal. So Rob starts kind of thinking about the, you know, his nutrition and his diet, but very much from a computer science perspective, since that was his background at Georgia Tech. So he starts thinking about, okay, these are their inputs and outputs. You put protein, carbs and fat in, calories in calories out, you burn calories throughout the day. And really this is a problem that can be kind of optimized. So he set up some spreadsheets and started crunching some numbers and looked for kind of the cheapest and purest inputs that when multiplied together or added together, could result in a balanced diet as defined by the FDA and the Institute of Medicine. So he starts prototyping it. And at that point, I still think, you know, this is just like a fun little side Project. There's no business here. At first when he told me, I was like, why are you going on a diet? Like, no one cares what we look like. They care about our, about the output of our code and the quality of our business ideas. They don't. They don't care what we look like. We could weigh 400 pounds and, you know, if we have traction on a thing, we'll get funded. But, you know, it was obviously very interesting to him. So he runs this experiment, creates a prototype, lives on it exclusively for 30 days straight, and then starts blogging about his experience. And that just kind of catches Hacker News off guard at the right time. And in 2012, 2013, Hacker News was still. I mean, it always has been very technology focused, and it still is, but there was really nothing about nutrition on there that could break through. And he had developed a little bit of a following on his blog about technical issues. And he, of course, was speaking the language of Hacker News, talking about things in terms of algorithms and quantification and data. So he was able to speak to that community in a very authentic way because we very much were a part of that community. And normally we were posting about software. Just, we were young software engineers and weren't able to build anything great yet. So that gets overwhelming traction. We'd put up different landing pages and different beta apps and shared them with our friends, had gotten tens of people to use them. I think the best one we ever had was like 500 users. But overnight we have 10,000 signups on this landing page just to learn more. And then he sends out a questionnaire to the customers or to people that gave us their email and says a whole bunch of questions about what's your height, what's your weight, what are your dietary goals, what do you. How. What's your physical activity? These are things you, you know, you'll see on, on a lot of health apps now. But the level of amount of information that people were willing to share and be a part of, kind of this hacker open source movement was insane. People would say, yes, I've done 23andMe, and I will send you my DNA. Like, I will go and get a blood test and send you the results. Like, that's how much I want to be a part of this. So that, that was amazing to see. And that was just incredible traction. From there, the press started getting interested. That helped, you know, gain a lot more signups and pre launch, you know, traction. We were able to launch a crowdfunding campaign which at the time was, I think, the biggest food crowdfunding campaign of all time. We raised over $3 million. And from there we were able to leverage that into raising some seed capital and then eventually a Series A and grow the company into a much larger organization. So that's kind of the Soylent founding story.

So if you get on Amazon and check out Soylent, the first comment is still, is it made out of humans? That is so bizarre.

Yeah, it's remarkable. I mean, we thought we were kind of like this, you know, nerdy sci fi fan in crowd that was aware of Soylent Green and the Charlton Heston film. But apparently every single person that has an Internet connection has seen that film because they all comment. But so it was obviously a joke. It was just a funny, like a, like, like what is the opposite of the thing that you should call this? People took away from it what they wanted to. We were definitely the picture of like the Silicon Valley hustling startup. Let's, you know, not go out and let's work along, work long hours and code and stuff. And a lot of, A lot of people, you know, for good reason, have, have qualms with that lifestyle. But at the end of the day, we weren't, we internally, we were thinking Soylent will, will give us time back and allow us to go and do other things and go on hikes and, and relax and spend other time. But it quickly became, you know, in popular culture, like, oh, this is, this is something that, you know, they're trying to force down people's throats and they, they're gonna take away Thanksgiving. That was a big thing, like, oh, my Silicon Valley is gonna cancel your Thanksgiving. And we were like, no, like, our goal is to, you know, save you money so you can afford to have a more lavish Thanksgiving, perhaps.

It's funny, the reaction of the media was bizarre because they started posting titles like the End of Food, because basically the narrative of Soylent Green the movie is that in New York there's an overpopulation and people are getting fed like fucking lentils and, and soy. But then they found out that it was made out of people.

But I mean, we were definitely leaning into that and having fun with that. Just a lot of that, a lot of that sarcasm and irony was lost on the over 40 crowd. But interestingly, especially at that time, it was incredible from a growth marketing perspective. And we, we, I would love to say, oh, yeah, we thought this through and this was our plan all along. But realistically, anytime we posted anything anywhere on the Internet, I mean, food is already a hot Button topic. Because everyone has their own diet, everyone has their own opinions. They have, oh, no, I like this doctor. I like what this person has to say. But a product named Soylent, immediately you post anything. Top comment. Soylent Green is people. No, it's not. Like, is this people? Why'd they give it this name? I want to fire their marketing person. So you just get so much, you get so many comments. And especially at that time, Facebook would just boost that stuff that had a lot of comments. So all of a sudden we just had tons and tons of traction on any post we put live and then also press articles. So, you know, these blogs and small digital outlets, they want traction and they know that if they write about something that's as controversial as Soylent, they're going to get a lot of traffic. So it really helped build this organic movement that drove. We didn't spend any money on advertising for years because just everything was completely organic. And that was definitely luck. But I mean, it also did come from the fact that there was this authentic voice at the helm which was very like witty, ironic tone combined with the actual computer science knowledge to raise write about things in a certain way that were either intriguing to people or absolutely infuriating.

Not made out of people, no people.

In fact, no animals. It's a vegan product. It's a vegan product.

That's the thing. I guess. Also we can look at this as sort of an optimization problem. Right. They're optimizing for faster eating times, faster preparation times for food and all that stuff. So. So Rob, your co founder, I watched a lot of shows that he went.

On.

And he was mentioning how he now has a, a or at the time had a diet of 90 Soylent and the rest would be for food. And he was mentioning how, well, you don't want to enjoy food every single time. Right. And yeah, in Neil Degrassi Tyson, he had a, an appearance there where he said something pretty interesting. He was talking about how he was driving in a car. Technology, he was living in a house, another human technology. But he was still eating grass. You know, he was eating like vegetables and like, not actually grass, but you know, things that were organic or something like that.

Yeah. And that is something that is, you know, tailor made to infuriate people who, who are in the Michael Pollan realm or, you know, the, the eat local or eat organic. And that stuff is true. There's a lot of evidence that eating organic and eating locally is, you know, optimal and is good from a diet perspective. I wouldn't Say that it's not, but it's just, is it cheaper? Is it more efficient? And for people who want to make a certain type of trade off, something can be a really good product for that. So like, I don't think, you know, it's not supposed to be all things to all people, but when, when people hear Silicon Valley and something, they're immediately thinking, okay, this is going to take over the world like Facebook and I'm going to be, you know, there's nothing I can do, so I must resist now.

Yeah, you guys got so much hype through just going through college. I would hear about it all the time. People would argue like, oh, Soylent, it's, it's going to take over and like take out Chipotle and like, like I need my avocado toast. And there's so many debates over Soylent and how, what it's doing to consumer behavior. I wanted to jump into your different iterations of the product. So can you walk us through how you guys kind of started off as experimenting with different nutritions that the body needs and kind of packaging it into this powder? At first, initially you guys had the powder packages and you would add it with the oil, oil and you'd add, add it to, you know, those blender bottles, kind of like a protein shake in a way. And then eventually you started bottling it. Now you guys have a coffee version of the Soylent. So walk us through the iterations of how you guys came up with the formulas and the amounts of nutrition that you think is ideal for someone that wants to streamline their food intake.

I mean, the, the reason we started with powder was, you know, entirely practical. It was something that we could make in our kitchen. So and then from there it was easy to find a manufacturer who had the ability to blend powders together because that particular machine is just basically just a huge blender and it just mixes everything up. So that machine might be between $100,000 and a million dollars. Whereas a align to do a ready to drink product, a bottled product might be 20 million, 50 million. So the barrier to entry is a lot higher there. We've pretty quickly knew that we wanted to go to a drink format and a bottled format just because it certainly satisfies the idea of being more convenient. But powder was great because it allowed us these really quick iteration times. We could just be in our kitchen and mix up different things and see, does this taste good? Is this acceptable? And then in terms of the actual nutrients that are going in, that was always managed pretty Much just in a spreadsheet, looking at the ingredients or the nutrients in the ingredients that we were using. So if we were using a certain protein isolate, we would look at the amount of protein in that as well as the amount of fat, because it's not, it's rare that you get an ingredient that is 100% isolated.

So.

So you need to kind of take into account all the different nutrients in each ingredient. So we were iterating very, very quickly. And even once we went to market and were manufacturing, we were still doing runs of improved products. You know, basically once a month. We launched a 1.0 product in May of 2014, and throughout that summer, we were shipping 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, and we've pretty quickly got to 1.6, and then that was stable for a while, and. And I think now we're on 1.8 or something like that. So the, the pace of play and the, the ability to bring that kind of startup mindset around, around iteration and quick revision and feedback, customer feedback was really critical. And, and the, the, the powder platform definitely allowed us to do that. Once we got to drink, it was much harder because even just to test it, the machine that actually can replicate what the results might be like on that $20 million line, just that benchtop machine is millions of dollars. So it becomes very difficult. So a lot of times we'd have to go to labs that had the equipment, work with technicians of those of that equipment, and then. And then see the results. And then once we got something, there was still a little bit of a gap between what we would make on the benchtop in a lab and then what would actually be produced. So navigating that, the staging to production translation was pretty key.

This is on, I guess, the product side. So how is the demand side? I mean, we just spoke about how it just went viral. Everyone in colleges were drinking it. Was there a certain moment that really took you in, I guess just 0 to 100? Or was it just stages of just good press throughout good and bad press?

I mean, there were definitely major step changes. The first was probably an article in Vice magazine that went pretty viral. The blog posts that we were posting were on hacker news and doing very well, but not insanely well. I mean, few, few hundred upvotes. The. But the, the Vice article would obviously go much wider because that would expose people to, you know, outside the hacker news community, to the product. And then as that grew, we did something with discovery. We did something. The New Yorker wrote a really long piece about the company that was a huge, huge, you know, just step change in the business. And then Rob was invited to appear on the Colbert Report. And that was, you know, you know, night, like late night TV is just insane in terms of audience. So we did so much business. Like, I think Shopify was down for like a second because there was so much traffic.

Wow.

But yeah, it was, it was pretty, it was pretty crazy how much, how much demand we were driving with the.

Product that might actually go down in history. Because like at, I guess this Was Shopify when? 2013, 2014?

Yeah, it was early.

This was like, I guess when did they IPO'd, like 2015.

So I mean, now they have Kylie Jenner on the platform and stuff. So yeah, I'm pretty sure they can handle any amount of demand. But at that time, I think we were probably, you know, close to setting records on daily traffic when we do one of these huge, huge press pieces. Yeah.

Wow.

Like taking Shopify servers down. I mean, Shopify now is like a, what, hundred billion dollar company? And I don't know, it's just historic to take something like that down. That must have been the amount of new visitors that might.

Yeah, the platform because of soy. That's crazy.

Yeah. I mean, we were also just having trouble keeping our blog alive. Like we were just self hosting, I think maybe a WordPress blog on AWS. And just the amount of comments was just crushing the database. And so they're just keeping it, just keeping it up and was so difficult because we were getting millions of hits on just various blog posts because Rob was such a, like, such a persuasive writer and he'd write these articles that were so infuriating for people, but also like there was a lot there and he was writing a lot too. Like at least once a month he would write something and he would do crazy experiments on himself. Like it wasn't just limited to Soylent and he really knew how to strike that nerve online and just do something like just weird enough to really get a rise out of people. And that stuff is just tailor made to get traffic.

Yeah.

Three months during that span of time, you guys were like blowing up everywhere. I think the New Yorker is the piece that said the end of food or something like that. It was ridiculous, dude.

Yeah. Yeah. And it was, it was. There was like a cover. Like the New Yorker doesn't do like cover stories, but they do like a, like a half pamphlet overlay on the COVID And our story was the COVID Basically it was the biggest piece of the week.

How did it feel? It's crazy to be. I mean, you were young at the time and you know, there's Silicon Valley stories that are like that, where young people, people just get famous so fast. But what is it like to be part of that circle? You coming in? None of you are food scientists, right? All of you are from background.

Yeah, I mean, huge imposter.

Yeah, that imposter syndrome must have hit hard. And then you got famous in three months. That must have been a crazy feeling. How did that feel for you guys?

Yeah, I mean it was, it was pretty wild I think. You know, we pretty quickly knew that we needed to bring on domain specific advisors. So we brought on the former CEO of Muscle Milk who had, you know, manufactured this exact type of product both in powder and drink form. So that was super helpful. And then we brought on the head of nutrition at Columbia to advise on the nutrition side and validate all of our assumptions. And then we were also working with professionals on the manufacturing side and the R and D side. So we were able, mostly because we were really good at generating demand which generated pre order revenue, which, which generated venture capital dollars which we were able to actually afford to bring on experts and then defer to them. So that was the short of getting through things. And then the rest of this stuff was mostly just testing and learning and we tried to keep that as much as possible to things where the downside risk was limited. Like if we put up, you know, a Shopify site and it, you know, there's an error there, like it's not a huge critical issue, um, it might hurt our business, but it's not going to hurt the customer. So that was one place where we kind of iterated a little bit more and we're a little bit more doing things in house. Same thing with the press and the PR and the blogging. All of that was, was, you know, fully handled in house. Whereas a lot of the manufacturing, you know, we really wanted to make sure we were working with the best in the world.

That's so crazy. I remember the backlog. I remember you couldn't order it at some point.

It was crazy. I wrote so many managing that backlog and deciding who gets what. And if you ordered twice when you.

Order, tough because the secondary market on free and for sale. Holy shit, dude, I can't even.

Was, was it like you mentioned Shopify and writing the Python scripts and stuff? Was it a conscious decision to get it like D2C? Were you just hell bent on. Okay, let's just get the consumer first and there's a closer connection with them. So now you can build on the data that you collect?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, we were super bullish on dtc, mostly because we ordered everything online ourselves. We were very used to that. It felt very natural. All of our customers were online and willing to pre order and subscribe. And when we looked at the trends of e commerce growth, it was clear that, you know, this was going to be growing for a very long time. I think eventually, you know, what we realized was that there was, you know, there is an addressable market for these types of optimized nutrition products. And that addressable market is somewhat smaller when you look at Only online because there's just only so many customers that shop online for this category. So eventually we realized that if we wanted to really expand and reach everyone possible, we had to go into retail. And that was a big reason why we raised the Series B from Google and brought on an executive team to manage the company and take the company from what we'd built and created kind of a very solid platform to build off of with the products and the D2C business. But then take it into Amazon, take it into retail stores, and we started seeing it ourselves. Like if we were traveling, we couldn't get it for ourselves. So, you know, in terms of, you know, kind of dogfooding, we were unsatisfied with the customer experience that we were providing, because if we were in, if we were in New York, you couldn't just pop into a store and get one, or if you were traveling through, you know, an airport, you couldn't get one. So we, we knew that we wanted to at least get into this grab and go context. But then also, you know, we had, before Soylent, we were shopping at Costco a lot, so it made sense to get into Costco and, and these, you know, larger channels as well.

So I wanted to dive into your role as Chief Technology officer. I feel like every company in Silicon Valley needs a chief technology officer. But it was hard for me to imagine what the role of a CTO would be in a company like Soy.

Totally.

So I'm curious to understand what your first primary responsibilities were. And I know that you already mentioned that you were handling volume and handling the amount of orders that were coming in and figuring out ways to get it to the right people. But that couldn't have been your only responsibility. Could you talk a little bit about your other responsibilities as cto?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's. It's interesting because, I mean, we weren't we weren't. Our product was not software. So having a CTO is certainly less. It's a different role than what you'd see at a normal Silicon Valley company. And yeah, I mean, at a larger CPG company, the CTO is much more like a head of it looking at network management and permissions and device policies and some of those ERP installations to manage inventory across Pepsi. It's a massive undertaking and incredibly talented individuals. But on the small D2C startup side, the CTO is usually just kind of an extension of digital marketing, responsible for building the website. Very much product focused and not in the consumer package goods sense of developing, you know, formulas and products, more on the, you know, on the digital product side. So I had a team of user experience, user interface designers, front end software engineers, database engineers who would build and scale the E Commerce website so that we could handle all that traffic and then provide a good experience for customers.

Basically just trying to think so. D2C is like, I guess it is mainstream now, but in 2013 it wasn't right. Even like Instagram, like you guys were putting out products there so early that it just added fuel to the fire and just kept running that engine.

There were a couple big D2C companies. I mean, Warby Parker was kind of the early one that a lot of people were looking to. And then, you know, dollar Shave Club kind of happened while we were doing Soylent. And that was a huge, huge mark for the industry. Um, and then there were a lot of companies that kind of got popular like Birchbox and Loot Crate. And people were. There was definitely like a subscription boom. And then now I think we're in kind of a new phase of a little bit more influencer driven with the Kylie Jenner brands and with a lot of other, like what Lady Gaga is doing. And then there's still, I mean, I see a ton of activity in D2C, whether it's in clothing or makeup or food or pretty much everything is dtc. And there was interestingly like a lot of, a lot of kind of anticipation about a reset in DTC because valuations had gotten high. There was a question about would larger companies actually acquire these D2C brands or would they just spin up their own? Unilever was looking at a few different options and there was a question about like, will there be liquidity for these startups. But now that Covid's hit, there's, you know, kind of a re, you know, a new wave of energy around D2C and E commerce because the Whole category is growing faster than ever before. So I'd say like last year the big theme was traditional D2C startups repositioning themselves as, as omnichannel brands. Really focused on brand development, focused on partnerships and, and developing the communities. Going retail very early.

Often like the White Claw.

Truly, totally. And often, often having their own bespoke retail spaces. There were a lot of startups experimenting with that and now I think a lot of those startups are like, well DTC is like still great and that's at our core. So focus on that. Yeah, that's.

That's funny that you mentioned influencers and how big it's right now. Just what came to mind was bang. Energy drinks, like they're just. It's wild how aggressive they are with their advertising with influencers. And they. I'm pretty sure none of them drink that stuff. It's.

You gotta watch the CEO's YouTube videos. They are the craziest ranch. It makes Reinhardt blog posts look like, I don't know, FDA guidance or legally. Like this guy is so just over the top. Like lot of, a lot of health claims. It's. I don't know. If I was his lawyer, I would be a little worried.

They saw what dollar Shave Club did and literally hundred thousand X the outrageous level.

Totally, totally.

Yeah, yeah.

So. So yeah, that's. I, I see that all over. Especially now with COVID going on. There's so much more Instagram ads going running right now because people are saying people are on their phone. More Instagram average time that you use it every day is way up. So that's huge. Right now touching on COVID 19 and how what's going on right now and how it's affecting all of these startups and established businesses even how do you think the current scenario is affecting consumer behaviors with eating out and people's habits and behaviors with how they're consuming food. Do you think it's gonna maybe potentially help Soylent be an alternative for people to turn to? Because restaurants are closed, your options are kind of limited and people are also tight on money as well.

Yeah, totally. I mean, so I think that there are kind of two waves. In February and March we saw the whole stock up phase and that was, you know, a lot of people going online and stocking up on their favorite products. And now we're seeing a little more of realization that we're moving into a recession, probably a depression. You know, pretty much everyone will be feeling a squeeze of some sort. So you are seeing a little bit of Consumer movement from the more premium food goods to more discount food goods. Things that were on trend like, you know, premium keto products or health foods that are maybe a little bit more premium ingredients. All organic, very, you know, sometimes they taste amazing but they're a little bit more expensive. You, you know, you see this with, there's been a little bit of a move towards refrigerated products. I don't want to name any specific brands but you know, you can see that there are some that, you know, we, you know, designed our product to be shelf stable and meaning you could throw, it's the perfect prepping product. You could throw it in the garage for a year and be fine. And then there was a counter trend to that, or maybe we were the counter trend, but there was a counter trend where there were shelf stable products that were either delivered to the customer cold in an ice pack or they were only sold through retail. And I think those products are going to start struggling a little bit as customers pull back from those more luxurious spending. And then you're also seeing this trend of a little bit more diy. There's a big baking boom. A lot of people are doing the sourdough starter thing or making bread, buying the more, you know, general ingredients. And you know, the interesting thing with Soylent is like we always wanted to encourage kind of this open source movement. So even before we started shipping the powder, we, we encouraged a really talented software developer who was a fan of the product to build this website that would basically allow you to customize a DIY Soylent so you could go on there and there were different recipes and they were, and they were able to, you know, people were able to put up different recipes. So if you wanted to do keto or you wanted to do, you know, maybe gluten free or a different thing that we weren't able to cater to, you could go on there, find a recipe or create your own with this kind of handy, you know, web app tool and, and then you could just click checkout and it would go to Amazon and he would get the affiliate revenue. And for a while there he was making a lot of money on affiliate revenue. It was pretty, it was pretty awesome. And, and you know, that's something that I, that I think like, regardless of the, of the impact that the drinks and the powder have as a product, you know, Soylent is very much like a corporation now. But I do think that the, you know, I hope that there's a little bit of a lasting change in the idea that like you can do this yourself. Like, this can be a resource and kind of a portal to a world where you're thinking about your health and nutrition in kind of an optimal way. So that if you're in a scenario where you're trying to cut back expenses but remain healthy, you know, you can, you can do that with a, you know, something that is like a Soylent, but, you know, maybe not even affiliated with the brand. Maybe it's your own thing, but you're just thinking about the nutrients that you're putting in your body and then optimizing those for cost and time. That's really the, the, the, the, the vision and the ethos of the company. And I hope that that's something that people can, can benefit from in, in, in this moment more than ever.

I was just thinking it's Soylent's in a really good structure, like a business strategy. It's in a good position because it's, in a way, it's countercyclical because your whole goal is to cut costs and to be an alternative. So in difficult times, Soylent's able to really deal with any, any kind of cycles that go on or recessions because it's, it's not a premium product. It's, it's good nutrients, it's quality ingredients, but at a good price. So I think that's, that's really, that positions you guys really well for any kind of scenario that's going on in the global economy.

Yeah, totally.

What does Peter Teal have in all of his bunkers? Is it Soylent?

No, it's people. It's people.

It's what?

It's people.

He had.

Yeah. Yes.

No, I'm just kidding.

But the thing, the thing is, like, for any situation that we were freaking out about early Feb. Yeah. Soylent would have been a perfect product to just go with, you know what I mean? Buy bags of it, put it in your damn. Like, like, preppers love this product, apparently. But it just, at this point of time, whether what happened or not, the first or second waves, Soylent has been.

In a good place. And one thing to add about this whole trend, I mean, it's, it's crazy. Like, a year ago I had not heard about oat milk. Now I drink that every single day. Right. So how has it been for you? I mean, Soylent was like, what was part of that was literally one of those early movers within this whole space where consumer tastes just literally changed in the span of like three, four years where we went from drinking whole milk to now just drinking Almond milk or oat milk. And now milk is considered. I don't think you get milk from cows anymore. You just get it from cashews and crazy shit like that. So, like peas? Yeah. So how has that been? I mean, just looking back, do you, do you see yourselves as, oh, maybe just early movers or reinventing the space or.

I mean, so there's two things. First, I mean, the idea of a, you know, a protein shake is not new. We really, you know, reintroduced that concept to people. We didn't really invent the whole category. Um, and, but in terms of the vegan trend, I think what was important was that we didn't come to that conclusion to make our products vegan on the basis of what the primary motivation for the trend was at the time. The primary motivation, as I remember it, of course, there were vegans that were vegans for different reasons, but the primary motivation was empathy towards animals, which we definitely had. But the real driving force was a, you know, like an efficiency gain. And really just thinking about if you, if you break the, you know, the pipeline down, you're trying to get energy from the sun into plants, they photosynthesize, they create nutrients. You could eat those, or you could, or you could, you know, eat the cow that ate the plants. So it seemed more efficient. And that was a different way of looking at it. And I think that's what allowed us to kind of stand out. And then when you look at the branding and the name being ironic and it being it, there was nothing about it that said, you know, this is the pastoral vegan brand that there are five others of. So it was a way for people to, you know, a lot of, a lot of the customers weren't vegan, but they were happy to, you know, participate in veganism because we made it so easy for them. And I have a big, I have a big kind of theory or just idea that the best way to facilitate social change is not to tug on the heartstrings or try and change someone's motivation. It's actually just to make it easier for them to do that space specific thing. I think Tesla does a great job of this where, you know, there was a movement early on for the electric vehicle, but it wasn't practical and it wasn't easy to do it. So even if you were worried about climate change in 2000 and you got the EV1, I think it was called, it wasn't an upgrade. Whereas now the people that are buying Teslas, they're buying the fastest car, the coolest car it looks great, the technology works. Yeah, they're good looking. So. So all of a sudden the people that are buying them, they're having the impact that they want to have, but they're doing it kind of on selfish grounds. But you know, I'm sure, you know, from studying economics, you know, getting someone to do something that's self interested is going to be a lot easier than trying to convince them, especially when you have a global free rider problem like with something like climate change. And veganism plays into the climate change equation as well. So our goal was to, you know, be vegan because it made sense long term from, from an environmental perspective, but also just from an efficiency perspective. Our society should be more efficient about extracting nutrients that we need and veganism is, is a path to that. We want to make, we want to make products that enable that as easily as possible.

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