S10E8: Pioneering Soda, Gut Health, and Lifestyle with Ben Goodwin, Co-Founder of OLIPOP

When you're that young of a brand and the customers that have already incorporated you into their life at that level, that now you've become an essential item for them during their one shopping trip a week. I was like, this is different than just something that's flashing. The relationship that we're building is deeper than I thought it was.

Welcome back to Season 10 of The Room Podcast. Claudia, can you believe it's been 10 seasons?

Madison truly cannot believe it will be 4 years of The Room with you this year. I'm thrilled to be back behind the mic with you for season 10. For all of our listeners since season 1, you truly have been with us for some formative years.

If you're new here, Claudia and I started The Room podcast with the mission of opening the door to the room where it happens. In turn, sharing the stories from some of the world's most iconic founders and funders. All in an effort to inspire and educate the next generation of entrepreneurs. And thanks to you all, we were recently listed on the Forbes 30 Under 30 Media list for 2024.

So why us? We're two best friends who met as product managers in 2018, then realized as we were making career transitions into myself, founder, and Madison, funder, wanted to talk to the entrepreneurs that had built great companies. Since starting the podcast, I founded Pryve, a commerce payment startup. Raised venture capital, and have faced a ton of challenges. Madison became a partner at Defy VC, was the first investor in my startup, and is now at Harvard Business School and is a pair VC scout coming to the table with the fresh funder perspective.

Over the course of 9 seasons, we've had over 88 guests amassing over $50 billion in enterprise value, ranging from conversations with the former founder and CEO of Zillow, Spencer Raskoff, to Michelle Zatlin, the founder of Cloudflare, Grammy Award-winning artist Sierra, and the creator of Next.js and CEO of Vercel, Guillermo Rauch.

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Welcome back to The Room Podcast for our 10th season finale. We are absolutely thrilled to end this season with our conversation with Ben Goodwin, founder and CEO of Olipop. If you haven't already become an Olipop fan or seen it in the beverage aisle of your local supermarket, Olipop is a pioneering beverage company at the intersection of taste and gut health, disrupting the traditional soda industry without sacrificing taste. Ben takes us on a journey through his upbringing and how it shaped his worldview, his pivotal realization about lifestyle changes, and the catalyst that drove him to become a founder. Not only does Ben share the origin story of Olipop, but we also dive deep into how to build a truly disruptive consumer business. Some key topics in today's episode include cultivating a community both online and offline, building an innovative product while disrupting an industry, and the future of CPG. We hope you enjoy this season 10 finale. While this is the last episode of season 10, subscribe and join our newsletter to keep up with some exciting announcements that will be happening over the next few weeks. Let's open the door. Ben, thank you so much for joining us in the room today. We are so excited to have you.

I'm thrilled to be here. Great to be with you, Claudia and Madison McIlwain.

We love to start at the beginning with our guests. So before we dive into the creation story and founding story behind Olipop, tell us, where did you grow up and how did that shape your view of the world?

I was born in San Francisco in the mid-'80s, and I don't remember San Francisco from like a birthplace standpoint because we actually moved down to Monterey, California. The way that it shaped my life is we grew up pretty poor, but we actually grew up in a really nice area, which is a weird kind of confluence. And also we ate a standard American diet. Now I have a company that manufactures healthy soda. I grew up drinking plenty of soda and obviously for worse, eating lots of fast food. So I'd had the personal experience that a lot of Americans have had. But then in my upbringing, it was against a really beautiful backdrop. That kind of background didn't set me up for a great potential future. And at 14, I overnight was like, what am I doing? I'm 60 pounds overweight. I'm not doing well in school, even though I'm like more than smart enough. So I, at 14, I got into nutrition and I started going for walks and the fact that I was in a really beautiful area where I could actually clear my head and think and get inspiration from the surroundings was actually ultimately really helpful for me. And then my first job was at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. So that's also was a great experience to hang out with sea otters when you're 15. It was really good.

Unbeatable. It's interesting you mentioned this transformative year or period of time as a teenager where you realized maybe I'm not living the healthiest lifestyle. A couple of years ago, we chatted with Kara Golden, the founder of Hint. And she also mentioned that she was addicted to sodas, Coca-Cola, stopped drinking them, and then lost a ton of weight, which is an interesting point that you were referencing in your own journey. Can you tell us a little bit more about that transformative moment where you realized, hey, this is not how life should be?

Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, to not break over the whole can of worms, there were a range of challenges associated with my childhood. It's actually not uncommon for entrepreneurs to have trauma in their childhood. You'd be surprised how many entrepreneurs either have some trauma in their background or are neurodiverse. I like lost my dad when I was young and we grew up poor and had a range of other challenges. Um, you know, and I think in my early teenage years that expressed itself through a large amount of like anxiety and a lot of the things that are the most impactful are on their surface quite simple, but they have a lot of depth to them. And in that particular instance, I actually just stumbled across this epiphany, which again, on its surface sounds very simple, but I wasn't raised religious. I don't know why we're here. I don't know what happens after we die, whatever. But I just became committed to this concept of having a good life. And like, what did that mean to have a good life? And I knew for one thing that kind of the trajectory that I was on was not going to create a good life. That actually was quite influential because as I continue to study for myself what that meant to have a good life, I ended up landing on the idea that I wanted to maximize my positive impact in the world. And I actually tied that target to having good life concept. But at the time when I was 14 and I started that process, there's a handful of things that I'm going to have to take control over and shift if I'm going to set myself up in that position. First thing I did is I jumped into caloric restriction because if you need to lose some weight, it's a good idea. Then I started learning about nutrition. Then I went on long walks. Then they turned into runs. Then at 17, I started getting therapy. So it was this kind of step-by-step process. And I did actually, I lost 50 pounds in less than a year. Pretty intense experience. But the other thing that came out of that was as I was really focusing on health and wellness and nutrition over a period of like 4 or 5 years, yeah, I lost the weight, I had more energy, et cetera. But I also really started to experience new levels of kind of cognitive clarity. And emotional stability that the more I leaned into nutrition, the more I got out of it. All of a sudden became really hungry for knowledge around self-actualization, self-improvement. Nutrition became a really powerful tool for these different axes of wellbeing. And as I look at the challenges we have on a domestic level around nutrition and health, and then later learning about the brain-gut axis and all these other things, it was really impactful to me that like, hey, if I can actually shift people's nutrition at a mass scale, that's not just a vehicle into physiological health, that's actually potentially a vehicle into other forms of health that we're having issues with nationally.

You were very passionate about this philosophy of how do we live a good life, how do we help others live a good life, and driving impact at a pretty early age. I'm curious, did you think that the way to drive impact was going to be by founding something?

That's an interesting question because I have always been entrepreneurial, but I didn't I didn't put the pieces together until later that I was entrepreneurial. And it was stupid stuff. Like it was, I don't know, in third grade, I really liked X-Men. And so I created this thing called the X-Men Club. And I think it was basically like, hey, everybody else who likes X-Men, do 50 cents of your lunch money every day. Let's put it in a pool and then we can buy toys with it. And they're like, I had a treasurer and I had, you know, like I had like structure, like a totally self-created club. Ironically, in third grade, the thing that was funny about that is my club binders kept disappearing, and I was like, where the hell are they going? And then I got pulled out of class one day because some kid told on me. I, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know what happened, but the principal pulled me out of class and said, you've got to stop it with the X-Men club because clubs turn into gangs and we can't have gangs here. And I Like, like, first of all, way to just not support independent local businesses, sir. But it's like, I still look back at that and laugh. I still remember the name of the kid who told me in high school, around when I was graduating high school, randomly had a young Thai coconut. And that was before there was any kind of coconut water floating around. And then I was like, these are delicious. A friend of mine and I just created a farmer's market booth and we just started selling coconuts at the farmer's market because I just thought it was cool. Or I've always been into music, electronic music, and I've been DJing for a couple decades and I just started throwing warehouse parties and giving my mixtape to local clubs. And I've always had the mentality, if I think something's cool or if there's something that I want to do or I think is important, if there's something established or if there's not something established, I don't really care. I'm just going to do the thing that I want to do. And then I ended up having a mentor at around the age of 20, civil rights activist, actually met him because I threw a big show that he attended. He was an executive producer for a local venue in Monterey and he needed somebody local. So I ended up working under him as a co-executive producer, but he was a civil rights activist who won a Supreme Court case by himself with no legal representation. He was really influential. The Supreme Court case that he won, he just went and studied himself. He didn't even have a lawyer. And I was really inspired by the direct action component of that. And so I come from a family that believes in academia and on its face value, so do I. But then I also was aware of the fact that if I went through this program, I was just going to be in debt forever. And I read the White Roads book by the Clif Bar founder, and it just dawned on me, like, I guess you can just start your own food, the health company. I think I'll just do that. It wasn't like I knew that there was this pre-established infrastructure. It was more just like, That's something I just wanna do.

Totally. And so from kombucha to Olipop, there were a few steps in between, and quite frankly, Olipop was not even your first company. In 2009, you founded Obi Probiotic Soda, which then exited in 2016. Tell us about the Obi journey and really what learnings you took from that first company, first founding, first exit that you now take with you in building and scaling Olipop.

Yeah, it was a super interesting experience. There are some aspects of the exit that just can't have public comment on. But from a learnings perspective, I mean, I think there was a professional learning that really related to the category. And then there's a range of personal learnings. And that's, by the way, also you being a founder would have experienced this directly, or Madison, you would have seen this in investments you would have made. That's one of the aspects of the entrepreneurial journey that I actually respect so much. Personal growth is non-optional. The courage it takes to do what you're doing, the mental agility that it ends up taking, the critical thinking skills, the stress management skills. Anybody going through those journeys better have a cadre of both professional and interpersonal growth factors. On the professional side, it was interesting because I spent 4 years of R&D. I was living bicoastally between the West Coast and New York. I had 3 different income flows. I basically worked nonstop and I found a microbiologist and this guy was absolutely wild. He's, to this day, it's crazy that I found him. It's crazy how perfect he was for what I needed because he would get hired by pharmaceutical companies and the Defense Department to go down to Latin America, basically jungle, and then try to find phytoactive compounds in undiscovered plants that had potential pharmacological use. And he had two PhDs, organic chemistry and microbiology. So he was used to working in these really non-traditional, not sterile, not well-equipped circumstances. So as somebody who didn't have a lot of cash, being able to link up with him and say, hey, we're going to work on this fermented beverage concept together. And instead of buying a $200,000 lab from Thermo Fisher, we would go to the aquarium store and Ace Hardware, and we made our own bioreactors by running an electrostatic gun over Ziplocs. Because it turns out the Ziploc baggies are actually sterilized in the back. So then you run electrostatic gun over them, you make micropermeability, and you just build yourself 500 miniature bioreactors for no money, right? It was that kind of stuff that we were doing. And so that process was interesting because it took about 2 years to basically mutate our own culture bank and get this fermented culture that actually tasted good, that could actually scale, that was actually stable, which is actually very difficult. And it was at that moment that it was some late night sitting in the lab and I was just like, God, we worked so hard on this. I really want to give this the maximum opportunity to meet as many customers or potential customers actually where they are. And it was, again, the really simple concept. It's actually surprisingly complex. I just was like, soda's massive and soda's also causing a lot of disease. So what if I could make something that tasted like a soda but actually had all these health benefits to it? And that was in 2010 is when I started working on that, on that product. And that did end up becoming Probiotic Soda. But it was funny because soda and soda is still ultimately declining. It's disproportionately declining with teenagers and children, but it's declining overall. Soda saw a bump under the stress that the population suffered through COVID, and they saw another little bump when they raised their prices under inflation. But the net track is that it's a declining category. So when I first decided to move into this direction with soda, I had major advisors who ran multi-hundred million dollar businesses who broke up with me as an advisor because they thought I was, quote, wasting a gift from God by trying to go in this direction to make a healthy soda. So we had to stick to our guns. And then eventually I met my current business partner, David, and we launched it. And I would say that, you know, we kind of hedged our bets a little bit. I released flavors that were more on the health market side, but we also had a root beer. And the root beer ended up being the top seller. Also, a lot of the traction we ended up getting and the consumer response we ended up getting, I felt like this is a really excellent case study that makes me really believe in the potential of this category. And then eventually when we exited Obi and I was like, hey, that was cool, but I definitely don't feel like I finished the mission out and I wanted to come back. It really gave us the conviction to lead all into this soda concept. That was a learning that was really valuable. And obviously there's learnings there about when you feel committed to something, you like, you gotta go for it. It's like, you kinda can't pussyfoot around too much. On the personal front, there's also like a lot of learnings. I would say one of the biggest learnings I had is in my early 20s, I was probably like a lot of people unnecessarily arrogant. Like I think there's a lot of Dunning-Kruger effect action going on. And then by my late 20s, which is when Obii was getting off the ground, I was on a very active ego suppression tour to not be that founder that always is stepping into the room, claiming too much oxygen. But I actually took it too far and I didn't have enough understanding of self and respect for specific areas where actually I am fairly differentiated as a person and knowing where my entrepreneurial instinct was the unique tool in the room. And getting to know yourself more and learning when those moments are that you need to stand your ground and when you need to be more flexible is a really important aspect of maturity over time.

So one could say you trusted your gut there. Sorry, I had to put that in. But in all seriousness, finding that balance of humility with authenticity for what were your unique superpowers in this origin story. And understanding deeply from a sense of empathy why better-for-you soda did need to exist in the market and why the existing incumbents just had no incentive to produce a product that was quote-unquote better for you, because it would be admitting guilt that the current product isn't good for you, which really opened the door to Olipop and what it is today. So just for our listeners who might be a little bit new to who is Olipop, could you give us the 1-minute pitch on Olipop?

100%. So Olipop is a new kind of soda. It's high in fiber and prebiotics, and it's quite low in sugar, but the tasting experience is just like the soda that we all grew up with. We are one of the fastest growing beverage companies of all of US history, which is very fortunate position to be in. And we have a large amount of clinical evidence behind the product. So we've got a really fantastic scientific advisory board who've written a mechanism of action white paper. We've completed in vitro clinical trials around the product. We're actually gearing up for a human clinical trial looking at blood sugar stability and metabolic health, which we'll have done this year. And all the work that we've done around our clinical evaluations actually opened up, uh, pretty substantial insurance reimbursement networks. So this year, 25 million Americans can actually get Olipop reimbursed against their food as medicine benefits. And there's also some pretty big stuff around beverages as engagement benefits as well. And I think that's the real one-two punch of Olipop is that the product and the flavor profile and the branding architecture has been built with a lot of empathy for the consumer and a high quality standard. And so we really do fulfill that soda need and we have respect. I'm not trying to shame people for the fact that they like soda because Coke was there for them on their 5th birthday. We weren't. Get over yourself a little bit. But the flip side of it is that we're really committed to actually setting a higher standard in health and wellness because it's between food supplements and beverage. It's a $300 billion category in the US and less than 1% of those brands, even though they're all charging a premium for their product and the consumer is trying to do something to make their life better. They're spending extra money to make their life better. With so few brands actually have any independent empirical evidence to deliver benefit, it's the consumer that loses. So that's our combo package.

That's incredible. And I know as someone who may or may not sneak a soda every once in a while, I kind of viscerally feel that mentality of even the rhetoric of me saying sneak or wanting to go on a soda cleanse and kind of kick that habit. And it's just built in, especially maybe in the circles of living on the coast and having that mindset of, oh, I know what's healthy for me, but sometimes I have to have this treat and we shouldn't deny ourselves the treat. And I love that Olipop is providing that treat moment with science-based gut health. And so just double-clicking on the science part of it, you alluded to some of these incredible initiatives that you've put behind it, but could you just talk a little bit more about the science and some of the process that you've built there in-house with Olipop?

Yeah, absolutely. In my personal journey, when I was working on the kombucha product, I do have an ever-bubbling frenzy for research. And in fact, most problems, I'm like, all right, let's start with what the research says. There's so much cool research out there. Why would you not just start by let's see what it says? So I've always been motivated around that. So if I was working on something that purports to be a gut health product, kombucha, and it actually is no human clinical trial that shows that kombucha provides a real benefit. Unfortunately, at the time I didn't know that, but I did start looking into microbiome research and there's this really interesting thing called the brain-gut axis, right? So we produce the majority of our neurotransmitters in our microbiome. So that was the kind of light bulb for me about how I changed my diet. And, and so this thing started shifting. So that discovery from my end in the research really has set me up for a deep fascination around the microbiome. The challenge is the microbiome's a very complex system where there's a lot of emergent clinical literature. So we're only studying it, we're only, you know, increasing our understanding in real time. And there's also like a big gap around consumer understanding of the microbiome. That's even more challenging. If you want a scaled brand, I I think you can only lean into talking about the microbiome so much. So we've always tried to use more accessible access points from a consumer understanding basis, hence the gut health. Also because we're high in fiber, Cometary and gut health is very legally defensible for us. But what's awesome about the microbiome is the under system for so many other systems in the body. So it's immune function. I just discussed the brain gut axis. Obviously the digestion piece, but it's also really linked to hormonal function, which includes metabolic health. And obviously diabetes is a massive issue domestically and internationally. And one of the things that people logically think of when they think of the challenges around soda, I felt really early on with Olipop that it was important. This whole thing I was just talking about with, let's increase the standard here. If we get lucky enough to be successful and are actually disruptive to a category as substantial as soda, I think then we kind of owe it to ourselves and to our customers to not then miss the opportunity as well to say, hey, this should essentially be the standard. So it actually started pretty innocently. Myself and a consultant who's also a friend that I've worked with for years, we got in cars, we got in planes, and we just flew around and we dropped in at a bunch of universities and said, here's the thing we're doing. Would you be interested in supporting us? And then a handful of really fantastic folks who I'm eternally grateful for, really believed in what we were doing. And that is actually a lot of the composition of our scientific advisory board today. So that was the starting place. Obviously, I wanted them to weigh in on the formula to validate that our approach made sense and was sound. Again, two of them, Dr. Joseph Petrosino from, from Baylor and Dr. Steven Lindeman from Purdue, co-wrote, co-authored the mechanism of action white paper. We actually have partnered really pretty heavily with Purdue. They've got a fantastic complex carbohydrates lab. So we actually do all of our in vitro clinical pipeline is in Purdue and all of our stability work we run through Purdue as well. And then look, I can go down a rabbit hole. We've done a pretty extensive battery test in that in vitro system. The super top line is that we saw a marked increase in Bifidobacterium, which is a very important probiotic that we really need as humans. And we saw a material increase in the fermentation of a compound called short-chain fatty acids, which do a bunch of really important things for the body. So we basically saw really strong first and second order outcomes associated with the fermentation of the product. And there's some more stuff in the pipeline that I can't quite publicly discuss yet, but it's cool.

That's incredible. And we talked a little bit about this when you came and spoke, but the viral moment of the gut talk meets really clinical-backed science and understanding a product that is something you know you can put in your body because it's been tested. It's a far cry from the plastic bag lab you, you started with. Sounds like top of the line. But B, I think just in terms of the consumer trust component, trying something new that Maybe you don't totally understand the entire label, uh, which we often rarely do anyway, but where's that trust component? You have to build that with your customer. So playing that forward a little bit, it's 2018, it's the heyday of D2C companies. Everyone and their mother has both started one as well as it's everything we're consuming. How did you think about product market fit and what specifically was the moment where you and your team said, okay, we've got something here on the marketing side?

We started brick and mortar, so we started with a small DSD in Northern California and they believed in what we were doing. They were generous. We had to pre-sell. They told us to go pre-sell 100 accounts and then we were at like 40 or 50. They're like, all right, fine, we'll carry your product and built it out like that. The first year was— we didn't even launch until I think two-thirds into the year. That was just getting it set up. And then the next year I think we did $1 million and I think that we went to 9, and then we just kept growing rapidly from there. The year that we did 9 was where I was like, okay, there's something really legitimate here. Right off the bat, we saw strong velocity data almost immediately. We put the product on the shelf. There was a moment, like the first version of the Vintage Cola, we called Cinnamon Cola. There is cinnamon in cola. So when I was making the cola, I was like, I'm going to tweak the caramel and the vanilla and the cinnamon. I'm like, How nifty. I'm gonna call it Cinnamon Cola. And everyone's like, is it spicy cinnamon? I'm like, it didn't cross my mind that would be a thing. So we actually had to rename it Vintage Cola and everybody's been fine. Also humorously, you can go find people debating online whether they like the cinnamon or the Vintage Cola more and they're the same formula, which I also thought was, that speaks to the power of the packaging. But the moment that was interesting was that $9 million year was the year that COVID hit and signals started to come through, they're like, holy shit, this is serious. But it was still some reactivity time left. I don't think it got really crazy until March or April. I basically just went to the team and was like, guys, we need to build out a DDC function fast. We, we had one, it was just a bit anemic in comparison to our brick and mortar apparatus. I'm like, we need to double down on this and create all sorts of systems around it because the prevailing logic at that point in time was because in a single serve 12-ounce cans, you're probably mostly impulse or grab-and-go purchase. And so obviously entering into a situation where now people are only going to the grocery store every week or two and impulsivity in shopping is basically falling off a cliff. In my head I was like, okay, we have to switch to this DTC function. There's no way we're going to hit our plan for the year. And what ended up happening is we ended up hitting our plan in retail, which was really unexpected. And then all that D2C revenue was on top. So we ended up overshooting, we ended up overshooting our plan by something like 33% because now these two systems are working together. Obviously I'm thrilled. And so we want to try to reverse engineer, like, how did that happen? And it was because for those customers that were already familiar with Olipop, when they were going to the store for their weekly shopping trip, they were pantry loading. They were getting enough because they actually really wanted to keep having one a day. And we didn't think that relationship existed yet. And so there's a difference between, okay, cool, we're seeing good data, we're seeing good pull-through, we're seeing good velocities. But when you're that young of a brand and the customers that have already incorporated you into their life at that level, that now you've become an essential item for them during their one shopping trip a week, I was like, this is different than just something that's flashing because the relationship that we're building is deeper than I thought it was. So I think that's the moment in this arc where that landed there.

So you've been feeling that pull from the market really since 2020. And in CNBC, it's reported that you're doing about $20 million in revenue a month now. So clearly that was then. I don't know if you have any new numbers you can share with us, but not public.

But it's going well.

So things have been up and to the right. And as a part of this process and building, you have taken on some venture financing as well as angels, raising about $43 million in funding total. We're really curious, who was that first person to say yes to you and investing in Allipop?

You know what, I'm gonna give my shout out to a gentleman who, he's Bay Area based, but big old shout out to Pat Finn. And Fin Partners. He's mostly a CPG investor, although he does some beauty and he does some other stuff. Pat has been a friend of ours. He was an investor in Obi, and it's a really interesting— when people ask me for really early stage investing advice, one of the things I oftentimes communicate to them is like, look, most of the investors are going to be an asshole. When you are really small and you have no proof points, most of them are going to be an asshole. And there's going to be some of them that meet with you and at least are going to hear you out, are going to try to get an understanding of what your goals are, your mission are. They're going to ask you serious and probing questions around your business model. They're going to challenge your thinking. That's all great. That's fine. That's healthy. And if it makes you uncomfortable, even the better, because it means it's actually pushing your thinking. That's where you want to start your investment. And Pat is the perfect representation of that and saw how David and I, what we were aiming for, what our mission was, how we had behaved during the first venture and saw the passion and the standard that we were looking to set as we came back for Olipop and basically said, I'm absolutely betting on you two again because I've seen your arc. And he was a part of the seed round, sat on the board for a little while, and now he's a board observer. And he's come back in a couple of times, but I still talk to Pat on a regular basis. It's really good to have those types of folks in the mix, and you're lucky when you get them.

As a founder, it's so important to have those key individuals who not only have the context around your journey, but also that level of trust as you're building and scaling. And so I think for a lot of our listeners who are founders or might be thinking of building a company potentially in food and beverage or CPG and thinking about fundraising. I know fundraising for physical goods is often quite different than software. As someone who has raised multiple rounds and incredible amounts of funding from incredible partners, what advice would you have for aspiring founders who are thinking about taking on venture capital?

Honestly, the partnership thing is definitively the most important aspect. I think there's 3 phases, at least that I've experienced. There's probably more, but there's 3 phases that I've experienced to, to fundraising, right? So the first one is the one I just covered off where you're sapling and people are, can be a bit dismissive or bit asshole to you. There's people who really take the time to listen and understand. And then there's also some folks who are just a bit predatory and watch out for that. There's pretty obvious signals for that. Like if they kind of, they try to paint themselves as your savior or whatever, like there's different ways to sniff that out. Then there's the next phase, which is you're doing really well or you're starting to get a lot of traction. And then all of a sudden, all those people that were used to be very dismissive are now very interested. You still want to try to find people who take the time to understand. It's really critical to find people who back you as an operator and want to understand you as an operator, but their focus is very business-centric. And a lot of their questions are on your model and on your runway and what you're going to do, because that is a good indicator that their head's in the right place. The other thing that can come in is you start to get some traction, especially for inexperienced entrepreneurs who are like, are used to being misfits and now all of a sudden they're receiving all the inbound. Watch out for people that fluff your ego because the ego fluffers almost universally will then use that same conduit to break you down during times of stress or lower performance. So if they come in through that personality, that buildup phase, there's a high likelihood that when the chips are reversed, because that's just like the level they're operating at, then you get To this third phase, which is more of where we are now, where actually it's less of a wild west and you're dealing with more mature funding entities. And then it's just like, have your data in together. You still have to keep selling the story. You still have to keep telling a really good story. It's gotta be compelling. Your strength as an operator is as or more important than ever. And you actually have to have your ducks in a row. Like your models have to make sense. You need to be audited and all those kinds of things to have a legit framework. That doesn't set up any red flags. But I think those are the 3 and that component of really making sure that the investors that you end up giving any kind of power to are partners. And because essentially in entrepreneurialism, hitting rough seas is literally inevitable. In fact, if we go too long without hitting any kind of weirdness, I'm like, all right, where's it coming from? What's actually wrong that's building up that we need to, like, jump on? And so, yeah, you want somebody who's a partner in those moments and they don't— their contribution isn't just adding more stress or trying to take advantage of the fact that you're down.

I think we could do a whole podcast episode on early-stage investment red flags.

I'll just learn from the Tesar Show here.

I could tell from your vibe almost immediately the likelihood that you fit into a lot of the biggest red flag categories or not.

Well, thanks, Pat. I appreciate that.

Nonetheless, incredibly important wisdom for people who are fundraising the first time to just keep an eye out.

It's always desperate. And that's where strength of conviction matters. It's like the founder entrepreneur, and sometimes it's hard to really feel this in your system unless you've been through the downside of it. But as challenging as things can sometimes be, and, and oftentimes startups turn into absolute pressure cookers. And so I, have a huge amount of empathy for that situation, lived through it many times myself. But the founder has to really keep in mind that if I put this thing in the wrong hands in order to keep it alive, I am going to end up compromising the vision down the road. And sometimes you're in a terrible place and you have to, you feel like you have to make some of those decisions and sometimes you do, but all that stuff ends up coming with a cost.

You mentioned rough air, turbulent times. Tell us about a time where things didn't go as planned. Tell us about one of these moments.

You know, it's really annoying with the Olipop story, 'cause I have been asked this question before, is my answer here, and it's an authentic answer, but it ends up being so obnoxious. You do all sorts of team building and meaning building and to keep people focused and under all the stress, but something we've had to deal with is too much of anything will end up causing challenges. And the simple reality is we've had triple-digit growth every year, including last year, since we founded the business. We had 960% growth one year. We almost had quadruple-digit growth. And that's awesome. I'll take that all day. It can put a lot of stress on your system. We've completely resolved our network capacity problem, but there were two years where we literally couldn't make enough product. And I will tell you, there's few things more depressing than being like, there's money on the table. And beyond there being money on the table, people want the product and we can't because it's not just the short term of you lost the immediate sale. Now your fill rates are down with your key customers and you are potentially damaging. You have more out of stock. So, so maybe your customer is going to go try your competitor or maybe your customers will be like, yeah, I like that flavor, but it's always out of stock or whatever. 2 years that had periods with capacity issues. That was super annoying. It wasn't like all year, it was just some peak seasons. And then I would also say same thing applies to hiring and internal processes. Last year we went from 74 to 200 top line in sub-25,000 stores, which has never happened in US beverage history before. When you go through that kind of growth, you're like, I know I need to just hire so many people. But if I hire too quickly, especially if I make poor choices because I'm overfilling the queue, I'm going to be disrupting the culture. Hiring too many people and then making too many mistakes, hiring the wrong people is really disruptive. So you're constantly in this organizational flex around what's the workload, how do we cover, what's the priority? And same thing with processes. I think one thing that we've had that has been really lucky is we have a very high trust culture. And we have a high affiliation culture. And so there's actually like a fair bit of trust that's historically permeated our team. And that has allowed a pretty high level of working together, coordination, despite the lack of some of the processes. But it's still painful when you're like, oh damn, we don't have a proper performance review system for the last 12 months, but we're at 80 employees. It's crazy because you would never want to have that situation, but there's just too much growth to, to manage. So I think like that has honestly been literally trying to manage the growth, get the right people in the door, not disrupt what's important about what we're doing, building our network capacity, leaders being stretched, including myself, where you need time to grow because growth takes time as a person. And there's just no time. There's no time to react to it. That's why I built Olipop Leadership University, which we now have our second year of, which has actually been incredible, but you've got to make some innovative choices if you're going to try to keep afloat in that condition.

Yeah, I think one aspect of building a company that's often overlooked is the notion that oftentimes a company will outpace the initial team, and that's often like a pain.

And then you have title inflation, right? Like, yeah, you're like, because it's the reality is like a VP at a $5 million company is a director, but who's going to be like, sure, I'll take the title demotion. Almost nobody, 99 people out of 100 won't. So then you have to be like, by the way, you actually have to do all the tasks associated, but you also have to uplevel your skills and you have to uplevel your leadership capabilities. And that's a lot to ask.

In regards to growth beyond what we've already talked about from the top level, you have an incredible community behind Olipop. No joke. Yesterday I was on my Instagram and one of my cousins was just self-making a video, loving Olipop. She's not an influencer, she's a micro-influencer at best. Love her. And I thought it was the cutest thing ever. And I was like, I'm literally talking to the founder tomorrow. So you can't make this up. Your community is everywhere. How did you think about building community for your product as a part of your go-to-market?

I love this question. There's like a split answer here because there's a range of things that we have done. So one thing is, whenever possible, certainly thinking about the customer, getting their feedback on formulation. We always have a running tab of every single flavor request that any customer's ever put in email or social or anything we've ever been able to find. We keep it all in a big database and then we stack rank them based on the ratios of requests. And so sometimes I purposefully do something that's just kicking around in my head because I'm like, this would be awesome. Hey, not many people are asking for this, but I've got a vision for it. I think it would be really delightful. But other times it's, hey, I'm so glad I know what our customers want. So it's that mixture of delivering things that we know that they want versus, and delivering things that are intriguing that they maybe wouldn't have thought of. And obviously we do, we've got the standard, we've got an email list, we've got a subscriber base, we have a text list, we have questions, we will go to a select group. Of subscribers of people who work in this deeper network and it gives us a great sounding board to say, hey, we're thinking about doing this. Like, what do you guys, what do you guys think? And a lot of really good feedback comes out of that. I would say the other part of the answer is even our community, it's this area where we've gotten really lucky to the point that you made, the level of organic affinity is so high. And I don't think we've probably done quite as much as we could. And again, I think it's one of those aspects of the rate of growth has meant that we're suddenly this big, but some of the systems haven't totally caught up to capture that because I'm really looking forward to developing platforms that allow us to continue to engage our customers and also allow them to share their stories with us because so many of our core consumers have an Olipop story that they are dying to communicate. And we're working on different ways to not only continue to tell the Olipop side of the brand story, but to allow the customers to communicate back to us and tell us their story. That is coming.

And that's such a special thing about being a consumer in 2024. You can complain about a lot of things about being a consumer today, but I think the thing that I love the most is the fact that you really can talk to your brands. And they live, they listen.

I know we're lucky. We're lucky that we get to have that direct line of communication. It's exceptional. And I love it because you can still have a vision, but it gives you an opportunity to ensure that you're getting more direct feedback. It's your own form of direct research, so you can be very consumer-informed and use that to shape and mold an original vision that you wanna share. And so it truly is a dialogue now. That goes just beyond purchasing power. And I think I really love that aspect of where we sit.

Well, because you're such a subject matter expert in the science space, I just had a quick, somewhat tangential but related to the category question around what is you and your team's perspective on Ozempic and how it's going to impact the consumer market of consumption as it effectively unlocks a weight loss habit that has never been seen before?

Yeah, that's interesting. I don't know my team's perspective on it. It definitely is not something that's broadly come up. My philosophy is essentially that there's kind of two major avenues of medicine, right? There's essentially what's called Western medicine, allopathic medicine, and then there's naturopathic medicine. Allopathic medicine is where the majority of our existing research sits. By proxy, it is viewed as being the most legitimate, but obviously it has some pretty substantial issues. Not exactly doing great with this country's overall health. And one of the reasons that's driving that is actually ironically an inadequate amount of research-based investment in naturopathic medicine. Again, one of the drivers behind bringing clinical work to what we're doing in Olipop, because allopathic medicine by its nature is extremely intervention-based. At the level of the symptom. So the symptom is excessive weight retention at the population level, which is typically associated with metabolic health syndrome. And so you have something like Ozempic that goes in and it attacks the issue in an interventional way, but it, the longitudinal work around that particular drug is not extensive and it's pretty aggressive in its intervention. And ultimately, if the underlying mechanic is not addressed, it's not particularly sustainable. I mean, inversely, from a terrain ecology standpoint, if you look at health from a terrain ecology standpoint, there's a massive behavior shift needed at scale, and there's a massive upgrade required to product quality and product offerings. And there's also a lot going on right now around stress. Like, stress meaningfully drives up cortisol production when it's chronically elevated. Can facilitate retention of weight, right? So we've got a really stressed out society, we've got a society with terrible food consumption habits, but that feels too daunting to tackle. So let's just go with the Ozempic and intervene at that level. So look, I'm not going to absolutely shame anybody who feels driven to use it, and especially for people who've had a successful experience on it, saw some. But I think it's like the craze around it is a signal around the larger issues that we're not, that we're not addressing.

No, it's an anecdote, but not necessarily solving the core panacea that we're experiencing. To your point, it will be interesting to watch, and I think we'll be able to see how it does ultimately impact consumerism as a product of helping people feel better and what that might look like over the long term. Thanks for chatting with us on all these different levels. We'll wrap up here with a few closing questions. My last question for you, and then I'll kick it over to Claudia, is what's your favorite Olipop flavor?

Oh, boy. The best I can give you is my top 5. So right now, my main rotation in my fridge is going to be Tropical Punch, Grape, the Lemon Lime. I'm really happy about this. Quince in there, guys. Like, come on. You don't ever see that. The Cherry Cola and the Watermelon Lime. Those are my top 5 favorite to drink.

It's like picking children.

Totally, totally.

As we wrap up today, we chatted a lot about sort of the history of Olipop, the history of you, Ben, and we're excited to ask what's next for Olipop? What can we get excited about in 2024?

Expanding distribution, expanding our brand platform, the Real Love Makes Us platform. We had our early foray with our Camila Cabello ad last year, but it was this weather balloon floating up and like wasn't into a brand world. So building that out this year is going to be high on our priority list. We do have some really exciting partnerships, some of which are going to get announced pretty soon, but we'll have those popping off throughout the year and a couple of flavor launches. So it's a bubbling pot. There's a lot of stuff that's coming down the road.

That's awesome. Ben, it's been amazing having you on the podcast. And as we wrap up today, we like to ask the question that we ask all of our guests to wrap things up. Who is a woman that has had a profound impact on your life and your career?

That answer's super, super easy for me. My executive coach, her name is Laura Greenberg. She's based in Chicago. She is a powerhouse of a human being. She has a PhD in organizational psychology. She has an MFT. She's done original research around both leadership and followership. I'm so lucky to work with her and we've been working together over 3 years now. She and I actually co-developed the Olipop Leadership University that I rolled out, and I wouldn't trust anybody else. I wouldn't hand over our leaders in our business so happily to anybody else than I can think of as I would with her. And I think having a really good executive coach that not only believes in you, cares about you, and wants to invest in you and grow you, but also understands you. That's difficult. You don't want somebody giving you like socially normative feedback. You want somebody giving you feedback that's fit for your crazy ass. And that's something she does a really good job of, this kind of understanding me. And there's just been so many kind of key leadership moments where she does it in her very Laura way. She does it in her very coachy way, but where she asks the right questions to unlock my thinking. and there's been a lot of stuck points, whether it's because of emotionality or whether it's because of complexity, where she's really helped me to grow and evolve as a leader. Our workforce is majority female. We have 65+% of our workforce is, is women. And there, there's many different, really incredible women that work in the business and work in the industry, and we're lucky to have them.

We love to hear that stat, and we have to make sure that Laura hears this episode.

We will.

That's awesome. Ben, thank you so much for being with us today. This was a blast.

Yeah, thanks for having me. Really fun conversation and appreciate you guys inviting me on.

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