S4E1: Kara Goldin of Hint. Accidental entrepreneurship and growing a household CPG brand with the founder of your favorite water.

Welcome to The Room Podcast. My name is Madison McIlwain and I'm a partner for seed stage investments at DefyVC.

And I'm Claudia Laurie, a co-founder of Pryve. We're a founder and funder who are in the room where it happens. If you're a first-time founder or an emerging venture capitalist, we're glad you found us. We share inspiring, authentic, and insightful stories from founders, funders, and operators who have been in the room and provide tactical feedback on their early aha moments and learnings along the way. Before we dive into this week's episode, we have a short message from our partners.

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Cooley is a global law firm built around startups and venture capital. The firm has been devoted to entrepreneurs and investors, partnering with both to transform breakthrough ideas into successful companies. Cooley works with thousands of entrepreneurs and newly formed companies to ensure that they are structured for growth and long-term success. Since 2005, Cooley has been ranked the number 1 most active law firm representing VC-backed companies going public. Learn more about the firm at cooley.com and also at cooleygo.com, Cooley's award-winning free legal resource for startups. This week on the season 4 premiere of The Room, we are so excited to share our conversation with Kara Golden, co-founder and CEO of Hint. Hint started as a beverage brand focused on providing healthy fruit-infused flavored water, a truly better alternative to sugar-laden sodas. Artificially sweetened drinks. Today, Hint has expanded into sun and body items centered around transparency and wellness. Today, the Hint brand is certainly a household name. You can find the colorful bottles in delightful flavors at any local supermarket. And today, Cara shares her founding story. On this episode, Cara chats about her breakup with soda and how she started making the original Hint in her kitchen with the vision to provide everyone something a little less boring than water. Her first distribution partners were Whole Foods foods and local markets and Google. And she tells the story of how she in fact delivered her first crate of Hint water on her way to the delivery room. She also tells us that although she may have been an accidental entrepreneur, she found success by being Undaunted, which by the way is the title of her new book. We are so excited for you to listen to our conversation. Let's open the door. Thank you so much, Kara, for joining us on The Room today.

Well, thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

We'd love to start at the beginning. Your story of starting Hint begins in 2004 when you went to see a doctor because you weren't feeling your best. Tell us a little bit about your breakup with soda and how that kind of kickstarted the Hint journey.

Yeah, so I had been drinking diet soda since I was in high school, never really thinking that there was anything wrong with it. I, my mom was actually a Tab drinker, and so of course I wasn't gonna drink Tab because Nobody, especially when you're in high school, does what your mom's doing. And so I started drinking Diet Coke and over the years, more and more of it. And then I actually started my career in journalism and then ended up moving to Silicon Valley and was in— that was my first foray into tech, into that world. And when I ultimately left my last role at America Online, where I was running the e-commerce direct-to-consumer partnerships, that's when I realized that I had gained a bunch of weight. I didn't feel that great. I had two kids and was pregnant with my third and had just consistently through the pregnancies gained a lot of weight and couldn't lose the weight as fast as I gained it. And so when I was taking a break, trying to figure out what I was going to do next after America Online, that's when I went to a doctor and I said, what's wrong with me? I can't lose weight. I've never had a problem with my skin and my energy levels were low. And that's when I really started to look at dieting. I had never dieted before in my life. I had never really watched what I was putting into my body or kind of what I was putting onto my skin. But I started to do that and I realized that even though I was a very smart person and could usually figure out a lot of really hard stuff, I I could not figure out how to get healthy and I could not do what I wanted to do ultimately. And so looking at food first, nothing still was working. I was already exercising, so that really wasn't as big of an issue. But the drinks, one day when I looked at all of the ingredients in my diet soda, my Diet Coke in particular, that's when I thought, oh, why don't I just test this and see what happens? So I eliminated Diet Coke, swapped it for water. 2 and a half weeks later, I lost 24 pounds. My skin cleared up and I'm like, wait, what just happened here? And what else am I doing? And realizing that really was the issue that I had really stumbled upon, but no one was talking about diet sweeteners. And Frankly, so many people today don't even know about this, right? And it's part of the reason why I really wanna share my story of founding Hint, because I believed when I started Hint that if I could take a product like Hint to the market, then I could help a lot of people get healthy. My goal was never to launch a beverage company. That to me was the tool to actually help people get healthy, but I thought, If I've got this idea, I've seen that it works, and I want to take it to market so that I could help a lot of people.

Feels like there's almost more information than ever on how to be healthy, and yet so much confusion and so many, like, critical components that are incredibly overlooked. And I think artificial sweeteners is definitely one of them. You mentioned that you started Hint because you had a personal problem, and many of our other guests on the podcast share that quality of, hey, I have an issue, I found a solution, as kind of their path to product product-market fit. So we'll dive into that a little bit later in the podcast. But you mentioned something interesting at the point in time in which you had your breakup with diet soda and you were thinking about starting Hint. You had an impressive career in news and media from Time to CNN to VP of commerce and shopping at AOL. How did you think through taking the leap and undertaking this massive career shift after having had so much experience in another industry?

So I think part of the challenge for so many people is that they overthink things. And so I've always emphasized, don't overthink things and instead figure out if it's going to be pretty easy to just go try something and see whether or not it will work. And frankly, even in launching Hint, I tried to figure out how to be scrappy in the cheapest possible way to actually see whether or not it would actually get traction in some way. And frankly, I think That's been my story for my whole life. And as my husband said, when he met me, that wasn't how he operated. He's an intellectual. He's our chief operating officer now, but he's an intellectual property attorney, very detailed. And, and he was always looking at how I lived life of just going out and trying it in some way. And then if it really, if I wasn't getting traction, then just back off. And maybe I was going left before and then go right. So I feel like I've always had that in me. Is it part of my DNA? I have no idea. Maybe it's the part of being the last of 5 kids and growing up in a house where I just have to go figure things out a lot of the time. But, but yeah, I started my career in journalism, which was really what I love to do. I love to write. When I was going to college, that was what I absolutely love to do. And it's funny, I give this talk when I'm on college campuses a lot that I had some friends that were finance majors and it just seemed like a foreign language to me watching them in finance. I just was, could not figure out what was going on. I think part of me wanted to hang out with them. And so I thought, well, maybe I'll go take a beginning class that's fit into my schedule. And I was so lost at school, was never that hard for me. But this class was just really hard for me. And I remember walking up to my professor and saying, how do I master this class? Because this is just not good what's going on. And I just feel really behind the eight ball. And he said, every day you should read the Wall Street Journal. I'm like the Wall Street Journal. Like, that is so daunting. There's no way I can read the Wall Street Journal. This poor kid. I'm 18 years old. I'm like that only really big finance people read the Wall Street Journal. And he said, and read Fortune magazine too, and combine the two of them. And after a while, you'll start to pick up on the speaking and the trends and all of that. So that's what I did. And, uh, I have a fun story in my book all about that, where I would collect all of my Wall Street Journals that I wouldn't get a chance to read during the week. And my roommates got sick of it and wallpapered my room at one point, which we left up for a while. But that was, Finally, I ended up minoring in finance and it was ironic to anyone who really knew me that I just stuck with it. And it was my hard stuff. Like journalism wasn't hard. Finance was hard. And I put myself into situations that were a little more challenging where I felt like I was gonna learn. So I kept telling everyone when I graduated that I'd been looking in the mastheads of magazines, not really finance magazines initially, but. Saw that everything was in New York. And so I one day was looking at the masthead of Fortune magazine and I thought, I'm going to go work for Fortune. And I was going to figure out how I was going to get an editorial job at Fortune magazine. And so that meant moving to New York City. And I got on a plane, very scary thing, didn't know anybody in New York and landed there and walked into the HR department because isn't that where you go and find jobs? And so, especially when they're not posting them and just hung out. They didn't know what to do with me. I didn't get a job at Fortune, but I ended up getting a job at a sister company called Time magazine. So that was my first start in journalism. I kept thinking that I'll take a job at Time and eventually I'll transfer over into Fortune. That never happened. But instead, I got a call from a recruiter for a late-stage startup. We didn't call it back in— this is the early '90s. Called CNN. And there was a guy named Ted Turner who had started this company. And I remember them asking me, did I know what CNN was? And I lived on the Upper West Side in New York and I needed cable in order to actually have any kind of cell connection. And so I was like, I definitely know what CNN is and I get it. It's 24-hour news. And you laugh about this now, but Ted Turner was such a visionary entrepreneur. And there were a lot of people saying, who needs anything beyond 6 and 10 o'clock News. And he really was the first person that I saw that put stakes in the ground around this concept of 24-hour news is really where the world is going and it needs to be across the world. And all of these things that I think back on now are things that I, as a founder and CEO, learned a lot from those things, including sometimes when the world thinks you're crazy because you're actually ahead. Of where they're at. It's your job to be putting stakes in the ground. And people will walk in, maybe not even intentionally do this, and say, what if we go in this direction? And you really have to be the person that's putting those stakes in the ground because no one else will be doing that. And it's really understanding what your brand is, what the brand promise is to your viewers or to your consumers. So after a couple of years there, which was very exciting. It was at a time when CNN was actually put on the map. There was a country that actually learned that they were at war by watching CNN. So it was a very exciting time to be there for sure, because everybody was like, oh my God, CNN. It was really pretty crazy. That's when I had met my husband in New York and we moved out to Silicon Valley. And we, I had heard about many companies out here, but the one company that I heard over and over again, and really the one founder that I heard about over and over again was this guy Steve Jobs. And I was lucky enough with all my babysitting money from high school to when I was in college to buy a Macintosh computer. And I remember buying it, had this cute little apple on it. It was one of the first Macintosh computers and being a journalism major, it meant a lot to me because it had a lot of function, but it had a, it looked so cool. It was very stylish. It wasn't as small as they are today, but it was small enough. And I thought, I'm moving to San Francisco and maybe I could get a job at Apple. Once I got here, I figured out that Mountain View and, and Cupertino area was a lot further from San Francisco than I wanted to venture. So I started looking at this little company that I had stumbled upon that was a spinout of Apple, a very little known startup that really Steve had incubated inside of Apple. And it was a project that basically took graphics and put them on a CD. And I thought, that's pretty cool because the internet is so slow today because of baud modem, we called it, but basically dial-up services. And so his idea was take all the graphics, put it on a, put it on a CD. The consumer doesn't need to know why it's going, why they're putting the disc in. But instead, just tell them to insert the disk and upgrade. Anyway, I heard that this company was in San Mateo, a little closer to San Francisco, and I reached out and cold-called them and I said, I just moved to the Bay Area. I was, you know, working at this company called CNN. And the guy who picked up the phone said, oh my gosh, like you've been working under Ted Turner. And I'm like a few layers down from Ted Turner, but yes, I've been working. He's running around in a suit and cowboy boots. And, and he said, oh wow, like, how did you hear about our project? And I told him I had been following Steve and what he had been doing. And I said, wait, you worked for Steve? And he's, yeah. And so we had this, oh wow, about each other's founders that we had worked for. And I was like, can I take you to lunch? I don't know anyone in San Francisco. He said, sure. So I ended up getting a job at the end of that lunch. I didn't know what I was getting myself into at all, but I just thought it was funny that he was even offering me a job after just trying to understand what his company did. And my role was basically to go out to retailers and try and get them to sign up for this disc. And it was a lot of fun and seeing early days of— this is 1994, early days of e-commerce. People didn't have backend operations. They didn't understand what they didn't have, but It was a crazy time. And one of our investors, about a year-ish in, America Online acquired us. And so I was part of an acquisition. And the concept was that there were a few of us that were asked to go into America Online. I was the youngest vice president, one of the few females at that level. I laugh because this is like 1996. And frankly, nobody thought e-commerce was gonna be happening. So I think they just thought it was one of those roles where they said, here you go do it. It's not really that important. So it'll be fine. She can handle it. It doesn't matter that she doesn't have that much experience. She's really good at this. So 7 years later, it's $1 billion in revenue to AOL. I think 2 years in, they woke up and saw what I was doing and they were like, wait, it actually is. There's revenue that's coming in there and she's operating it like a real business out of her home office in Pacific Heights. They didn't know what they were doing. Initially, they went, they had an idea, they had a vision, and then they hired people who would help support that vision and continue moving it forward. They would hit roadblocks. They would have failures along the way. They would run up against challenges like bad modem speeds, and that didn't stop them. They figured out every single day, what can we do? And for me, I think that was really the key thing that allowed me to have the courage to go out and do my own thing just by working underneath those people.

It's obvious that you've been in a lot of circumstances that were unknown and new, and you've learned from those challenges and also have been around some incredible entrepreneurs. You call yourself, um, an accidental entrepreneur. Tell us a little bit about what that means to you and how that has impacted sort of the evolution and the growth of Pint.

Yeah, well, when I left America Online, it was at a time when 9/11— I was on maternity leave and 9/11 hit and I was pregnant with my third son and my third child, my first son, actually. And I remember thinking, if there's no tomorrow, what am I really doing? Something that is meaningful, that has purpose, that has some kind of mission. And I didn't know what that meant initially. I thought that probably meant a nonprofit, that would be the next thing that I would do. But I just kept searching for that nonprofit and kept searching for my purpose, and I would do a lot of informational interviews. I was— I remember just thinking, maybe if I just keep talking to lots of different people, the idea will come to me. And I guess to some extent it did, but it really when I just decided to think about what I was most concerned about in my family. And I think oftentimes, particularly for parents, not just women, I think men feel this as well. It's like when they have children, that's when they really start to look at the food options, the diaper options, all of these things that is just this mystery. I've never felt so stupid until I had children, right? Looking, how do I, what kind of stroller do I Bye. It's just, it's hard. Right. And so I felt if I really wanted to be a great parent, I needed to practice what I preached for myself. And I was not as healthy as I wanted to be yet. I wanted my kids to be really healthy and wanted them to have all the right skin creams and diapers and all the rest of the stuff. Fast forward about a year into launching Hint. It was interesting because I had started hearing about this new disease called type 2 diabetes, and a friend of mine works still at the Center for Disease Control, and she had been telling me about this new disease that she was hearing about that was really interesting, not really even knowing what I was doing or frankly any of the challenges that I was having, but she described it frankly a lot like me and was saying like the people that are running into type 2 diabetes are typically active. They're eating and drinking diet sweeteners. They've put on weight and they don't really understand why they've put on weight. And yet they're having a low calorie meal, drinks, whatever. And I was like, wow, that sounds like a lot of what I was going through. Again, this is, you know, about a year later. And then I really started to hear from customers too. That was why they were looking for a product like Hint. Which is an unsweetened flavored water, that they wanted to try and avoid these diet sweeteners. But you have to remember, 16 years ago, almost 17 years ago, nobody was talking about this. I was way ahead of where the consumer was and frankly where most of my friends were. And so I call myself an accidental entrepreneur because I never really thought that I was gonna go launch a company after I left AOL. A lot of people have said, did you hate tech? Did, was there some problem? Was that like, I had good days and I had bad days, right? It was a really exciting time, but I think it was just what I cared about and what I felt like really had purpose all of a sudden was in front of me. And I thought, if I can actually launch something like a drink that just has fruit and water in it with no sweeteners that can help people get healthy, That's something as a parent I feel really good about.

I'd love to orient our listeners around where we are in your timeline and where we are in the journey of Hint's birth. So you are going through this personal revelation and realizing there just needs to be a better way for water and for drinks in general that is both healthy and good for your body and energizing in all the ways that we think drinking water or any sort of liquid does. Are we under the assumption that Diet Coke would do? How did you go from this idea of, okay, there needs to be a better solution, I'm going to actually start this? Like, what was the first step in starting Hint for you?

So I started slicing fruit in my kitchen primarily because what I realized is that water was super boring for me, and that's why I never drank water. So I grew up in Arizona. I should have been drinking a lot more water than I was, but I had swapped in Diet Coke. Cook for the water, thinking that it was just fine. But in order to get over this idea that I had in my head that water was boring, I started slicing up fruit and throwing it in the water. But it was a hassle, right? That I would take a pomegranate and I'd slice it, and I was at the grocery store every day buying fruit. And then I didn't want fruit with pesticides in it, so I'd have to— I'd go to the special market. So not only was it a hassle, So there was the convenience factor, but also it would go bad after in the refrigerator. It just looked weird in the refrigerator and nasty sitting inside of a pitcher for a while. So I missed being able to go to the store and pick up a 12-pack of my favorite drink. And so I thought if I could put this into that format, then that would be really convenient and it would be less expensive and it would just be a lot easier for me initially, but also for lots of other people to be able to find it. I actually, even before this point, I thought this product has to be out there. I was living in San Francisco at the time and Whole Foods had just opened. Then I thought they would be the store that would have a product like this. And everything had a sweetener in it, whether it was regular sugar or diet sweeteners. And it's funny because I really came at it from a consumer perspective initially, where I just started asking the guy who looked official and was stocking the shelves. And he's, no, we don't really have a product like that. Oh, actually we have this product called Vitaminwater. And Vitaminwater was super hot. Some of my friends drank Vitaminwater. And when I finally turned the bottle around and looked at it, which I had never really done, I saw that it had 300 calories in it and more than Coke. And they didn't even have a diet version of the product then, but the fact that there was this word vitamin on it, I would ask my friends, I'd be like, so why did you think it was healthier for you? And they'd say, well, because it's vitamin and water. And we would have this love fest over, over words. I'd say, I know me for the word diet was better for you, that it really pulled. Me and where I didn't ask any questions. That's when I really started looking at the supermarket as a whole, as a place of healthy perception versus healthy reality. I started like walking the aisles and not just Whole Foods, but at every market thinking, wow, what other words are there out there that are tricking consumers who really are willing to spend money on a diet? but also really want to get healthy, but can't because they can't figure it out. And so that was the moment when I said, I'm just going to get this product on the shelf. I know exactly what I want and I'm going to go do it. And Whole Foods Market on California and Franklin in San Francisco. And so in my neighborhood, and I went there and said, hey, how do I get a product on the shelf? And the guy. I don't think he really thought I'd be back. He just, I was some lady that seemed nice enough. I don't know. She's like saying, how do I get a product on the shelf? And he said, I don't know. You need a label. You need a bottle. You need to, we have this program at Whole Foods at the time where they wanted local. He's, I was like, well, I'm local. My product's local. I'm making it in my kitchen. And he said, okay. But he didn't think I'd be back. And so 6 months later, I was back. With this product. Something I talk about a lot is it sounds great when you're gonna go launch a product and then all of a sudden, like, you barely tell people you're gonna launch a product and then people are like, oh, when are you launching your product? And after a while I'm like, I'm not gonna talk about this anymore. Cuz what if I don't launch it? What if I can't figure this thing out? It was, I was self-funding it. I didn't go, I wasn't trying to go out and get money for it, but I had a mini business plan. I, finally enlisted my husband because I thought I have to take $50,000 out of my bank account. I, he's probably gonna think I'm gonna go with some girlfriends to the Bahamas or something. I should probably tell him that I'm buying caps. And, but he was a Silicon Valley attorney at Netscape and he was, he had just left Netscape and, and was like, wait, what? You're like, you've got 3 kids and you're launching a beverage. I get that you've gotten healthy by getting off these diet sweeteners, but you have no idea what you're doing or what you're talking about. And I said, yeah, but if we can launch a company that basically helps people, then wouldn't you just think that would just be awesome to be parents who did that kind of thing and really changed an industry? And he's, I don't know. I don't know how you're going to do it, but do whatever you want. You made some money at AOL and go for it. I'll just hang out on the sidelines. And that's when I shared with them that I was pregnant with our fourth and I was having really a lot of morning sickness. And it'd, it'd be really great if he came with me to the bottling plant. And he was like, wait, you're launching a beverage company and you're having your fourth child at the same— this is crazy. He's laughing at me, but also crying inside thinking, wow, this is crazy. So that, that's when he said, okay, let me know what I can do to be helpful. I He kept thinking that if he was helpful, that maybe I would come to my senses and he would say, yeah, that was the right thing to do. But instead I just kept giving him tasks to go do. And he was, okay, get in my Grand Cherokee and go pick this up. Got it. This is what I'm gonna do. And so that's how it all began.

You dropped your first case of Hint off at that local Whole Foods on your way to have your fourth child. Is that correct?

I did. 2 pallets were actually delivered into our garage in Pacific Heights. And the thing that I was worried about is that I was gonna have a baby in a couple of days, and I had all these cases sitting in my garage and in San Francisco, and then I was about to go have a baby and I gotta get the 2 pallets outta my garage somehow. And then that's when I woke up the morning that I was having a planned C-section. And I said to my husband, what would make me so happy? And he's thinking a walk or brunch, I'm like, can we go to Whole Foods and see if we can get it on the shelf? He's, they're not gonna take a whole pallet of product. And I'm like, I know, but even if we got it halfway down, then I'll, when I get back from having a baby, I'll figure it out. I'll try and sell the rest of it. And so he, we loaded up the car and we went that morning. I didn't have to be at California Pacific until 2 o'clock in the afternoon. So we got there at 10:00 AM and I walk in and I said to the gentleman who I had initially talked to about launching my product, I said, hi, do you remember me? And he said, I do, but you are super pregnant. And I said, I am. And he said, oh my gosh, are you going to deliver in the store right now? And I said, oh gosh, I hope not. I'm scheduled to deliver it at 2 o'clock at the hospital. But, and he said, how do you know you're going to have a baby today? And I said, well, I'm having a planned C-section. And he said, so how is that different than an emergency C-section? And I said, well, I've had both, so I can actually educate you on both of those things. And my poor husband is like backing up into the fruit and vegetable section thinking, oh my God, he— she's going to actually tell him how to have babies. Right. At this point, I did. I educated him about exactly how I knew I was having a baby and that I'd be headed to the hospital for my planned C-section. And then after I finished, I said, okay, so by the way, I would so appreciate it if you got the product on the shelf and I'm leaving to go and have my son. And yeah, that'd be really terrific. He said, I'll try. I don't know if I can do it. And I'm like, you'll try? I just shared my heart with you about your— come on. And my husband said, stop selling. We need to leave, Cara. And I said, okay, fine, whatever. So I had no idea whether or not he was actually gonna put it on the shelf. And then I got the phone call after my son Justin was born and everything was fine. I got the phone call and he said, we need more product. Your product is gone. And I'm like, who took it? And thinking somebody stole my product. And he said, no, I got it on the shelf and we sold 10 cases overnight. I'm like, wait, what? Who? You have to understand, I stopped talking about this plan of mine to be an entrepreneur and start a company because all my friends were in tech. They kept telling me, I don't know, like, you don't really know anything about the beverage industry. Are you sure? You were a successful tech executive. Why are you going and doing this? And so I stopped talking about it. I'm like, gosh, my friends don't even know. I actually got it into Whole Foods and this is crazy. So that's when I got out of the hospital and checked out early and my husband said, let me at least go deliver the cases. And, and so that was his first official day where we had officially on to go and deliver cases. And he became the chief operating officer. Wow.

So you're off delivering your baby, your husband is delivering cases, and you realize that there's actually some legs to this idea of healthy water that has a little bit of flavor. Walk us through the decision to go from what was essentially your kitchen and your home cooking show with all the ingredients and processes that you could do as an N of 1 to scaling this business and the decision to take on some venture capital and outside investors to help you with what came next, which is getting more cases on the shelf at Whole Foods.

We self-financed it the first couple of years and something that I kept thinking about again was that I was not— I knew that I was launching a new company and a new product, but what I didn't fully understand until a couple of months in was that I was launching a new category. And so I learned that I was launching a brand new category that no one else was doing called unsweetened flavored water. When I kept going out and trying to talk to buyers, And Whole Foods was relatively easy to get it on the shelf. I had other challenges with Whole Foods along the way, including that I felt like they kept raising the bar every time I'd get it on the shelf and I'd have a 3-week shelf life. And then they'd say, oh, you're doing great, but you're gonna get kicked out if you don't get to a 6-week shelf life or 6-month shelf life. And then I was just like, oh wait, you just told me I got there. And, and so they just kept raising the bar more and more because I was launching a product with no sweeteners and no preservatives. So launching a new category in addition to launching a new process where I didn't want to use preservatives in it, no one was doing that. We knew VCs in Silicon Valley, but, and initially knowing that we came from tech, we got people reaching out to us. We got plenty of angel investors too who were reaching out to us saying, hey, we'd be really interested. But the minute that saw that there was no real tech kind of side to it. A lot of our contacts didn't feel comfortable investing. And something I always share with entrepreneurs is that it was never difficult for me to get the meetings, but what I realized along the way is that investors invest in what they believe they can actually add value to and what they know. And what was so interesting to me was that there was a lot of fear by the tech community around this idea that Coke and Pepsi, if it was such a great idea, they were gonna crush it. And I kept thinking, that's possible, but I don't worry about that. And it's funny because I had grown up in tech where there was Microsoft, there was Compaq, there were lots of big companies, and Silicon Valley wouldn't be what it is today if they worried about the big guys. Yet when it was in a different industry, they were the doubters. And so I kept thinking, well, I'm going to play this out a little bit more. I get what they're saying, but I'm going to keep going. And then ultimately we ended up getting into Google kind of by accident. Again, my friends didn't really know what I was doing, and I, in their mind, I wasn't working. And so this one guy that worked with actually my husband at Netscape reached out to me, Omid Kordesani, and he was at Google and he said, I'd love it if you, you know, came and talked to me about this role at Google. And so we sat down for lunch and I brought a few bottles of Hint with me and I said, so I really appreciate you talking to me about this role, but I think what I'm most interested in doing is really giving this a little bit more time and I feel like I'm making progress. And I pulled a bottle of Cucumber Hint out of my bag and he started laughing. He was like, wait, what are you doing? And I said, I know it's so crazy, but here I'm helping people get healthier. And I remember Omid just laughed. He said, I have no idea what you're doing, but I really appreciate it. And I appreciate the passion and the conviction and purpose behind it and let me know if it doesn't work out in some way. And by the way, you should talk to this guy, Charlie, who is our chef that we just hired at Google to cook meals for our employees because there aren't enough restaurants at this time around Palo Alto. And so we decided to hire chefs to come in and cook for us. And I don't think we have a drink. So I took the card. I took Charlie's card and— or took his email. And more than anything, I followed up with Charlie because I felt bad after Omid was sort of offering me a job. And he's a friend, and I wanted to be respectful of his time and follow up with him. And so Charlie was like, he was like, oh, okay, you have a beverage. Well, yeah, we'll take 10 cases. How much is it? And I told him how much it was, and he said, okay, just bring an invoice with you. And Do you have a distributor? And I'm like, no, I'm driving in my Grand Cherokee. And so I said, I can't come out of the car because I've got kids in the car. It was crazy. And not really knowing whether or not it was going to work, which later led to us becoming number one beverage in Silicon Valley to all these tech firms starting at Google. And what was the craziest thing about it? That was like an accidental distribution as well, is that for 2 years, the first 2 years, We were the only drink inside of Google, and it was crazy. And it wasn't like we went and struck any type of deal with them that was exclusive, but it was nuts because the employees would see the bottles of Hint and, you know, we would test flavors. It was like this beautiful thing. And people, I remember somebody in the beverage industry hearing that we were in Google and poo-pooing Google a bit and saying, Yeah, but it's not really a test because people are getting it for free. And I was like, well, but the thing is that people might try something once for free, but then they won't pick it up anymore. Right? And so watching consumers pick up BlackBerry Hint and Watermelon Hint, and we would, we started to really understand what was possible when we didn't have the situation that we had inside stores. Which was stacked with feet, 16 to 20 feet from Coca-Cola or Pepsi or whatever. And ultimately what ended up happening is like people would leave Google and then go to Facebook and then they'd say, hey, I just started in South Park, my new company, and I was wondering if you can deliver cases. And we just said yes.

You've definitely told us this story of fortitude and grit and going after what in hindsight is really tackling kind of the beverage industry and launching a new category. And these are massive things to do. And yet you as person of one and a small team of some incredible core people were able to chip away at that mission. Not only are you a CEO and founder, but you're also an author, and it makes a lot of sense because your stories are incredible and provide a lot of learning and insights. For many people who are maybe embarking on a similar journey. Your book is Undaunted: Overcoming Doubts and Doubters. What's an example of a doubt or doubter that you overcame?

I think it really starts with yourself, right? And every human has doubts, right? Every human has fears. And you may look at somebody as incredibly successful. They're a unicorn. They've got this big thing. And what I've always seen is that their best entrepreneurs, the best CEOs, the most inspirational people have had challenges along the way. They've had something that they're afraid of. They may not go right out and tell people what they're afraid of, but they— the greatest thing about them is that they were able to tackle those and overcome them. Unless you actually place yourself into situations, you can't grow, right? And the best things happen if you look back on things that you thought were a little scary, that maybe you doubted, maybe a lot of other people doubted as well, but instead you say, no, I'm going to go there and I'm going to trust. The more you put yourself into positions where you are learning and you're not the wisest in the room, you start to get really used to it. And it's, it's endearing in its own way. And yet it's not something that we talk about as even in school as things that we should really look out for.

Thank you for sharing what Undaunted means to you and that mindset that you've adopted and are helping to inspire other people to do as well and take that leap of faith and trust that they can do it. It's so inspiring. There's so many different other problems to be solved in the world. And you solved one that was knocking on your doorstep. Step with your own personal life experience, particularly in consumer product goods. So much has changed in the CPG category since you would've originally thought of Hint. We're curious about, as an entrepreneur who is a pioneer in CPG, what do you think is on the horizon for that category of entrepreneurship and innovation?

I think that particularly coming off of the pandemic, health and wellness is like the hottest thing on people's mind. I've been speaking all over the world virtually through my book launch and it doesn't matter whether if it's the US or India or China or Latin America, everybody wants this virus to go away. They wanna get healthy, they wanna stay healthy. And I think that products like Hint or other products that really are helping people to get to the core of things are here to stay. And then more than anything, I think that the, and this really is not just consumer products, but also just from a manufacturing standpoint, that's a whole other podcast of stuff that we've done coming from tech, from a totally different industry. Again, everybody was looking at us like, you don't need to do that. You don't need to have a product that doesn't have preservatives in it. At the beginning of the pandemic, in order to keep up with demand for our product, we were launching Walmart and Sam's Club and Aldi. And then a month into the pandemic, we got a call from Costco to launch nationwide, which is very unusual. And because we had actually automated so much of our production and, and we did that because we don't have preservatives in the product, we got all the people out of the room when we actually put the fruit in the product because we thought, well, what if someone sneezes and then what happens? And people and everybody in the beverage industry was like, don't worry about it. And we, we were like, well, we do worry about it. I don't know. I guess nobody else worries about it. But we do worry about it because we know that one little bacteria getting into a bottle can grow. We decided to automate so that we would get everybody out of the room, which we accomplished by the end of 2019. So when the pandemic hit, while factories were getting shut down looking for COVID, the FDA walked in our factory and walked out of our factory because they were like, I just can't even believe what you guys— how did you know how to do this coming from a different industry and really embracing the fact that we don't know everything, but we're going to try. That kind of mindset of figuring out how can we do this in a small way and see whether or not it works. Direct-to-consumer business, which is 50% of our overall business, tripled during this time. It was— our overall business grew 50% because we were ready. And we acted in a way that even 16 years later, we not actually being the experts, not actually knowing every single day what to expect and really staying scrappy, staying hungry, saying yes more often. All of those aspects are really the things and that I think you can learn no matter what industry. You're working in or you're coming from the story.

Thank you so much for sharing all of that. And we just have two quick fun questions to close with, the first of which is— I, I'm dying to know— what is your favorite Hint flavor?

If there's all the flavors stocked up, I don't know if it's because I'm— I noticed the red color, but cherry, it seems to— I always pull that out. But I like them all. It's like asking My favorite kid. Exactly. I know.

I, I knew it was an impossible question, so we appreciate you giving us a nod. And I know my personal favorite is Sparkling Blackberry. It reminds me of the Izzy Blackberry that I grew up with, but that's so much healthier. So I always go for my Blackberry Sparkling. I have to save it to the end, otherwise it's the first thing I drink.

We ask this one closing question to all of our podcast guests. The question is, who is a woman in your life that has had a profound impact on you and your career?

Woman in my life. She's not around anymore, but I would have to say my mom. My mom decided to change careers when she was 45 years old, when she had taken a break, and she was an art history major and then decided she wanted to go into fashion. And yeah, and so it was, again, when you're a little girl, you don't really understand. Everybody thought she was crazy to go and do what she was doing, but she was following her passion and wanted to find what was— what she was curious about. And so I think back on her a lot as really being an early-stage trailblazer for me and someone that I admire for understanding what she wanted to do and making herself important and a priority.

Thank you so much for sharing. It's been such a pleasure to have you on this episode of the podcast, Karen.

So nice to meet you guys and thanks for having me.

Thank you for listening to this episode of The Room. If you enjoyed our conversation, please subscribe. Stay tuned for next week's inspiring guest airing Tuesdays at 7 AM Pacific. See you soon.

All opinions expressed by Claudia Madison and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of the 5EC. This podcast is This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.

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