but here it was at 0.3% of the Beer Market had seen no innovation in 30 years less than no marketing it was so clearly a lesser than product and so non-alcoholic beer fell to very stigmatized very Niche populations people have been drinking alcohol for 5,000 years but I just think there is going to be a majority of occasions in the future where people want to socialize want to have something delicious but not the alcohol we want to have a huge positive impact in the world on the way there too I in my head think that non-alcoholic beer is easily going to 10 or 20% of beer if not 50% of beer over time as increasingly influential people continue to talk about it publicly and destigmatize it but I think this is just the very emergence of a long-term emerging category what I think is different about non-alcoholic beer than all the other beverage alcohol Trends is every other beverage alcohol trend has been like a one forone substitution of the same occasion what we're doing is like totally Reinventing and opening up occasions so it's it's more occasions for existing drinkers when you were figuring out how the heck do I Market this thing what did you do at that stage of the company I was just thinking like myself like where would I want to encounter this product and Discover it I knew people would have to try it to believe it that it was good and imagine when it would fit into their life and I really chose athletic events not because of the name of the company but because welcome to the peel Where We explore the world's greatest startup stories I'm your host Turner Novak founder abanana Capital The Venture Capital firm that also created a new market keep listening for my conversation with Bill schuel founder and CEO of athletic Brewing athletic pioneered the alcohol-free adult beverage category taking it from 0.2% of the Total Beer Market to athletic being the number one selling beer in Whole Foods within 5 years Bill grew the business to 90 million in Revenue within 5 years after launching but he specifically emphasizes how slow they actually went to get there we talk through the history of non-alcoholic beer and all the health benefits writing a 96 page white paper on the market while still working at his prior hedge fund job Bill's process for thinking through creating a new category or Market the struggles of raising the very first Angel round how he marketed the product in the early days Athletics unique Omni channel strategy that enabled them to iterate very fast and the story behind getting into Whole Foods in only two weeks Bill never thought he'd be an entrepreneur and athletic Brewing is a testament to playing a long game and a story of following your passions and being the change you want to see in the world a quick shout out to my friend Joe Pompano for help suggesting great questions who actually quit his full-time job to go Allin on his own business after signing an early deal with athletic I think you'll learn a lot let's jump in after a quick word from ATO there's a world where your CRM is powerful easily configured and deeply intuitive ATO makes it a reality ATO is a CRM built specifically for today's modern company it's flexible easily configured to your unique data structures and works for any go to market motion from self- sered to sales L it automatically enriches your contacts sinks your emails and calendar let you create powerful reports and quickly build zappier style automations the next era of companies deserves more than a one-size fot CRM with an outdated user experience someone recently described attio to me as the of CRM which if you're in the no that is pretty High Praise join 11 Labs replicate modal and more try ATO instantly at ato.com that's aio.com or if you want to support the show tap the link in the show notes and scale your company to the next level thank you ATO now let's talk to Bill Shelt at athletic Brewing Bill how's it going welcome to the show awesome Turner thanks for having me excited to be here yeah so I'm excited for you I read a stat recently that as of I don't know exact date but you were the number one beer sold in Whole Foods just by volume that's pretty incredible yeah the Whole Foods data set is definitely some of our best data when I was starting athletic a lot of where we could go was just narrative and we didn't have any real world examples to hang our hat on but I I had my experience and I was like this is going to be huge there's a sea change going on and one day it could look like this but it was always pointing at other things saying it could be that and now we have real data we have National retailers where non-alcoholic beers over 10% of all beer sold in them where it was like 3% of beer when we started and in one of the most Leading Edge grocery stores nationally Athletics the number one adult beverage overall so that has been like the first not the first but like a real real proof point that it is happening and it's going to keep happening yeah cuz I remember even growing up like in college you know you're drinking Bud Light or whatever and you kind of Wonder do I need to be drinking this like do there there's obviously some benefits to drinking alcohol but there's obviously like a lot of downsides too and so it's it's so fascinating that it was just kind of not a market really non-alcoholic beer how did you come up or how did you come across the opportunity originally like was there a like a thing where you kind of had this light bulb went off as like wow you can drink non-alcoholic beer yeah it I mean it had to happen to me personally and I apologize in advance like the squirrel past rate on this episode I hope isn't too high in your episode list because has non-alcoholic beer in it but like there are such misconceptions about non-alcoholic beer and I admit I was part of that like I only ever SP spoke about non-alcoholic beer if I was making fun of it until I was a drinker of non-alcoholic beer and like really wanted it and needed it and I I think the hard part is non-alcoholic beer was really born out of the prohibition era so like it was when alcohol was taken away which was like this fun thing America was just into the Roaring 20s and like I don't know when exactly prohibition went into effect but essentially fun was taken away all these great options off the table and this generic near beer entry emerged and it was so clearly a lesser than product and it was marketed as such and it just carried these enormous stigmas forward like 80 years and there's really no marketing effort or product Innovation effort to try to change those deeply inrad stigmas in society and so non-alcoholic beer fell to very stigmatized very Niche populations it was assumed that non-alcoholic beers for people with medical conditions religious preferences or people in recovery and really thought of this Market that was like 1% of the population 1% of their life like niche of Niche where really it's almost the exact opposite like if you really think about non-alcoholic beer the occasion based when it could be consumed it's not 1% of 1% it's actually almost everyone is not drinking 99% of the time and if it tastes well if it's marketing great and people are excited about it this could be the best part of the day of like a majority of the population but here it was at 0.3% of the Beer Market had seen no innovation in 30 years less than no marketing so I was call it mid-2010s like walking around in grocery stores and so I had stopped drinking for kind of just like personal lifestyle reasons and I can go more into that but you know if you look around the grocery store at that time every category had totally innovated like if you walked into Whole Foods it's like local this organic this like they were incredible sourcing on everything in the whole store nothing looked like it did in the 1980s except this one corner and these like two Dusty offerings in the corner and it was like why isn't that shelf changing there's 10,000 breweries in the country and why is no one thinking about this it's kind of an oxymoron non-alcoholic beer like it it almost it sounds like that can't exist almost yeah the name of the category itself might as well say like not fun not good like non-alcoholic is like it's just like no no no and here I was I was you know I think just like so many people fashion themselves like I'm not that special a person I thought of myself as a very average modern busy adult I was working at a large hedge fund I like to do my workouts in the morning so like wake up at 5:00 am work out go to work I was like graded on my outputs at work in a very intensive trading hedge fund shop and then after work I wanted to do work dinner social stuff dinner with my wife and like but that was all alcohol occasions most days of the week most days of the weekend and alcohol was such a performance cealing on my whole life and like work was just following me around in my phone at those work dinners I wanted to be like totally coherent and like taking notes and stuff and you know at the end of it I I was like maybe I'll stop drinking for a month in that I was training for a long-distance running event and I was like I'm going to stop drinking for a month and like I'd been blowing myself up somewhat too regularly during that also blowing yourself up like drinking too much you mean or yeah like occasionally drinking too much and I was like man this is just so unproductive to everything and I stopped drinking for a month and I slept incredible I felt great working out I was unintentionally losing weight I was super focused at work I had no off days and it was just like this like positive cycle that I had entered into and I realized alcohol was this big limiting factor on my lifestyle and it didn't take long at all for me to realize that and but I was in all those social situations all those work situations everything and I just had such an authentic need for better products there like I was either on the kids menu or had these very inferior older products and it it was just a product that really needed innovation is it like less profitable to sell non-alcoholic beer like do you think there was some kind of incentive thing the reason that people didn't really ever invest in it like have you ever figured that out well I think there's a bit of an innovators dilemma too so if they like if people who make 99.5% of their money on selling alcohol talk positively about non-alcoholic beer there's like oh do we really want to like steer people in that way they may realize they don't need the money training as much like so I I think there's a bit of innovators dilemma and there's a lot of friction to getting going I mean absolutely nobody in the industry wanted to work on this nobody wanted to talk about it it was really hard to attract resources I went through some really big valleys of lack of awareness and it took me forever to find our you know technical co-founder like I came in as an outsider and our other co-founder John is an incredibly talented Brew like brew master who he's both of us have grown a lot with the business as it's scaled but I talked to hundreds and hundreds of people before I got to John and it was all nose all rejection contract manufacturer and so we built it all ourselves and so I think there was a huge amount of friction and disbelief to get him going but obviously now there's hundreds of entrance who've come into the category since Athletics started yeah and when you first started it what do you think the opportunity was to build a big non-alcoholic beer business like was there a reason that it didn't have to just exist inside of a different kind of incumbent was it just that nobody cared and it was just like a new new product or New Market yeah I think for it to really like a true Innovation to happen it was almost too much of a bureaucratic risk to happen within a big company in a way for someone to really make a big bet on and put their name on I I do really respect and want to shout out like Heineken especially did a really nice job with their hinin 0000 and launching that from within the company and since then a number of the big Brewers have launched products in the category which is awesome it's a rising tide environment and very positive sum but I I think it had to come from the outside it was it was such a hard road to slog both on product and marketing I think it's natural that there's a specialist in the category and then is it do you have to do a different type of process to brew it so it's almost like different in like you need to invest in completely new Machinery maybe a new brewer like entire Brewery or entire facility is that true so there are some pretty big Technical and investment modes so like there's 10,000 breweries and 10,000 wineries in the country and relative to the average Brewer making like a new product say a hard Seltzer or something requires no new equipment can just plug in play and go really so you make hard Seltzer with the like beer lines or I was comparing to other types of innovation so if your average craft Brewer was to like make a line extension of some new beer or some new hard Seltzer it's kind of plug-and playay and go for non-alcoholic beer we really one of our first principles moments was kind of not using all the existing technology that been used to make non-alcoholic beer come up with a new process ourself from the ground up that wasn't as highly processed and go about making the product in a totally different way and once we realize we actually had this very valuable proprietary secret on how to make it differently that was a big part of our decision to stand up our own facilities it is somewhat different equipment a lot more actually on the food safety and quality side which is kind of Out Of Reach of most Brewers in terms of capital expenditures but um really to protect it as a trade secret also and control the quality oursel too we knew coming into this category that was so stigmatized on quality we wanted to have perfect beer every time otherwise we were dumb it and we didn't want to rely on the contract manufacturer for that so that that was definitely part of it so when you say compromising on quality are you saying just generally we'll say 10 years ago pre athletic Brewing existing the beer didn't taste that good or was very low low taste or yeah well by ttb standards were not allowed to disparage other brands so I will say the market itself was bleak enough that I didn't have an entrepreneurial bone in my body and it was so Bleak that I wanted to go out and reinvent the category and I saw an opportunity to make far better products I did see a big Economic Opportunity but I was already in a great Economic Opportunity in my hedge fund job like the risk reward of leaving that job for better economics was very poor you know how bad the percentages are of companies hitting escape velocity but a big part of it was like the personal imp too you know I'd been There's Something Beautiful about working a job and getting a paycheck and but there is part of life that I think is so the Fulfillment and the impact is so important too and I'd never really had that and so I I kind of saw in my own life how positive an impact reducing my alcohol intake had on you know my sleep my health my performance at work my personal relationships my workouts my fitness and even things like over time like my intellectual curiosity I hadn't really been much of a reader for like 12 or 15 years since like high school and all of a sudden at age 30 when I stopped drinking I was like mowing through books at night it was like my intellectual light bulb had been turned back on and I was all of a sudden like watching YouTube's on topics I was interested in I was reading like I was just like picking up books on all different topics for the first time and so it was like this really positive thing in my life and I actually had a couple friends like just like on the lead by example like started to drink less or stopped drinking entirely asked me how my journey was did anyone care did your co-workers treat you different and when I saw the impact on some of their lives that was really meaningful to me on like a one-on-one basis and I saw the chance with athletic Brewing to potentially do that at scale like there hadn't existed these moderation off ramps it was either you were drinking or you were not drinking and you were not participating before and that was a pretty stigmatized choice and like if you look around at the stats too like alcohol has a lot of stats attached to it in society like well past the 15 million documented alcoholics in the country one every five deaths below the age of 50 is attributed to alcohol 5% of all cancer 70% of incarcerated people are under the influence so there's like just like crazy stats on the impact of alcohol in the world and I was like I never want to stand on a soap box and be like prohibitionist whatsoever like the world's a stressful place and people can relax in whatever way makes sense for them however if we could destigmatize other options that were more moderate probably have an enormous positive impact on tens of millions of people over time and that's one been one of the most exciting things playing out that I've seen in athletic room yeah and technically I actually have one of the cans in front of me here I'm going to open in a second there's technically like a very very small amount of alcohol right it's it SS in the can 0.5% alcohol so how would that kind of compare to just a traditional just beer like alcoholic beer so that's kind of just a labeling thing and I I know because it's called out on the label that like it brings attention to it but really like an enormous percent of the food in grocery stores has alcohol so basically any drink you have with flavor probably has alcohol all favorite colas have Trace alcohol like fruit juices really anything with flavored like flavored Sparkling Waters have Trace alcohol pasta bread anything with carbs basically so bread can be up to 2% ABV so like yeah there's it's a big misconception that like everything is 0.0 that's not alcoholic beer it's like actually pretty much everything in the grocery store has 0 to 0.5% alcohol it's just labeled very clearly because this is not alcoholic beer so so this is almost there's the same amount of alcohol in an athletic brewing beer as you'd get in like a Pepsi or a Coke or or soft drink potentially it it could be more or less depending on the beer and depending on the brand but it's it's in the same non-alcoholic Federal standard of all those products yeah interesting okay cool I'm gonna open this one up right now because I haven't tried this flavor yet so I don't know how loud this will be on the mic for everybody cheers and this is your IPA right right yeah so that's our run wild IPA that was one of two Brands we launched with it's still our most popular beer it's really like the most highly awarded non-alcoholic beer on the planet it's so it's meant to be like a traditional but very approachable West Coast IPI it's got like a Vienna malt backbone that's pretty hearty and like a few different hops make up the Hop pill okay yeah it literally tastes like an IPA that You' get from any craft Brewer like it very comparable oh thank you it's definitely the goal is yeah they've won most of our Flagship years have won awards versus full strength alcohol beers at different competitions and stuff yeah the goal is to I said the word without compromise earlier but that's like one of our main slogans it's meant to be like the same flavor the same experience as alcoholic beer and that lets you know someone have it as a dinner on like a dinner pairing on Tuesday or like you know you can drink non-alcoholic beer at any time and have a great culinary experience and then get back to whatever you were doing too and not feel like you'd cross this alcohol lined in the sand for the day yeah and I I think when I first reached out to you I mentioned my so my father-in-law has been drinking it for a couple years and when he remember the first time I noticed it I was like non-alcoholic beer what so so crazy but he's like yeah just I I like beer but he for some health reason he can't really drink it anymore he has to be pretty pretty careful and yeah just have a couple athletic Brews and he's still good there's no no real impact from it so it's super impressive it's it's really cool awesome yeah that's what it's all about is like like you just said with your father-in-law but like anyone not drinking for any reason at all and like they may drink alcohol at other days of the week like 80% of our customers do still drink alcohol at other times it's just they like a good tasting beer with flexibility in other times yeah it's almost like you you hit this you mentioned a bunch of reasons of why you may not want to drink alcohol but there's still this kind of social signaling reasons that like hey you might want a can of beer in your hand just to fit in or for social social purposes and you've also kind of solved that too where if you look at the can it just looks like a can of beer it there's there's no like oh that person's drinking a non-alcohol olic beer or they're they're not cool or you know it's it's not a it's a can of water or something or a bottle of water or a glass like it it fits right in so yeah there is even in like a group of five people there's like so much stigma around choosing not to drink that it like it does make everyone uncomfortable because it's so ingrained in society and we really just want to give people options that they can be like proud of and comfortable with and like one of the big things for me was was realizing I just love to be in bars and like it was more like more about getting to the place and seeing the people and being with the people I wanted to be with than it ever was about the alcohol and the drinks itself and but it took me a long time to realized that it actually wasn't about the alcohol that I was doing anything on weekend nights so then what was the moment that you started the company like I know that you kind of have a story of like that specific time or that period can you just talk us through that yeah and as I said I didn't have an entrepreneurial bone in my body I thought I had just stopped drinking and I was like on with my finance career and so about a year and a half after I stopped drinking me and my wife were walking to dinner and I was just complaining about like I know there's going to be like we're were walking to a great dinner I was really excited about but I was saying I bet there's going to be like a sugary soda at most like a mocktail that they take no pride in and I was basically like why can't someone just fix this it's so annoying like I was basically saying it's going to ruin the whole dinner just because there aren't any good non-alcoholic drink options and I was like I'd pay anything for a good non-alcoholic beer to be on that menu and my wife like hit me so hard in the shoulder she was like and she never tells me I have good ideas or anything like she's definitely like my biggest critic and adviser and like she was like that is a good idea you should do it and I was like what are you talking about like it hadn't even crossed my mind that this was an idea and she was actually getting her MBA at the time so she was probably in a really receptive place to hear that also and to help me in business planning but it was just this incredible snowball feeling of passion and intellectual curiosity and research and you know that feeling when you just get absolutely lost in a project and that happened for like two years I was just like having so much fun working on this project and researching and calling people and like reading Brewing textbooks and but eventually that got to a point where I thought I was two years in and I honestly didn't know if I was ever going to do anything with it I I had actually told a colleague about it for the first time I told no one I was working with that I was working on this the whole two years until a couple weeks before I quit and I told a colleague finally and I said but there's like 10% chance I ever do anything with it and then fast forward a couple weeks it's like the last couple days of the year like December 27th and me and my wife go out to dinner and I didn't realize but she was Bally like wanted to go out to dinner to sit me down and talk about this and she's like I want you to walk in on the second of the year and quit your job and she was like we can figure out the budgets we can make this work but like this is such a passion and I don't want to be talking about this in 20 years as non-alcoholic beer becomes an enormous thing you had the idea you didn't do anything with it you had this business plan she's like I don't want to know you if we're talking about this as we get old and gray and you don't do anything with it and I was like kind of like blown away and thought about it for two days and walked in and quit my job but it was like yeah my wife was super involved in those two very pivotal moments and since like we talk about it every day obviously but yeah and then I was all of a sudden out the door hadn't intended to quit my job even a week before and I was just kind of off and running it was it was very much a burn the boats moment I was a accidental interpreter I've had one idea ever and I've just been so excited about it so were you also approaching this maybe from an industry research standpoint like if you found an investment opportunity at the fund you were at maybe you would be able to take advantage of it was was that maybe like the initial stages of research or for some reason not I I guess I had scoured the internet and you're pretty hard for non-alcoholic beer so I was pretty confident nothing that great existed and like there wasn't anyone at least like talking publicly that they were working on it or anything so I I'd kind of hit a dead end in many ways I'd never thought about that way but I I actually I don't think I was looking to invest in something I think I was just ready to build it and make it happen and you I've heard you mention this before you had a 96 page business plan I mean that is that's intense what was in those 96 pages it was a real like white paper on what non-alcoholic beer in America could be why it doesn't exist why it could exist analoges in the real world you know everywhere else in the world n alcoholic beer was already essentially 5% of the global Beer Market and in a lot of European countries it was upwards of five eight 10% at the time already so it there are real places around the world even where alcohol is a big part of C like customs and social norms that non-alcoholic beer was going to be a big thing and some green shoots that way but I you know I I've every respect for seral entrepreneurs and people who can identify something and be like that's probably going to be big and they develop it they spin it up and they sell it and they're on to the next thing I had such a deep feeling in myself like just that I am an average modern consumer and I need this so badly that there got to be aund 100 million other people just like me looking for this and so kind of went out there to fix it with like of course I ran surveys and stuff and I had a lot of survey data in that business plan but like I just had such confidence that this was going to be big I will say it did really help that like at the moment as I was in business planning there was like the biggest craft buying Craft brewery buying spree ever going on anheiser Bush had just bought like 10 craft breweries at mostly undisclosed sums but there were two enormous headline transactions Lanas and B Point both got bought for a billion dollars right around that time I think one of those happened before I quit my job one happened after but I had these two great exit stories even though I was not like planning on building for an exit necessarily but it at least made it somewhat easier or more real world to raise money with there's actually industry activity happening so so then what came first did you raise money or did you find your co-founder so I I was dialing in the business plan for the next six months after I quit my job and immediately started networking um so I was like going to Brewing conferences with like 10,000 people like really out of my comfort zone just trying to talk to people and did you tell them what you were doing or were you pretty quiet about that I tried to and you know in business planning I was like so secretive of the idea and then immediately once I crossed the threshold to talking about it I was like open to talking about it with anyone and I'm glad I did that because I got a lot of really good feedback along the way and it's something it took me a while to realize is that like an idea is an idea an idea is like 0.1% the chance someone takes your idea and goes and works relentlessly on it and Spins it up and is successful as a competitor is like so so low even at the biggest competitors or like multinationals like people don't just grab onto ideas and incubate them it's like there's like literally not a process for it so I I generally find like sharing ideas and talking about it is like a very positive feedback loop what was not a very positive feedback loop was talking to people about my idea because it was just like straight rejection across the board and I am like very nice people the Brewing world is full of like extremely nice people and and even they were dismissive or yeah in like the nicest way possible they'd be like man we see thousands of people at our Tap Room every year and not one of them has ever asked for non-alcoholic beer or like I'm like oh have you tried offering it or do you like do a survey did you say like would you have had a non-alcoholic beer today if we had one you know and they're like uh so I started putting up job ads on message boards and stuff and yeah literally talked to hundreds of people before I got to our co-founder and by the time he responded non-alcoholic beer was not in the job ad and he applied and he had all sorts of awards he had won like a bunch of like the highest to win like IPA crap Brewing awards at very Peak industry times too so like super competitive Awards he had won or medaled in so I knew I was talking to an extremely talented person probably the most talented of everyone I had talked to and I basically started the conversation with like please don't hang up like I know you're going to say no but please don't tell me no till Monday I was like if you promise me you'll just like listen for 5 minutes and say no on Monday that would be like really make my weekend and he was like okay he's probably like what is this guy about to tell me like what is he gonna say and then he like gave me all the time in the world and I was just like rambling about my non-alcoholic beer Manifesto and I think he he was a young parent at the time he had a one-year-old and a 5-year-old he'd grown up in the food service industry his dad had been a Pioneer on like Farm totable restaurants and he like really understood the food industry but also like the alcohol side of that a little bit so he was like well thank you this was really interesting like I'll think about it over the weekend and apparently he talked to his family and like thought about it a lot and the like Innovation Challenge of it coupled with like the potential for positive impact and he hit me back on email and he like I was immediately going to hang up but you convinced me to stay on a few minutes and he's like then I was 100% going to say no dot dot dot dot and I think it's genius he's like I see it he's like the world needs it this will be such a fun Challenge and me and him just like spun off and talking about it and emailing about it and then I flew down probably within a few days to see him in New Mexico oh yeah by the way he was almost perfectly across the country the one person interested in this yeah you were still in I don't know if you mentioned Connecticut yeah you were in Connecticut okay yeah so i' basically put my life savings into securing a warehouse and some very small brewing equipment this was pre- meeting John right about the same time yeah and so I actually didn't commit to the warehouse till like 3 months after I met John yeah so I convinced him to move across the family with his one-year-old 5-year-old and his wife and yeah basically we started home brewing in an empty Warehouse just like two grown men who didn't know each other but it it gave us a really good chance to set the company up for the long term things that I didn't expect to be so important because they had never been important in Prior organizations I worked at like the employee handbook company values like setting the team and the foundation of the company up for the long term with like the impact we wanted athletic Brewing to have in the world which was in my business plan and all my planning materials but really like concretely setting that up and then communicating to everyone who joined our company along the way went way farther than I ever would have thought like I would have thought I'd write the employ handbook once and put it in a filing cabinet and like if we ever ran into trouble I'd be like well you read it and but like it actually is something like I sit down and talk to with every single person who joins our company still to this day and it's been like really like a North star yeah wow yeah I mean I I think of all those corporate employee hand books that they give out on the first day and then you put them in your desk and then you never look at it again yeah I think the difference is like me and John wrote it we iterated on it and like we were like okay this is a good version of this handbook and then I think on day like early in their employment with athletic people sit down with me and they're like wow he's really excited about this handbook it must be important yeah and and you did this while you were Brewing the first like testing the first recipes basically right yeah so to set the stage a little bit John moves across the country I'd bought these stainless steel tanks and fermenters that were about like as tall as me there was a three and a half barrel system and John goes those are way too big and he brought in Gatorade jugs the next day from his house and like like literally a gas stove to like cook them on and and so we had this string of Gatorade jug stacked three high in a row in like a stair formation almost and we did hundreds of trials we'd probably do like three a day you know we' change like it was like purely scientific method it was like we're going to change the temperature in this tank one degree today and we're going to do this thing different the next day this thing different the next day and see how it came out and at any given time we had this this like we called it a fermentation cart but we had like 20 or 30 experiments going on at once and they're like bubbling in these C boys and we'd monitor them we'd taste them and we'd like take notes and we'd adjust like back in the process and it was a really fun time and super small scale and I'd say around like four or five months into it the beer actually started to taste pretty good so at that time we moved the home RW setup to his parents garage actually which yeah another embarrassing thing for two grown men but like they just had like a little more space there and we started to do construction on the warehouse oh I didn't realize the The Homebrew setup is on the wall behind me there oh nice okay so this was the one in in your Warehouse or in his parents garage yeah so that's Stratford Connecticut was our first Brewery it was about 8,000 square fet So when you say Gatorade jugs it's like the football sideline Gatorade exactly I thought you meant Gatorade like a little like a big thing you drink out of but okay yep and so yeah we went from that the beer started to taste good then we started hand bottling it I started taking it around to retailers I built a list of like 300 interested retail clients took it to a distributor and then that way when we were when we finished construction we had a distributor ready to go we had a retail list ready to go I had a full list of Summer sampling events ready to go and we're kind of like like a coiled spring ready to hit the market a little bit a market that didn't want our products at all but well so the the retailers didn't want it or the consumers didn't know that they wanted it or kind of exactly that it's like you know there's such overused quotes about like Henry Ford saying like if he ask customers what they want he'd say a faster horse or something like that it it was like one of those situations where the Distributors didn't want it the retailers didn't want it and the customers didn't know they wanted it so there was like no dialogue around the category I had to find the customers find the retailers to convince the Distributors but then once it was on the retail shelves I marketed and sampled like crazy to make sure people were coming to the stores to clear it out and it actually was it was like the biggest oxymoron or ironic shift where we literally could not have a discussion or get someone to care whatsoever in 2018 and then coming around to the next summer on the market for 2019 we'd been sampling like crazy and like opening retailers all of a sudden in summer 2019 this enormous Brewery we had built that we thought was going to last us for 5 years potentially we outgrew it in like 10 months so it was just like all of a sudden like every week the shelves were getting cleared out we could not keep up we had to hire more people we raised more money and we doubled the size of the brewery in very short order in like June 2019 and we're like we're gonna be good for another few years now and like we outgrew it in like two months holy cow wow and so it was we kind of knew we were in like scaling trouble there cuz it's not like a piece of software where it can basically like scale infinitely if you get the cloud space it's we had to actually like build the manufacturing and like manufacturing is like a if you're absolutely flying manufacturing building is like 18 months and so yeah we started hunting for distress facilities at that point so we are you said distressed yeah I don't mean to use that term so lightly it's it's just like underutilized breweries essentially that we could go out and potentially purchase okay so get a good deal basically yeah because we were pretty under capitalized from in all directions like so working under capitalized on working capital under capitalized on being able to acquire a nice Brewery or surely build one and so yeah we went out there and started kind of knocking on doors and seeing is there any underutilized capacity out there where would it make sense I I guess a big part of what I left out before too and like why we hypers scaled so fast is we entered a category that had been nothing but l it was like boom one kind of beer that was all the category was if you were drinking non-alcoholic beer you got a logger come athletic Brewing we made a whole range of beers so we launched with an IPA and a golden nail but we also launched digitally native on D Toc so most alcohol breweries when they launch they launch locally and then you open beer distributors but it's it's extremely fragmented and takes a long time to scale out your your web even as recently was 2018 when we launched there was almost no cpg going on on the internet definitely not in beverage like hint waterer had launched online and they were like a real Pioneer on DDC and I kind of read about yeah that story and Cara golden and I was like athletic could definitely sell online why not and so we launched online and I was packaging the packages I was like you know if we sell five a day whatever it's great and at first it was like five a day that was 10 that was 25 that was like 50 a weekend and before I knew it was like over a 100 orders a day coming in on our e-commerce because where the category had been one style we were all of a sudden offering we launched like 15 beers that first year and we averaged like 50 new beers a year since then so it was like more variety than the category I'd ever known and I would like by no means am I like a Tik Tok genius or anything I was our social media was just very authentically our company story and at 12:00 every day I would just like walk into the back and be like this is what we're doing today or like this is the race I'm at this is where I'm sampling or this is where I am in the world it was like in a very authentic like feed of what's going on in athletic brewing and so every Monday at 5 o'clock we'd release our new flavor of the week and I'd post about it at like lunchtime what it is and all of a sudden people became very customed to being at their computers at 5:00 and buying the week's release and we started selling out of these releases in like 30 seconds wow okay like I I think a lot of people have a concept of what like a Craft brewery like hype releases and like people go wait in line for like a beer release for like a big one and that line can be hours long what was different about us is we were launching just online like a Ticket Master con like concert or something and I me and John were absolutely shocked that like you know these a thousand orders would go through in like 30 seconds and and then I'd get phone call I was customer experience I was everything and so like my phone would just absolutely blow up for like six hours after that and I'd have to like apologize to people tell them when the next one is what's coming next week things like that and i' basically anytime we released a be I'd spend to like 2 am on my phone talking to customers after that and but that was great in many ways too cuz like the iteration and the feedback we got through the whole I I was doing our social media and our customer experience for at least the first 18 months of the brand and like that customer touch point was so valuable everyone has their own journey and like ours surely hasn't been perfect but I am thankful that like I wasn't over resourcing I didn't launch with like a big team or especially a team of senior people because I I think a lot of times companies almost build too much and they never get that feedback around launch time from their customers and I had to face our customers every single day on social media in phone calls in emails I was doing like 75 sampling events a summer like giving out beers too so like I had constant contact with our community I think that was very formative also yeah and so I think you started the company in 17 launched in 18 and then 2019 you did about two and a half million in Revenue roughly I think that was the numbers that I saw yeah yeah and so then we had a like Loi on a facility all the way across the country because we were selling a lot of beer in California and just generally the west coast online and so in March 2020 we bought a facility like me and John were in Connecticut and we bought a facility in San Diego and Co hit yeah and anytime someone says March 2020 I always know something is about to go down yeah so we made like the biggest finan Cal investment of our company's life thank goodness we had just closed our series B and so we were well capitalized and we had some great teammates heading that direction and we actually like hypers scaled like crazy during Co we we finished 2019 with 26 teammates and we finished 2020 with about 120 most of those were on the west coast and I would say extremely high percentage of those teammates are still with us four years in here yeah I moved to the West Coast myself to be closer to that newly jelling team out there yes so we scale we bought a 40,000 Barrel Brewery scaled that up to about 160,000 barrels it's like 880,000 square feet was that facility so about 10 times the footprint and 15 times the output of our initial facility and you did I think in 2020 you did about 15 million in revenue is what I saw yeah somewhere around there yeah yeah and then you had 61% market share of the non-alcoholic beer industry in us or something like that I mean that is that's a pretty big percentage Yeah it's it's kind of held pretty close to that I think we're still like 55 share of The Craft non-alcoholic beer market when we launched there were about 8 to 10 maybe non-alcoholic beers in the country there's now 150 Brands and about 500 beers in the market in athletics about a 55 share of The Craft non-alcoholic side yeah it's been fun since then in in 2020 we were finally able to open more states of distribution so we we probably opened about 20 states of distribution that year and then we also started to look at where we could scale up our East Coast manufacturing footprint as well and so in 2021 we lost a lot of facilities to bigger like Warehouse type companies over that time period but we finally found a great one on the east coast in August of 2021 and scaled that up and opened it in June of 22 and so the the new Brewery in Connecticut that I'm in right now is about 50 times the capacity of our original Brewery and about a little over 15 times the footprint one thing I really wanted to hit on was fundraising you you touched on it a little bit but I know you had a lot of conversations and it was a long grind it's what it from what it sounds like what was that very first round that you raised like this was back was it before you launched and was was it just after you had kind of brought John on as a co-founder yeah so most of our Angel Investors as unbelievable it sounds I can't believe I was actually like raising the money at this point it almost seems asynchronous to company progress but I raised most of our Angel round without anyone having a chance to taste the beer so it was like it was total narrative and it was like believe me and I thought it was going to be all friends and family that knew me really well and I actually got a lot of NOS from that Co and you know I wasn't like the pushiest person ever because people are funny about money and I I really just like kind of like kept talking to people and a lot of my NOS led to you know it's a no for me I don't really do pre revenue or the privates but like this person I know would probably be really excited to talk to you or like this person might be really excited to talk to you and I it was really Bleak for a while I remember I went out to a a college friend organized a dinner with five of his friends and I didn't have huge expectations for the dinner but was like really thankful for the audience I'd had like 40 NOS at this point which was like pretty exhausting you like you know you travel an hour you have a long conversation you travel an hour home and then you get a know like a week later and like rinse and repeat 40 times was pretty tough had you gotten any yeses at this point yes some of my former colleagues and Friends basically it was like immediate yes 100% here's 25 or 50 Grand which is like I also didn't realize that like the size of Angel checks is typically very small even for super wealthy people which was a miscalculation on my part too I would have thought that like very wealthy people do like $250,000 Angel checks and I think that happens in some spheres of the economy but not in like unproven pre-revenue manufacturing so it was a lot more checks that I had to recalibrate but yeah back to that example of the dinner like i' had so many NOS at that point that all five of them went in for $5,000 each and I was like so excited yeah I ended up cobbling together an angel round with 70 investors of which like me and my wife were the largest single investor and then like a very long tail but that group of people like a lot of people who had invested not much money in the angel round I was writing monthly investor updates that were very accountable saying exactly what we were doing and every time you know we did a bridge round in October 2018 so six months on the market and I was like Hey investor team essentially like I'm looking to raise a 500,000 Bridge round strictly for working capital to scale like we're starting to see some traction as you've seen in the investor updates and it was like boom immediately oversubscribed and then our series a the about six months later in March of 20 19 I gave people a couple months notice and there were like good traction the market I was like spring is gearing up pretty nicely these are plans for the year ahead I'm looking to raise this series a and it was like boom over subscribed and almost the same thing with our series B A year later which was a big step up it was1 17.5 million doar and actually at that point so all along the way I had always thought I wanted to get institutional capital and funds that had seen other brands emerge from this stage and get going and I I really got a lot of no repes or nose outright or people got fairly far into the process and then declined for any number of reasons and I don't really blame them we didn't have a great margin profile at that time we had good unit economics but like terrible iaon like realized gross margins and stuff and but you were building breweries right like yeah and hiring a Salesforce and doing a lot of unscalable behavior and it so it was always a no from the VCS but I had this incredibly passionate Angel cohort that was like very passive let me run the ship I was giv great updates every single month which I think won me a lot of accountability and uh so we got supported really well through our series B by a group of angels and had no institutions along that way you mean even at the series b or yeah so series C was our first institutional round which I think it got gave us a lot of freedom to run the business really fast up to that point and our series C was led by Alliance consumer growth who's like a like a great name in consumer VC I'd actually been fortunate enough to meet their CFO at a at a farmers market in the world a few years earlier and she had joined my board of advisers um so I like knew them well by the time they got onto the cap table too and I think that was the perfect time in our company's life cycle to get a real institution on the cap table who could help us with things like running proper board meetings and like what is a like proper monthly close and things like that look like not monthly close but like monthly Financial packet and like long-term planning long-term organizational planning like stuff like that so mostly on like people and hierarchies and stuff like that so it was like the perfect spot to go from this great ground swell of Angel support to institutional investors at that point was that 2020 or 2021 uh 2021 was our series C okay and you I mean you did I I think 37 million in Revenue that year yeah that was definitely time it's like okay this is a real business there's like people really want this stuff should probably institutionalize it a bit yeah it was a good opportunity to get really focused we have an incredible well-rounded team we b in a couple more senior leadership team members too at that point and it was the time to like team up with some people who really knew what the road ahead looked like as well so in many ways like just 100% still running the show and like we we have a very clear long-term vision and kind of like operating consistently towards that has been our thing so what is the longterm Vision we're talking 10 20 30 100 years I don't know how far out you you plan and think but what is it yeah it's I mean it's basically beer for the modern adult it's you know people have been drinking alcohol for 5,000 years and it's fine but I just think there's going to be a majority of occasions in the future where people want to socialize want to have something delicious but not the alcohol and we want to have a huge positive impact in the world on the way there too but it's so I in my head think that non-alcoholic beer is easily going to 10 or 20% of beer if not 50% of beer over time as increasingly influential people continue to talk about it publicly and destigmatize it and stuff but I think this is just the very emergence of a long-term emerging category if you look at like the emergence of the energy drink category it was like from nothing and Red Bull and Monster came out of nowhere and just like were really focused on it and grew it into this enormous category what I think is different about non-alcoholic beer than all the other beverage alcohol Trends is every other beverage alcohol trend has been like a one forone substitution of the same occasion you know if like someone's like drinking tequila this year it's probably like they may have moved from like whiskey to Tequila but in the same occasion what we're doing is like totally Reinventing and opening up occasions so it's it's more occasions for existing drinkers like so take your average Drinker who drinks one or less day per week this permissions to people to drink five to seven days a week and feel guilt-free about it and do it at a fraction of the calories and not slow them down at all so like there's the occasion growth but then there's the population growth too in my age group per neelen 32% of adults don't consume alcohol but as you go down the two generations after 36% of the Next Generation don't drink alcohol and the next one is 45% of gen Z legal drinking age consumers don't consume alcohol so like in two generations 133% change of the adult population drinking habits so like there's a big opportunity to welcome them into the adult Beverage World Plus anyone who's lapsed from drinking alcohol for any reason at all we can welcome them back in too so there's like a lot of growth there and you know I in my travels and readings like one thing I heard Mark andreon say is like if you could have like people product or category be right you want category to be right more than anything I think that's what we have here is like a really strong health and wellness and occasion growth category and then we're trying to be the best product and the best marketed and the best distributed and the most focused in that category and you know I'm just going to be here just like ruthlessly focused on it for like 25 years years and I think there going to be a lot of people who come and go and stay focused on it for like 3 to six months and like people within a big Corporation might care about it for their like twoyear stint at the company but like we are just going to be here talking about non-alcoholic beer in 25 years still yeah I feel like I don't know if it's the the internet's mature and the way people discover information has just changed but I feel like we are definitely not going back to consuming un products like I don't know the best way to to tea up or to phrase what I'm trying to phrase but we are only going to be probably making more informed decisions and trying like if you look at like what's the most popular podcast content influencers out there like it's Health stuff Wellness stuff taking care of your things you know going going around the incumbent solutions that have been created and pushed to us so I feel like just this General trend of like being healthier whatever that means we're just going to keep going that direction yeah the number one most forwarded Apple podcast last year was huberman on alcohol which so obviously hit an audience and then I mean I'm I know I'm like a walking prototype for our product and I've like built the product after myself but like I have literally a whoop and an eye watch and if you like drink alcohol or get a bed night's sleep they like wake up like blaring at you basically it's like the first thing you see on the phone is like the whoop did you drink alcohol last night you know and and there's just such more access to information you know when I was growing up if you needed an answer to a question no one in the family knew off the top of their head you'd like maybe think about the FDA Food Pyramid and encyclopedia like I I'm not trying to like totally date myself like I did we had dial up modems and stuff but like it's crazy how much information access has improved in like a 20-year period though yeah and then it's crazy the things that your parents or grandparents whatever told you or knew is kind of the truth what we know to it's like yeah that was completely wrong like that was just some unfounded fact or Stat it was just pushed by who knows who or why but yeah like I feel like people there's definitely some downsides to it though I feel like there's some you know information that we maybe people are getting access to that might not be correct um there's definitely two sides to it but on the health side I feel like people are generally they're able to inform themselves and make a little bit more of their own decisions which generally I think is a good thing y for sure and there's there's definitely bad Health advice out there too so buyer beware or consumer beware when you were figuring out how the heck do I Market this thing like back in 2018 2019 they're kind of maybe it wasn't as popular yet not quite as many people were thinking about this stuff or open to it what did you do like what was the strategy yeah so I've we've literally never done focus groups never done like real surveys to try to get at things like we do measure and everything and we survey our existing customers for sure but at that stage of the company I was just thinking like myself like where would I want to encounter this product and Discover it and it took some trial and error like I definitely tried sampling beer all over the place because I knew people would have to try it to believe it did was good and imagine when it would fit into their life and I really chose athletic events not because of the name of the company but because you know you could interact with hundreds of happy sweaty enthusiastic people in a very short amount of time and be very efficient with your time at athletic events if I went to sample in like a liquor store grocery store I might interact with like 10 or 20 people per hour some of them are like there to buy a handle of vodka and are definitely going to make fun of me and like I spent so many nights in like liquor stores on Friday nights getting made fun of high school kids it's unbelievable so the high school kids were making fun of you oh for sure yeah oh man so I like started to set up at like local 5Ks half marathons anything from like that distance all the way up to ultramarathons and Iron Man's and triathlons and everything and you know any every any given weekend I'd be at at least two races we also had a Tap Room in stford Connecticut opened I was the bartender there so you know I'd wake up at 3:30 a.m. on a Saturday I'd drive wherever my race was that day I'd pour hundreds of beers get back to open the tap room and then do something else on Sunday but I was giving out thousands of beers a weekend on average and like you know a lot of those people having pretty good experiences with it and then rushing into stores around that area and like I had really good data where like I would do a race in an area and then measure the rate of sale around those stores it would be like and so I I knew I was on to something with that and so but it was like rolling up my sleeves and just getting out there and talking to people and it it cost almost nothing besides the cost of product in my time yeah I was going to say potentially when you talk about financial profile not being the best just giving out all these free products I could see how that could impact the gross margins a little bit but it's marketing also for sure yeah I mean just generally I think if you're I don't know where the trade-off is but I feel like as an early stage investor you have to be comfortable with the financials not looking that pretty in in a lot of cases which is super hard but I think my strategy for almost coping with that or or getting comfortable with it is I usually try to not look at the actual financials too early on because then you can kind of it doesn't it doesn't automatically turn you off like oh this company this company's like burning twice as much as they Tak in Revenue like I'm not interested at all you can kind of get like the vision the product you understand their strategy when you see the financial you're like okay it does make sense I understand why they're losing so much money but you can kind of piece that together the spreadsheet you go a couple columns out couple years out and maybe starts to look a little bit better yeah as long as there's like a real plan to change it and it's an agreed upon time where the company's going to change it and you're honest with your shareholders and your boor about when that's happening you know 2021 we were still unprofitable we'd invested in a third facility and 2022 was looking like a deeply unprofitable Year too and but we had good unit economics and I went to the board and I was like this is our four-year plan at this point wrapping up 21 22 is going to be deeply unprofitable 23 is going to be close and but like kind of wanted to like all hold hands as a board as a management team and say we are going to execute on this plan if we deviate off this plan this is where we're going to cut hard in 2022 on marketing and overhead and things to get closer to plan on iida but I was really thankful our board saw the timeline all different classes of our investors were on board with that but I I appreciate that I had that leeway but I don't necessarily think that works as well without a communicated plan I think a lot of you know what I've seen I have a lot of friends who are founders of all different types of compan companies like outside of cpg too and where I've seen trouble is where they don't communicate that plan far enough in advance and then they get ambushed at a board meeting where it's like you haven't changed fast enough and you're you're basically out or we're cutting for you and they're like wait I but I've been meaning this since like you like you have to communicate that plan farther in advance and like one of our great board members always said to me like I can take any amount of bad news but I want my expectations set and communicated when there is bad news and so I generally try to set long-term expectations yeah that's smart the the the point about being able to take bad news but just make sure it's it matches expectations or it's doesn't catch me too too off guard one of the I think Super interesting pieces about your strategy is you did pretty heavily online pretty quick but it seems like you got into retailers relatively fast also how did you manage that so early on it was kind of just an overall Omni channel strategy it was like different teams working on different channels and you know I we tried we had this unbelievable data set from our online business and we're like learning a lot from that side of the business and we had to provide the best customer experience we could but we we did kind of learn that it was almost like two different customer bases in a way also like the customer base not only being the end buyer like Distributors and retailers have very different needs from like an online shopping customer too and so Distributors and retailers wanted efficient use of their square footage and like High Velocity per square foot basically and we were kind of uniquely set to do that where historically beer brands of alcohol do all their Innovation testing on retail shelves and so you know these big breweries launch like 40 50 Innovation products per year and maybe five are back the next year and so like they cycle through all this waste and unproductivity with athletic we were doing all that testing on ourself and then bring the next season like a a tried and proven lineup and usually if we make any swaps it's one of our products killing an existing product and so that way like with our Distributors with our retailers it's very focused like what we're putting investment behind this quarter is going to be similar to next quarter in the next quarter and a customer that we convince to fall in love with you know run wild at a certain store in one quarter is going to be able to find that beer for years to come there and I think that investment adds up over time so but yeah retailers and Distributors generally want simple and then we kept all the noise off to the other platform so you kind of inversed what the general strategy is in food and be or in beverage specifically is you did your testing online and then the your retail channels was like the proven the hero products the ones that you know are going to sell so when they're ordering they know you maybe have a smaller percentage of shelf space But even higher velocity and more sales so you just look so good when they're looking at all their data they're like holy cow we got to get more of this non-alcoholic athletic Brewing stuff we gotta reorder faster yeah and like and it's simple too so it's really efficient and profitable for them too yeah I think a lot of Brands don't have variety online too because they use contra manufacturers and 3pls so to get like a complex lineup out to the D Toc world can be tough sometimes if at athletic we own and operate all the breweries so in our breweries we have everything from three and seven Barrel systems to 20 to 200 Barrel Brew brew houses so like we can make anything from like you know 100 cases to thousands of cases at once and that lets us be really Nimble on what we make what system we make it on and different things and where we make it plus we do all of our fulfillment and packing inhouse so you know we pack and ship over a thousand packages each day on both coasts so we they can be incredibly customized we can do returns ourselves we can do a lot of variety ourselves easily so our owning all of our rails has really helped also yeah I was going to say that's also in terms of margins little bit more Capital intensive but once you get scale probably better margins by just owning it all in house yeah what's interesting about our breweries you know it's definitely better economics over time owning your manufacturing is like scaling manufacturing utilizing properly is definitely difficult there's nothing worse for margins than an underutilized facility and so we've definitely been through those valys as well an interesting thing too on the supply chain is if you own your facilities and make all your product you can be more long-term forecasted and like hedge your inputs Brands who contract tend to just be price takers so it's like realtime commodity costs to the contract manufacturer and like there's a big fluctuation of input of costs too so like you may be fine in one season and not really thinking about it but there are huge risks to contract manufacturing out there interesting the other thing I've heard with contract manufacturing too if you are building the you know and it sounds like what you guys did you kind of built a almost proprietary or a new way of doing something but if you're using a contract manufacturer it means that other people people are also able to build their product the same way so in terms of defensibility longer term it's like I'm just going to use whoever contract manufacturer you are and I'm going to make the same product they're going to make it exactly the same way and maybe I'll just undercut you on price or something and then that just ruins your margins so yeah and contract manufacturers have shifting priorities too where if if like a brand who pays a majority of their bill BS or more bills than you do like needs extra summer canning line capacity like they will get it and you might get bumped and stuff so so I heard you your story of getting into Whole Foods I know that was kind of how we started the the conversation how how did that happen I feel like there's you know I've heard that the story is kind of interesting can you talk through that for sure yeah so me and John were hand bottling beer in his parents garage and it was unlabeled beer like definitely not exciting Packaging and I went into local Whole Foods and the local forager in the store I was like this is amaz basically like I presented with a plain brown bottle and was like I'm really excited about this been working on this company for about a year really three years but like in business planning but she tasted the beer and was like this is amazing like we've been waiting for this I think you should go and talk to our buyers at Regional and like she's like this is something we talk about and I think our customers would really like it and so like literally the next week I went to the regional Whole Foods in New Jersey and it was so cool to see for such a big company like Whole Foods is not like in many ways it still is your local natural grocery store but for a big company I was so shocked that like Discovery could happen at the local level like that and immediately they got something up the chain so fast to like a decision maker who can make a pretty big decision and within like two weeks of meeting that first buyer I basically had a commitment for Connecticut Statewide whenever we launched they obviously want to see like The Branding and make sure it was compliant but and then since then like it started selling well there and they've taken us to every state we've gone to and open the stores immediately so it really cool to see a big company like that be so Nimble yeah that is super impressive especially when you think it it's Amazon it's like one of the biggest corporations in the world at this point and like great super accessible team at the store level it's really like very decentralized it's kind of the way we built the brand like a lot of things these days there's the temptation to like hyperscale and do things at like a touchless pace and like at athletic we've really kind of gone backwards and just like done the local thing like met with key Partners in person when we have big news we travel and we tell people when we you know we sample our beer in person we do a lot of we our team did over 55,000 store visits last year as a team like we're literally in Market talking to people all the time and I think it's a Brian chesky quote but like do the unscalable thing over and over again which I'm sure I got wrong but like I always tell that to my team it's like sure there's like all this you want to do but if you just like start doing it and like you know if you do 10 unscalable things every day at the end of the year you've done thousands of unscalable things every day and that's like pretty darn scalable at the end yeah well you you were mentioning before that you have gone very slow kind of compared to maybe what someone would expect but I'm I'm I'm just looking at you launch in 2018 and in 2023 I think you did like 90 million in revenue or maybe that number is wrong but that's pretty fast six years to get 90 million Revenue my opinion is that's pretty good so you actually still did end up going pretty fast even though you kind of went slow also we've added more dollars every year of re like Revenue growth every year of growth has been better than the year prior so it is kind of like like a freight train once it's starting moving like it was really tough to get it going and but like my big thing is just being like super consistent and of course there are periods where we ship a bunch of meaningful work and stuff but like regardless every day we're showing up and thinking about this and like doing more stuff and I'm a big believer in being able to go like 65 miles hour for a very long time and it may not seem like the fastest time in the world and I've had all sorts of times where investors or other industry participants or teammates have reached out to me with like real concern being like I don't think you're going fast enough on this why do you miss this opportunity we should launch a canned water do you see what these guys are doing or like like all sorts of stuff and I'm like sitting here doing my thing going 65 miles an hour every day and like there people who go screaming by us or like things we could have done but like at the end of the week every week when you look back it's like wow we made a bunch of progress at the end of a month it's like wow we made a lot of progress and like but I like look in our buildings now and our breweries and it it's all like literally thousands of small steps and in like putting that towards I I think like entrepreneurship is just such a a long game and as I said before I have all the respect in the world for people who can hyperscale and do things and sell them really quickly and but I I think the really big outcomes happen over like much longer time scales and it's just got to be like consistent effort and work and progress and I think we are just that relentlessly consistent compounding over a long time and I'm so excited what this looks like in 10 years yeah you also said something super interesting in a different interview I listened to you said that most of the ideas and it seems like new products and Concepts comes from the team you just kind of let people run with ideas like what do you what did you mean by that I've always been a big believer in like decentralizing power as much as we can you know I kind of realized early on there's this great book the emth problem which is basically the concept of like if you want to do everything like the company's not going to grow where an example for athletic early on is like I thought I was like really good at the canning line and fast which sounds so dumb at the time so this is like actually putting the pouring the beers into the cans and bottling them and stuff like doing the pack deex on top of the packs and stacking them in cardboard cases and putting them on pallets and like for sure like maybe I was 10% faster than someone we would hire to do it but our co-founder was like you got to get out of the back and go like think about big term big pictures sell beer work on finance and where I'm going this is if if a Founder is like a single touch point that has to touch everything the company's done it's like a very narrow funnel and nothing's going to ship quickly no one's going to learn no one's going to make mistakes innovation's not going to happen like the company can only be as good as I was in that instance and I I've been a big believer in giving people way more decision-making Authority more responsibility like letting them grow into things letting them be challenged come at things with Outsider perspectives like people have never been in our industry just like jumped into the industry but I think like through all our mistakes and through that decentralization has been so much more progress too I have a general Sense on like what's going on with everyone in the company and we have like pretty good reporting structures on like a monthly and quarterly basis where you like get a bunch of material to read and I try to catch up with people as regularly as I can but like there are a lot of people out there just running incredibly effective business units within athletic Brewing who I totally trust also yeah I mean you could not probably be doing 90 million in Revenue you were doing everything all by yourself like at some point you got to figure out how to delegate yeah and I'm I'm definitely like the master of none for sure yeah I mean I'm I don't know if I could ever do it like I'm very bad at delegating so that's why maybe that's why I just have a podcast and invest in in startups because it's just not my skills I'm definitely delusionally optimistic and like overly trust people to like run with it and learn and you know if we when we see people make mistakes multiple times or not have that initiative and not be able to make progress that's when we typically tend to move on but like you know a lot of people have grown into it incredibly well too awesome well this has been a great conversation thank you so much for coming on yeah thank you so much I feel like there's like I could have done this for hours so if I can be helpful to anyone in your audience like please reach out link might be the easiest why but yeah I'm past the days where I've given out my cell phone number as the company number reluctantly so but yeah thank you so much for having me on I've Loved following you on Twitter for years and your content so really appreciate being a part of it yeah thanks for coming this is a lot of fun thanks for listening to this conversation with Bill schuel founder and CEO of athletic Brewing if you don't want to miss future episodes subscribe to my newsletter in the show notes and you'll get new episodes plus a transcript in your inbox if you want to support the show share this episode with a Founder friend who's also trying to create their own Market or category thanks again to bill for coming on thank you for listening I hope you enjoyed see you next time [Music]