Jan 20, 2023 · 1h 1m · news
Liquid Death CEO Mike Cessario: How I Turned Canned Water to a $700M Company | E968 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In this engaging interview, Liquid Death Co-Founder and CEO Mike Cessario shares the unconventional journey of transforming canned water into a $700 million powerhouse through rebellious, entertainment-first marketing and gritty operational execution.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Harry holds 14.1% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Harry as informed peer 3.1 Guest teaching 3.4 Guest disagreement 1.3 Harry pushing back 1.3
speaking balance: gold is Harry, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 0:55 Calling out inaccurate journalism
Mike immediately shuts down Harry's initial question premise regarding a Rockstar hydration origin story, pointing out that Harry is not a journalist and that press coverage got it wrong.
Hardest push from Harry ▶ 20:49 Challenging brand alienationHarry directly challenges Mike on whether the aggressive skull branding and color scheme alienate potential customers who might otherwise like the beverage.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 47:30 Exposing CPG retail warfareMike educates Harry on the unseen gritty realities of CPG retail sales, detailing how rival beverage reps deliberately peel off inventory barcodes to stop reorders.
Harry holds his own ▶ 58:30 Harry framing 20VC brand equityHarry synthesizes Mike's points on brand trust to explicitly state his own high-level strategy for 20VC as an authoritative curated brand.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Harry as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Harry pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hook: Debunking Alternative Culture and Embracing Rebellion | 2 | 5 | 2 | 1 | Harry asks about an alleged Rockstar origin story, but Mike immediately reframes it as incorrect journalist reporting and educates Harry on the actual origin involving Vans Warped Tour and canned water. | |
| Overcoming Early Skepticism with Strong Digital Data | 2 | 3 | 1 | 1 | Harry prompts Mike on advice for founders facing skepticism. Mike explains how early social media data validated Liquid Death before traditional CPG investors understood it. | |
| Mike's Upbringing, Punk Rock Background, and Corporate Detour | 3 | 2 | 1 | 2 | Harry offers a personal vulnerability story about his childhood and asks Mike what he is running from. Mike responds collaboratively by describing his upbringing and corporate ad agency career. | |
| Defining High Performance in Business and Life | 3 | 3 | 1 | 1 | Harry asks for definitions of high performance and great branding. Mike explains that strong brands transcend functional utility using Gucci t-shirts and Harley Davidson analogies. | |
| Harnessing Mass Entertainment Tropes in Beverage Marketing | 4 | 4 | 2 | 3 | Harry directly challenges Mike on whether skulls and hard aesthetic cause brand alienation. Mike dismisses the concern by drawing parallels to horror movies and broad audience entertainment appeal. | |
| Early Business Mistakes: The Danger of Bad Distributor Contracts | 3 | 4 | 2 | 1 | Harry asks about past operational mistakes. Mike reflects on bad distributor contracts and explains why CPG founders fail by overestimating product uniqueness. | |
| Marketing as Entertainment: Parodying the Industry to Build Loyalty | 4 | 4 | 2 | 2 | Harry asks about storytelling vs branding, bringing up Liquid Death's viral taser video. Mike clarifies that marketing is lower-tier communication and parodying bad marketing creates brand affinity. | |
| Why Modern Advertising Is Losing Its Creative Edge | 3 | 3 | 1 | 1 | Harry asks why modern commercials have lost creative edge. Mike blames over-reliance on focus group data and social media fear of outrage. | |
| Developing a Thick Skin Against Internet Critics | 3 | 2 | 1 | 1 | Harry asks how Mike deals with personal criticism online. Mike offers a perspective on social media ratios and ignoring vocal minority internet noise. | |
| The Earned Media Strategy to Compete with Beverage Giants | 3 | 4 | 1 | 1 | Harry inquires about allocating social media marketing budgets. Mike explains Liquid Death's earned media playbook required to compete against multi-billion-dollar beverage giants. | |
| Generating Viral Ideas: The Saturday Night Live Model | 3 | 3 | 1 | 1 | Harry asks how ideas are generated across teams. Mike describes structuring their creative department like the Saturday Night Live writers' room. | |
| Running a Low-Budget Playbook with High Success Rates | 4 | 4 | 2 | 2 | Harry pushes on budget risk if a big creative bet fails. Mike details how they produce content extremely cheaply, such as their $100k Super Bowl ad. | |
| The Gritty Reality of CPG Retail and Competitor Sabotage | 3 | 5 | 1 | 1 | Harry asks what Liquid Death doesn't get enough credit for. Mike educates Harry on store-level execution and dirty tactics by CPG competitors who tamper with retail stickers. | |
| Quickfire: Movie Recommendations and Shifting to an HBO Content Strategy | 3 | 3 | 1 | 1 | Harry transitions to quickfire topics. Mike shares his pivot from a high-frequency 'Netflix' content model to a high-quality 'HBO' event-style strategy. | |
| Leveraging Celebrity Investors to Build Earned Media | 3 | 3 | 1 | 1 | Harry asks about activating celebrity investors. Mike explains using provocative stunts like the Tony Hawk blood-infused skateboards to gain global press. | |
| Brand Admiration: The Genius of Trader Joe's | 4 | 3 | 1 | 1 | Mike praises Trader Joe's for mastering private label branding. Harry connects this insight directly to his own strategic goals for building trust in the 20VC brand. | |
| Capital Intensity and Navigating Dilution as a Scaling Startup | 3 | 3 | 1 | 1 | Harry asks about lessons for early founders and future outlook. Mike highlights managing equity dilution in capital-intensive industries and outlines long-term plans to rival Red Bull. |
Statements from this episode (27)
Monster Energy secretly gave Warped Tour bands water in Monster cans
“They made cans of monster that looked exactly like monster, but it just had water in it. And they would give that to the bands to drink. It was not for sale.”
Junk food dominates fun marketing while healthy products target older demographics
“All the junk food does all the fun marketing. Healthy stuff is very quiet. You know, they more market to like an older demographic. They don't do anything fun”
Liquid Death surpassed Aquafina's social following in just four months
“In four months, we have more social followers than Awkwafina.”
Traditional CPG investors struggle to value early digital brand traction
“When we talk to more investor types on the traditional CPG side, they don't typically understand the digital. Social world as strongly. So they didn't know how to value some of this stuff as much as maybe the tech world kind of did in the early days.”
Harley-Davidson targets affluent professionals like dentists, not actual biker gangs
“When Harley is doing their marketing, they're not targeting biker gangs. They're marketing to dentists, like people that can afford a 25,000 dollar motorcycle”
Monster Energy's core buyers are truck drivers, not extreme action athletes
“The core monster customer who buys the most monster are not skateboarders and action sports athletes and all these people that. You see in their marketing, it's, you know overweight guy outside of Riverside who drives a truck or something like that.”
Truly beloved brands must accept being deeply hated by other consumers
“Like, I always say, it's like, if you, if there are people who truly love something, there has to be people who truly hate it. It is not possible to make something that Everybody loves. All it's possible is to make something that everybody doesn't really give …”
Liquid Death had to pay to escape terrible early distributor contracts
“We got into bad distributor contracts in the early days where it was like, you sign these contracts with these distributors. They're terrible distributors. And literally there's no way to get out of them unless you have to pay them to get out.”
Cessario regrets not hiring a retail industry expert much earlier
“Had we, you know, been able to see the future and known, hey, we would have brought a retail person on way earlier to help us navigate this space that, that definitely would have been something we did.”
Liquid Death would never have survived a Coca-Cola focus group
“Like Liquid Death would have never made it through a focus group at Coca-Cola.”
Brand identity is a CPG startup's only true defensible moat
“But the brand is what you can truly own, and that really is your moat, more so than most brands think it is. They think their moat is an ingredient, or they think it's something else. It's not really. It's like anybody can replicate your formula It's your bran…”
Cessario: Marketing is rapid communication, not high-level storytelling
“Marketing is not storytelling. Really? I think it's a lower form of it. So I think it's more about communication, I guess, which I think is a little different than storytelling.”
Marketing functional benefits like low calories fails to build brand affinity
“Then these other brands that are just marketing with functional benefits. Oh, less calories, less grams of sugar, better tasting, you know, all of those things, like they don't actually resonate brand affinity.”
Over-reliance on data testing is destroying modern advertising creativity
“I think a big part of it, and this is, you know, a guess, is the current, two things, the current state of data. People are trying to make too many decisions based on data, rather than insight of what's funny. It used to be like people in an agency were saying…”
Irrational fear of fringe social media outrage forces brands into boring marketing
“And then I think the other part of it is the current state of social media. The fact that if one person doesn't like your commercial, they can go make a bunch of noise on your brand social page about it, and now the brand is like, oh, two people said they hate…”
Four conglomerates control 98% of the retail beverage market
“Four or five big players literally own 98% of the market between Coke, Pepsi, Anheuser-Busch, Molson Coors. I mean, that is 98% of the beverages you see on a shelf in a store anywhere.”
Liquid Death structures its marketing department like Saturday Night Live
“We think about our marketing team more like we are Saturday Night Live. You know, like, Saturday Night Live has a group of professional writers, comedians, who are writing these funny skits day in and day out. They have celebrity guests that come in. You have …”
Liquid Death spent only $100,000 producing its Super Bowl commercial
“Even the Superbowl commercial that we did, that was the beer commercial with the kids. I think all in, we spent a hundred grand on that commercial when other companies are spending millions of dollars.”
Weak marketing ideas require expensive production value to capture audience attention
“When you have a really good idea, you could film it with an iPhone sometimes, and it'll actually still be good. But when you have an idea that's not very good, you have to start throwing all this production value at it to have something that people care about,…”
CPG branding fails in retail without dedicated in-store merchandising teams
“The marketing and brand makes people love the product, but that's just the beginning. Then it's like when you're in the store, when a store orders product, oh, we need more liquid debt. They order liquid debt. A distributor comes, drops cases off in the back o…”
Beverage competitors sabotage rivals by peeling inventory stickers off stockroom cases
“Beverage competitors were coming and pulling those stickers off their competitors' cases, so when the guy came over to try to scan it, he couldn't scan it. He's got a lot of shit to do. He's not gonna go all the way to the back and go print out new stuff. He's…”
Liquid Death shifted its marketing from a Netflix to an HBO model
“We've Kind of dramatically changed our approach to content and not to slander either of these two companies. It's just two different strategies. Moving more from the Netflix approach to the HBO approach”
Small social media content often consumes as many resources as major campaigns
“The reality is doing a little thing often takes as much time and headache and even budget sometimes is a big thing. And it's like, you have all these things to manage and it's sucking everybody's time up and You know, by design, most of it's not going to be li…”
A standard Tony Hawk trick video would have generated zero social engagement
“If we would have just posted a video of Tony Hawk doing a crazy skate trick, it would have gotten no engagement on our social, but we found a funny way to use him where we take his blood and mix it into ink that we printed limited edition skateboards with and …”
Liquid Death spent only $10,000 shooting its viral Tony Hawk blood campaign
“To film him taking blood and showing us silk screening skateboards, that cost like 10,000 dollars to shoot that.”
Beverage startups are highly capital intensive and require massive scale for profitability
“You're almost constantly raising as a startup, especially in beverage that's very capital intensive. It's like, you have to get to a certain level before A beverage company can become profitable unless you're selling a nine dollar can of something that's got 8…”
Liquid Death aims to become a multi-billion dollar beverage-entertainment hybrid
“I like to think that we're, you know, Not that far off from what you see in a brand like Monster or Red Bull, you know, just a, you know, much bigger brand known for sort of blurring the lines between being an entertainment company and a beverage brand. Like, …”
Shorts cut from this episode
▶ Remember This Super Bowl Commercial? 🏈👀 · 20VC with Harry (@44:33)
▶ The Dirty Secret of Food & Beverage Industry · 20VC with Har (@48:04)
▶ Dirty Secrets of the Food & Beverage Industry 🤐💩 · 20VC wi (@48:04)
▶ Kids drinking beer? Rate This Super Bowl Commercial 🤣 · 20V (@44:31)
▶ Founder of Liquid Death on Why Marketing Needs More Heart an (@33:21)
▶ Story behind Liquid Death’s $100,000 Super Bowl ad 💦💀🏈 #s (@44:31)
▶ Tony Hawk's $10,000 Crazy Marketing Stunt 🛹🩸🤯 #shorts · 2 (@55:31)