The Exchanges

Q Yeah. And I guess not, not that long after you got into some of those, those smaller stores in Connecticut, You had a pretty significant breakthrough with Whole Foods. Um, how did that happen?

A So in December, 2017, I was sampling a local Whole Foods beer manager, and they said, you should really go down to the Brooklyn store and meet the forager, who has, like, a bit more decision-making authority, and so the next day, I drove to Brooklyn, tracked down the forager, it turned out to be her last day, and she gave me, like, a few minutes of her time, and we sampled the beer. She said, this is incredible. Our customers would love this. She was like, you've got to go to regional next week, and so she made me an appointment for the following week with Chris and Justin at the Whole Foods regional office in New Jersey, and that meeting went well, and that was our biggest breakthrough, I'd say, early on, where they committed basically on the spot to a statewide launch in Connecticut.

AI assessment note: “I was sampling a local Whole Foods beer manager, and they said, you should really”

Q Yeah. So you're, um, in college, and, and, you know, you grew up where so many people, so many of your friends, parents were, basically were commuters to New York City, and many of them worked in finance. Was that your thought, too? Did you think that's sort of what I'm going to do?

A Yeah, I, I didn't really know what I wanted to do, so I defaulted into finance. I was great at math and science, and that seemed like a good fit, and, and so I kind of pulled on that thread, and a professor really helped me go down the trading route more than anything else, and I did a lot of interviews, but didn't get into any of the major banks. Um, I talked to them all, and I ended up getting into a firm that is, I would consider very, like, entry-level in the financial world. It was called Knight Capital Group. Probably one of the top trading shops On Wall Street. Didn't have the big bank pedigree, but was probably the perfect spot for me to get in and learn.

AI assessment note: “I didn't really know what I wanted to do, so I defaulted into finance.”

Q So when that month ended, did you continue it? Did you say, you know what, I'm going to just try this. I'm going to become like a teetotaler.

A Yeah. So I, I felt confident a talking to my wife and then I went into work and told not only my boss who sat directly next to me, but the head of the desk. And I said, I want you guys to hold me accountable for Because there are social pressures. There's everything. And I want accountability both outside the work walls and inside the work walls. And I was like, I'm stopping drinking and I want you guys to hold me to that. And they're like, Hey, can we actually talk about that? And they pulled me in confidentiality and they were like, I bet you don't know about that guy, that guy, and all these respected people I knew either inside or outside the walls of the firm actually didn't drink. And they were like, you may want to go ask them about it. And I went to some AA meetings, um, just to like really respect the process and commit to my decision, and I read the big book of AA and learned about those programs, and I put in some work on myself personally.

AI assessment note: “Yeah. So I, I felt confident a talking to my wife”

Q How did you get meetings? Who did you call?

A General colleagues, friends, and family, and then networking from there. And so I, I had this confidence coming from the financial world that everyone from my former life was just going to invest in the concept, and I'd be off and running with funding. But in angel investing, you know, people write very small checks to pre-revenue companies, and I know there's very high probability of loss, and a lot of people who I expected to invest didn't invest I'd go out to a dinner with five to 10 people, and I'd be really optimistic, and get five to 10 no's. There was no momentum in the category. I didn't, so I was basically raising money in a category that didn't exist, had no money, and I wanted to do it in a very capital intensive way. I didn't have a product to share. And so there wasn't much to really sink their teeth into besides this hundred page white paper I had and a ball of enthusiasm. And I found myself three months into those meetings and had less than 10% of what I was looking to do raised.

AI assessment note: “General colleagues, friends, and family, and then networking from there.”

Q Right. And did you have a name at that point or not yet?

A We did. The name athletic was a huge decision. It, I went through hundreds of names, Latin names, geographic names, silly names, totally made up words. I really liked the number eight at one point. So it was going to be like liberate, And like all these words that could have theoretically ended in a, thank goodness our legal counsel, whether they were trademarked or not, I think he might've been shooting down a lot of just bad names looking out for me. Um, but we chose that name athletic because we are building in a category that had never had any positivity to it. And I wanted it to be something that was aspirational, positive, that people could hold in their hand for the first time and be really proud of what they were holding.

AI assessment note: “We did. The name athletic was a huge decision.”

Q Okay, you start to get quite a bit of traction by the summer of 2019, and the demand is outstripping your production. You cannot make enough beer, right, at this point. What, what was going on? I mean, this seems like a good problem to have, but it actually was, I imagine it was not a good problem at all.

A Yeah, so we opened the doors with four teammates at Athletic Brewing. So we Hired 20 more people in 2019. We built the sales force all over New England. At this time, we also had a couple incredible investors join our team, and we raised a Series A in March 2019. John did an incredible job scaling the manufacturing and supply chain in-house. And, you know, if you go back to then, the non-alcoholic beer category had been nothing but lagers. And all of a sudden, there's this craft brewery in Connecticut that's launching with a Full flavor lineup of IPAs, golden ales, stouts, and every week I would mention something to John. I'd say, you know, it's so hot out. Should we make like a great fruit stand summer beer? And John would like literally stop at the farmer's market and make like a blackberry Berliner Weiss or a raspberry sour. And so we had built this e-commerce business over this time where, so like beer had never been available on the internet essentially before. And we started to list these beers every Monday at five PM. And so our customer base that was slowly growing national started to expect us to have a new beer that was like new to non-alcoholic beer style available online nationally at five PM on Mondays. And we were selling out these beers in like 30 seconds. It was like, it was like a concert going online on Ticketmaster.

AI assessment note: “We hired 20 more people in 2019... scaling the manufacturing and supply chain”

Q What was the spark that got you to just stop drinking for a while? Because I think initially it was just, you just start, stop drinking for like a couple weeks, right? Like, a lot of people do dry January, or I don't know if it was January, but you basically did a version of that.

A Yeah, so mine was September, and I'd been running longer and longer distances all summer. So ironically, like, five years after I left college, I absolutely fell in love with fitness, and I had this idea that I wanted to run ultramarathons, and here I was, this adult, turning 30, trying to be healthier. I was thinking about what kind of father I want to be down the line, what kind of husband I want to be, and I was like, I'm gonna stop drinking as I'm in this training block, but also with an eye towards Maybe I'm stopping forever. And in that month, I felt incredible. And speaking personally, like not making broad health claims or anything, um, all of a sudden I realized, whoa, I, I've slept through the night like three weeks in a row.

AI assessment note: “I was like, I'm gonna stop drinking as I'm in this training block”

Q because we can talk about this later, but beer consumption, to your benefit, has fallen in the United States over, over the last decade. Um, how are you going to get people to be aware of it? I mean, you still, even if you're in Whole Foods, and you've got a tiny little space in the refrigerated section, how are you gonna get people to even know what it is?

A So I did a mix of grocery sampling, store sampling, everything. But I found in those moments, I was really only interacting with like, 20 people, and like a pretty low hit rate. And I just started to think about my life, and like, where would I like to see a beer? And I'd run a number of Spartan races, and half marathons, and like, at all those things, I would have loved a beer, just not the alcohol. And at those places, people are happy, sweaty, thirsty, they want to celebrate. And so I started reaching out to local race directors and saying, can I show up? I'm going to run your race, but can I bring a beer, a cooler of a bunch of beer and hand them out? And so many people were like, I've been organizing this race for 20 years, it finishes out of high school, we can't have beer, and I've been dying to have beer at it for 20 years.

AI assessment note: “So I did a mix of grocery sampling... started reaching out to local race directors”

Q And by the way, how much, how much time did one batch take? Like a day? A day. A day, ok.

A Yeah, so picture two guys who barely know each other at all for nine hours a day in a warehouse. I had my laptop off to the side. John had the boots on and was like mostly doing the brewing, which I thought I knew and I really didn't know anything about. And John and I were building something very proprietary that we couldn't talk to anyone on the outside about. So John and I could stand together in a warehouse and talk about what's really important. We talked about our families. We talked about what life we wanted out of our career. In that time, we built a really thoughtful employee handbook that I still sit down with every teammate who starts to this day with. Um, you know, we have a chance to really get the culture right and everything, so we had a lot of time on our hands.

AI assessment note: “nine hours a day in a warehouse. I had my laptop off to the side”

Q in, in, in, you know, it's a trader, but, but you worked for a company. You had a steady income. So how, how does a person who doesn't call himself that, who does, who has risk aversion, which by the way, most entrepreneurs do, I should mention, how does he go get to a point where he's like, I'm going to leave this thing and do this insane other thing?

A Well, as I started to look around and ask people, I realized that there's, like, my experience is probably very common, and increasingly so. I could see in the financial world that when I entered the financial world, it was a badge of honor to be coming in hungover. If you weren't hungover and out till midnight with clients, people would ask, what are you doing? Like, oh, you went home after work? That must have been nice, like, half day. Um, But I could see in that transition in the 12 years I was in finance that that totally got flipped on its head. And in 2015, if you were walking in with a hangover, everyone was kind of talking about it and being like, what's this guy doing? Like the concept that people want to be a little healthier and a little more productive and a little more present with their friends and family and loved ones is I had such confidence that's going to be evergreen. But it was one of those things where I didn't talk to anyone close to home or in the market because I was being so precious with my idea.

AI assessment note: “I had such confidence that's going to be evergreen”

Q have a minimally viable product to use a startup term. How did you start to, I mean, when you started to, like, where did you go? Did you go to LinkedIn? Like, where do you go to LinkedIn? Or is there like a beer LinkedIn? Because you have to find somebody who knows how to make beer, I'm assuming, in order to find the person who can make non-alcoholic beer.

A So I went from a world where I had 200 really talented brokers covering me. And anytime I rang the phone, wrote an email, I would get a very quick and very helpful response. Um, and it was an always on, like I would wake up in the morning every day and there would be 200 emails that I would scan through to catch up. And it was a very weird feeling to roll out of bed And I would instinctively grab my phone and open my email, and there would be just nothing there. So it was eerily quiet, and I started trying to network to broker, uh, to brewers. I find a bunch of brewing conferences I'm going to attend over the next six months, and I also started looking at contract brewers.

AI assessment note: “I find a bunch of brewing conferences I'm going to attend”