Liquid Death: Mike Cessario

Mike Cessario came up with the idea for a viral water brand by asking himself “What is the dumbest possible idea we could have?” His answer was Liquid Death: an aluminum can of water that looks like a cross between beer and poison. While it seemed self-destructive, the idea turned out to be brilliant: Liquid Death connected with customers who don’t typically buy bottled water, and built a moat around itself by being entertaining and edgy—something most brands struggle with. As a former ad-man with one failed business behind him, Mike initially sidelined his idea when he couldn't find a co-packer to put spring water in aluminum cans. But seven years after launch, Liquid Death is both a water and an entertainment company, with annual revenue well above $100M. This episode was produced by Kerry Thompson with music by Ramtin Arablouei. Edited by Neva Grant, with research from Casey Herman. Our engineers were Robert Rodriguez and Josh Newell. You can follow HIBT on Twitter https://twitter.com/HowIBuiltThis & Instagram https://www.instagram.com/howibuiltthis, and email us at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Guy Raz?

  Our presenting sponsor today is Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Every founder on this show started with a hard question. Not the marketing plan, the 2 a.m. kind. Is this idea any good? Am I the one to build it? Should I quit my job? Anthropic got built the same way. A public benefit corporation founded on one hard question. How do we make sure AI goes well for people? So they asked over 100,000 people their hopes and their fears and are publishing what they find, even the uncomfortable parts. Me? I've got my own hard question about AI. Here it is. If everyone has access to something that can help them write the business plan,

• 0:46Guy Raz?

  build the prototype, analyze the market, maybe even come up with the idea, what separates the people who actually build something from everyone else? I don't have a clean answer yet, so I've been sitting with it with Claude. There's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai/hibt. We get support from U.S. Bank. A question I love asking founders. What's the one decision you almost didn't make? The one that changed everything? Because it's never the obvious stuff. It's never, I decided to start a company. It's the small, boring, Tuesday afternoon decision you barely remember making until you realize it's the reason everything after it either worked or didn't.

• 1:32Guy Raz?

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• 2:16Guy Raz?

  on gas and EV charging, office supply stores, cellphone service, and restaurants. You pick up an extra $750 cash back as a bonus. And you've got a low APR on purchases and balance transfers for 12 months while you're scaling. Same business, same expenses, two completely different outcomes based on one small decision. Visit usbank.com/business to learn more. The creditor and issuer of this card is US Bank National Association, pursuant to a license from Visa USA, Inc. Some restrictions apply. If you travel often, you'll want to hear about this unprecedented offer. For the first time ever,

• 3:00Guy Raz?

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• 3:45Guy Raz?

  or bring a guest to the Delta Sky Club. Make every trip feel more rewarding with the car that upgrades your travel. Apply today at delta.com/cardsocial. Offer ends November 4, 2026. Minimum spending requirements and terms apply. Flights are fulfilled as flight certificates valid for Delta Comfort or Delta Maine to select domestic destinations. Book 21-plus days in advance. Up to $80 per person and taxes and fees apply. Other restrictions apply. When I pull up to a gas pump to fill my car, I'm not thinking about chemistry or engineering. I'm thinking about getting in, filling up, and getting on with my day. And it reminds me a little bit of the founders I talked to on this show, because the best

• 4:27Guy Raz?

  ones obsess over things their customers will never see. Tiny details, invisible improvements, relentless iteration. And not because anyone's watching, but because it makes the product better. That's what the mobile brand does. It engineers fuel the same way great founders engineer their products. Mobile Supreme Plus Premium Gas helps keep engines three times cleaner, which can mean better performance and improved gas mileage. It's for people who care about what's under the hood, even if they never see it. Three times cleaner compared to mobile, regular gas in port fuel-injected engines. Actual results may vary. Visit mobilefuels.com for details.

• 5:11Speaker 01

  So you're talking about a quarter million dollars just to do the bare minimum run of a canned product? So I'm like, OK, I don't have anywhere near that kind of cash. And there's nobody who's going to write me a check for the idea at that time. Well, I want to put water in a can and call it Liquid Death. They're like, that's the dumbest idea ever. No retailer will carry it. This might be a lot harder than I thought it was going to be.

• 5:41Guy Raz?

  Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

• 5:52Guy Raz?

  I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how Mike Cessario turned store-bought water upside down by putting it in aluminum cans and calling it Liquid Death.

• 6:11Guy Raz?

  You've probably heard the adage, "There's no such thing as a saturated market," which, I don't know, is that really true? Have you visited the energy bar aisle at the supermarket lately? There must be hundreds of brands. But still, it is true that a smart approach can break through in even the most crowded aisle. And if you don't believe me, well, today's story is just for you. Because today's story is about water, bottled water. And that market is huge, worth over $300 billion globally. In the US alone, there are more than 80 different brands.

• 6:53Guy Raz?

  So many that it would seem almost foolish to try and break into that market. But a little over seven years ago, one foolish entrepreneur decided to do just that. He had no experience in water. But what Mike Cessario did have was very good instincts and almost two decades of experience in advertising. And Mike knew that if he tried something so utterly weird, so totally outlandish, it might just work. Seven years on, the brand he built, Liquid Death, sells more than $100 million of water a year. And what is Liquid Death? Well, it's just water.

• 7:38Guy Raz?

  But what makes it so weird, so different, is how it's packaged. First off, it's in a tall boy can that, at first glance, looks like malt liquor or an energy drink. It's got a grisly-looking skull on the front with a Gothic horror movie font that spells out Liquid Death, a name that, you have to admit, is kind of unforgettable, which is just what Mike Cessario intended. For years, Mike worked on creative ad campaigns for different clients. He loved putting edgy humor into his pitches, but he was often frustrated by clients who didn't get the joke. So he decided to make his own ad campaign.

• 8:20Guy Raz?

  In fact, before Liquid Death was an actual product, it was just an ad, which Mike posted on Facebook as a test. A test to see if people would want to buy an aluminum can of water called Liquid Death. And as it turned out, they did. Mike grew up in the 1980s and 90s in Delaware and Pennsylvania. His parents divorced when he was young. His dad worked for various companies, and his mom was a respiratory therapist. And from a pretty early age, Mike was into two things: skateboarding and punk music.

• 8:55Speaker 01

  I kind of went down the punk rabbit hole, got a guitar, started playing music, started playing in a band with some of my friends that I skateboarded with in like 8th grade. And then that kind of defined me as a teenager going through high school. Like, I played in a band and I skateboarded.

• 9:10Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 9:11Speaker 01

  And I was always into creative. Like, I did art, drawing, all of that since I was really young as well, so.

• 9:18Guy Raz?

  What were you drawing?

• 9:19Speaker 01

  I drew a lot of cartoony stuff. Like, when I was probably 10 years old, my older cousin Eric gave me his whole, like, collection of Mad magazines. Like, some as early as like late 70s Mad magazines, all the way up through the 80s. And I just thought that was the coolest thing I'd ever seen. So that kind of like, comedy is what drove my creativity and how I drew stuff, like funny cartoons, funny scenarios, little bite-sized things that felt like Mad magazine.

• 9:52Guy Raz?

  Yeah. I guess after you finished high school, you sort of bounced around for a couple of years and played in a couple of bands. And from what I understand, you were sort of trying to decide whether to get into music full-time or... Or to go to college, but but eventually you did leave home. You left the East Coast and decided to go study graphic design in California, in Pasadena. Right?

• 10:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was it was not because I didn't love music as much. It was more because I realized the reality of a band is four or five people and you need everybody to be on the same page. Like I was all in, but I kind of knew I didn't feel confident that everybody else was.

• 10:34Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 10:35Speaker 01

  And then, once I was in Art Center, that's when I all my first time, probably in my life, I was fully focused on one thing. I'm like, done with the music thing. I've been burned too many times that way. I know that I can't just go get a job in design. I need I need to get great at this. This is where I really got to get my life together. And I focused 100% on design and advertising and, you know, was getting straight A's and was at the top of my class. And yeah, that's when I then went went into advertising.

• 11:03Guy Raz?

  And I guess one of your maybe your first job out of there was working for a pretty sort of well-known agency, Crispin Porter Bogusky.

• 11:14Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 11:16Guy Raz?

  And this is like, tell me, I mean, I don't for people who don't know advertising, they're like a pretty well-known, was a sort of a particularly creative agency, right?

• 11:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, they did a lot of funny disruptive marketing. That resonated far more with me than like the graphic design world. It's like measuring pixels and designing to a grid and all this very meticulous stuff. You know, I was always into the more, oh, let's make stuff that's funny and clever. But, um, you know, I think people will tell you like a year at Crispin at that period is like five years anywhere else because again, it was like, you know, people called it a sweatshop, like it really burned me out after a year. I mean, doing that where, I mean, I think there was a period for three months I didn't have a single day off. So it was. After a year, I kinda was starting to look at some other spots.

• 12:09Speaker 01

  And of course, because I had a year of Crispin under my belt, there were some other agencies willing to pay me a lot more money than I was making as a junior, you know, creative.

• 12:17Guy Raz?

  So you would, after that, I think you went to another agency in Seattle after that, and you would spend the next sort of seven years, at least eight years, kind of bouncing around different agencies, living in the Bay Area and Seattle. But I wanna, I wanna kind of ask you about this time, because around 2009.

• 12:37Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 12:38Guy Raz?

  Where you got invited to see the Vans Warped Tour. And, I mean, presumably you did like, this is, this is your jam. And these are like punk bands, Vans Warped Tour, skater culture. So, and, and I don't, you know, I don't know if it was apocryphal, but it seems like that was a moment that would, in some ways, kind of slightly foreshadow what we're obviously gonna eventually talk about later on. But tell me about, about the Vans Warped Tours lands in Denver.

• 13:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, Denver, yep. And when they were coming through on the Warped Tour to Denver, like I, you know, they hit me up, hey, Mike, we're gonna be in Denver, you should come out to the show. So I came out, they gave me, you know, wristband passes, like I was hanging out back on the, on the, on the, their tour bus with, where they have like this kind of city of tour buses for the Warped Tour, where they all park. And people were just sitting out in lawn chairs back there, bands, like, you know, drinking, playing games, that kind of stuff. So just hanging out with them there. And yeah, I saw they had these, you know, they were all drinking these cans of Monster Energy, but really small, on the bottom of the can, it said, "Tour Water." And they were like, yeah, because I thought they were drinking energy drinks.

• 13:52Speaker 01

  And I'm like, no, no, no, like, this is water, like the energy drink sponsor, you know, they don't want us drinking any other products besides Monster on stage. And like, clearly, people aren't gonna drink energy drinks all day in the hot sun. And so they said, so the, the brand had to create. Water for the bands that looked just like their product that they wanted to promote.

• 14:14Guy Raz?

  Oh, wow. So it wasn't like they were they were opening up Monster Energy, pouring it out and refilling it with water. It was literally water, but it just had Monster Energy on it.

• 14:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, they were never pouring it out. Like, Monster had to create this for the bands.

• 14:27Guy Raz?

  But but the point is, is that like, the the image was of these like punk rockers, who actually were probably healthy and like living a vegan lifestyle onstage with Monster Energy, which is just packed with sugar and more sugar. And that's not what they were drinking. They were actually drinking water out of those Monster Energy cans.

• 14:46Speaker 01

  Exactly. And it's like, huh, that's kind of weird.

• 14:50Guy Raz?

  But but this was not, to be clear, this was not like an aha lightbulb moment. This was just an observation that you had of these guys drinking water out of Monster Energy, and you just kind of filed it in the back of your head. It wasn't like, I'm gonna change the world tomorrow.

• 15:05Speaker 01

  Exactly. I mean, I was so into brand and marketing and, I mean, deep, deep, deep in the weeds, especially like when you're working for such a top agency like Crispin. It's like, everybody eats, sleeps, and breathes like advertising and marketing. And everyone knows what's the new campaign and what's been done before and what hasn't. Like, yeah, that was my career. So I was hyper tuned into all the nuance of brand and marketing.

• 15:29Guy Raz?

  Mike, I'm curious about the kinds of ad campaigns you you did during this period. Like, like what your personal style was?

• 15:37Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 15:38Guy Raz?

  Because at one point, I know you were living in San Francisco and you're working for an ad company there. And I guess your clients didn't always appreciate your sort of peculiar sense of humor. So what kinds of suggestions? Like, do you remember making a suggestion that that didn't get made? That you were like, God, this is so good?

• 15:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, there was one. It was funny. What's funny is it didn't get made. And then, whatever it was, 10 years later, I finally made the idea myself for Liquid Death. And it's one of our most successful things that we've done. There was a golf club company, Callaway. And they released this golf club called Diablo. Literally had devil horns on it and flames. And we were trying to come up with, you know.

• 16:28Guy Raz?

  A campaign around it.

• 16:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, a campaign or just like, you know, because golf world, it's sort of like, they would joke like the marketing is so stale and unchanged.

• 16:37Guy Raz?

  She knows and she knows in polo shirts.

• 16:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, and literally, you just say, four yards longer. Like, that's the campaign. It's four yards longer, show a pro, show the club. That's, that's, that's golf marketing. And one of the ideas I had, I'm like, okay, well, it's this, you know, whatever it is, $400 golf club with devil horns on it. It's called the Diablo. And I said, what if we ran a magazine ad? That was like a contract where if you ripped out this ad, this ad and sold your soul to Callaway, you would get like the first, whatever it was, the first 20 people to do it would actually get a free Diablo club.

• 17:22Speaker 01

  And I'm like, think about it, like, how much press attention will that get? How many people will talk about that for free? That is not going to talk about an ad with a golfer that says four yards longer on it.

• 17:35Guy Raz?

  So it would be the ad in a magazine, like a golf magazine?

• 17:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, like a golf magazine. Exactly. Yeah.

• 17:40Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 17:41Speaker 01

  And I thought that was, I just thought, I'm like, man, this is gold. How do you not do this? Like, it's, I mean, and my boss wouldn't even present it to the client. He's like, we're not even showing the client this. I'm like, all right, fine. But yeah, it was those kinds of things. And, you know, we also were working at that time on the airline, Virgin America, when that was kind of a new hot airline and we were their agency. And, you know, I presented like all different kinds of, I think, kind of cool ideas. But, you know, again, they just ended up only wanting to show the client just like very straightforward, like semi clever headline.

• 18:21Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 18:21Speaker 01

  On a billboard and, you know, not anything too disruptive. So, yeah, it was very frustrating to just really not be able to kind of, I guess, hone into what the, you know, what I felt like my creative potential was.

• 18:33Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 18:34Speaker 01

  And then that's when I started thinking, I kind of was at this. Crossroads of, man, I'm, I'm deep in it.

• 18:41Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 18:42Speaker 01

  So I literally had the thought, okay, if I have to depend on clients to buy the ideas that I think are, are, are the smart things to do, or I have to depend on my boss to be willing to be passing this through. That I'm like, the only way, my only solution is I need to create my own product that I control what the marketing is for. That's the only way. Um, so then I really started thinking about, okay, if, if I'm going to create my own product, like, what would it be?

• 19:13Guy Raz?

  Yeah. It's almost like, it's almost like you were saying to yourself, I don't really care what the brand is, I just want to do cool ads. And that's like, and so the, the product doesn't matter. It's just, I can't sell these ads to clients, so I gotta make something myself and just, it'll be like an outlet for me to make cool ads. So what were you thinking about? Like, what kinds of products could you sell around, you know, like, yeah?

• 19:36Speaker 01

  So I was actually really inspired by this guy. Um, he was a creative advertising agency owner in Philadelphia named Steve, Steve Grass. And, uh, he had this agency called, uh, Quaker City Mercantile. And they actually helped create and, uh, launch two of the most successful spirits brand launches of like, at that time, like, almost the last couple of decades.

• 20:05Guy Raz?

  What were they?

• 20:05Speaker 01

  Hendrick's Gin.

• 20:06Guy Raz?

  Oh, yeah, sure.

• 20:07Speaker 01

  And Sailor Jerry Rum.

• 20:09Guy Raz?

  Rum, okay, yep.

• 20:10Speaker 01

  So he was kinda like a punk, sorta like a punk rock sorta guy that, you know, ran this agency in Philadelphia for years. They had partnered with this big liquor conglomerate called William Grant and Sons that was based in Scotland. And, um, they asked them to help launch a gin brand. And they were like, hey, as a Scot, a Scottish company, it's really unique that we would ever launch a gin, you know, whereas everyone sees us as Scotch. So they helped them, they kind of helped them create the, this entire Hendrick's Gin brand.

• 20:39Guy Raz?

  Which was groundbreaking, cause that was everywhere. All of a sudden, everybody was drinking Hendrick's Gin and they were talking about botanicals and like all, you know, right? I remember.

• 20:49Speaker 01

  And at the time.

• 20:51Speaker 01

  I was just very surrounded in the spirits industry. Like at the time I was dating someone who was like a, you know, mixologist bartender. In San Francisco. In San Francisco, yeah. Like I was really into whiskey and bourbon and trying all these different unique things. And my brother was a bartender at the time. So I just felt like I'm more connected to this world and probably know more about it than the average person. I think that was my sort of, um, you know, litmus test for like, what kind of product to make, you know? Yeah. So yeah, when I thought, okay, it's gonna be liquor. And literally, I just started looking and doing my homework. Um, but yeah, the one kind of category that I thought that I couldn't find one cool brand in really was brandy. Um, and I was like, you go to

• 21:36Speaker 01

  the liquor store and you look on the shelf at the brandy section, and there was literally dust on some of the bottles. Um, and I started, I was like, so then I bought some brandy and was tasting it. And I was like, oh, wow, this actually tastes a lot like bourbon, just a little bit sweeter. Why is this such a dead category, yet a very similar tasting spirit is like the hottest thing there is right now? Clearly, that is a brand and marketing problem that needs to be solved. So then I started kind of developing a brandy brand. That's always the funniest thing to say. Um, a brandy brand that felt more like a whiskey

• 22:17Speaker 01

  brand, you know, because I felt, hey, people understand like the, the, the design and branding aesthetic of whiskey and they associate it with a flavor profile. How do we bring more of that to brandy? Because it is, it really is closer to that kind of profile. People thought brandy was like ultra sweet liqueur, but it's not at all. Yeah. So when you say we, it was, it was. It was me, really. It was me. I created this brand that was packaged and marketed more like an Americana whiskey. Yeah. What was it called? Western Grace. Yeah. So yeah, we kind of created this thing. It felt like a whiskey, but it was, it was American brandy. And I found. A distillery in Ukiah, California.

• 23:00Guy Raz?

  Sure, yeah.

• 23:01Speaker 01

  And, um, yeah, and these guys have been making some of the best brandy in the world for like 20 years.

• 23:08Guy Raz?

  They were making wine there?

• 23:09Speaker 01

  No, they were making brandy.

• 23:10Guy Raz?

  They were making brandy.

• 23:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, they had made like this craft brandy, you know, and I think when they saw this marketing, young marketing guy who was passionate and excited about the category and had this cool idea, um, on, on how to market it and branded, I think they got excited about it and they were like, yeah, you know, we'll, you know, we're down to kind of make it for you.

• 23:30Guy Raz?

  All right, so you find this distillery, uh, north of San Francisco and, and then to get more help, um, from what I, from what I read, you did something really smart, which is you reached out to the folks from that, that ad agency, Quaker City Mercantile, that, that you just talked about, that helped launch Hendrick's Gin.

• 23:48Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 23:49Guy Raz?

  Um, and, and I guess you connected with the creative director who used to work there and, and some other people and, and they actually agreed to partner with you to, to help you launch this brandy and, and I guess you moved back east to where they were based, which is Philadelphia, to kind of work with them, is, is that right?

• 24:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I moved back to Philly. We, we started figuring out the details of, um, you know, working with this distillery, how much they wanted to charge us, um, how much we were going to create. And that was really like, we were just going to create a really small amount. Like, I want to say like the first batch of this stuff was maybe like 15 grand or something like that. It was like not many cases, like, I don't know, 60 cases or something like that.

• 24:35Speaker 01

  And then literally it was, you know, the, these guys, I mean, they were creative directors and like VP level account people at the agency. So they had probably pretty high paying jobs, like they were homeowners, like they kind of had their own independent money where I did not, like I'm still paying student loans. I have like nothing in my bank account. So they were able to kind of put up like a little bit to kind of help it going, like I had, um, You know, I basically asked my dad, like, hey, I got this thing like, I think they lent me like five grand, like, just so I could like, put in a little bit also. And we got like, the first production going where we, you know, went through all the legal head, you know, of like, dealing, like, getting an actual, you know, through the red tape of

• 25:17Speaker 01

  having an alcohol brand and we got it into a warehouse in Philadelphia.

• 25:22Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 25:22Speaker 01

  What I realized then was with alcohol, so much of it isn't marketing. It's like this, getting it into like, the cool craft cocktail bars and getting bartenders on board and doing tastings, like, it wasn't really at that level about, you didn't have the money for like, brand marketing. It was just like, okay, you just gotta get this in the right people's hands. And they're basically like, yeah, we're not gonna have any money to do real marketing for a while and it's social media and you, you know, you can't market alcohol to anyone under 21, so you have to be careful about what you can put on social. And then, after two years, I just butt heads with the two folks that I had started it with. You know, we just weren't on the same page about so many different things.

• 26:07Speaker 01

  Different, totally different vision. And then, they kept the brand going for a while and it wasn't until, I think it was two summers ago during COVID, that they officially sort of shut the company down.

• 26:23Guy Raz?

  Right. And so you never made any money off that?

• 26:25Speaker 01

  No, no, didn't make any off that.

• 26:27Guy Raz?

  I mean, you probably were spending a lot of your time just on like, the mundane, you know, logistics of just getting it distributed even.

• 26:37Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, it was such a headache. I mean, the legal paperwork, background checks, like, it really was such a nightmare. And that was part of the reason where when I was thinking of my next thing, I'm like, okay, whatever it's gonna be, is there's gonna be almost no regulations, like, no complicated ingredients or manufacturing processes, like, it needs to be very simple because that stuff just. It's, yeah, it was really difficult.

• 27:06Guy Raz?

  Were you, did you feel like, I don't know, like you failed? I mean, did you feel bad? Did you feel like, God, I poured all the last two years into this thing that I really thought was gonna be the thing? And now I'm like back to square one, working, looking for agency work again.

• 27:19Speaker 01

  I mean, it was, yeah, I mean, it really was a tough time for me. It was like, you know, I worked at one agency that wasn't great. And then I got fired from that agency because they kind of, I think they realized my head just wasn't in it. And I was literally just like phoning it in. So it's like, I'm fired from a really crappy agency, or what I thought was a crappy agency at the time. And I just had this whole like, what does it all mean? Like, where, you know, where, what am I gonna do with my life? I have no interesting work in my portfolio. There is no cool agency that's gonna really hire me.

• 27:52Guy Raz?

  But eventually you do get hired by an agency that was, I guess, based in Chattanooga in Tennessee. It's called Human, Humanaut, like astronaut, humanoid.

• 28:02Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 28:04Guy Raz?

  And you wind up doing an ad there, which kind of turns your career around, which I've seen. You can still see it on YouTube. The client was the dairy company Organic Valley. And you, you make this video for them. It's actually so funny. It's so good.

• 28:22Guy Raz?

  I didn't know about it until I did research on this for this interview. It was like a parody of, of protein drinks. And they were trying to market a protein drink. Can you, can you tell me the story about that, like the idea that you came up with?

• 28:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, so protein shakes in culture were so associated with like muscle bound growth, right?

• 28:44Guy Raz?

  Guys who are jacked.

• 28:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. You tell anyone, you know, and that's the whole culture that they were gonna be launching into. So, yeah, we had this idea, oh, you know, if all these bros keep drinking all these chemical laden protein shakes, like, how long are they gonna be around? And they might become extinct. And then like, you might miss bros if that happens. So that was kind of the seed of the idea that we then turned into this like, you know, it's, it's sort of a format that's been done a million times, like the parody PSA.

• 29:16Guy Raz?

  And it's, it's just a video of a bunch of guys like. Pumping iron at the gym, no body fat, just, you know, muscles, and then drinking these really sugary, you know, or whatever, chemically protein shakes. You know, the premise is that they were going to die.

• 29:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, right, yeah.

• 29:32Guy Raz?

  Drinking these drinks.

• 29:34Speaker 02

  But our bros are in serious danger. Every day, millions of bros drink protein shakes in order to get jacked, yoked, and totally swole. But most bros are unaware of the scary chemicals and artificial ingredients inside these shakes. If bros keep pounding this stuff at this rate, we could face a total bro colony collapse.

• 29:56Guy Raz?

  And what did they think? I mean, were they at all reluctant about this idea? Were they like, oh, I don't know, it's a little edgy?

• 30:04Speaker 01

  So I think they liked it at first. And then, once we had the final cut of the video, and then they started, you know, sharing the video with some of their, you know, family farmers, because it was like a, you know, it's a company, it's a co-op, so it's like, you know, partially owned by the farmers. So they run the stuff by the farmers. And of course, that was the wrong thing to do, because these guys just totally didn't get it. And they literally almost didn't run it.

• 30:33Guy Raz?

  But they were nervous.

• 30:34Speaker 01

  They were nervous, yeah. So then we launched it. It goes totally viral. Everyone loves it. And then, you know, Organic Valley's calling us, guys, we need bros at trade shows. We need bros everywhere. We need more bros. What's the second bro video we're gonna do?

• 30:48Guy Raz?

  Yeah, I mean, it's, I mean, you look at it and you think, this is a no brainer. It's gonna go viral. But obviously, it's impossible to know. But it looks like an SNL skit. It's just so funny.

• 30:58Speaker 01

  Yes. Yeah, it was, I mean, for not much, they got millions and millions of dollars worth of, you know, eyeballs out of it.

• 31:05Guy Raz?

  Yeah. So that was, I mean, it sounds like, you know, that was a sort of an important turning point. I wonder whether, when you went to this agency, Humanot, right? This is around 2014. You know, did you think that your time as an entrepreneur was over? That you had tried this brandy brand and it didn't work out? And maybe you should just keep, you know? And now you're getting some momentum in this agency. And did you think, okay, this is good. I'm good. This is gonna work?

• 31:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, I felt like I had found. My lane again, you know, like I was making stuff that I was actually proud of. Then that started bringing in more people, you know, more companies coming to us for that like viral YouTube video, you know, especially from the health food space. So that kind of became like our specialty. We started doing it for, um, you know, other brands.

• 31:55Guy Raz?

  Meantime, this is now like eight, you know, six, seven years after that Vans Warp Tour show where you saw people like these rockers pounding water out of Monster Energy cans. That idea was kind of in the back of your mind, but you weren't admittedly thinking of this as a brand. But I guess what around this time, around 2015, this idea comes back to you, not, I think not initially as something you wanted to make, but like as part of an ad campaign for, for a client, right?

• 32:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. So at Humanat, um, we had the opportunity to pitch ideas to this company called, I think they're called the Center for Science and Public Health.

• 32:37Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 32:38Speaker 01

  And they wanted to do a commercial that really like brought to attention like the dangers or unhealthy elements of soda. And I think it was called the Real Bears. And you know how Coca-Cola, like their icon was a polar bear?

• 32:54Guy Raz?

  Polar bears. Yeah.

• 32:54Speaker 01

  So you couldn't say Coca-Cola. You couldn't disparage a brand, but they just had this little, um, cute cartoon where they had polar bears that were drinking soda. And it was like, kind of real happy, like, you know, go lucky. But then it's like, they start getting diabetes and then they get their arms amputated.

• 33:18Speaker 01

  Then they, they said, hey, guys, we want to do something like this, but now we want to call out the dangers of energy drinks. Because that was such a big thing.

• 33:26Guy Raz?

  The dangers because they're just packed with sugar.

• 33:28Speaker 01

  And caffeine.

• 33:29Guy Raz?

  And caffeine. Yeah.

• 33:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, um, the thing that we landed on was that.

• 33:35Speaker 01

  And that kind of came from, you know, some of my experience, you know, from the Warped Tour, which was the reality is, you know, these guys are use all these, you know, action sports athletes to market this stuff. It seems like they're drinking this stuff, but the reality was it was all bullshit. Like, these guys are actual athletes. Like, they have trainers. They will, they will not be drinking this much caffeine and sugar. Like, they take their stuff very seriously. So, you know, we, you know, we came up with like a couple of different ideas and like, you know, the idea that I had, and I think partially because I had just come off of like an entrepreneurial thing of creating a product. So my brain first goes to, oh, what if we created

• 34:17Speaker 01

  a water brand that looked like an energy drink? And it was all about making fun of the fact that this is what these guys actually drink. So maybe we do like a funny video that almost feels like it's like, I don't know, like a commercial or something for this ridiculous product where I think, you know, we were saying something like 100% water, 0% bullshit. Like, that was like the line.

• 34:41Guy Raz?

  Yeah. Yeah. And, and what did they say? What did they think about the idea of, of doing a, you know, a spoof ad like that?

• 34:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I wasn't there to actually present the idea. It was like our boss who presented the idea. And, you know, they just, they had zero interest in creating a real product. They're like, no, guys, like, we don't want to create anything like that. Like, we literally just want a funny video like the Real Bears thing, but for energy drinks. But I just knew there was something there. I'm like, regardless of these guys were going to do this, like, I think I stumbled onto something really interesting here. And I kind of just kept it in the back of my head. And like, I started just flipping that entrepreneurial switch again, because I finally found something that got me excited, that I thought I saw white space there again.

• 35:25Guy Raz?

  How, how do you, how do you remember that happening? I mean, it was an idea. You first encountered this kind of weirdly in 2009. Then you pitch it as a spoof product. But then how do you make the leap in your mind to be like, wait a minute, no, maybe this, this is a real product. Like, maybe there is something I can do here?

• 35:45Speaker 01

  Well, I think I was already in the What's my next entrepreneurial mindset constantly? And I started just really doing, you know, my, when I kind of focus on something, I just go into this like deep dive of homework, like where I just become obsessed, where I'm like, okay, let me research the, you know, the bottled water market.

• 36:05Guy Raz?

  What would you find out? I mean, I mean, this is like 2015. What, I mean, there's a lot of water brands on the market, a ton. I mean, you go to the aisles of Safeway at that point now, I mean, still, there's everything, I mean, from Voss to Fiji to Mountain Spring to Avion and Perrier and Poland Spring and, you know, there's a lot of brands.

• 36:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think a lot of brands that are all very much the same and not fun or interesting, you know, when you compare it to something like Monster or Red Bull or, you know, Bud Light or like these, you know, brands that are associated with hilarious commercials, exciting packaging, you know, youth culture, like all of that kind of stuff.

• 36:51Speaker 01

  There was nothing like that in water.

• 36:54Guy Raz?

  When we come back in just a moment, how Mike comes up with the brand name and the logo that do not evoke spring water. In fact, think poison. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This.

• 37:14Guy Raz?

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• 37:56Guy Raz?

  The agents bring speed and scale and people bring taste, judgment and control. Learn how you can get more out of your site from a Framer specialist, or get started building for free today at framer.com/built for 30% off a Framer Pro annual plan. That's framer.com/built. Rules and restrictions may apply. AI isn't just opening new business opportunities, it's changing the way businesses get work done. The questions they ask, the decisions they make, the routine tasks they can hand off. That's the idea behind NetSuite Next, the next generation of NetSuite with AI woven

• 38:37Guy Raz?

  into the tools your business already relies on. NetSuite Next surfaces insights exactly when you need them, puts agents to work on routine tasks and problems, and lets you ask complex questions in plain language, like talking to a knowledgeable colleague. But technology is only part of the story. AI is also reshaping how people and teams work together, and that shift is already underway. That's why NetSuite wants to put a new expert-created business guide in your hands today. It's called Aligning for the Agentic Era: How AI is Changing Everyday Work. And right now, it's yours, absolutely free. Inside, you'll discover how AI could reshape work across your entire organization,

• 39:22Guy Raz?

  and how to position your business to prosper from it. If your revenues are at least in the seven figures, get NetSuite's free business guide, Aligning for the Agentic Era: How AI is Changing Everyday Work, at netsuite.com/built. The guide is free to you at netsuite.com/built. netsuite.com/built.

• 39:44Speaker 03

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• 40:29Speaker 03

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• 40:30Speaker 04

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• 40:46Speaker 05

  Hi, Guy. This is Stephen Council. I'm in a small workshop in Queenstown, New Zealand, where I listen to How I Built This. Perhaps that's why I relate so well to my favorite episode, Burton Snowboards with Jake Carpenter, because he was in a small workshop by himself as well. I admired how he was open about his loneliness. He showed his emotional vulnerability. And he was so modest, having created an Olympic sport and a whole new industry that reached so far it impacts the town I live in here in New Zealand. We're a ski and snowboard destination in winter. It's a beautiful episode. Thanks for such a great show.

• 41:24Guy Raz?

  If you want to share your favorite episode of How I Built This, record a short voice memo on your phone telling us your name, where you're from, what your favorite episode is, and why. A lot like the voice memo you just heard. And email it to us at h i b t at i d dot wondery dot com. And we'll share your favorites right here in the ad breaks in future episodes. And thanks so much. We love you guys. You're the best. And now, back to the show.

• 42:01Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's around 2015, and Mike is thinking of launching a bottled water brand that's unlike anything that anyone's ever seen before, starting with the idea that it won't even be bottled.

• 42:17Speaker 01

  The original idea for a can, or a tallboy can, was like, hey, this... Looks like something like a beer or energy drink that feels fun, but what's inside is actually really good for you, which is rare. There's rarely anything inside of a can that's really good for you.

• 42:32Guy Raz?

  The concept from the beginning was canned water, not bottled water, not plastic or glass, be in an aluminum can. It would be a tall boy, so it could look like malt liquor or an energy drink.

• 42:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And then, so I'm trying to find like, okay, where's there a water source? Like, who can actually can water? So I'm like Googling, you know, water sources in Kentucky or Tennessee or places like, hey, who can maybe actually produce this stuff? Then I also started seeing that, you know, the more news articles about how bad plastic is. Like, that was, like, those were starting to pop up in a big way then, where, hey, you know, how much plastic ends up in the ocean? And companies were starting to say, hey, we're just gonna stop using, you know, plastic, you know, bottles in our companies. And it was, it was, it was kind of a hot button topic that was starting to kind of, you know, sizzle up at that time as well. So it's like, oh, great. Not only

• 43:27Speaker 01

  is the can really cool, now there's actually, there's like a deeper reason why, you know, aluminum's infinitely recyclable. It's way, you know, it's a way better alternative to plastic. Like, it all, all these moons just started aligning that this was the right path.

• 43:42Guy Raz?

  Okay, so while you're researching this, right? First of all, imagine there's lots of places that bottled water in the United States, in North America. So I imagine it's not that, it's sort of like cosmetics, right? You go, there's tons of white label manufacturers, and you stamp your brand on it. So was it, was it relatively easy to identify, you know, a bottler that could take water and then just put it in a can in the US?

• 44:10Speaker 01

  I, I had the same exact thought as you had, and it was the opposite of that. It was impossible, didn't exist. And that's kind of-

• 44:17Guy Raz?

  Because, because why? They were only using plastic?

• 44:20Speaker 01

  So when you create a bottled water, or a canned water, the only way it makes economic sense is you have to basically bottle it at the source.

• 44:30Guy Raz?

  And you did not want to use city water? You wanted to use spring water?

• 44:34Speaker 01

  Right, right. And even if I wanted, even if I wanted to use city water, there's a whole other thing that you'd have to do there. But no, I wanted this to be like a premium spring source, because you knew that, based on the cost of aluminum, you're not gonna be able to sell this for the same price as a- Piece of trash, plastic bottle, right? It's like, this is gonna have to have a premium price point, so you're gonna have to justify it with, at least the product inside feels like there's a premium story. Oh, it's from a mountain, it's from a natural source, this isn't, yeah, city water.

• 45:03Guy Raz?

  And most spring water is bottled at the source because presumably it's very expensive to truck it down somewhere.

• 45:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, it's like you have to find a source, yeah, you'd have to tanker truck it, you know, spend money on fuel.

• 45:15Guy Raz?

  So, nobody does that?

• 45:16Speaker 01

  No one does that.

• 45:17Guy Raz?

  All water, that's spring waters. And so presumably, there are places that are bottling water at the source in cans, right?

• 45:23Speaker 01

  Presumably, but no, because it was not a category that existed. So, every single, you know, water source that had bottling capabilities, they only had plastic capabilities. Maybe a couple of them had glass. But even that was rare. So, it was all plastic, like, the whole industry.

• 45:41Guy Raz?

  You could not find, you could not find a spring in North America that had a, had the ability to bottle this or to can it. So, that's probably discouraging, right? There goes your idea.

• 45:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, that kinda slowed some of the momentum of my idea down, when I realized how hard it was gonna be to produce, like, what started as this like fervorous, "Oh my god, I found something, I found something, I'm researching, yes, all this stuff makes sense." And then, yeah, it's kinda this big roadblock of, well, literally, there's no one that can make it, so this, you know, this might be a lot harder than I thought it was gonna be.

• 46:18Guy Raz?

  And meanwhile, I guess around this time, you decide to move back to California, this time to LA, and I guess you get a job as a creative director at a skateboarding company down there, but, but, but this idea, this canned water idea is, obviously, it's in your head, it's like gnawing at you. I mean, you think that there's something there, of course, obviously, and, and at a certain point, you, you come up with a name for this thing, and a concept for how you want it to look.

• 46:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I think once, you know, once we're in like, I think it's like 2017, early, I think when I'm like... I finally have kind of landed on, you know, what the general concept for Liquid Death was going to be. Cause it wasn't always going to be look like a beer. It was kind of like, you know, does it look like an energy drink like? So then when I finally decided, hey, I want this thing to look like a beer. Like that was kind of the concept. I remember calling one of my best friends and telling him, I'm like, hey, I think I have the new business ideas. Like, what is it? I'm like, I want to put water in cans that look like cheap beer. And that felt right to me because I'm like, you know, everybody wants stuff they're not supposed to have. You know, it's like, they say, hey, if you want teens to think something's cool,

• 47:36Speaker 01

  you actually market it to people in their twenties. You know, it's like energy drinks, they kind of market to teens, but seventeen year olds don't think Monsters is the coolest thing, but twelve year olds do, you know?

• 47:48Guy Raz?

  Yes. Oh, yes.

• 47:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. So it was like, hey, if we actually want, you know, teens or even people in their twenties to want something like, let's not make it look like a kitty energy drink that twelve year olds think is cool. Let's make it look like a beer that like everyone between, you know, fifteen and fifty think is cool. So then I just really started pulling all these beer references for like, hey, what does classic beer design look like? What kind of fonts?

• 48:17Guy Raz?

  You started making like a mood board.

• 48:19Speaker 01

  Mood board, exactly. Like pulling all these references of like, I used a lot of craft beer inspiration, not so much in the design, because craft beer design, part of what makes it great is it doesn't look anything like typical big beer. But it also just, it almost is like craft beer is cool because it kind of looks like a soda or energy drink most times and not a beer. And that's what makes it interesting.

• 48:43Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 48:44Speaker 01

  So then, but from like a naming perspective, I thought some of the craft beers had some of the most interesting like brand names compared to regular beer where it was like, there was like a skull crusher IPA. There was like arrogant bastard ale.

• 48:58Guy Raz?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 48:59Speaker 01

  They had all these really interesting.

• 49:01Guy Raz?

  Fat tire.

• 49:02Speaker 01

  Fat tire, yeah. Like, I think like one of the early, like really bad names that I had was like Southern Thunder.

• 49:10Guy Raz?

  Terrible name.

• 49:11Speaker 01

  Terrible name.

• 49:13Speaker 01

  But I think when I really started thinking about like, again, it's like, okay, let's take a step back. Like if I launch this thing for real, what I learned from Western Grace, there's going to be no dollars for marketing. And the only chance this has at survival is it has to be something that people naturally want to share on social. So then I started thinking like, okay, what are some of the names where if someone saw this, they have to share it. And that's where it's like you literally start trying to think of what's the dumbest, craziest thing you could think of, like start there.

• 49:46Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 49:47Speaker 01

  Like Liquid Death, like Liquid Death was one of these names. It was just like, what sounds like something that like you would never want to drink. And it's like, you know, Liquid Death, like do the opposite of what you think you should do. But I remember thinking like, yeah, Liquid, like a beverage called Liquid Death, like there's no chance someone's not sharing that if they see that in a store.

• 50:08Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 50:08Speaker 01

  And so, once I had the name Liquid Death, kind of had like rough sort of package design, came up-

• 50:16Guy Raz?

  But you designed it. You came up with like a skull design.

• 50:20Speaker 01

  Well, no, I worked with a buddy, the buddy of mine I mentioned a while ago, who was like the intern Chris been years ago, who was a designer. He kind of helped me out, because he's way more of a designer, I think, than I was. So he kind of helped throw together some can designs, based on like some kind of clear direction I had. Like, hey, kind of want this colors, this thing. I actually kind of made the type, like I found the typeface for Liquid Death and kind of did that.

• 50:46Guy Raz?

  You wanted old English typeface?

• 50:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 50:48Guy Raz?

  Because it looks almost like malt liquor.

• 50:50Speaker 01

  Well, what they call that, it's called German black letter font. And that's why so much beer, because beer came from Germany, really, to the US.

• 50:58Guy Raz?

  Oh.

• 50:59Speaker 01

  All these old brands, they use like that very German inspired look and feel. So then I started thinking of, okay, we don't have any money. This is going to cost a lot of money to produce. Like you can't make them, because I knew, I knew a little bit about what it costs to make aluminum cans, because I think I got a quote from one of the like Ball or one of these aluminum can manufacturers. Like, hey, what does it cost to produce, you know?

• 51:21Speaker 01

  16 ounce cans or 24 ounce cans. And it's like, oh, wow, the minimum, minimum you can produce is like 200,000. And so you're talking about a quarter million dollars or 150 grand, something like that, just to do the bare minimum run of a canned product.

• 51:39Speaker 01

  So I'm like, okay, I don't have anywhere near that kind of cash. And there's nobody who's going to write me a check for the idea at that time. Well, I want to put water in a can and call it Liquid Death. They're like, that's the dumbest idea ever. No retailer will carry it. So I'm like, okay, I'm going to make a funny kind of commercial for this that feels like it could be viral, like the stuff we had done at Humanod and, and things like that. And then the original idea was, but I'm going to use this video to be like a Kickstarter or Indiegogo thing.

• 52:10Guy Raz?

  Right. Oh, you would, you would build, build an Indiegogo page with a video on it.

• 52:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 52:14Guy Raz?

  Okay.

• 52:14Speaker 01

  And I think, yeah, we set out to raise like, it was like, you know, like $150,000.

• 52:19Guy Raz?

  On Indiegogo.

• 52:20Speaker 01

  On Indiegogo. So we made this video, you probably saw where it's the, the woman who's pouring out a can of Liquid Death the entire time. She's kind of giving this monologue about water has been like misbranded and people think that, you know, water is some, you know, yoga thing when really water is deadly. Like, you know, it kills.

• 52:40Guy Raz?

  Kills.

• 52:40Speaker 01

  Surfers and, you know, whatever. And then there was.

• 52:42Guy Raz?

  Avalanches.

• 52:43Speaker 01

  Avalanches, yeah. And then there was this funny idea of like trying to position water comically as extreme.

• 52:49Guy Raz?

  And the closing shot, which is quite shocking and very risky, is of a guy duct taped to a table, like she, you, it pans out, this woman pouring the water is actually pouring it onto a guy who's being tortured, wearing a, like being waterboarded, basically.

• 53:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. In this. Yeah, it's a, it's a guy in a, in a business suit.

• 53:09Guy Raz?

  A business suit.

• 53:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:11Guy Raz?

  Basically being waterboarded by Liquid Death. So this, and you, you basically hired some actors and just made this. It wasn't expensive to make this video?

• 53:20Speaker 01

  No, we made this whole thing for 1,500 bucks. My wife, Carly, edited the whole thing. She actually edited almost all of the early Liquid Death video stuff.

• 53:30Guy Raz?

  Just using like, like whatever software you use on your Mac?

• 53:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And then that was actually me being waterboarded.

• 53:38Guy Raz?

  Okay, so I want to just break down the two things because the video would be very successful, but the Indiegogo campaign did not, actually was not successful.

• 53:47Speaker 01

  No, it was like, we set out to raise 150K and I think we raised like 1,500 dollars.

• 53:53Speaker 01

  So now I'm like, okay, now I'm just going to put it on social media. Like, I'm going to make a Facebook page for Liquid Death, make it seem like it's a real company. I'm going to put this video on there. I'm going to make a couple funny social posts about it. So I put maybe a couple thousand dollars in paid media behind the video and behind some of these little social posts over the course of like four months or so.

• 54:17Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 54:18Speaker 01

  So then like, after four months, the video had like almost 3 million views. It was like 2 and a half million views.

• 54:27Speaker 01

  The, the page had like, you know, 50, 60,000 followers. I have hundreds and hundreds of comments from people that range anywhere from like, this is the greatest thing ever, how do I buy this to, this is the dumbest-

• 54:39Guy Raz?

  Is this a real?

• 54:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, is this a real thing? Yeah, is this a real thing? This is the dumbest thing I've ever seen.

• 54:45Guy Raz?

  Because there was no link at the end saying, order Liquid Death. You did not have a product to sell, right?

• 54:50Speaker 01

  No, didn't have a product to sell. And then eventually I made like a pre-order page where it's like, oh, you could still pre, quote unquote, give your email and pre-order this.

• 54:59Guy Raz?

  Yeah. I, I'm wondering, Mike, how did you? So the idea was, like, because there's different ways of doing things. Usually people will make like a trial run. They'll try to maybe sell it at a farmer's market or like at One Whole Foods. You started with the ad campaign. You didn't even have a product ready to go. But when you made this video, did, did you have the infrastructure in place? Like, did you identify a man, a potential co-packer, a place that could bottle the water for you? Because you mentioned earlier, it was impossible to find anyone who could do this.

• 55:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I had none of that.

• 55:37Speaker 01

  And I knew that the one thing I did know, if I did want that, or if there was gonna be a way to produce it, it was going to be probably at least a hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

• 55:48Guy Raz?

  It's gonna be really expensive. Yeah.

• 55:50Speaker 01

  So I knew that the only way to get the capital was to really kind of prove out and de-risk the concept. So when I had, all of a sudden, early 2018, I had a Facebook page with a lot of followers. I had a video with millions of views. I had tons of comments of people seeming genuinely interested. I literally had a 7-Eleven franchisee from Michigan who said, hey, I own three 7-Elevens. How do I get this in my stores? I had the biggest non-alc distributor in New York called Big Geyser. One of their people reached out saying, hey, can I talk to a sales rep about carrying your product? So I used all of that to then say, okay, maybe I can actually now go raise, you know, a friends and family

• 56:33Speaker 01

  kind of round. You know, my family was not wealthy, so it was not like I could just go get money from my family. So, but it was like, hey, former bosses that were big marketing executives that I had good relationships with, who maybe like, you know, them writing a $5,000 check for something wasn't a big deal. So I basically cobbled together all these like, you know, 2,000 to, I think the biggest two checks I got were each like 20 grand. But everything else was small and I've kind of put together this round of like 150K.

• 57:05Guy Raz?

  So you wanted to prove that you could gain virality and then you could raise the money that you would need to actually produce the product. But where were you gonna do that? You said that nobody was doing this. Nobody was canning water. It was all plastic bottles.

• 57:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, you know, before we actually started raising the round, I did have a couple different leads on who could produce it and roughly what it would cost. So there was, you know, there was one place that was, I think, like outside of Las Vegas that said, hey, we can do it, but it wouldn't be spring water. It would be kind of like more of the city water.

• 57:42Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 57:42Speaker 01

  Which I wasn't that excited about. And the guy was basically like, oh yeah, did you know that like, you're not gonna be allowed to call it liquid death. Like the FDA won't let you do that. And I'm like, what do you mean? He's like, oh, yeah, it's death. Like you're saying, you know, it's false advertising. And you, you know, I'm like, really? And I, and again, I trust some of these people, but

• 58:00Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 58:01Speaker 01

  Thank God I didn't. But, um, so I still kind of knew, okay, I've talked to the experts now. And literally now they're telling me there's no, really nowhere they can do this. So then I'm like, okay, I'm going to start Google searching outside of the U.S. I'm going to start Googling Europe, canning water, co packing in Europe. And sure enough, I found this place in Austria that said they own four of their own spring water springs. They had canning capabilities. Email them, they're like, oh yeah, we can definitely make this for you. I'm like, really? So then it was, yeah, so then.

• 58:33Guy Raz?

  So, so just to interrupt, I mean, everyone told you this is impossible. But essentially what they were saying was it is impossible in the United States.

• 58:41Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 58:42Guy Raz?

  So my, like, if I was you, I would be thinking, okay, even if I was looking at Europe, I would be thinking, that's just going to make the cost so much higher to get this done in Europe. Like, I don't really want to do that. But that was your only option. That was the only option available.

• 58:57Speaker 01

  Only option available.

• 58:58Guy Raz?

  But you still needed the capital to make.

• 59:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I, at that time, like, I was already raising the capital because I had the one source ready to go in pricing. So I knew what it would cost. But then when I started, you know, the money started coming in. And at that time, once I was raising money, I am not a finance guy at all. So a good buddy of mine, um, uh, JR, who I went to high school with, he was kind of like a serial entrepreneur. Ever since he graduated high, you know, he, he went to college for finance. So then he came on board with me as like a co-founder. But again, at that point, so much of it was already like, the, the brand was already figured out. The Facebook page was already going. I already raised, raised most of the money. It was just like, okay, now I have all the pieces. Now I need you to kind of help me.

• 59:43Speaker 01

  You know, execute all this stuff and do the stuff that I'm not good at. And he was very cool with that arrangement. And that was, that's what I think worked so well with us in the beginning was we never stepped on each other's toes.

• 59:53Guy Raz?

  And, and so when you, I mean, and even when you were raising money, right? From friends and then eventually you, you were able to raise a little bit from a, a VC firm that had, I think had invested in Dollar Shave Club. Did any of them ever ask you, well, what's the qualitative difference? Like what, what makes your water taste better? Or were they all kind of convinced by your argument that that doesn't matter? It's water, you know, spring water is spring water generally. It's all about the branding side.

• 1:00:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, that was always part of my pitch, like as a marketing guy who really understands the nuance of brand. That's what I could make clear for people. The reality is that in most things, it is brand why things win, not functional differences. Like Nike doesn't market because they say, hey, our commercials, our shoes use this type of material that lasts 37 days longer than Adidas. Like, no, no, no, it's all brand. Or why someone's buying a $700 Gucci T-shirt that has the same functionality and thread or whatever it is as like a $20 Target T-shirt.

• 1:01:01Guy Raz?

  Might be the same factory.

• 1:01:02Speaker 01

  Might be the same factory. But that you can more easily understand why brand matters and why that is still successful. When, because I think for me, that's the definition of brand.

• 1:01:13Guy Raz?

  So, so there's no point in sort of leaning into this, our water, you know, mountain spring water tastes so pure and like that. You, you, you couldn't really carve out a space in the water category by doing that alone.

• 1:01:27Speaker 01

  I mean, it needed to be what people perceived as at least a premium product, which what we found is like source did matter to people. So that's why it was like, hey, as long as we have a good source story, like, hey, this is, you know, mountain water. Like this is from a mountain. That's enough to make people feel like, okay, this is a premium product. I don't need to get into the weeds beyond that.

• 1:01:49Guy Raz?

  How did you know that? Did you have access to market research?

• 1:01:53Speaker 01

  No, I think it was just, you could kind of just, you could look at the brands out there and, you know, it's pretty easy. I think like.

• 1:02:00Guy Raz?

  Intuitive.

• 1:02:00Speaker 01

  Intuitive, like you could talk to average person, uh, hey. What do you think is more premium? Water from a city or water from a mountain? Uh, mountain, yeah, okay, got it. It's not rocket math.

• 1:02:11Guy Raz?

  So you, all right, so you find this place in Austria to package and you've got now some money that you've raised. And the idea was to just what? I mean, now that you have 80,000 followers on Facebook, that was gonna be your presumably, these were gonna be your first customers. So, so you were gonna sell them direct to, to consumer from like, you were gonna, I don't know, have like a logistics or drop shipping or some kind of third-party, you know, logistics team that would sell them directly? Or you would do it through Amazon or what? What was the plan?

• 1:02:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it was through Amazon. And you have your product as a page on Amazon. People can buy it. Amazon ships and fulfills the product for you. And then Amazon charges you a fee for every case that they ship and fulfill. And it was very expensive. That's why, you know, we had to charge $20 a 12-pack in the beginning to even get anywhere, you know, into the black in terms of like making money on a case, which was so expensive. Because it was so expensive to ship a heavy case of water that weighed 13 pounds. Like, that's not cheap to ship. Like, if you try to go to FedEx right now and ship a 12-pound case of Liquid Death, they're gonna probably charge you $20 just to ship it.

• 1:03:27Guy Raz?

  So you had to sell this at a premium. I mean, you had to basically, in order to make some profit, which I guess you could because you already had these 80,000 Facebook followers, many of whom are waiting to order this.

• 1:03:41Speaker 01

  Exactly, yeah. We had a little bit of a built-in audience. And again, so many of those people didn't even believe it was real. Like, they still just thought this was a funny page to follow. And then, once we were like, hey, look, guys, it's real, you can buy it. It, it generated a different level of buzz, I think, you know?

• 1:04:02Guy Raz?

  And you, I, so you launched this, this is amazing, because it's, we're talking here at the end of 2023, you launched this in 2019, at the beginning of that year. And in the first month, you sell out all your inventory, do about $100,000 in sales. So that's, that's a very good sign. Was it all through that Facebook page that you were able to sell it? Was it, or did you, did you like pay for some PR at that point? Or did you, because you had some money, did you, did you start to do some of that?

• 1:04:31Speaker 01

  No, so, you know, just before we launched, it was, you know, we had real product that was getting ready to be shipped to the US from Austria in like October of twenty nineteen, of twenty eighteen. At that same time, that's when I met our first kind of venture capital investor, Science, who, like you said, was behind Dollar Shave Club. You know, you know, they put in significantly more capital, which actually enabled me to quit my freelance job I was doing full time to pay the bills to actually go full time to Liquid Death at a huge, huge salary cut. So then I was able to just kind of quit my job and spend for

• 1:05:11Speaker 01

  the first time ever like full time, full time focus on Liquid Death in like late 2018. And I worked with Science to kind of help me figure out the tech and digital aspect of making this like a true D to C brand to start.

• 1:05:24Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 1:05:25Speaker 01

  You know, we had a strategy for, you know, paid social promotion. But again, I think the first month, we only spent maybe twenty five hundred bucks in paid media to generate a hundred thousand dollars in sales.

• 1:05:37Guy Raz?

  When we come back in just a moment, why logistical log jams force Mike to find a co-packer that's closer to home. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This.

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• 1:07:03Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's early 2020, a few years after launch, and Liquid Death is starting to grow and starting to get orders from some big retailers. First, Whole Foods, and then, kind of on the opposite end of the spectrum, 7-Eleven.

• 1:07:22Speaker 01

  I was always targeting, who are the people that don't care about healthy brands, that are drinking soda and energy drinks and beer most of the time? How do you get them to actually resonate with a healthy brand and actually want to make more healthier decisions based on, you know, it's more fun to have this brand walking around than it is, you know, a Fiji or something else? So it's like, you get a lot of overlap in terms of like, yes, we bring new people into the category where it's like, hey, these construction workers who shop at 7-Eleven, who are buying two energy drinks for the first time ever, are coming over and buying a premium bottled water just because of the brand. They were never buying Fiji or Voss

• 1:08:04Speaker 01

  before. But then you're also getting the people who did buy Fiji and Voss were like, oh, I like premium water, and this is just a more interesting brand. Like, yeah, I'll try that. And yeah, it's good.

• 1:08:14Guy Raz?

  Yeah, I mean, it's, and the other thing that's amazing, so I understand why Whole Foods is interested, because they like, I mean, this brand was a purple cow. It was like, people are going, you knew that you, people were going to stop and pick it up, especially Whole Foods shoppers, because Whole Foods shoppers are not used to seeing something called Liquid Death. Like, you wouldn't go to Whole Foods and think like, wow, they're selling a sugary energy drink, or they're selling malt liquor at Whole Foods. Like, you're like, right, I mean, so in some ways, it was like the perfect, you know, retailer to launch this brand.

• 1:08:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, and in a way... It was the only retailer who would even give us a chance. I mean, we had talked to, I don't know, like a broker for Target. And they were like, uh, yeah, guys, we don't think this is the right fit for mom.

• 1:09:03Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:03Speaker 01

  And like, any of these other big retailers like wouldn't really give us the time of day because it says death on it. But at least Whole Foods, what they really identified with was our whole death to plastic messaging.

• 1:09:14Guy Raz?

  Right, that was part of the campaign because when you launched, I mean, not only did you, when you launched, you also then started making more of these videos, right?

• 1:09:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:22Guy Raz?

  And in an, and one of your videos is an animated video that is also just insane. I mean, it's basically an animated video of like a can, a can like ax murderer, just like killing people and just slaughtering them.

• 1:09:39Speaker 01

  Murdering thirst.

• 1:09:39Guy Raz?

  Yeah. He's murdering thirst and it's just like gory and bloody. And, um, I mean, it's basically like a, yeah, I mean, it's like a, kind of an insane video, but again, designed to get people talking presumably.

• 1:09:55Speaker 01

  And, and really, it's, I think it's an interesting topic and I talk about it so much, like everyone uses the word edgy, like, oh, you guys do edgy marketing. So all we are doing is we just want to make legitimate entertainment, not marketing. And it's a tried and true approach that Red Bull was very successful with, Monster was very successful with, where they blur the lines between an entertainment company and a beverage company. Now their specific type of entertainment is action sports, but that is a very, I think, limited genre of entertainment. Like, yeah, it's really cool to watch skateboarders and snowboarders and skydivers like do crazy stunt like stuff, but there's a lot more entertainment in the world that people consume. So for us, we're like, hey, our entertainment is comedy.

• 1:10:40Speaker 01

  Like, that's what we're really good at. We're really good at making people laugh and making funny videos. And not a lot of companies are, like, a lot of companies struggle to deliver humor, but that's our unique strength that we have.

• 1:10:52Guy Raz?

  And if your tagline is murder your thirst and your video is a cartoon giant can on a, you know, mus- muscle bound beast, just axe killing.

• 1:11:02Guy Raz?

  People who are drinking, then you're going to get attention. One of the things that I was curious about is you launched in Whole Foods like the week the pandemic starts and a big part, I have to imagine, a big part of your whole like strategy is that it's so such a weird product, Liquid Death, that that people were going to pick it up and that's half the battle. Like, once somebody picks up a product, there's a good chance that they might actually take it to the register and buy it. But now Whole Foods are, you know, mostly, I don't know mostly, but a lot of the shoppers in there are like, you know, professional shoppers for delivery services, right?

• 1:11:41Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:11:42Guy Raz?

  I mean, were you worried that your sales were actually going to be badly affected because people wouldn't be able to physically like see it and and pick it up?

• 1:11:50Speaker 01

  Well, luckily, by the time we had launched in Whole Foods in, you know, the late spring of 2020.

• 1:11:58Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:59Speaker 01

  We had already built a pretty large Amazon and direct to consumer business.

• 1:12:07Guy Raz?

  You guys, I think, did about, what, in your first year, $3 million?

• 1:12:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:11Guy Raz?

  Dollars already?

• 1:12:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, just under $3 million.

• 1:12:14Guy Raz?

  In revenue, yeah.

• 1:12:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. And again, remember, we were selling those cases for like 20 bucks on Amazon. So now I'll-

• 1:12:22Guy Raz?

  12 cans for 20 bucks.

• 1:12:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, and then because of all the, how expensive it was to ship a heavy case of water, now when it was in Whole Foods, they could actually sell it for $14.99. So now we can tell everyone, hey, you can go get it at Whole Foods now for a lot less money. So we were able to kind of drive a lot of existing customers that we had from Amazon into Whole Foods. So that definitely helped.

• 1:12:48Guy Raz?

  And you didn't have any issues getting it to the US, given that there, you know, shipping and all that, all those disruptions?

• 1:12:53Speaker 01

  No, there was, I mean, there was some issue, yeah. We definitely dealt with some issues where things were held up at the ports. I mean, we had things where some of the first shipments of Liquid Death were held up by customs because they see something called Liquid Death and they want to make sure it's not like a terrorist thing.

• 1:13:08Guy Raz?

  Yeah, right.

• 1:13:09Speaker 01

  But-

• 1:13:10Guy Raz?

  Liquid methamphetamine or something.

• 1:13:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So we definitely had, you know, issues where, you know, our containers were held up for like a month at a port and we had to like wait on product. Like, there was, you know, a ton of stuff to kind of to battle. And then the real- You know, pain point was in spring of 2021. If people remember, there was that container ship that ended up blocking the Panama Canal.

• 1:13:37Guy Raz?

  Oh, yeah. Was it the Panama Canal or the Suez?

• 1:13:39Speaker 01

  The Suez Canal. Yeah, you're right. You're right.

• 1:13:40Guy Raz?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:13:41Speaker 01

  And it just completely halted so much. It was such a, like, it it kind of started this chain reaction of the ocean freight costs. Literally, over the course of two months, ocean freight costs went up like 5X or something insane.

• 1:14:00Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:01Speaker 01

  And all of a sudden, we started getting killed on ocean freight costs in the back half of 2021, where, you know, we might have been spending, you know, $3,500 to ship a container from Austria to to the US. And now, all of a sudden, it was 12,000. And then 2022, everyone's saying, oh, it's gonna come down, it's gonna come down. Never went down. And then like midway through 2022, it went up again. So we kind of knew eventually we would move to co-packing in the US. Once there was, you know, a good partner for us that could do all the things we needed them to do. So, you know, we got connected with a great source in the mountains of Western Virginia. Not West Virginia, but like Western Virginia.

• 1:14:44Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:45Speaker 01

  And then we also, at that time, you know, we had launched flavored sparkling, which again is more like a healthy soda than it is like.

• 1:14:52Guy Raz?

  They're low in sugar, right?

• 1:14:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:14:54Guy Raz?

  Two, three grams?

• 1:14:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, yeah, it was like three or four grams of sugar, 20 calories. So that opened up some of our co-packing abilities. Once, you know, we started having a ton of success in our flavored, flavored sparkling.

• 1:15:07Guy Raz?

  Mike, by 2021, you, I mean, now you're starting to really attract investors, and I'm sure they're banging on your door. By 2021, you raised a Series C already at a, a, a over half a billion dollar valuation, which is, by all accounts, just crazy. I mean, you, you launched this brand with no valuation. And, and you're at half a billion in a year and a half. And You know, and you're, you know, as I say, you're attracting all these people who wanna, wanna work with you. And I wonder whether a part of you started to get nervous about how quickly, I mean, or maybe, I don't know. I mean, I've talked to founders who are like,

• 1:15:50Guy Raz?

  we're growing too fast, you know, this is too fast or there's too much pressure. But I don't know, was a part of you worried at all? Or were you just like, yes, amazing, let's bring more of this money in?

• 1:16:02Speaker 01

  No, I think I was, I was excited at how fast it was growing because I think we built the team the right way to be able to sustain the growth. I think, you know, even as an organization, we've taken a very, almost top-heavy approach where it's like, we want seasoned gangsters in every position, you know, where they've done things at a much higher level so that right now they can do this level of stuff in their sleep versus like, you start with, I don't know, a lot cheaper labor to kind of try to save money, but it's less experience and less, you know, talent. And then there's more risk that if you're growing that fast, that they don't even know how to deal with that kind of growth

• 1:16:47Speaker 01

  and it breaks. So I think we built the team the right way to be able to sustain that level of growth we were at. Because yes, it was fast growth for us as a company. But, you know, even in 2020, 2021, I think we, you know, we did, I think it was like 45 million in like gross top line revenue. That is tiny for a beverage company. Like, you're not even a blip on anybody's radar at that level. I mean, and I think, you know, people had reactions to, you know, whatever it is, over a half a billion valuation for, for water, like, what's, what's wrong with, with the world? It's like, did you know that Smart

• 1:17:32Speaker 01

  Water, plastic bottles of municipal tap water sells a billion dollars a year of it? Same thing with Aquafina, same thing with Poland Springs, like, These are massive categories. This isn't.

• 1:17:44Guy Raz?

  I'm not surprised. No, I'm not surprised at all. I wonder, I mean, the thing is, and we've done on the show, you know, we've talked to founders who started a brand or product and really tried to build a moat around it, right? Because that's what you're taught. It's like the famous Microsoft documents where you build a moat and then, you know, nobody can compete with you. Your product is protected. It's so hard to replicate. Water is not hard to replicate. Obviously, anybody with some capital can bottle water. But your whole play was about brand, right? Now, you're in a space with a lot of big players, the Poland Springs and the Aquafinas and the Dasani's and they go on and on, Fiji.

• 1:18:25Guy Raz?

  Did you start to see any of them even attempt to try and eat into your audience, your market share?

• 1:18:35Speaker 01

  No, and I think that, you know, brand is the moat. And I think it's hard for people to wrap their head around what that means. But there's a lot of sort of historical precedence to show that that's the case. I mean, you've seen that there was a great example, Coca-Cola, the biggest company in the world with all the resources and shelf space in the world, tried to take share in the energy category by creating Coke Energy.

• 1:19:03Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:04Speaker 01

  And it was a two-year experiment that was a massive failure and, you know, hundreds of millions of wasted dollars. And you would think, hey, how could Coca-Cola fail at creating an energy drink brand? And it's just like, it shows that giant companies are really bad at creating brands. Like, there's just too much bureaucracy. There's too many focus groups. I'm sure Coke Energy, it probably passed the focus groups. It probably passed all the layers of tests and everything. Then in market, it just totally fails. Think about the other things people in beverage try to use as a moat, like, what is your functional ingredient? You can't own that ingredient. Coke can buy that ingredient for way less than you can.

• 1:19:46Speaker 01

  Like, there's real much, like, you can't own cans. Coke gets cans for a fraction of the cost that you're gonna get cans for. So if you're a canned water brand, marketing it as. Can water, aluminum, infinitely recyclable, that's your whole brand? You're just, yeah, you're just educating people on why cans are great. So then now Coke can just put it in a can and you've just helped them, you know, break in. So that's why we always led with brand and what we could own first, which is funny irreverent brand, making people laugh, murder your thirst. Death to plastic was always the second thing because at the end of the day, we knew we can't own aluminum cans as a brand.

• 1:20:25Guy Raz?

  Yeah. Okay, now here, here's, I think, a fair question to ask and probably have been asked a version of this, but, um, you know, you, you have this amazing brand that was obviously hit, it's really hit and I can see it with my kids, right? And I can, and can see with, with, with your sales. I mean, I think you're on target to do, track to do at least, what, a hundred million dollars in revenue this year, maybe more?

• 1:20:53Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, significantly more.

• 1:20:55Guy Raz?

  Significantly more, okay. So what is, what makes this brand sustainable in the long run? You know, I mean, there are so many examples in history, starting, you know, and go back to the pet rock, that, that were phenomenon, that were, they were, these were phenomenon for, for a few years and then they just kind of went away. I mean, what makes Liquid Death have staying power? Like, you know, Perrier has been around forever, Avion's been around forever. So what makes this brand, or does it matter whether it's around in 20 or 40 years?

• 1:21:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I do think that the era of brands lasting 50 years are, are no more because of the, because of the internet and technology.

• 1:21:42Guy Raz?

  Huh.

• 1:21:42Speaker 01

  Like, look at Coca-Cola, like of their, whatever it was, 120 year stint.

• 1:21:50Speaker 01

  A hundred of those years did not have the internet.

• 1:21:53Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:54Speaker 01

  And I think because of the internet and the hyperspeed digital culture, the other difference is you can make as a brand now with digital and virality and the democratization of media and attention. In five years, you could be a brand that's literally doing billions of dollars in sales.

• 1:22:18Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:18Speaker 01

  But that used to take 50 years to get there.

• 1:22:21Guy Raz?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:22:22Speaker 01

  Like, like, look at White Claw. I mean, that was a brand that didn't exist. And then all of a sudden, in five years, they were doing, you know, whatever it was, like, over a billion in sales.

• 1:22:32Guy Raz?

  But that's a good example because they've also declined significantly since then.

• 1:22:35Speaker 01

  But it was, that was an interesting scenario because they had, hard seltzer was a new category that had this massive spike during COVID that was kind of unprecedented. And now it has just kind of settled down to what is still a huge category. It's just not that, like, in the outer space level that it was during a very particular cultural period.

• 1:22:58Guy Raz?

  I mean, part of you, maybe, maybe not. I mean, given that, you know, this, as I say, this is like a, it's like a, an overnight success story that took 25 years, right? Because you were in this space of advertising branding for so long. You were observing, you were watching, you were like, trying to push your ideas and, and you couldn't quite convince people to, to do the things you want to do. And so essentially, you started a brand so you could, you could make funny advertisements. I mean, that's basically the story of Liquid Death. You, you wanted to have fun making ads, and this was the vehicle to do that.

• 1:23:27Speaker 01

  Exactly, yeah. It was, yeah, it was, you, you have a product that generates money to help fund, you know, cool things that people want to see in the world that is not more crappy marketing, that people are willing to literally spend $10 a month and not have to watch, or that they can skip. You know, what we're, we're in the attention. Game like we need to generate outsized attention for our budgets that allows us to swing way above our, you know, our weight class really where we can generate similar amounts of attention as let's say Coke or Pepsi type brands can, but we can do it with

• 1:24:08Speaker 01

  like one fiftieth of the budget, you know, like that's the game we're playing. Like if we start trying to play the same game as the big guys where it's like, oh, let's go sign a $2 million athlete endorsement deal, or let's go rap a NASCAR for a million dollars. Like that stuff is not going to move the needle for you and you're just going to burn through your money before you ever get to the finish line because now you're trying to play the same game as the big guys with, without anywhere near the resources and you'll lose.

• 1:24:38Guy Raz?

  I mean, you in a very short period of time, because your whole career, you were paycheck to paycheck, you know, you're making a decent living, but you are not a rich guy. But in a very short period of time, you made a lot of money, probably much more than you could have imagined. Um, I mean, it must be kind of amazing to be in that situation, but unanticipated or, or what? Like in 2019, if I would have told you, hey, you're going to be multimillionaire in like a year and a half, would you have been like, yep, I know it?

• 1:25:07Speaker 01

  No, I wouldn't have. Uh, because I think with all the things that I'd gone through in so long, it's like, I, you know, I, I think I had a cynical view of like, man, like every good thing I try, something fucking happens. Uh, so I think I, you know, it was, I try not to let myself get too excited about things too early. So I kind of just want it to like play out. So I take everything with a grain of salt and I've, I've sort of always have that approach. I still have that approach now. It's like, I don't want to ever like get too carried away or too comfortable. I think it's so important that you're always hungry and feeling this could end at any moment. And how does that change the way you think? If you, if you know it could end at any moment, like how do you approach things differently?

• 1:25:51Speaker 01

  How do you take more precaution? How do you not take too big of risks? Um, because I think that is a fatal flaw is like the bigger companies get, you start trying to act more and more like a big company.

• 1:26:04Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:05Speaker 01

  And, and, and, you know, it can go south pretty quick.

• 1:26:09Guy Raz?

  When you think about the journey you took, right? And I use that word journey hesitatingly because it's so overused. But I don't know. Do you ever think about why it happened? Like, do you think it was because you worked really hard and you're really smart and you thought things through? Or do you think a significant amount of this has to do with just getting lucky?

• 1:26:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, there's always luck involved. I mean, I think back on so many moments where it's like, man, so good thing we did this and not that, or this might not even be around right now. But I think, to your point, a 25-year in the making overnight success, I think all of my previous experiences all kind of helped ladder up to help me make the right decisions. And then again, just the hunger of all this failure, I think it just all laddered up. And then the fact that it could be a brand that was truly a reflection of myself in the brand. It's not like some MBA business guy who's like, what are the kids into? Here's what they're into.

• 1:27:16Speaker 01

  When it all starts with me as the CEO, it just kind of trickles through the rest of the company and decisions get to be a lot easier. It's a lot simpler to have a unified voice and know what to say yes to and what to say no to. I think it's all sort of, I think, come together to make it this successful.

• 1:27:35Guy Raz?

  That's Mike Cessario, founder and CEO of Liquid Death. By the way, remember back when he was working in advertising, how they nixed his idea about selling your soul to the devil to get a Diablo golf club? Well, Mike sort of brought that idea back, but to Liquid Death this time. You can now go onto the company's website and sign away your soul for exclusive access to merch and other deals. And on the signup sheet, it says, by selecting Sell My Soul, I agree to receive important info and offers from Liquid Death, since they will own my soul for eternity. Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show.

• 1:28:20Guy Raz?

  If you want to contact us, our email address is [email protected]. This episode was produced by Kerry Thompson with music composed by Ramtin Arablouei. It was edited by Neva Grant with research help from Casey Herman. Our audio engineers were Robert Rodriguez and Josh Newell. Our production staff also includes Alex Chung, Chris Messini, Carla Estevez, J.C. Howard, Sam Paulson, John Isabella, Catherine Seifer, and Malia Agudelo. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.