The First Drop: Cracking Open a Nice Volume

As much as I want to tell myself – and others, primarily at cocktail parties – that I’m an “ink-stained wretch”, in reality I spend an inordinate amount of time interviewing people and moderating panels on stage for our company’s events, BevNET Live, Nosh Live, and even, on occasion, Brewbound Live.

Prep for those events is pretty all-consuming, as we spend months trying to put together a lineup of founders and experts who are offering their time and experience for the benefit and education of others in their industry.

It’s a different kind of pitch than the ones founders and executives are used to giving to retailers, distributors, investors and the media. In those cases they’re trying to look their best, to show off hot new products and optimized supply chains. In one way or another, it’s all about making the sale by showing enough evidence that you’re worth the gamble.

Our audience is a different one, and it often makes speakers backtrack and analyze their process. It’s about the “how”: in the case of the sale, it’s how you prepare, how you build the case, how you close, how you react and come back when it doesn’t work out.

Of course we look at more than just sales and investment, but the basic idea, that exploration of the forces behind any transition point, are what we’re after.

The best interviews require research, and in the case of some founders, I’ve found that they supply their own best research materials in the form of memoirs, and I’ve really developed a weakness for the founder story format.

After all, where else can you find out that one of HINT founder Kara Goldin had stared down a rattlesnake in the Grand Canyon, except in Goldin’s Undaunted? Or that Daniel Lubetzky, the founder of KIND, once was nearly forced out of his bedroom – because he was using it as a temporary warehouse for an early spice company called Peaceworks, unless you’ve spent time parsing Do the KIND Thing? That Mark Rampolla used Led Zeppelin as his soundtrack when he boxed up cases of ZICO in his garage, as he describes in High Hanging Fruit?

As columnist Gerry Khermouch has pointed out repeatedly in the past, Mission in a Bottle, the ‘graphic memoir’ of Honest Tea co-founders Seth Goldman and Barry Nalebuff, is a particularly good look at the early startup experience.

Now, I’ve read a fair number of these over the years, mostly about food and beverage founders, occasionally straying – Phil Knight’s Shoe Dog, about the founding of Nike, is a particular favorite – and right now I’m deep in a couple that are among the most enjoyable of the type. Both lay bare not just the wins but the painful mistakes and near-misses that come with the startup life.

I picked up Greg Vetter’s Undressed – the story behind the rise and ultimate fall of salad dressing brand Tessamae’s – as a kind of blow-off-some-steam narrative to break up the much less breezy work of chewing through the dense J. Anthony Lukas doorstop Big Trouble. (That book is really incredible, by the way, offering up a pretty timely look at the way American corporate power attempted to control the narrative around government, justice, work, and journalism during the Gilded Age that our current President seems to worship so much – it even features a violation of Habeas Corpus that would make Kristi Noem blush, if she could figure out what it meant).

Anyway, Vetter is ruthless in his to-the-inch mistakes, which he clearly made so that you won’t have to. Drums of olive oil are heaved into storage units when truck lift gates don’t match the ramp; investment bankers are recruited and go AWOL; working capital goes South – literally.

Chris Hunter’s Blackout Punch is similarly instructive and self-flagellating. Hunter, best known (he resignedly admits) as the co-founder and former CEO of Four Loko and currently the CEO at Koia, weaves a highly sympathetic story of personal and professional growth. A self-identified hustler, he’s also clearly a great salesman and student of the market, adapting the trends he sees in other parts of the business world as he builds up companies.

There are lessons on the sources and pace of innovation, ideas about why business partnerships soured, thoughts on professional coaching and a gradual understanding of what it means to be an entrepreneur in consumer products. As someone who invented a 24 oz., 12% ACV energy drink, Hunter also supplies plenty of tales of booze and drugs to help the learning go down easy.

In each of these books, there are lessons in personal growth as well as professional; there’s a healthy understanding that luck plays a factor but it’s bolstered by preparation and hustle; and there’s ultimately a sense that good or bad, at least there’s a sense of how things happened, not just that they occurred. Entrepreneurs might sell their own stories as well as they sell their products, but we’re fortunate that they’re willing to share the lessons on the page, as well as on the stage.