YouSaid · the spoken record

Bill Shufelt

lines on the record: 90
first: 2024-11-18
most recent: 2024-11-18
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“It's incredible. And she was like, I could see her just lit up. And she's like, people have done things like you're talking about in alcohol. She's like, you can do this She was basically like, I believe your passion in it. I have watched you undergo this amazing transformation, how you talk about helping other friends get sober and get better options. This idea is a way for you to take that impact that you've had on yourself and take it to tens of millions of people.”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I opened my mouth a few times about it, and there was great feedback about usage occasion, but then also very skeptical feedback about doing this as a full-time job. Like my dad, who his perspective of seeing my childhood, seeing me at a great college, seeing me at a top financial firm, when I told him I was thinking about doing this full time, that is like taking 30 years of investment in my future and like jumping off the diving board basically. But I will say there were a few moments in that last month of 2016, which all kind of cascaded. I came home around Thanksgiving 2016 and my wife was at the kitchen table listening to Jim Cook's episode of Your Show. Great episode by the Byzantine.”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As I start to look around and ask people, I realized that there's like my experience is probably very common and increasingly so. I could see in the financial world that when I entered the financial world, it was a badge of honor to be coming in, hung over. If you weren't hungover and out till midnight with clients, people would ask, what are you doing? Like, oh, you went home after work? That must have been nice, like half day. I could see in that transition in the 12 years I was in finance that that totally got flipped on its head. And in 2015, if you were walking in with a hangover, everyone was kind of talking about it and being like, what's this guy doing? The concept that people want to be a little healthier and a little more productive and a little more present with their friends and family and loved ones is I had such confidence that's going to be evergreen. But it was one of those things where I didn't talk to anyone close to”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But you yourself said you were not intrinsically, you didn't feel like you were an entrepreneur. You didn't feel like you had that risk. Profile that you well, I mean, you must have because you were a traitor, but you worked for a company, you had a steady income. So, how does a person who doesn't call himself that, who has risk aversion, which, by the way, most entrepreneurs do, I should mention, how does he go get to a point where he's like, I'm going to leave this thing and do this insane other thing?”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And there's other methods, but we really wanted to make great craft beer, like fully loaded, incredibly aromatic. And to that, I decided to just start reading brewing textbooks. And so I went on the UC Davis, the Siebel, like all these famous brewing school websites and downloaded the whole curriculum. And probably spent the next upwards of six plus months just reading all those books with the lens of, okay, if I want to brew great non-alcoholic beer now, what can I change here potentially?”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because just so I understand how the process is made from what I gather. Basically, the way non alcoholic beer traditionally was made in the US was you'd make beer and then you would just heat it up and you just basically steam out the alcohol, right?”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I kind of want my first principles moments was the product has to be totally reinvented. And so then I started to think about like actual process to brewing beer. And I actually was reaching out to a lot of people. There was a very nice man in Germany who worked for one of the largest equipment manufacturers who actually got back to me. And I did some phone calls at like four in the morning before I went to work with him. He was incredibly helpful foundation-wise on how noncoer beer is made, what kind of equipment, how to cost it out. That was frustrating.”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yep. Yeah. And so it'd be like, with what frequency would you drink a great tasting non-alcoholic beer? Never rarely regularly frequently, whatever. And I found typically with like 55% frequency, people would drink a great non-alcoholic beer if it existed.”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I was using a couple softwares. One my wife recommended from her MBA program and then Google used to have this amazing Google Surveys program where you could pay like a penny a survey response or something.”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So clearly, I mean, this was a category that nobody was really thinking about. So why did you think it had potential? I mean, I think I read that around this time you did some market surveys or something. But how? What did you do?”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Products are all made in the same way they were made in the 1970s, no new branding, dust on the bottles. You're lucky if they're in code. And I was like, this should be an exciting shelf.”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and from a branding perspective, it was a totally radioactive category for any major beer company to put their flagship in. Really, my hypothesis is in our country that there's these prohibition era stigmas where alcohol had been taken away. It was replaced by this very lesser than product near beer. There was really almost no innovation in Nearbeer besides like light branding innovation for like 80 years. In 2015, almost all the non-alcoholic beer on the shelf when I stopped drinking. So I stopped drinking in 2013 and immediately started looking at that shelf. And I'm standing in a very exciting natural foods grocery store where everything has been innovated locally sourced, organic, and you get to this one corner of the grocery store and there's been no innovation in 30 years.”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it was non-alcoholic beer at the time, basically for 30 years, no innovation, no exciting marketing, totally flatlined industry with a...”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you were looking at, I mean, one of the things you do, right, when you're researching an idea is you're looking for market share or market opportunity. And from what I read, the whole non-alcoholic adult beverage market was like 0.3%. I think non-alcoholic beer was like an 80 million dollar market. I mean, that's not that big, right? When you're a bunch of businesses competing for $80 million, most people would just say this is not worth going into.”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'd like literally never had an entrepreneurial bone in my body. I thought I was off on this finance career for the next 25 years. And she was like, you should do that. She's like, the changes you've undergone, like this is such a great opportunity. And we went to dinner. We talked about the whole dinner. And so it's worth noting she was also in a really receptive place to hear this. She had always had entrepreneurial ideas and instincts, but she was more working at corporate job up until the point she got her MBA. And so at the time I mentioned this, she was in her MBA program. And so she is naturally hearing in a really good spot to hear an idea and also have like the research resources ready to recommend. And then I kept researching it over the next couple years. So I was researching the beer industry. I was researching how it worked, starting to build.”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I was like, I know this food's going to be great, but the drink is going to absolutely ruin it. I'm going to have some sugary meal pairing that is absolute garbage. And I was like, why can't someone just fix this? And why isn't there a delicious non alcoholic beer? Like everyone would want it. And I was just kind of talking out loud and like I always talk out loud to my wife. We'd known each other for 13 years at this point and she never ever told me I had good ideas. Like my biggest critic, best advisor, perfect partner for me. Her reaction to that moment was so singular and stood out. She like hit my shoulder as we were walking this sidewalk so hard that it spun me around and she was like, you should do that. And I was like.”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, like at a restaurant, a good drink is equally as important to whatever's on the plate. And so I was kind of just muttering to myself, like, it's unbelievable there aren't good options without the alcohol. I said that to a fair amount of people, but I was mostly internalizing it. And it wasn't until I mentioned it to my wife when we were on vacation. We were walking to the nicest dinner of the trip that we had kind of circled on the week. And I was just complaining about the three sugary pina coladas or the cokes I'd had that day.”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so you're dealing with this just kind of awkwardness of going to these places. And did that sort of spark any ideas or thoughts? I mean, eventually it would, but just initially you would just be frustrated?”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It really did, and like so I was someone who was so used to being extremely comfortable socially and like owning those moments and like really using social occasions to my benefit in the workplace or personal life to being on really awkward footing.”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and it honestly felt like the music stopped in these restaurants and like everyone at the table would stop and look at me. Record scratch.”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For sure. It was like imagine a work dinner where there's 12 people around the table and a waiter waitress is taking the orders of everyone. And they get to me and I try to ask about a non-alcoholic cocktail menu, non-alcoholic beer.”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All right, so you basically decide you go through the process of pushing alcohol out of your life, but now, I mean, what does it mean for the dinners you're going to and the social events you're going to? I mean, we're talking about, I think, like 2014-ish time frame, right? 2015. And so, you know, you could have sparkling water, you could have just soda water and lemon or something. Did you feel like people would be like when you wouldn't order a drink, it would make people uncomfortable? Or do you remember how people reacted?”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I felt confident talking to my wife. And then I went into work and told not only my boss who sat directly next to me, but the head of the desk, and I said, I want you guys to hold me accountable because there are social pressures. There's everything. And I want accountability both outside the work walls and inside the work walls. And I was like, I'm stopping drinking and I want you guys to hold me to that. And they're like, hey, can we actually talk about that? And they pulled me in confidentiality and they were like, I bet you don't know about that guy, that guy, and all these respected people I knew either inside or outside the walls of the firm actually didn't drink. And they were like, you may want to go ask them about it. And I went to some A meeting.”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I didn't realize adults could sleep through the night. I just figured it was stress, it was everything. And so my sleep was better. When I worked out, I went from surviving workouts to feeling like I wanted to accelerate throughout the whole workout. And one of the most notable things to me was this intellectual curiosity. In high school, I'd been in every honors and AP class across the board. I used to take electives like Latin that were totally off the curriculum. And all of a sudden, 12 years later, when I stopped drinking, I found myself watching YouTubes on different topics. I started reading a lot of books again. And I think alcohol was a dampener on my evening intellectual activity. I think it was a way to escape from the stress of my day job, the world, and everything. And just shut off my busy brain for a few hours.”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so mine was September, and I'd been running longer and longer distances all summer. So ironically, like five years after I left college, I absolutely fell in love with fitness. And I had this idea that I wanted to run Ultra Marathons. And here I was, this adult turning 30, trying to be healthier. I was thinking about what kind of father I want to be down the line, what kind of husband I want to be. And I was like, I'm going to stop drinking as I'm in this training block, but also with an eye towards maybe I'm stopping forever. And in that month, I felt incredible. And speaking personally, like not making broad health claims or anything, all of a sudden I realized, whoa, I've slept through the night, like three weeks in a row.”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What was the spark that got you to just stop drinking furlough? Because I think initially it was just you just start stopped drinking for like a couple weeks, right? Like a lot of people do dry January or I don't know if it was January, but you basically did a version of that.”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then I was very social, and so Thursday, Friday, Saturday, often Sunday for sports and stuff, you'd have happy hours, family occasions, barbecues, weddings, bachelor parties, everything. And so very often I was in the five to seven nights a week of drinking. After about 12 years of that, as I was turning thirty, I was about to get married. And me and my wife had had conversations that I should probably drink less and maybe not drink at all.”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure, yeah. I love having fun, very social. I'd really fall in love with craft beer when I went to college in Vermont. That was kind of like a hotbed of the early regional craft breweries But in New York City, really liked generally anything. It was more about the social experience and the food pairings. In the finance world, especially at that time, it was very common to do three or four work dinners a week and steakhouses, boozy dinners. And inevitably it was probably almost 150 to 200 work dinners a year.”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I never on paper had an alcohol problem. In hindsight, I definitely look back on the period from 18 to 28 or 30 after my mom passed away. And I was definitely drinking more than I should have been.”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and my baseline assumption was that no adults like work. I was the mindset of like, I show up Monday through Friday, I crush it, and I live my life for the hours outside of that. I was at this firm that no one in their right mind would ever leave. There was something to the stability for my family. Really, I didn't know any other path to. And I would have never considered leaving it for another 25 years. I didn't even have a LinkedIn account. I had absolutely no interest in looking around.”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I actually do find a real intellectual passion for trading and investing. And then my next step in six years was I went to SAC, which is widely considered one of the top hedge funds in the world. But at some point work, it didn't have a fulfilling nature to me. It was intellectually challenging, but like, The Sunday scarries were so real that they would bleed into my Saturdays even.”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, 2005. So I started on the help desk. There's 12 monitors around you while you're sitting there blinking lights everywhere. Instant messages coming in from 200 people. And so it's like a constant barrage of inputs, 270 days a year, 12 hours a day. And it was so exhausting that I'd often be crawling in the door at the end of the day. The part I did love about it is it was totally merit-based. The harder I worked, the better I did. And eventually I got asked off that desk because I was being helpful and got better and better opportunities from there.”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I didn't really know what I wanted to do, so I defaulted it into finance. I was great at math and science, and that seemed like a good fit. And so I kind of pulled on that thread. And a professor really helped me go down the trading route more than anything else. And I did a lot of interviews, but didn't get into any of the major banks. I talked to them all and I ended up getting into a firm that is, I would consider very like entry level in the financial world. It was called Night Capital Group, probably one of the top trading shops on Wall Street didn't have the big bank pedigree, but was probably the perfect spot for me to get in and learn.”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So you're in college and you grew up where so many people, so many of your friends, parents were basically commuters to New York City, and many of them worked in finance. Was that your thought too? Did you think that's sort of what I'm going to do?”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I was just doing my thing going to classes, not incredible class attendance, a lot of partying and socializing. And I would say towards the end of college, I took academics more seriously. But it was unfortunately a bit of an underwhelming academic college focus for me.”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Looking at that period in hindsight, I think I was more adrift than I would have thought or that I realized in the moment.”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As I look on it with more of a distant lens on it especially, I was very fortunate to meet my wife almost at the exact same time my mom got sick”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was really very sudden, she was diagnosed spring of my senior year of high school, and then she was very sick by the end of that summer as I was going off to college and she passed away three months later. And yeah, she was really like the rock of our family and a huge inspiration in my life. So supportive, so optimistic, endlessly busy and encouraging. And in many ways, as I've become a parent or on this journey, I almost feel like she's more present in my life. Are all these moments in the day where I actually talk to her, like when I walk my dogs at night at the end of the day, or I'm with my son, or I'm making a big business decision, I do feel like there's someone in the room giving me like good guidance on judgment.”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“$800 million, and it now commands about 20% of the non alcoholic beer market, but more importantly, it's a beer that is actually enjoyed and appreciated by people who truly like beer. Bill Schufeld grew up in the 1980s and 90s in the town of Darian, Connecticut. His dad was a manager in the textile business, and his mom was a kindergarten teacher. But when Bill was a teenager, she got very, very sick”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I was basically raising money in a category that didn't exist, had no money. I wanted to do it in a very capital intensive way. I didn't have a product to share. I had already committed to the lease, to the brewing equipment with my life savings. And there was just less than no momentum. And I remember at one point lying on our kitchen floor. It was one of the very few valleys I've really been in. My wife basically immediately and without blinking was like get off the floor. That's absolutely silly and you've got to keep at it.”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT