YouSaid · the spoken record

Kat Hantas

lines on the record: 97
first: 2024-10-21
most recent: 2024-10-21
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yes. Moms. Yes. The three of us are moms. So Nicole Sarka and I are all moms. And that is who I was observing. And moms have a lot of pain points, right? Whether you're working at home or working outside the home and you're managing the household, raising the kids, you need to have energy. You have to have a good night's rest. You know, you have to be able to get up and do it all over again. Yeah. And the way that we thought about it, right, was, okay, who we're trying to get to Keilah into the house. For that wine occasion to replace the wine, get rid of the wine, and insert the tequila. That happens through retail purchase, right? Through buying at the grocery store. Like in California, you can buy alcohol in a grocery store.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, all right, so you want to make a tequila that does not have those qualities, does not taste like a jolly rancher. And for the drinker, the consumer, you're thinking of a specific type of woman, right?”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, basically, there were some flavored tequilas on the market. We tried those flavored tequilas, and it was exactly the problem that we had with kind of flavored spirits in general as a category. The three of us as three women, we all felt the same way. Our problem with flavored spirits is that they tend to be overly sweet, have a weird aftertaste like you're sucking on a nickel and smell like a jolly rancher. The way I would describe it is like, it's like trying to spray perfume on someone with really bad body odor. Nothing improves. The body odor is still there, but you're just masking it with like the perfume. And now the perfume doesn't smell as good and the person doesn't smell better.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What I'm curious about is if even in 2018, I mean, now it's even more so, but if you went to just even a Whole Foods in 2018 that sold liquor, you would see tons of tequila on their liquor shelves. You'd see tons of bottles. It's like now it's even more, you know, just saturated, you know, like energy bars. But did you guys do that? Did you walk through stores and like look at the bottles? And then at any point did you think, oh, there's just so many brands here. How are we going to break through? I'm just curious about your thinking process.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, and she was a Stanford engineer that was a friend of mine as a mom friend, but she had worked in food innovation. So she knew how to bring The commercialization of something you're making at home.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have to go through distributors, so your initial customer is not your ultimate customer, right? Yeah. We were selling tequila to women, but we didn't come from beverage and we certainly didn't come from alcohol. So they're like, well, you guys are insane for even thinking that you're going to get this done. But, you know, listen, we were three smart girls and we just had we had this That there was a white space that nobody was servicing.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly, exactly. And it's a three tier system. Unlike wine and beer, you can't sell directly to your consumer as a hard alcohol brand, like as a spirit brand.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we would ask them, you know, like, do you drink tequila? How does it sell in your bar and restaurant? Like, where does it land in terms of how it performs? And we would just as much information just about the industry and how do you price it and who do you buy it from? And like, do you know those people? Could you set us up with those people? So I would say in almost all those cases, they would say to us, it's a really tough business. It's a very complicated business because selling booze in this country is very complicated.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We had so many conversations with, we basically would talk to anybody who was in the business touch the industry in any way, shape, or form.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, all night long, and she even had kids younger than my kids at the time. Like, her kids were still little. And, you know, she's the woman who has the baby and then is, you know, on the laptop in the room.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I said, hey, listen, you know that tequila you've been drinking at my house that you love? I said, I'm thinking that it's a business, and here's why. Do you want to start this tequila company with me? Like, I actually want you to be my partner, not just, you know, help me on the side. And she said, yes.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. She was their CFO. Then she went on and was the CFO and the COO of Britain Co., which was sort of a millennial Martha type of venture. And then she was at the time when I asked her to start this business with me, she was the CFO of Angelist.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Heck no, heck no. I couldn't have done it by myself. And I thought it was really important just having been around so many founders. It's incredibly lonely. And your family very quickly tire of hearing about your woes and your friends follow pretty shortly thereafter. They don't want to hear about it. So you definitely need some people in the trenches with you. And plus that there were things that I hate doing and don't know how to do and didn't want to learn in my 40s. Spreadsheets, Excel. I don't want to know about those things. I don't want to open bank accounts. I don't want to deal with like I wanted to focus on storytelling, marketing, the brand, and sales. That's it. And the good thing was I didn't have to look very far for the finance piece because that was my sister, Nicole.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I didn't think that obviously because again, the way I was looking at it was I just wasn't just thinking about tequila as a category. Like that's the category. I was thinking more about the user, like who is the customer and what is the occasion in which this consumer is actually going to drink this product. And that's where I found the white space.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's interesting because, I mean, as all this is happening, you could have taken a completely different perspective and thought, you know, George Clooney, all these celebrities getting into tequila, like, this is just a mad dash right now. It just seems... Like, you know, a gold rush that's probably going to be a bust.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Unbelievable amounts, exactly. And then guys were switching from beer to tequila, I think, to drink fewer carbs and so on. So I noticed that that was number one. And number two, I noticed people were ordering, especially women, like tequila soda, splash of juice, tequila soda, an orange slice, right? And they weren't ordering shots. And so I thought, huh, that's interesting. There are all these people drinking tequila for wellness reasons and they're switching from wine and champagne over to tequila. And there was nobody talking about, you know, spritzes and that wine occasion and to women. So that's when I was like, huh, there's something here that's not being addressed.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Definitely. But even with them asking for it, I would just make it for them and still was not thinking this is a business, was still just, you know, for nine years just making it for myself and for friends. But I had always been sort of entrepreneurial-minded, right? I knew I wasn't going to go work for someone. And what I started to observe was a lot of my girlfriends in particular were switching from wine and champagne to tequila. Right. So just to time set this, this was like, you know, 2018, right? So George Clooney had come out with Casamigos and that really, I think, brought in like a whole slew of tequilas that had come on market, people like wanting, you know, both celebrities and non-celebrities.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All right, so this is like your house drink. And this is just what you served for a bunch of years. And at what point during that time, because I'm sure now and again people would be like, Kat, this is great. You should sell this at the farmer's market. You should bottle this up and sell it. And people were like, I'm sure people said that to you from time to time.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. Basically, I would infuse multiple types. You know, I would do the cucumber jalapeno. I'd have strawberry pink, peppercorn is an amazing infusion for tequila. There was like a honeydew kiwi. And I would just make bottles of infused tequila, different club sodas out, and then just like a charcuterie board of filled with garnishes. And that is how I entertain even today.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Bingo. I would do what you just described. I would take a wine glass because I also like the ritual of holding the wine glass. So I would take the wine glass. I would put in one ounce of this infused tequila, add club soda and like a slice of orange. And that would be my drink.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's exactly what I did. Leave it in the fridge and I would stick my finger in the liquid and taste it, you know? Like, okay, this needs to stay longer. And I would leave the cucumber in then longer. And that would sort of even out, cool off the spice.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, right, exactly. But then even that to me, I could still taste the harshness of tequila. And I quite liked wine. So it needed to be as good. Or better than the glass of wine. And I thought, I got to do something to the stequila to make it more drinkable and easy to use. So I started infusing it.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At first, that was a hard pill to swallow, to be honest, because I was like, ugh, that sounds very harsh and aggressive for a Tuesday night. But I went home, I stopped drinking wine, I immediately felt better. So I thought, okay, that worked. Now, what am I going to do to this blanco? Because I was not just going to start drinking Blanco tequila. No. The way that it existed”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he didn't say shots. I mean, honestly, I didn't analyze it that much. I just kind of thought, I'll just try it. I'm just going to go home and try not drinking wine and see how I feel.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you could do those as well. He just didn't want me to drink an aged spirit because when you age it, you put it in barrels and yes, what leeches in to the liquid is some flavor, but also those things can react with your body. So if you're trying to drink cleaner, just drink a white spirit.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's an agave. Yeah, it's an agave plant. It's a cactus. Yeah. So tequila, the way that you make tequila right is you first make an agave wine, so you cook the agave plant and then you squeeze it and you get all that cheese and then you add the yeast and you take that wine and you boil it and then you condense it, you know, you cool it and it rains down tequila. Basically. So basically, a distilled spirit, vodka, same thing, right? Gin, you just pass it through a flavor basket. But basically, there's nothing living in it anymore, right? Distilled is just cleaner.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So I was 35. And what I was noticing was I would have a glass of wine while I was making dinner and usually a glass of wine at dinner. So I'd have like two glasses of wine. And that night I wouldn't sleep well. I'd wake up in the morning and have a headache sometimes, not having felt rested. And sometimes I'd sweat. At first, I thought, you know, hey, maybe this is early menopause. So I went to my doctor and just said, hey, listen, this is what I'm feeling. Is this early menopause? And he said, let's do some blood work and tests and whatnot. And we did, and he said, no, everything looks fine. Let's look at what you're eating and drinking. And I would say, you know, a couple glasses of wine. And he's like, ah, there's the culprit. Just stop drinking fermented spirits. And I said, okay, well, then, you know, what should I drink instead? And he said Blanco tequila. You should switch.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Got it. Okay. Okay, so you and Quincy get married, I think, around 2009, you guys moved from New York to San Francisco for his job. And then by the time you're out there, I think you guys have started a family as well, right?”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was going to promote the film, right? Like it was going to do all of the things, and in the end, all of that just disappeared. So the big lesson was like, you can plan it all so perfectly in this industry, in the movie industry, and still, you know, opening weekend, you could have a tornado hit. You know, I mean, there's still like something that can completely derail it. And so sure enough, that's what they did. They fired the lead singer. They brought in this new lead singer. They end up being a rock band and they went nowhere. Their career was over. And then our movie went to television.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Eric from the band, and they don't want to be a boy band anymore. They want to be a rock band. And I was like, I'm like, is there some sort of a hidden camera somewhere? Is this some sort of a joke? What are you talking about? And he said, and it's worse, they're not going to promote the film because they don't want to be a boy band and they don't want anything to do with boy bands. And they're not going to let us release the song. You can't buy the music. We could play the music in the movie, but we couldn't buy it on iTunes. So it was like, oh my God.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Legit music They were amazing. So last day of shooting, I get a call from Craig Helman, Head of Atlantic Records, and he says, we have bad news. I was like, what's the bad news? He said, well. The band, when they rap tonight after we finish shooting, they are firing the lead singer.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, and I'll tell you why. There's a reason why you've never heard of them because we had lined it up beautifully. We had Craig Kalman and Atlantic Records. They pre-bought the soundtrack, which is unheard of for an independent film with no distribution yet. But they believed in it. And they thought they saw what we saw. We're like, yes, timing, perfect. Their second album will come out. The headline song will be Kidnap My Heart that they wrote for the movie and everybody's waiting for it. They were adorable. The lead singer was so handsome, so cute. They were great actors. They did a really good job in the film. On the last...”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Two high school girls who kidnap a boy band, the boy band was played by a real boy band, so we cast a real boy band in the film, the band in the movie was called Five Alive, the band in real life was called The Click Five.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's not horror at all. It's totally music driven And we thought we totally nailed the timing because high school musical had just come out and eight miles. And so we thought this is perfect.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yeah. Anything can happen. You can have your project set up at a studio. The studio head leaves. The new guy just puts everything to turn around.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we ended up making one film. We had many that we had set up and were in different stages of development, but we ultimately made one film.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and so I guess the way it works is you've got to find somebody to finance a film, and then you've got to bid for a script. And I mean, you're up against huge production teams with Academy Awards and lots of money. And so that must just be a tough business for two people just starting out.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Basically, thought okay, let's do music driven stuff and horror movies. Because with humor, it's hard to write because you go overseas or somewhere and the humor doesn't translate. But with horror, A, it works as long as it's a good concept. And B, you don't have to worry so much about the A-list actors because anyway, you know, they all die. It's really the idea that sells it. So as like young new producers, we thought it would be much easier to get movies made based on a great concept versus based on A-list talent that we really wouldn't be able to get.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I thought, you know, let's go get a little more experience and then let's start a production company together. So she went off to Disney and worked on the development side and I went to three arts, which was a management production company.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, or at least I wanted to be on the film side. Like, I don't watch television. But sure enough, as it would turn out, I got promoted onto a television desk. So now suddenly I was in TV and it's really, it's grueling. I mean, you are living and breathing scripts and TV scripts. And I just had no interest. I wasn't part of the TV going audience. You know, so I didn't feel like my voice really mattered in that space or I could lend any sort of, you know, creative input that would make sense. So that had run its course. And I had met a gal that I was sitting across from while at CAA and she would talk to me about books that she was reading all the time. And so I thought that was amazing because I like to listen to stories.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yep, and that's where everyone starts. And it doesn't, you know, you've got lawyers in there, people have gone to Harvard and business school and everybody starts in the mail room. And the way that you get promoted out of the mailroom is based on the need, like whatever sort of desk opens up. So in that way, you don't have as much say in what you end up doing.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. He wrote Force Gump. Actually, funny story there. We were still dating at the time. And I remember sitting at dinner one night and Eric asked all of us. There was like, we were like 10 people. And he said, okay, how many different ways are there to make shrimp? And we all started to chiming in with the different ways to make shrimp. And then we broke up and, you know, he gets nominated for the Oscar. Obviously, the movie comes out. And there's the scene in the movie. It's like one of the iconic scenes of Forrest Gump with a like shrimp scampy, fried shrimp.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In one of five states in Mexico. And if it's not, you can't call it tequila. And so Cat had to find a distiller in Mexico that was willing to work with her. But all of that work would pay off because barely three years after she launched 21 seeds, Cat and her partners managed to sell it to the beverage giant Diagio for a whopping amount of money. Now, as I mentioned, before she launched 21 seeds, Cat had spent more than a decade raising her kids. At the time, she left a career as an independent film producer in LA. She got into the industry right out of college, in part through a guy she dated at UCLA, and his name was Josh.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“After almost nine years of serving her homebrew cocktails at her house, Kat decided to make a business out of it. This was in 2018, and she called it twenty one seeds. Now, if you went to a liquor store that year, you would see a lot of tequila brands. Like so many it's almost impossible to know which one to pick. But Cat wasn't necessarily trying to get you or me or the frat boys looking for tequila slammers to buy her brand. Just as liquid death was trying to appeal to teens and young people who would otherwise drink an energy drink, Cat was targeting moms, especially wine drinking moms looking for an alternative. But as you will hear, the spirits business is really rough. fifty states with fifty different regulations, challenges finding a distributor, and of course tequila must be produced.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Similar story with today's founder Kat Hondas. Kat spent most of her mid thirties and early forties raising her kids. She also had a pretty tight group of friends, women who would gather and hang out and usually crack open a few bottles of wine. But his cat and entered early middle age, those glasses of wine really started to hit her hard, and strangely or maybe not so strangely, her doctor suggested she switch to Blanco Tequila. Now I'm no doctor and this is not a medical advice show so I can't vouch for Kat's MD but at least for her it worked. A little tequila and soda water didn't seem to give her headaches and sleepless nights. Eventually, Kat started throwing chunks of fruit and herbs into her tequila, and soon her group of fellow moms was also enjoying cats, home infusions.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We go down to Mexico to do our first production run, and when we went to do that at scale, it just, it didn't work. The equipment was breaking. We were clogging it up with like the pulp, you know, from the fruit, and it was a disaster. And that night we went back to our hotels and we got the email from BevMo. And it said they wanted all three SKUs in all 147 stores.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, one of my favorite parts of traveling is getting a feel for a neighborhood, the way locals do. A few summers ago, I was in Rome and stayed in an apartment I booked on Airbnb. It was tucked in a quiet neighborhood just outside the Roman forum. Every morning I'd walk to the corner cafe, grab an espresso, and just watch the world go by outside. I even managed to chat with the owner about the neighborhood he lived in for nearly forty years. And he got me thinking about my own neighborhood. There are incredible hiking trails and great restaurants and, of course, the beach. And when I'm traveling this summer, listing my own place on Airbnb could be a really smart way to let someone else experience the area the way I do, like a local. Listing your home on Airbnb while you're traveling is a great way to make some extra money. You could put the money toward your next trip. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT