YouSaid · the spoken record

Michael Kirban

lines on the record: 100
first: 2020-08-03
most recent: 2020-08-03
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

“I think in order to be successful, you need some luck, right? I look at my life and I look at everything that I've been able to accomplish, not only through work, but also personally and family and everything else. I've been incredibly fortunate, incredibly lucky. But I also think that hard work and positivity brings what could be luck, brings good fortune. It could also be willing something to happen. And that comes with a lot of hard work.”
2020-08-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vita Coco: Michael Kirban · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For me, I think never having a fear of failing has been very important, right? I've been told since I was young by everybody besides my immediate family, you know, specifically as we talked about my dad earlier, I was told quite a bit as a kid that I'm never going to be successful, right? So what's the worst I could do is fail? Like everybody thought I could or would. So I think that kind of sparks a bit of the risk-taking nature that is needed for an entrepreneur. I also think that an entrepreneur who's going to not only be an idea guy, there's plenty of idea guys that can't really create great culture and great organizations. So I think it's a combination of the ability to take an idea, but also the ability to execute against the idea and bring people along for the ride. And I think that's been one of the things that have”
2020-08-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vita Coco: Michael Kirban · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, none. We're all working from home. We're going to keep the office closed until September. And even though some people, you know, everybody's got work to do and some people are working harder than they were in the office. Others might not be as busy, especially during a time when things are closed if we can afford to keep people, now is the time to keep people employed as much as possible for sure.”
2020-08-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vita Coco: Michael Kirban · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so the first few weeks we saw massive spikes, really, really significant growth. And that was an awkward position to be in. The world was falling apart. People were losing their jobs in unprecedented numbers. And we were seeing these massive, what we were calling pandemic profits. So that led us to do some things to get back to our local communities. Shortly after the spike, we saw the big club stores continue to do well. Everything else kind of declined. And then after a couple of weeks, it started to really pick up again. And the business now across all grocery, all mass and club stores is growing significantly. And I think it's because people are spending more time at home. They're consuming more. We've become somewhat of a household staple. People are making their smooth.”
2020-08-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vita Coco: Michael Kirban · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Taking money off the table, a significant amount of money, right? So I've got the financial security to not have to worry about anything. So now I could take bigger risks, always calculated, but I could take risk. I could go longer and enjoy the people I work with, which is basically, you know, my second family. I love what I do. I love the creative aspects of it. What else am I going to do, right? So I don't have to sell the business. That's the beauty of the position that Red Bull China kind of put me in. So now I'm super focused on, you know, what does the business look like five years from now? And kind of thinking about this business as a broader platform of better for you, healthier functional beverages as compared to Vita Coca, the coconut water business.”
2020-08-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vita Coco: Michael Kirban · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. So kind of like Madonna and them coming in as investors, we had somebody coming in and buying part of our stake. And at the same time, we got major value add, right? It just worked very well.”
2020-08-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vita Coco: Michael Kirban · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's actually Red Bull China, so they're the owner of the Red Bull brand in China, so they have a huge beverage company in China. They were looking to diversify, but 25% of the business became our distributor in China.”
2020-08-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vita Coco: Michael Kirban · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, the lawsuit claimed we were claiming that it was life enhancing. Since then, we're obviously very careful about all of our packaging and all of our marketing materials goes through all sorts of legal checks before anything goes into market because you don't want to make false claims, but it's less about making false claims and it's just about making claims in general that could lead to somebody insinuating that you are trying to deceive, which is the last thing we want to do, right?”
2020-08-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vita Coco: Michael Kirban · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About a third came from Brazil, and we talked very openly about all the work we do in the Philippines and Sri Lanka and Indonesia.”
2020-08-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vita Coco: Michael Kirban · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, the first one was that the second one was that we had a little tagline on our brand that said born in Brazil. It was on the back of our package.”
2020-08-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vita Coco: Michael Kirban · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, you know, I felt, and I still feel to this day that either there was a competitor involved or it was just a money grab. And typically, we've been through several of these. We had another big one a couple years ago. Typically, these are money grabs. And they're part of the...”
2020-08-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vita Coco: Michael Kirban · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think, you know, look, at the time I was convinced Zika was involved. I don't know if they were or not at this point. You said it was like a...”
2020-08-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vita Coco: Michael Kirban · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's a big, that was a big issue for us early on, not only in Brazil, but as we started to produce in other countries, taste was different, potassium levels were different, sodium levels were different, sweetness and sugar levels were different. So taste was an issue, but also nutritional panel was an issue. So over the years, we created a procurement team, a supply chain team that has become the best at blending ages, breeds to create a consistent taste across the globe.”
2020-08-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vita Coco: Michael Kirban · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Nothing, it's an ingredient, it's an ingredient powder mixed with water in a plastic bottle created down the street in the US.”
2020-08-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vita Coco: Michael Kirban · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the biggest expense is obviously cost of goods. So, you make the product, you ship it across the world, you ship it to stores, whatever it is. Let's say that costs 50% of your wholesale price. So you're already 50% down. Then you spend 10, 20% on marketing. Then you have a team and you have operating expenses and an office and everything else. And unless you have real scale, by the time you're done, you're competing for space against Coke, Pepsi, Kerriga Pepper, and Nestle and everybody else, you got to fight for that space. You need people for that.”
2020-08-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vita Coco: Michael Kirban · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They relied on Coke, and so they had some really interesting distribution points that we couldn't get, whether it be certain accounts in airports or whatever it might be, food service, things that we just couldn't get to with our distribution network. But we had built a team that was just willing to run through walls and willing to fight to beat Coke. You know, we were the underdog and they should have won. You know, if you remember, I said early on when Zika was acquired by Coke, I had several people tell me, don't worry. the entrepreneurial startup business will win because Coke just won't focus on it. And I realized after about a year or two that that was in fact true. And it wasn't only in New York. It wasn't only in the US. By this point, we were fighting each other in London. We were fighting each other in Seoul. We were becoming a global brand and they were trying to do the same thing at the same time.”
2020-08-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vita Coco: Michael Kirban · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so it was huge because now we had a national footprint, right? Now we could go to national retailers, whether it be Walmart, Kroger, Target, and sell to them on a national level. While at the same time, we were getting this great expansion of awareness. So it worked out really well. I think a lot of brands struggle because they get one or the other way before the other, right? So you maybe you start to get awareness, but you just can't build distribution because you don't have the distribution footprint and power to be able to do it or vice versa. You build distribution. You see that a lot. And the brand just doesn't pull because nobody knows what it is. For us, these things kind of came together at a very interesting time and it really worked.”
2020-08-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vita Coco: Michael Kirban · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, quickly. First, we started to see a ton of incoming inbound PR. I would say we got more PR than any brand of any sort our size should have ever gotten. So I was this guy selling this little coconut product that people a few months earlier had never heard of going on news shows and getting to a point where a year earlier I would go anywhere else in the country and nobody would have ever heard of coconut water or Idacoco. you know, all of a sudden you walk into a store in Minneapolis or you walk into a store in Dallas or wherever and people are like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's that coconut water thing. I've heard about it, but everybody's drinking it, right?”
2020-08-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vita Coco: Michael Kirban · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They have ownership And they're now more motivated than if they were getting paid a couple hundred grand or whatever it is to go do something and talk about it, they're super motivated because first of all they love the product. That's why they invested. But now they have real skin in the game.”
2020-08-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vita Coco: Michael Kirban · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, which was amazing, right? So now we're not paying somebody to endorse our brand. They've, in theory, paid us, right? They've invested.”
2020-08-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vita Coco: Michael Kirban · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. And he's just super connected and friends with all of these people. And he started making some phone calls and he called to me more and he called Matthew McConney, called Anthony Keatis, a bunch of people and said, well, me and my friends will take the whole round. Madonna took the majority of it and they all put in the rest of the money, they took the round. And now we had these people with a much bigger mouthpiece than we could have talking about our brand. And that was a game changer.”
2020-08-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vita Coco: Michael Kirban · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're not Coke. We're not Pepsi. We're not of that scale, that size. And then almost jokingly, I said, you know, but we are looking to raise some money. You know, if you guys wanted to invest and his ears perked up, he said, you know, not only will Madonna invest, but I'll get other people. Because he manages so much.”
2020-08-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vita Coco: Michael Kirban · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or something like that. That was kind of the idea. You know, I mean, he said, Madonna's drinking it on stage. She's talking about it in interviews. It's part of her diet and so on and so forth. How can we work together? And my response was, I don't have any money to pay her. And even if I did, I wouldn't therefore have any money to put her on billboards or invest behind.”
2020-08-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vita Coco: Michael Kirban · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So basically, this friend of a friend introduced us because he knew that Madonna was already drinking Vitacococo. Was married to a Brazilian and therefore has coconut water in the house. And he saw this as a big category, a potentially big category in the future. And so he was willing to take a coffee. He wanted a coffee with you.”
2020-08-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vita Coco: Michael Kirban · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So around the same time that Koch invested in Ziko, a friend of a friend, introduced me to Gio Siri, who is Madonna's manager today's U2's manager. He's quite connected.”
2020-08-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vita Coco: Michael Kirban · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So pre Coke, it was more or less the same beverage. As soon as Coke invested in that business, they moved to a concentrate model. So they were no longer 100% pure premium coconut water not from concentrate. So we quickly changed our packaging and put in huge letters across the front, never from concentrate. And that became our big selling difference.”
2020-08-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vita Coco: Michael Kirban · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were, but I also realized that Coke is just so large and Ziko was just so small for them at the time that it was going to be, you know, people were telling me they're not going to be successful. You know, you have to remember they bought, I think at the time, a third of the business with a path to owning the whole thing over three years or something like that. So they didn't own 100% of it. It was too small for them to focus on and to put real resources towards. And that was an advantage for us. I think Mark, the founder of Ziko and the team there, expected it to be easy once they did their deal with Coke and it wasn't that easy.”
2020-08-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vita Coco: Michael Kirban · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, there's actually, if I think about it, there's actually probably, say, 6,000 cases on a container. So it's a little bit more than that.”
2020-08-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vita Coco: Michael Kirban · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, deposit to his bank account. We went on salary not so early. I mean, we had one or two employees before we actually went on salary.”
2020-08-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vita Coco: Michael Kirban · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We hired Gold We hired some marketing people. I wasn't doing as much in store sampling anymore. Now I had other people to do that. And those people were, you know, our brand educators. We started to invest small amounts into marketing. Like we got a van and put coconuts on top of it and painted it, Vitacococo. And we started to Vitacococo Van would arrive, hydrate everybody, and do some hula hooping and all sorts of stuff and then leave.”
2020-08-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vita Coco: Michael Kirban · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we were doing less than a million dollars in sales. So we were not a big company. And so when you think about it, it's actually a decent valuation on the business”
2020-08-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vita Coco: Michael Kirban · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Goldie is the best Goldie is Michael Goldstein. Goldie was at Vitamin Water. And then when vitamin Water sold to Coke, I brought him over. And he came over because his wife is Brazilian and he loved coconut water. He thought it was a great idea. I never thought I would be able to recruit somebody from a company like vitamin Water, and he came over and he is just this incredibly aggressive, charismatic, competitive, incredible guy that just does not stop. And so my competitive drive and wanting to win was accelerated to a whole new level.”
2020-08-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vita Coco: Michael Kirban · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was that it was Ira came up with this idea he saw in Brazil with like this blow-up costume and he had a Vita Coco Tetrapack made and we put Ira's brother in it and he would go around New York City as a Vitaco Tetrapack We made these bicycles that were amazing where we took these like a normal bicycle and attached a little small trailer behind it. And we would ride around New York City and we had these billboards on the back of our bikes that said, you know, try Heideko or drink vitacook, what's great, or take a two-minute vacation or these different things And that was our advertising. So it was like a moving billboard.”
2020-08-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vita Coco: Michael Kirban · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was really in New York, and it was, we both built these small sales organizations that were also incredibly passionate and treated the brand like it was their own. And any move on it was a personal attack.”
2020-08-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vita Coco: Michael Kirban · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A lot of that, you know, I mean, literally like buying their product out of stores, putting it in trash cans, taking their point of sale material down, hiding it in back rooms. This is ug”
2020-08-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vita Coco: Michael Kirban · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The beauty about them is they were a bunch of guys that had left the distributor where Zika was sold. So not only were they a much smaller distributor, but they also had it out for that distributor and for Ziko. So together, we had this drive to win. It was a war. Yeah.”
2020-08-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vita Coco: Michael Kirban · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, they would literally just piss us off. They would set up their sampling truck outside of our office every other day and sample people. So everybody around our office would be walking around with Z-code. I mean, it just was a constant battle.”
2020-08-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vita Coco: Michael Kirban · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Talking about all the health benefits and everything else, and getting people to try it. And again, remember, I had this instant consumer in people from the Caribbean, people from Southeast Asia, people from Latin America. And in some cases, they would taste it and they would buy a case. They weren't buying a case of anything else first time they're trying it in a store, right? So I had some early success. And then after I would do my demoing, my sampling, I'd go home and do the bookkeeping. And that was kind of what the day looked like.”
2020-08-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vita Coco: Michael Kirban · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Put it in the store, and if it doesn't work, I'll buy it back from you. And he did, and pretty quickly it started working really well in his store, and he was one of the real early success stories.”
2020-08-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vita Coco: Michael Kirban · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would go in on my rollerblades because I could hit, I don't know, 50 stores in a day on my rollerblades. Whereas if I was walking, it'd be a lot less. And I would go in and show it to, you know, the store manager or whatever it was. And half the time I'd get kicked out, sometimes they would find it interesting. They would say send me some, but find out later they weren't going to actually take it. And then other times people were just like, no way, this is ever going to work. I remember one of the early stores I went into, I rollerbladed in there and found the store manager. And first he's laughing at me because I'm on rollerblades and I'm a sales guy without a polo shirt and a briefcase. And he takes a sip and he said, this is never going to work. Tastes like sock water is what he said. And I said, I promise you. I said, give me a chance. I said, take two cases.”
2020-08-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vita Coco: Michael Kirban · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I knew they had a bunch of partners and they had real capital and they had, they just, they also, I think I found online somehow their business plan was published or their initial market research was published. I remember thinking, holy crap, these guys actually did like market research and they actually had a business plan. Wow. Like they're for real.”
2020-08-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vita Coco: Michael Kirban · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But yeah, no, I mean, running into Zeko everywhere, everywhere we would go, whether it was a yoga studio or a grocery store, whatever it was, people were like, oh, I love your product. It tastes great. But I just brought in the other one”
2020-08-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vita Coco: Michael Kirban · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, no, yeah, exactly. So we knew nothing about each other. We just started running into each other in the street. I remember one of the biggest distributors in New York, I went and pitched him and Mark was in there the same week. And he ended up choosing Mark. I said, but why? He said, because there's as much more sophisticated looking.”
2020-08-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vita Coco: Michael Kirban · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was the problem. In the early days, we didn't know if there was space for both of us. And so there were plenty of accounts that they would get first and we couldn't get in.”
2020-08-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vita Coco: Michael Kirban · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, and I remember the product was arriving like a week later, and I went to a GNC store. And I was talking with the manager and I showed him what we were doing. And he's like, that is incredible. It looks amazing, but And I said, What do you mean? Is it coconut water? He said, Yeah, it's called Ziko. And he showed it to me. He had a sample there. And he's like, it's almost the same thing. It's also blue. You know, it's same packaging. And I remember my heart sinking just being like, this is not happening”
2020-08-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vita Coco: Michael Kirban · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was there, I think, just short of two weeks, but his guys kept on selling it for, I would say, another month or two thereafter. And I believe they sold just over half of the product we sent. And then together we paid to destroy the rest of it because it was at some point going bad. Yeah. And he paid me for the product that he sold, which was enough to cover the majority of our costs for the initial product. And that was it.”
2020-08-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vita Coco: Michael Kirban · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A lot of coconut water. It's a lot, but luckily there was no education needed, right? People knew what coconut water was. And people like to drink their gin with coconut water, you know, and now they could do it without cracking open a coconut.”
2020-08-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vita Coco: Michael Kirban · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So he said, if you want to come down and help me sell it, I'll pay you if we sell it. And that's exactly what I did. I went out of the Bahamas, spent, I don't know, probably 10 days at least, maybe two weeks. I went door to door with him and his sales guys, and we hit bars and restaurants and nightclubs. And I was hitting grocery stores and hotels and just selling coconut water in the Bahamas out of a tetra pack.”
2020-08-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vita Coco: Michael Kirban · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And she said the other options are you destroy it or you export it. I said, export it. She said, yeah, it just can't come into the country. And so I said, okay, I hung up the phone. I was freaked out. I didn't know what to do. And then I remembered I had been at this trade show in Chicago where Ira and I went maybe a month or so earlier and met a bunch of people from all over the world and people at trade shows that they're always interested, but there's sometimes not so much follow-up. And I grabbed this card of this really nice guy that I met in the Bahamas who owned an alcohol distributor. And I called him up and I made a deal. I told him I'd send him the product and he wouldn't have to pay me unless he sold it, right? Because he wasn't just going to buy two containers worth of product on a new brand.”
2020-08-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vita Coco: Michael Kirban · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, should be that easy, right? But it wasn't. I said, What do I do? I mean, the product is going to lose shelf life. I don't have the money. I need the money from the sales to, you know, to pay for things. And she said, Well, you can't sell it. You could either put it in an FDA warehouse. And I said, okay, what's that cost? She said, it's probably about $30,000 a month. I said, that's clearly not going to work. Wow.”
2020-08-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Vita Coco: Michael Kirban · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT