New this morning, non alcoholic beer company Athletic Brewing announcing
it's raised a $50 million equity financing round led by
General Atlantic.
And joining us now coincidentally,
his name is Bill. She felt.
And I asked you that question right away,
founder and CEO of Athletic Brewing.
And I asked you initially,
is everyone a friend of Bill West And about by
that I mean someone that that really would get in
trouble if they had any alcohol.
And some are I, I would imagine,
but many are not people that that are drinking
non athletic for that reason.
Non alcoholic beer. Yeah. I think actually in general,
I think the word sober is somewhat outdated in many
ways where I think people are just super busy modern
adults.
We all have phones in our hands.
We want to feel a little bit better.
We want to be a little more alert.
People tend to drink like one day a week,
one day a month, but there's a lot of occasions
outside of that.
And a delicious beer goes great with a lot of
different parts of life.
So, so you're, you're here to talk about
a nice fundraising round. Let's let's get that out of
the way and then we'll talk about some of the,
the, the implications because I,
I have a lot of thoughts for sure.
Yeah. So, So what happened?
So we announced a big investment.
We increased our West Coast production capacity and announced that
a couple weeks ago.
But kind of in conjunction with this,
we're welcoming General Atlantic to our cap table
of $50 million equity financing
to the company. And they'll ultimately invest significantly beyond that
in the round.
But on anyone, if you ask anyone in the financial
world,
a short list of globally respected investors,
General Atlantic's usually in the top three.
And so we're super excited to
have them on board and just their their perspective and
advisory on like scalable disruptive companies is it's just such
an honor to be having their investment and it's your
valuation go to with this round.
Yeah, well, we're a public,
we're a private company and we don't tend to talk
about valuation.
I can say that
we our revenue has more than doubled since our Series
D about 18 months ago.
And it was publicly disclosed at that time that our
valuation was about 400 million.
So, and the I mean,
you went from 855 cases to hundreds of thousands of
cases per year.
You one of the in IPA,
you're one of the 10 largest Brewers and it's non
alcoholic,
right? Yeah. So yeah, we we'll sell,
we sold well over 3,000,000 cases last year or over
100 million cans,
did over 90 million in revenue last year as a
company and are growing well beyond that this year.
We're a top 20 Brewer overall,
top ten in craft beer out of over 10,000 craft
Brewers
from one of the smallest just a few years ago.
So I'm I'm drinking it and it's good and it
tastes like beer.
Am I going to feel like I had and I'm
starting to think maybe that there's some type of placebo
effect.
Is there not or, or or is there's not right.
I mean, you really aren't.
There's no alcohol. So it's impossible that you're feeling anything.
Well, I think what you are feeling is the placebo
effect.
People there is a pussy drinking
for 5000 years, holding beer in their hands when they
are socializing,
when they're relaxing, when they're unwinding from their day.
It signifies I'm with friends,
I'm having a great meal and very little that actually
has a lot to do with the alcohol.
And that was kind of a key insight for me.
And as I was doing survey work for Athletic Brewing,
as you know, I was in the financial world previously
and when I started to share the germ of this
idea with people,
people were just like, that makes sense.
I would drink that all the time.
I'm sick of alcohol or like I would like to
be drinking a lot more,
but alcohol holds back to why is the time right
now for non alcoholic beer as opposed to in the
past where you had like an O'doul's,
which sort of just I
that's in was not because it tasted like swamp water.
OK, well, that that that was because I was going
to say on The Simpsons,
they would have the non non alcoholic
in the convenience store and the and the guy would
walk back and just it would be a false front.
No one ever opened the door before.
It would be a place to go where you go
into the back of the store because no one ever
checked to buy any of the non alcoholic.
But I think people are mentally no now they're not
alternatives as opposed to before you were.
It was he said it was high perform.
So you're working out. It's it's six in the morning.
If you go out with your,
like, in the financial business and you have 5 or
6 beers,
you're not feeling good at 6:00 in the morning.
It to work out. Yeah.
I mean, I was up listening to your show and
at the desk at 6:00 AM for 12 years and
out to three or four work dinners a week.
And in the beginning of that career,
it was, you know, steak dinners,
boozy drenched dinners. And I would feel terrible.
And I saw a real shift in the 10 years
I was in finance to,
like, people being really excited instead to do like,
soul cycles or various boot camps and hit the day
running.
I think a big part of our reinvention is it's
both product and marketing.
So our our Co founder John Walker is an extremely
talented and highly awarded Brewer who had won every
Johnny Walker. Yeah, which was one of those like universal
signs that was so obvious like it should have hit
me over the head that he's the right guy,
but he is so talented and so are so many
of our teammates.
And another big differentiator is which this investments going to
is we've invested over $100 million in our manufacturing,
which is really differentiated quality that this segment had never
seen before.
It's amazing. And and I ask you,
I, I like play golf,
OK, something like that hot so that that I do
like to drink like a Corona or something and I
like there is a little bit of a feeling I
could drink one, but if I hang out,
I could switch to this,
couldn't I? So that I don't get,
you know, so I'm not like
driving after three or four beers.
You could, you could drink one alcoholic beer and switch
to this,
couldn't you? Because I've, I just realized I'm drinking this.
I'm like Brett Kavanaugh. I like beer.
Remember when he said I,
I like beer? Even though it's like anything you're doing
in your day-to-day life,
like we've got a beer for that occasion and what
you're doing now,
like that afternoon beer on a stressful day.
Like I drink an IPA like 4 in the afternoon,
non alcoholic. Yeah. And it,
it's amazing. Or golf courses crush it for us where
people may have had one beer during the round,
they may have 5:00. And it's super refreshing.
They can get in the car after they can go
meet their kids at the pool.
Right. Yeah. There's not that like line in the standard,
all the bad quality because there's plenty.
And. And then the one other thing I mentioned earlier
this week,
it, it used to be maybe one glass of red
wine is good for you.
Now they're starting to think that alcohol is just in
general,
it could be one glass,
could be five. It's never really great for you because
your liver is dealing and your,
you know, your brain and everything.
And when you get older,
it gets much more difficult to,
to process the alcohol, I think.
Yeah. So I think whatever people's views are on health
and alcohol,
you know, the world is stressful.
I don't want to take away people's alcohol.
But like, 10 years ago,
there were no options if you weren't drinking.
And you're at a work dinner,
you're like drinking seltzer water.
Yeah. Like, so we just want to have great options.
And I think it's all about occasion growth.
Where maybe the occasion base for alcohol is shrinking,
but we want to build that back up,
welcome a lot of new people into the beer world
and give people a great beer they can drink seven
nights a week and feel really good about it.
It's amazing. Yeah, I like it and it's good,
but was it really bad?
Old alcohol. Old. The previous
intro of of alcohol, of non alcoholic beer.
Was it crappy beer? Was it swamp?
Was it bad it was there?
I mean, because like, walk around a grocery store.
Never had one. It was when I stopped drinking 10
years ago.
It was so weird to see a part of the
grocery store.
They'd seen absolutely no evolution in 30 years.
And it was like, it's like athletic brewing is such
a simple concept,
just hiding in plain sight.
And yeah, just trying to be really positive about it.