They Backed Poppi. Now The Angel Group Wants to Back You.

26:45So it sounds like going back to the question of what's the order of importance of the terms I mentioned, in this case, it was velocity because they were doing so well. And you were like, okay, wow, if this brand is doing this well this year, you know, what's next year look like? We believed in the category. Okay. So CSDs had been flat or declining, and you had some OGs like Jones and like Hanson. Like those brands weren't really creating new momentum and new growth. They were better for you. Were they better for you though? I mean, relatively speaking, it took Coke and Pepsi. Sure, okay, fair enough, yeah.

27:21And there's another one. I can't picture it had the bird on it. I can't remember the name of that one. But so there's these brands that were out there, But Olipop and Poppy were bringing new energy. They were clearly kind of leading the category to a new direction. So for us, it was really, we had belief in the category. And then, you know, in terms of how big it could go. And then, you know, there was a lot of noise in the industry at that time around apple cider vinegar. But I think more accurately around gut health. There was the bright, bold packaging. It just felt like the right brand at the right time.

27:54A lot of momentum. And, you know, it was real. Like when you looked under the hood, there was actual real velocity there. There was real discovery happening, real trial, real replenishment. And, you know, there's a lot of brands that you see out there that have a high profile. They get a lot of distribution. But when you really start to look into the different corners of where they're selling, it feels like it's more push than pull. Poppy felt like pull the whole time. There was a lot of push too, but there was real pull behind the brand. If you had had the opportunity to invest in Ollipop at the time, would you have?

28:26I think we've had to run that by Stephen and Allison. So yes, I would have if it would have been kosher to do so, but I'm not sure that it would be. Well, I guess what I'm asking is, and I have the utmost respect for both brands and both sets of founders. I wonder, you know, if an angel investor or any investor is presented with two brands that are both doing well, that both have similar velocities and excitement surrounding their brands, which one gets the nudge? Where's the X factor? Yeah. Well, in that case, I would have chosen Poppy if I had to choose between the two, because Poppy at the time was the only one that was shelf stable.

29:04So now we've got unique merchandising versatility, right? So we can be in the cooler and we can be off shelf, right? We can be an ambient. We can get those K-Stack displays that Olipop couldn't. Plus, one unique thing that I liked about Poppy was that they weren't trying to mimic or replicate traditional soda flavors like a Sprite or like a Coke or like a root beer. Not initially. They really pushed out with fruit flavors first. And I felt that it was a really smart play because you didn't have to have consumers kind of comparing apples to apples. So, yeah, I felt a lot of conviction behind Poppy.

29:42And uniquely enough, actually, you know, I mentioned top shelf deals earlier. We actually were able to get into Olipop for some of our members a little bit further down the line. But it'd be great if you're an investor and you believe in, let's say, the gummy category. There could be multiple brands that win. If you're angel investing in the earliest stages, high failure rate, maybe three, four brands make it. And the rest of the two or three dozen or so don't. You know, it'd be great to have exposure into multiple brands in the same category. Same thing with the whole protein craze, you know, and protein ice cream and such.

30:13I mean, this is an easy segue because I just got your newsletter, which was sent out on January 30th. And it lists some of your recent investments. And one of them is a brand called Nowadays. And it's a THC cocktail brand. At least this is for the angel group. I don't know if you're personally invested in the brand. But man, I can't tell you how many THC drinks we've seen come into the office over the past year. Hundreds. Yeah. Hundreds. And I'm like, who's going to come out of this? Because clearly, you know, most of them are going to fail. I'm guessing there's going to be literally five that maybe make it to the next year.

30:49And the Angel Group has invested in Nowadays. So what is it about a brand like that that you say, okay, now we're going to pull the needle out of the haystack and pick the right one here? I mean, how do you define potential for a brand like that? You know, we came in a little bit later nowadays relative to when we invest in most brands. But what stood out there was that I think they had a real handle on just this moving target around regulation, how brands are able to move into, I think, a safe zone while we wait for clarity on how this category is going to mature and develop. So I think that's one thing you got to look for if you're investing in this space is that you trust leadership and their ability to navigate how these products are going to get to market, how they're going to legally sell these products to consumers.

31:46But formulation integrity, so product and ingredient integrity is also really important. You need products that are safe and that are consistent and reliable for consumers to use. So I think they checked a lot of those boxes and they had kind of, I think like Poppy and like Alipop, they had just kind of shown that they were going to be kind of a breakaway threat in this category. So naturally that gives you a lot of conviction, but we also invested in a super early stage brand in this space called Shift Naturals. Very interesting company on the West Coast very, very early on, but has a unique way of going about formulating their products.

32:26They do all low dose beverages. So they've got, you know, an ability to get into almost every state that allows THC products to be sold. and so really smart founder, really interesting company to keep your eye on. In the same way that you thought Better For You Soda could supplant legacy brands, do you see THC beverages or describing themselves as cocktails, do you see them supplanting alcohol-based beverages or do you see these products just bringing new consumers into the fold and just expanding use of THC? I think it's going to do both. I think we still have, you know, a lot of people writing on maybe beer or maybe more broadly Bev Elk's downfall or, you know, everything's been downgraded, right?

33:17On the outlook for beer and alcohol sales. And I think it's real, but I think it's going to take a while before it's, you know, it would be a sector that we wouldn't invest in. I think we still have generations of folks who like to consume their beer. And one of the reasons why we wanted to get involved with Garage Beers, we believe in that sector, we believe in that brand. But certainly things have changed. And I think it's a really exciting development. I think people have grown tired of the price they pay for going out and having a night of boozing. I remember when, what was it? The hard kombucha products came out.

33:53And I was so ready. I was in my mid thirties, maybe late thirties. Kids were on the way. I was so ready to give up the hangover, but I couldn't get past the taste profile. It wasn't worth it. There was still too much of a trade-off. And I would drink those products, two, three of them, trying to catch a buzz. The efficacy wasn't always there. And for some reason, I still felt a hangover in the morning. These THC products, I think, can really change the game. Do you drink alcohol anymore? Yeah. Modelo, garage beer, those are my go-tos. I drink a little tequila, less so with kids. But yeah, it used to be a pastime.

34:30I would go out on a Friday night, go down to the bar, kind of decompress, have a Modelo and a shot of tequila and just kind of wind down that way. So still like my alcohol. Yeah. You know, I think all the downgrading of alcohol or the concerns about Gen Z and their consumption of beverage alcohol, I wonder as kids get older, as they start to get into those moments where they're done with work and they have kids and they just need a moment to decompress a little bit. It could be that they're using THC products or smoking weed or doing whatever. But I feel like the use case and opportunity for Gen Z just isn't there as much as it had been for us when we were in college and that was the thing to do.

35:20Now, certainly there are other things that younger folks can do, but I just feel like the use case and the day part use might be a little bit further down the line. Yeah. You know, what goes around comes around. It seems to be cool. I hope it's not the case, but it seems to be cool for kids to pick up a pack of smokes and smoke casually on the weekends or at a party. I've seen that. Oh, yeah? Yeah. I've seen like, you know, this kind of, I don't know, celebration of cigarette culture, of cigarette brands, of, you know, 80s muscle cars and, you know, 80s, 90s, everything that around 80s and 90s seems to be kind of coming back again, even our vices.

35:59And so, yeah, I don't know. We'll see. But maybe that's just what I'm seeing in Toledo, Ohio. Cigarettes, huh? Wow. I never thought we'd see those come back to the United States. Like, I remember those days when you go into a bar. Can you believe that? You used to be able to smoke in bars. You used to be able to smoke on freaking planes. Yeah. My dad was a bartender for much of my childhood, you know, loud, smoky, late night bar. He would be bartending. It's like a scene out of cocktail, be flipping bottles and people, ashen cigarettes left and right. And so I grew up in that environment. And yeah, I think we're in a better place now.

36:30I would say so. Yeah. I would say so. We're also in a better place when it comes to options for legacy product categories, whether it be condiments or yogurt or French fries. And I'm I'm mentioning three product categories that you guys are invested in via some amazing brands, AO, Jesse and Ben's, Painterland Sisters. I love Painterland Sisters. What a fantastic brand. When did you guys invest in that company? Pretty early on. So this was 2000, what year are we in, Ray? We're in 2026. This is, I think it was - As we're reminiscing on days past and years past. Yeah, I think it was 2024. It was two expos ago.

37:13We had met Haley and Stephanie by chance, walking in the North Hall, 10 by 10 booth, humble little booth there where they were slinging yogurt and I'd never heard of the company before. And out of the corner of my eye, I see their brother and I don't know if it was Wranglers or Levi's and a big old belt buckle and I think a flannel shirt, manning the booth, and it just looked a little out of the ordinary to me. And I just moseyed over there, I think right past Haley and Stephanie, who were out in the aisles, as they always are, kind of greeting showgoers. It just looked like something that reminded me of home a little bit.

37:48A lot of my family kind of involved in, I guess, rural life. And so it stood out like a sore thumb at Expo West. And Panerlin Sisters, female-founded yogurt from kind of middle of nowhere, Pennsylvania, fourth generation dairy farm, and tried the product, which is a skeer yogurt, a hundred percent full fat, you know, full cream. Definitely a thicker consistency than you might be used to with yogurt for sure. Yep. Organic. And they were just, you know, so it was kind of checking all these boxes of what we're looking for, kind of coming behind, I'll call it maybe the, the Maha movement, right? It was just kind of getting back to simple food and the product really impressed.

38:28And then And I think what we saw a lot of potential, and it was just bringing this kind of female energy and female voice into a category that had really lacked it, that a lot of women shop in the yogurt set. And, you know, quietly they were doing 4 million in sales their first year. And most venture funds would typically be hopping all over that, but they were largely undiscovered because, you know, they'd kind of cross that threshold to where venture funds would typically get involved. And they're in a massive category. I don't know if you can find too many categories that are much larger to build into, invest into than yogurt.

39:03High unit buy rate, high repeat rate. And yeah, they've grown tremendously. So they were, you know, largely self-funded. They did a crowdfunding round and we had met them at the right time. They were my first call after Expo West. I think I even emailed on the plane right back and said, hey, I want to connect as soon as we all get back from Expo. and we hopped on a call and made fast friends and raised a pretty good amount of money, almost a million dollars through our Angel Syndicate. And we've been working with them closely ever since. And yeah, very proud of what they've been able to accomplish so far.

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40:25Discover what's possible with Vibrant today. Visit vibrantingredients.com. How many brands do you meet at Expo that, or how many brands have you met at Expo that you've invested in? I don't know. I'd have to think about it. It's probably four or five. Not a ton. Not a ton. You know, we discover a lot of, I think, worthwhile brands to look into and kind of keep our eyes on. And then they might, you know, actually materialize into investment. But, you know, like I said, we're only gonna invest in maybe eight, nine brands a year. In the early days, we were only investing in maybe five or six brands a year.

41:03But yeah, you mentioned like, you know, the condiments category, you know, another brand that my partner at the Angel Group, Chris Robb, and a couple of other members invested in is Botchon. So that transacted news broke today. $400 million acquisition, amazing job by Justin Gill and his team. What a fantastic brand. Yeah. You know, my partner Chris has obviously been very bullish on the condiment set. We saw, you know, like Truff came in and broke new, you know, Bacchan's actually broke new ground on where we could go with pricing, premium price condiments. We saw Truff do that for a bit. And, you know, so AO comes along in the mayonnaise category and I think breaks new ground with, you know, not only premium positioning, but that kind of culinary angle that David McCormick and Molly Bass kind of conjured up together using her credibility.

41:50Really, really unique product, you know, in terms of like there's real inclusions, you know, real like cut up pickles in the, in the dill pickle mayo that they use real mustard seed in the, in their mustard mayo. And then, um, yeah, you look at the frozen potato category with Jesse and Ben's and other brand that we got behind very early on. large, massive category shopped every week by consumers with very little innovation. And the category there is largely concentrated within a handful of players that weren't really innovating and comes along at the right time with the whole seed oil movement.

42:24And we were kind of taking bets internally about whether or not the avocado oil skews, because they fried their fries in avocado oil. And then they also have skews that are fried in beef tallow. And my wife actually called it right. I was betting on avocado because at the time, avocado oil is everything, but it's actually trending more toward beef tallow. But, you know, Jesse's got his finger on the pulse of what the market's looking for. Now they're, you know, I think the fastest growing brand in the natural channel in the frozen potato aisle. Really, really incredible what they've been able to build there.

42:55But that's, you know, look at our second generation of brands is Aomeo, Painterland Sisters, There's Coyota's Tortillas, Stone & Skillet, Bowie, the Agua Fresca's brand, Jesse & Ben's. They're showing a lot of promise just like the first generation of brands did. These are all fabulous brands you mentioned. I will say, and I love Jesse & Ben's, I love their positioning. Their packaging is fantastic. The fact that they are using different oils or bases to fry their potatoes, I think is really differentiated and interesting. but I would be wary of investing in a commodity category like fried potatoes or frozen potatoes.

43:32I feel like if you think about, you know, the private label business, you know, the major companies that are like a McCain's or an Orida, all they have to do is create their own version of a Jesse and Ben's and what's going to stop them from doing that. So what made you feel like they were so differentiated that the big players, the big commodity players couldn't come in and just take their space? Great question. So we took a lot of time doing store visits when we had met Jesse just a couple years ago and looking at what consumers were being offered in the space. Forget natural, but when you would go into a Kroger, a Publix, Safeway, all the brands were the same.

44:10And you look, you flip over the ingredient panel and there was always some sort of, you know, simple ingredients. I think this thing that these large brands struggle to do is anticipate, not one, I think they can see the trends coming, right? I'd be surprised if they didn't know that there's a clean label movement sweeping across every category in grocery. And eventually it makes its way into the mass market conventional retailers where those consumers are looking for it. It used to be the left and right coast consumers that were really the consumer bases that were looking for these products. And then eventually it would kind of make its way into the middle of the country.

44:54And I think what we see now is a lot of the consumers in the middle of the country, and maybe even in more, you know, the Kansas cities, the San Antonios, the Clevelands, the Nashvilles, you know, the Atlanta Georges. These are the markets that I think are now kind of creating trends and getting back to like red meat, getting back to dairy, getting back to meat and potatoes. There was going to be a movement back toward like family-friendly offerings, family-friendly categories like frozen meals, frozen entrees, frozen potatoes. So we saw that the movement away from seed oils is happening. The large brands, I think, struggle to either act and innovate on time, or they're happy to just wait and see what shakes out and either, you know, go in, like you said, with one of their own brands and kind of buy up facings and kind of squeeze them off shelf.

45:46or litigate them into oblivion, as we've seen happen with one of our other investments. The other thing I think they struggle is to really put out brands that consumers respond to. And I think that's like a deft touch. It's not easy to build, like, in a corporate marketing environment, a Goodles, a Jesse and Ben's. You know, those types of brands, I think, just need a founder's touch, you know, to kind of put out into market. I just sat down with Gabby Lewis, who's one of the co-founders of Magic Spoon. which is a brand that I never thought in a million years would be where it is today, because I never thought anyone would buy a$10 box of cereal.

46:22Jeez, I was proven wrong. But Magic Spoon is another one of those brands where, you know, they've succeeded in a commodity category by offering something different, by really focusing on macros, focusing on premium ingredients and flavors. And then recently, you know, it was, I think, what was it? Just a few months ago, I was in a stop and shop, which is a grocery chain up here in Boston. and I had seen this terrible knockoff of Magic Spoon. And I saw that it was created by one of the big cereal companies, one of the big food manufacturers. And I'm like, huh. So I guess it's not as easy, to your point, of some of these big players being able to create something on their own.

47:02Yes, they can come in with their own product after the fact, but how much of that matters once that brand has established itself as the preeminent offering within that particular category? Jesse and Benz, I hope it gets there. I really do. I think their product is amazing. Their branding is fantastic. The beef talo thing is pretty interesting to me. I wonder. I'm also kind of on the fence about whether that can become as mainstream as it might be in some pockets of the country, but it is interesting for sure. Yeah. There's the brand that if it can get to the point where they are, where Jesse is, you know, where he's now crossing over into more conventional retailers, I think that's where you start to really see, you know, what a brand's kind of makeup is in terms of how they navigate that growth, how they play a new game, kind of working with conventional retailers.

47:48And, you know, there's a different playbook that's in store for that. So a lot of this comes down to, you know, building the capabilities of the team as kind of new opportunities demand and thinking about, you know, how you might right-size your product offering, how you might right-size your price pack architecture, your value proposition in general. So, you know, you got to give an opportunity for these brands to evolve because what you see today might not be exactly what you see in a year or two as they start to push into larger retailers. So I just want to see a two pound bag of Jesse and Ben's as opposed to the smaller pouch bag.

48:22Then I'll be really happy. Yeah. I imagine you're talking to the founders of the companies you're invested in on a relatively regular basis. So let's go back to Jesse and Ben's. How involved are you in advising the brand as it continues to grow and scale? Do you feel like you like to have a hands-on approach? I know you're not getting involved in a day-by-day kind of basis, but do you like to be intimately involved in how they're thinking about retail strategy or innovation? Yeah, some of the brands that we get involved in, whether it be through the Angel Group or through Supernatural Ventures, our investment fund, I think in general, we like to be, you know, within arm's reach of these founders at any time, like most investors would be.

49:09But I think what's unique about what we have is, you know, we've got this committed pool of capital through Supernatural Ventures. We have a unique obligation to our LPs and to ourselves and to the founders to stay very close to those businesses. So we're typically at minimum on, you know, monthly calls where we can stay close, understand whatever kind of challenges they might be facing or opportunities are on the corner. Or we, you know, we can tee up unique sponsorship opportunities or promotional opportunities that we might have to bring to our portfolio companies. Obviously, you know, we've got a lot of connectivity in the industry, retailers, distributors, where we can be helpful in making connections.

49:47for the group and for our members there, our angel investors there, you know, we do biannual calls with our founders that we invest in. So we've started to make those much more scheduled so that we can stay connected to those founders. They can take advantage of this large network of folks that we have in the group who can really be helpful. But yeah, I think a lot of it is just comes down to, you know, founders keeping investors up to date, keeping those investor newsletters going out, making sure you're very clear in what you're asking for, what opportunities you're facing. But I think like anybody else, we'd like to stay close to our founders.

50:24Some were a little bit more, you know, like Goodles, Poppy, you know, we were just happy to have the opportunity to invest. They had great teams around them. Ciete, you know, those brands were going places and we just tried to champion them every step of the way and, you know, try to try to be good stewards and investors. I'm sure it helps validate you and the angel group in the eyes of founders who are operating very fast growing businesses when you have exited from a Siete, from a Poppy, are currently involved in Google's, have exited from a Bachans. But I think the vetting process at this point is very much now, you know, brands are very much coming to you as much as anything.

51:04or am I wrong? You know, now that you have super natural ventures, I mean, is it still very much, hey, we're looking at opportunities for brands that are doing well and that we might have a chance to invest in them or are most folks coming to you at this point? Yeah, well, we benefit from a lot of inbound. So, you know, through the group, we've got 275 members. That's 275 tentacles out into the industry. So we kind of all share and deal flow together and the Angel Group benefits from that, Supernatural Ventures benefits from that. But I think, you know, for the most part, deals are going to come from our members.

51:41Goodles came in from a friend, Gil Eyal, in the group. Spencer, you know, found Poppy. So there's always a different source. But I think more and more, we're seeing brands that we want to get involved with, whether it be through Instagram, you know, somebody posting, something we might see from you guys, reading in an article. What's great though, is I think we do have some credibility in the space. People wanna work with us. I think it's a place where brands, when they do raise with us or through the fund Supernatural, that it establishes some momentum for them. So I think we all see kind of mutual value.

52:15And once we find something that we like, I think as long as the terms are right and the timing is right, we can typically make something happen. Speaking of brands that you brought to the table here, we have a couple that you brought with you all the way from Ohio. So thank you so much for that. But the first brand is a brand called El Nacho, which we're familiar with here at BevNet. They're a Boston-based brand of premium tortilla chips, which are fantastic. What interests you about what these guys are doing? I love the category, large established category that most consumers buy in, you know, week to week or month to month.

52:49And you look at the packaging, and for anybody who's listening, you just look it up online, El Nacho, you know, and it's kind of like that reach out and grab you type of, you know, packaging and bright colors. You've got the luchador type of luchador. Yeah. Characters. Yeah. Interesting flavors. Right. So we've got the health badge with, you know, made with avocado oil. You've got, you know, unique flavors with a hot honey mango tortilla chip. You got a chili lime, you know, so it kind of goes from just a tortilla chip to a little bit more in that direction of maybe like a better for you Doritos.

53:24But I think with flavors that are a little bit more unique, novel, a little bit more imaginative for a newer generation of consumers. Plus they make a great, just standard corn tortilla chip that is, you know, I think is as good as it gets out there in the market. So, you know, brand, product, shelf visibility, solid operators come from the restaurant industry, food service industry, and self-manufacture. There's real crap behind these products. I haven't seen their social media. Imagine these things really pop on Instagram. How much does social media impact your evaluation of a brand? I guess you could say when you see something that's kind of popping on social media, it's a real plus, but it's certainly not a necessity.

54:09There's a lot of brands that, you know, scaled and kind of gotten to the finish line, actually gotten to pretty large exits without having, you know, a material following online, but certainly helps. I mean, it could be a real advantage, a real ace card if a brand's got a following. I think this is a brand that could do that. And, you know, they've got a newsletter that's pretty cool. I think as they start to develop the brand more and more, it's got that type of potential. Are you on TikTok? I used to be. I just deleted it. It just wasn't healthy. I had an unhealthy relationship with TikTok. It is hard.

54:43I've spent maybe five minutes on TikTok. I've never really been a TikTok guy. But Instagram, I spend probably too much time on. It's just so addictive when you're scrolling through videos and you just see these quick videos over and over and over. And the algorithm has gotten so good that they just know what's going to be interesting to you in kind of a scary way, but that's for another podcast. I'm with you. Anything where I can just be centered around our fascination with food is good for me. And TikTok was taking me all kinds of different rambles. I didn't need to be going down. So I've limited my social media here as of late.

55:16Well done. Well done. Now this brand I have never seen before, which is called Wild Monkey Bar. The candy bar reimagined is the tagline. Let's take a look at this. Yeah. Okay. Wow. Okay. So no one needs to hear me say this again, but I'll say it again. I am a Snickers fiend, love Snickers. We'll eat Snickers probably till the day I die. And hopefully it's not the reason why I die, but this looks really cool and it feels Snickers-ish. That's a great compliment because I think the way we're looking at, and this is just a brand that where we're kind of becoming friendly with two co-founders out of Boulder, Colorado, husband and wife team, I think really wanted to design something that was more like a confection, a real confection, like candy bar product that happens to hit like a nutrition bar.

56:07So you look at some of the ingredients here, you've got organic cashew butter, organic pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, pecans, organic oats. So there's a layer of granola in here. So it eats like a candy bar, but you don't have to feel nearly as guilty as when you're housing one of those Snickers bars. You know, you nailed it when you said it feels like a cross between a candy bar and a protein bar. When you look at it, it has that look. It's a white package with gold lettering, which feels reminiscent of one like a high-end protein bar. And also like when you actually see the candy bar on the front of pack, you're like, okay, this looks really amazing and indulgent.

56:46It's also relatively high calorie. It's, well, quite high calorie for a candy bar, 410 calories, and then 11 grams of protein per bar, which is great. You know, we look for brands where there's a really, really, even of a small sample size, encouraging kind of velocity story. So they're only sold in the front range of Colorado right now. I lived in Boulder for eight years. It's its own bubble. You can walk into a couple stores, coffee shops out there, and if you were to sit there and watch, you know, over the course of a day, not that anybody would do that, they're going to clock velocities that can range anywhere from 30 units a week to upwards of 200 units a week with these bars.

57:25Yeah. So that told us that there's a consumer for this and that there's real discovery and kind of fanaticism happening around this product. this is, I think, a nice contrast to what we've been seeing both in the confection category and in the kind of nutrition bar category, but really intentionally made very, very early on. The calorie count, I think, is probably something that you could look to address through unit size, maybe even pack format, right? You could go into something with, you know, like a two-pack, or you could go into like mini monkey bites, you know, something a little bit more poppable, a little bit less of a calorie hit.

58:03But I think when you try this, I think you'll agree there's real potential here because it's not only, I think, a delicious product, there's also all these kind of cool sensory aspects too with the crunch and the creaminess of the product. So yeah, very cool stuff. Well, thanks for bringing these. And I can definitely get a sense of how your own evaluation plays into products that end up on your desk. And this happens every single day. And it feels like it's fun to be an angel investor, I'm sure. But I'm sure there's also times where it's like, I can't do everything for everyone and can't be everywhere for everybody.

58:37And this is one of the hardest parts of your job. But for folks who are considering investing in this space and putting a few thousand dollars of their own money into a CPG company, or perhaps even joining the angel group at some point, what's some advice that you have for them? what would you recommend they do prior to making their first investment? Yeah. So probably follow a similar journey that I did, which is one, don't go it alone. I was real, I think it was gun-shy. I didn't want to pull the trigger, you know, unless I had other smart people around me. And even if you're an experienced investor, it's always great to do it alongside other people who are just familiar with the industry.

59:15I would say that, you know, you want to be an accredited investor, which means I think as an individual, you make$200 ,000 a year or more for consecutive years, or your household is generated$300 ,000 or more for consecutive years, or you have a net worth of a million dollars or more. So you want to be an accredited investor. And I think part of that is it's not a substitute for real retirement planning and savings. It's high risk. When you're investing at the earliest innings of these businesses, I think you need to come to grips early on with the realities of angel investing. you know, some of these investments are not going to materialize.

59:50They're going to go to zero. So if you only invest in one or two companies a year, you might look up in three or four years and see that, you know, some of them or all of them have closed, you know, they, they haven't made it to an exit, you know? So I think it's important that you diversify, you invest in maybe two, three companies a year. And that way, you know, when you get some that do actually reach an exit, the outcome can kind of more than dwarf, you know, the checks that you wrote into the ones that didn't quite make it. Yeah. But I think you got to look at it as like ROI from more than just a couple, you know, from just kind of a binary, you know, outcome.

1:00:28If you enjoy the journey, if you enjoy getting behind founders and companies that are putting their all into a business that you like for one reason or another, you like the founders, you really like the product, you really want to see this category kind of get overturned with better for you products. And you want to champion it to your friends and family, feel like you're making a difference. You know, if you work in the industry, like many of our members do, you can actually mitigate some of the risk, right? You can make valuable introductions. You can lend your perspective or expertise behind the investments you've made, unlike putting your money in the stock market, a company that you can't Touch or TAC or real estate.

1:01:08So you got to get in the game. And I would suggest doing it, you know, where you can get curated deal flow, not a plug for the angel group exactly, but get, you know, curated deal flow, do it alongside other folks who kind of have a little bit of experience. And, you know, it feels different when you're going in as a group than you are when you're kind of going it alone. I think that's excellent advice. I think there's a lot of people who want to to support early stage brands and want, not just to support them, but to eventually make some money off of concepts that they feel could go a long way, but they don't have the confidence and don't have the experience yet to do so.

1:01:45And I think just in that three minutes that you shared gives people a good foundation for where to start. So thank you so much for that, Adam. Adam, this is such a honor for me. I mean, I feel like I could be sitting down with you for the rest of the afternoon, but I know you have a lot going on and need to get back to Ohio. But thank you so much for coming out here. It really means a lot to me and the team and really excited to share this conversation with your audience. Excited to hang out again at Expo West. Yeah, and thanks for hosting my daughter and I and showing us around, Ray. This is something I think we'll always remember.

1:02:20That brings us to the end of this episode of Taste Radio. Thank you so much for listening. Taste Radio is a production of BevNet.com Incorporated. our audio engineer for taste radio is joe cratchy our technical director is joshua pratt and our video editor is ryan galang our social marketing manager is amanda smerlinski and our designer is amanda huang just a reminder if you like what you hear on taste radio please share the podcast with friends and colleagues and of course we would love it if you could review us on the apple podcast app or your listening platform of choice check us out on instagram our handle is bevnet taste radio as always for questions comments ideas for future podcasts please send us an email to ask at taste radio.com on behalf of the entire taste radio team thank you for listening and we'll talk to you next time