Is that how, is that how you went about it?

I mean, yeah.

You, you bring the product.

At the time, this was very early days, we had, uh, a manufacturer that actually...

It was a juice manufacturer, not a water manufacturer, so the water tasted a little bit- ... kind of like juice.

Very, very, like, little.

But we figured out if we put it in, if it was cold, you couldn't really taste that off taste as much.

Okay.

Yeah.

And then you can find the people to help you execute on a steel mill.

So I always kind of believed in that.

It was always like, doesn't matter what the idea is, if you know how to manage, you can do anything.

So- Yeah, it was a funny story.

Like, we were just, that next weekend we were going up to a hike, me and my buddies, and one of us sticks our hand out of the window, and like, "My hand is cold." And so anyways, we k- start brainstorming and we, we s- like, what if we did this thing with a hand-warming iPhone case.

So it's Bluetooth controlled.

So am I wrong, you raised a big round in like four years, or like in 2019 too or something, right?

and yeah I think there is something about being 22 and young that actually makes you almost more fearless because you at that point it's like you have everything to lose but nothing to lose at the same time it's like if you're not coming from money you're not losing somebody else's investment you just get to go and build and do the thing that you're passionate about but do you have things that you tell yourself every day or mantras I mean now obviously you're You've had this really successful company, but were there things that you were saying to yourself to get you through like those really hard days where I'm sure that there were a lot of days that were like, are we going to be able to do

it? Yeah, I would say I definitely have some philosophies that are constantly going through my head.

One is I was kind of in a way lucky enough to have...

Started from very humble beginnings and not from a place where I had a lot of, let's say, abundance, like financially.

And so I knew that and I was happy.

I was like happiest guy in the world.

So I knew that even if I was living under a bridge.

bad mentor? Or how do you also optimize? I think people can sometimes get mentors and then they're a little bit like, what do I do with this? How do I make the most out of this? And in your most effective mentor relationships, what have you made sure to bring that person? Or do you set expectations up front on what you're going to need from them?

[laughing]

But we were just walking around New York, uh, a year, a year and a half ago, and saw the I Love New York logo.

So outside of the collaborations, what we thought is, we wanted to make sustainability fun and engaging for consumers, right? So the way we thought about it was, a lot of times, sustainability is boring, it's expensive, and it's inconvenient, right? So number one, we're bringing the convenience factor by pu- putting our product, you know, on the shelf with other bottled waters.

Why is bottled water the, the biggest category in all consumer in history? Is, is because of the convenience factor.

Um, so we made it convenient, we brought in a low price point, but to make it fun, we thought to start collaborating with different, um, IPs or licenses, right? So we started partnering with Hasbro and Nickelodeon, um, Mattel, which is Barbie, Snoopy, et cetera, and launched this licensing division-...

where we would put SpongeBob on a bottle, or Minions, or, you know, Jurassic Park, whatever it may be.

And the whole idea was- there was that you don't have to really care about sustainability to love SpongeBob, right? But as a by-product of that, you're doing something that's better for your health and better for the environment.

But what, what's your answer to that question?