From the Red Carpet to Cactus Water & No Is Part of the Process
At 21 he was left with basically no teeth and no jaw. Today he is co-founder of a cactus water brand his famous friends put their own money into.
THIS WEEK'S THROUGH-LINE
Ask questions in the room you are already in. When the answer is no, ask for feedback.
Welcome Note
Thanks for reading the forty-first issue of The Advantage. This one is brought to you by Proppel. Details on Proppel and the discount for Advantage readers are at the end of the newsletter.
If you want to build something and have not started, watch my conversation with Oliver Trevena. He was hosting a TV show in Hollywood and rushing into business meetings on the side, and his reps dropped him for it. Today he is co-founder of Caliwater.
Fundraising is rejection, and I love it now. The Practical Edge is what I do after every no. Let's get into it.
WORTH WATCHING:
Stick Your Nose In
The Advantage · Mike Wystrach × Oliver Trevena · 46 min
This week I sat down with Oliver Trevena, co-founder of Caliwater, a cactus water made from prickly pear. He started it with Vanessa Hudgens, a friend of 17 years.
At 21 Oliver was a theater kid in England, about to leave on a cruise ship tour singing and dancing. Walking back from a club one Friday night, he was attacked and left with basically no teeth and no jaw. He took the compensation, 13,000 pounds, and moved to LA. He says it was the worst thing that has happened to him, "but without a doubt, the best thing."
Somebody offered him a TV hosting gig and asked if he had done it before. He told them of course, loads. "Complete lie." Next thing he was on a red carpet interviewing people, and that turned into his own show and the big award shows.
WHAT I LOVED ABOUT IT:
He was modeling for AllSaints, one of his favorite brands growing up, and ended up in the mix with the ownership group talking about bringing it to the US. "Just because I stuck my nose in," he said. "Instead of just sitting on the sidelines being like, I'll take a picture, you get involved."
His reps did not love it. "You gotta pick a line. Are you doing business or are you doing entertainment?"
He kept both. Once the business side was paying his bills, he was not walking into auditions needing the job to pay rent. He calls that having a Plan B, and he thinks it made his Plan A better.
I could not agree more. That has been my biggest argument with founders taking secondary. Some old school investors want founders so hungry they can barely get by. Tell me a real life situation where that works. When you are in a high stress environment, you do not show up as your best. I always tell people you are the most attractive when you are in a committed relationship, because you are not trying to get anyone.
THE LINE THAT STUCK
"You start with this door, there's always a couple more doors off to the left and right that you could probably open and might lead to something else."
He said it a few seconds before telling me he never went to business school. Watch him explain it →
MY 20-SECOND RECAP
if you do not have the full 46 minutes
→The product has to speak for itself. Caliwater has a long list of famous backers who put in their own money. Oliver: "no friend is giving me money for something they don't like."
→A third and fourth competitor can be good news. When more cactus waters showed up, Oliver called his lawyers to ask if he could sue. They told him, "no, this is amazing." Same thing at Freshly. People told us the space was crowded, and it kind of was, with Blue Apron and HelloFresh in it. It is super hard and expensive to educate the consumer, and they were doing it too.
→He kept it flat. Retailers and friends kept asking for carbonation. Caliwater never added it, and now hydration is trending.
→Poppi was not an overnight win. The headline was the PepsiCo sale for nearly $2 billion, about seven years after it launched. Oliver on the years before it: "They don't write about that." Caliwater is launching in Walmart nationwide, years after friends and possible investors first asked him why it was not in Walmart.
→There is a cost. Oliver told me it is hard to take care of his mental and physical health at the pace he is going.
PRO MOVE
Pick one company you already work with or buy from. Email someone there this week and ask how the business actually makes money.
Fundraising is the closest thing I have to acting. My brother is a musician and actor, so I live vicariously through his stuff, and both are rejection. You are asking someone for something and they say no. Oliver jumped in: "Well, they say yes and then they say no again."
What I realized is I could look at it as binary, where every no meant failure, or I could treat no as part of the process. So every time I go into a pitch now, I ask how I grow and learn from it. Where is the information? How do I get better at this?
A lot of it is out of your control. As an actor you have to do a good job, and you also have to be right for what the director is thinking. Fundraising is the same. Which is generally life.
THE DATA SUPPORTS IT
The US Army has been running after action reviews for decades. Scott Tannenbaum and Christopher Cerasoli pulled the research on debriefs together, 46 samples and 2,136 people, in a 2013 meta-analysis in Human Factors. Debriefs improved performance by about 25% over control groups, for individuals and for teams.
Shmuel Ellis and Inbar Davidi at Tel Aviv University ran it with soldiers in an Israel Defense Forces navigation course (Journal of Applied Psychology, 2005). Soldiers who went over their successes as well as their failures after each training day improved more than the ones who only reviewed what went wrong.
HOW I USE IT
I have raised $300 million. I love fundraising now because I enjoy the process. When I leave a pitch I am super analytical. Did I do a good job? I always get feedback.
Now I am on the other side of the table too, and it is kind of like dating. In order for things to happen, magic kind of needs to happen.
THE CHALLENGE
The next time a pitch, a sales call or an interview ends in a no, sit down within the hour and answer the four questions from the Army's after action review:
→What was supposed to happen?
→What actually happened?
→Why were there differences?
→What did I learn?
Then ask the person who told you no for feedback. Do it after the next yes too.
Every business I have been part of came down to the people in it. Freshly, Petfolk, the ones that worked and the ones that did not. When people ask what a CEO actually does, my answer is that the real job is finding people who are better than you at the thing you hired them for. Oliver said it on the episode: it is tough to find people who care as much as you do.
I was a customer of Proppel before they were a sponsor. They specialize in marketing and operations, and they place talent from the US, LATAM, and beyond. Video editors, graphic designers, media buyers, and more out of LATAM. Managers, directors, heads of department, and VPs in the US.
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