DTC POD - #310 - $100M+ Businesses in Controversial Industries: John Coogan, Co-Founder of Soylent and Lucy

DTC POD #310 - $100M+ Businesses in Controversial Industries: John Coogan, Co-Founder of Soylent and Lucy

Blaine Bolus 00:00:06 - 00:00:45

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Blaine Bolus 00:00:45 - 00:01:21

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Blaine Bolus 00:01:21 - 00:01:39

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Blaine Bolus 00:01:44 - 00:02:09

What's up, DTC pod? Today we're joined by John Coogan, who is the co founder of Soylent, the co founder of Lucy, and more recently he is an Eir at Founders Fund, as well as a big creator on YouTube and all the other platforms. So we're really excited for this conversation today. John, I'll let you kick us off. Why don't you tell us a little bit more about yourself, your background, how you got started, maybe with Soylent. Was that your first business? How did things start for you?

John Coogan 00:02:09 - 00:02:52

Yeah, sure. I grew up in Pasadena, California, basically right outside Los Angeles. Went to a school right next to Caltech that was very focused on STEM and science, technology. So was always interested in know. Some people try and call Pasadena NASA Dina, because NASA's there. Never really caught on as nickname, but culturally, it's a very techie city. And so I went to college, studied economics, eventually learned to code, was doing some internships at some finance firms, Citadel being capital, a couple small venture shops, and saw that basically, the less employees at the company, the better I did. And the bigger the company, the more painful it was.

John Coogan 00:02:52 - 00:03:33

And so eventually I said, okay, I got to just start something. And the summer after college was, like, the perfect time for it. And so I grabbed a friend from high school, went out to Silicon Valley. We eventually got accepted to, essentially y combinator. It was a spinoff run by some of the Y Combinator folks, and then they merged it in, but now it's Y combinator. And basically, if your audience doesn't know about Y combinator, it's kind of a startup school. Three months, you sprint as hard as you can to build a business, show some growth, and then at the end of the program, you pitch it to investors, and there's a big room of investors. So we go through that program, we utterly flop.

John Coogan 00:03:33 - 00:04:05

Everything we build sucks. And I was learning to code. I was getting really great at it, and we were putting apps in the store. We were actually learning how to produce products, but we didn't know distribution, didn't know marketing. So we would kind of just build something, and then it would be a dead end. But we had wound up living with another team that was in Y combinator, and this team was building kind of hard tech, wireless networking stuff, a bunch of Georgia tech guys. And they also ran into the same problem. They pitched.

John Coogan 00:04:05 - 00:04:35

No one wanted the deal. No one liked it. Eventually, the idea was pretty reasonable, and I think someone wound up doing it, but it wasn't the right team. Know, building cell phone towers, essentially as new grads no one really trusted you would require a lot of money. So both companies have kind of flopped at this point, and we're running out of money, but we know, just build something people want. Make something that you like. Just start building for fun instead of really overthinking. Like, we need to build something that will make money.

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