Founders: How Vitaminwater founder Mike Repole built a drinks empire

**Hannah Mullane** (0:03)
Hello, and welcome to Founders on Business Daily from the BBC World Service. I'm Hannah Mullane. Today's founder is Mike Repole, the entrepreneur behind some of America's biggest drinks brands. So big, in fact, that the chances are, you would have tasted some of his products. Hi, Mike, welcome.

**Mike Repole** (0:20)
Hi, Hannah. How are you?

**Hannah Mullane** (0:21)
Yeah, good. It's great to have you.

**Mike Repole** (0:23)
Thank you so much for having me today.

**Hannah Mullane** (0:25)
So let's go back a little bit, Mike. So you grew up in Queens. Your first job was stacking shelves in a supermarket. Fast forward almost three decades, and some of the brands you were once stocking have become your competitors. You co-founded Glasso, the brand behind Vitaminwater and Smartwater and then BodyArmor, building them into billion dollar brands with celebrity investors, including rapper 50 Cent and two of the world's biggest athletes, Kobe Bryant and Tom Brady. You sold both of those companies to Coca-Cola for a combined $9.7 billion. It's not shabby.
And now you own Race Horses, a football league and are investing in everything from sportswear to healthy snacks. But you still insist you are Mike from Queens.
Wow, that's a lot to get through, isn't it?

**Mike Repole** (1:09)
Yeah, that's a good summary of 57 years of my life. I appreciate it. Hannah, my dad was born in East France, and my mom was born in a small town outside of Naples in Italy. And they came here about three years before I was born.
And I'm a first-generation kid from Queens, New York. That's where it kind of started.

**Hannah Mullane** (1:31)
And what was that childhood like for you?

**Mike Repole** (1:33)
I spoke Italian till I was four years old, because my mom and dad didn't know English. I was thrown into kindergarten, so that's where I learned English through my friends. And I have a brother who's 14 months younger. And between my mom, my dad and my grandmother, I really had a tremendous staff growing up. They were unbelievable. I was spoiled. You know, we didn't have a ton of money, but we had more love than I could ever imagine. And, you know, it didn't matter what I did. I mean, my parents could be tough on me, but they loved me unconditionally, no matter what I did.

**Hannah Mullane** (2:04)
And they're hard workers too, right? Immigrant parents coming to the US, working multiple jobs. Tell me a bit about their work ethic and how that had an impact on you.

**Mike Repole** (2:13)
My mom was a seamstress, you know, and then she did special jobs on the side. You know, she would drop us off at school, go to her job, then pick us up, drop us off, go back to the job. My grandmother was around helping raise us. And my dad was a waiter in a French restaurant in Manhattan. He would leave at like nine o'clock in the morning and work the lunch shift, have a couple hours off, work the dinner shift, get home at midnight. I'd go to school. My mom would tell me, make sure you say goodbye to your dad. I'm like, he's snoring. And she said, go give him a kiss. And I gave him a kiss, went to school. I really only saw him on Sundays growing up. So I think a lot of the work ethic I got was from my mom, but I'm known to be working till 12, 1 o'clock at night. I guess growing up with a dad that got home at 1 o'clock in the morning, I guess I thought that was normal.
I've always said they came to this country in their 20s without speaking a word of English.
You know, the risks I've taken in business don't compare to the risks they took in life, right?

**Hannah Mullane** (3:17)
So you're a risk taker, but you've also got a bit of a rebellious streak in you, haven't you? Tell me a bit about when you used to sneak off to the races.

**Mike Repole** (3:26)
Yeah, it's a risk taker, rebellious, and ADHD, OCD, and borderline phasy. But other than that, I'm leaving some out because I know it's only a half hour show. But with my ADHD, I was never, you know, I really couldn't sit still in class. And I started going to the racetrack as a kid.
And honestly, I would go there were 20 bucks. And you know, many times it would be $10 for my dad and $10 for my mom. I always say I borrowed it because my goal was to bring it back. And listen, I wouldn't, I don't think it's something they should teach as a high school curriculum. But if you want some pressure, take $20 from your parents at nine in the morning and make sure at four o'clock in the afternoon, you got to return that 20 Oh, they're gonna wonder where it went.