Spotting Billion Dollar Investments Was Hard Until I Learned These 3 Rules | Rohan Oza

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Every deal on Shark Tank, that's a beverage. I know they're looking at me.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:03)
Nobody wins the lottery seven times. You got sharks spitting out the product, you've got a terrible brand name, and you pick up 25% of that company. Sold for a billion and a half.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:13)
Is this just art or is there some science behind it?

**SPEAKER_1** (0:16)
One of the biggest lines of Robert Woodruff was like, he wanted Coke to be within Arm's reach of desire. Brand is creating bad design. One in 10 Americans influence the other nine. The goal is to spot that one.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:28)
Can you teach us more about how it's done?

**SPEAKER_1** (0:30)
It's actually three things. One is spotting stuff early, one is building the brands, and the other is actually...

**SPEAKER_2** (0:44)
You are, you're the brand father.
You have been crushing it in the beverage space. I was reading the research on you the last couple of days. I knew about Poppy, I knew about vitamin water, but I didn't know the extent of it. Can you brag for a second? Give me a shout out some of the brands that you've been involved with.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:04)
I actually have started none of them. I only co-founded one, which is Poppy, and I'll tell you that story. But the rest, I just bought them early when I bonded with founders. I think it was like vitamin water, smart water, they were tiny, VitaCoco.
Even things I lost money on were well-known, like Popchips, vital proteins, One Bar, Bulletproof, lost money, but still well-known. What else? We have Farmers Dog, Once Upon a Farm, and then probably Poppy is my sort of most famous one.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:33)
That's an insane roster.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:36)
It was funny. Actually, one of our founders who you know, a guy called Gores, who's the co-founder of Gymkhana Fine Foods, was at our, we had an LP conference and you know, we're so focused on like the brands and the teams and growing stuff. And like you sometimes bury yourself in the weeds and you don't sometimes ladder up and he's that growth. When you look at the sheet of brands on Cavu, which is the fund that I have sort of masthead, it's insane, this ecosystem you've created. I think you need to do a better job of almost leveraging that ecosystem. And again, the light bulb went off because he's a founder, right? He's growing an incredible brand and part of it is I focus on individuals and sometimes we've got to bring the whole gang in to realize the strength of what we have.

**SPEAKER_3** (2:25)
It's sort of amazing because when a lot of people say the word brand, it's sort of related to taste and both of those can be pretty nebulous. But you sort of are like Paul McCartney or John Lennon where like you've made enough hits where you're like, okay, is this just art or is there some science behind it?

**SPEAKER_2** (2:43)
Nobody wins the lottery seven times.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:45)
Yeah, I mean, that's quite high accolades to be in any conversation that used the Beatles name. But there's always luck, guys. It's not like this, you can't, the dice has got to roll your way a little bit. But if you have a game plan, which I've sort of honed over time, the odds flow in your favor. And so I've created some mantras and some principles and so on and so forth that I actually created after the fact, because you don't go in and say, all right, guys, I've got five mantras. You almost like, you have a few hits. You're like, how did this happen? And then I rewind and go, okay, this is kind of how it happened.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:20)
Give us one. What's one of the first ones you've realized like, okay, all right, that this is one that matters. We got to put that concrete.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:26)
Couple of big ones. One is influence the influencer.
So you got a pot of money, right? Whatever, 100 grand, million, 100 million, whatever you ought to spend on your marketing budget. Who do I get to? I can't get to everyone. It's not Boston. Unless Amazon has the budget to get to everyone. But most people, when they start a company, don't. So from my perspective, it's one in 10 Americans, and I say America because 100% of my career actually is America in terms of success. So this is the greatest country in the world to be an entrepreneur. I say that everywhere I go. I truly believe it. So in America, one in 10 Americans influence the other nine.
The goal is to spot that one.