The Truth About Taking a Different Path with Zeke Bronfman

Josh Felgoise (00:00.204)

Welcome to Guy's Set, a guy's guide to what should be talked about. I'm Josh, I'm 24 years old, and I'm here to find all the tips, advice, and recommendations for everything you're wondering about. Let's get into it.

Josh Felgoise (00:17.954)

Yes, you heard that right a new intro. It's officially season 2 of guyset Welcome to a new season and a new era of guyset before we get into the episode I have a few announcements to make for season 2 and a lot of exciting things coming up some fun A lot of just a lot of fun shit Okay so the first thing is that the intro is different and you already heard that and the biggest reason for that is because it's no longer just the guys guide to your 20s and

Here's why I don't think the topics that I'm talking about or the things I'm having conversations about the things that we're wondering about the things that we don't know where to the answers to or want advice for or recommendations about we just find the answers to or magically solve when we become 30 or 31 or that we had the answers when we were 17 or 18 or 19. Also the things that we're anxious about now or the things that we're curious about or worried about or wondering about are so different at this age.

than they are at 27 or 34 or 18. And sure, you're a very different person at those stages of your life, but a lot of the same anxieties and worries and curiosities and things that you don't know where to find the answers to still persist just in a different way. So these conversations or these episodes are still relevant and valuable at any age. And I think it's kind of dumb to put a time limit or an age limit on who this is for or who these conversations are for.

because at end of the day, they're really for anybody. And sure, while it's still a guy's guide to what should be talked about, and it always will be that because that is what I know and that's what I'm looking for and I'm still trying to and will be attempting to create till forever. Well, it's still that. These are still topics and conversations and pieces of advice or tips or recommendations that I think anybody can take and implement in their life or take from and relate to. So.

I just think it's dumb to put a age limit on it. That's why I've taken that out of the intro. That's the first thing. The second thing is a weekly newsletter. It's actually happening. I know I talked about this a while ago, but it's actually happening starting this week and below in the show notes of this episode, you'll be able to find a place to drop your email and every week you'll get an email talking about that week's episode as well as some other tips, recommendations and advice on whatever else I want to talk about for that week.

Josh Felgoise (02:42.988)

It will also have a couple other blog posts, some other recommendations, maybe some product recommendations, some book recommendations, podcast recommendations. Other than this one, of course, health, wellness, style, fashion, any tips that I can think of, I'll put it into the weekly newsletter. Like all those things that I used to write about on my website, guyset.com, which was a blog at first, all that stuff will now be in the newsletter. So that'll be coming out once a week.

So that will be in the show notes below and you can also find a sign up on my website guyset.com and there will also maybe be a few bonus episodes that will also be dropping on Thursdays. So they will just be different things I want to talk about that I haven't been able to fit into the regularly scheduled Tuesday episodes and they'll be bonus episodes. So look out for that. Not a guarantee but just look out for that. I'm so excited to dive into this new season of the podcast. I can't wait to.

have so many more conversations, share so many more tips and recommendations and advice and things that I learned along the way. I can't wait for all of you to see what's in store and who and what guests I have on. It'll also be a surprise to me who I have on. And really, thank you so much for listening. And now let's get to the episode. This week's episode is with Zeke Bronfman, a co-founder of The Absorption Company.

I met Zeke through our mutual friend, Josh, shout out Josh. And we bonded over the fact that we both were following some sort of passion. I wanted to have him on because I find it so interesting to talk to people my age. He's also 24 who are taking a completely different path than most people are after college or trying something completely different and taking a risk because it's something that most people don't do or haven't done. He founded a company with his best friend. I hope they're best friends, at least they're friends.

Uh, he's founded a company with his friend and two celebrity co-founders, which he will tell you more about in the podcast. As I said, I just kind of love having conversations with people who are pursuing something that looks totally different than most people and putting their time and energy behind it. And while his path looks completely different than mine and most people's, I found it so comforting that we all kind of face the same struggles and we all are going through the same shit as each other at 24 years old.

Josh Felgoise (04:59.142)

so I think it's a really great episode. do a live taste test of the product on the episode, and I think there's a lot to take away from this conversation. So without further ado, please welcome Zeke Bronfman to Geisse.

Josh Felgoise (05:17.934)

Sweating from being outside. Yeah, no, I agreed and how's the background look? Perfect. It looks good. Okay, so every day after I work out I go either to the steeper persona with Nate in the winter That's fine. But in the summer you leave and you literally hold your mic a little bit closer and you literally sweat for The next two three hours. So it's like you're walking outside, right? It's so hot outside and your body temperature is already so hot. You can't cool down. It's brutal it is

And it's starting now. It's just gonna be miserable from here on out. Wait, who's Nate? Tell us about who's Nate. Nate is my co-founder. We met when we were in college freshman year. This is actually the second business that we are launching together. And he's unfortunately not late today, which is he's not on this. But he would have come next time. time. Next interview. so Zeke and I met at a dinner through a mutual friend. And we talked about your previous company and what you were starting before you started it, right? Yeah. It was right before.

And now you've launched absorb more. So we're to talk about that, but let's start with your first company. Cause you've, you've taken a pretty different path and approach to life after college than most kids. So talk about that and, and life after college. Yeah. So not even after college, Nate and I dropped out midway through our junior year. Yeah. we went to Williams together. met beginning of our freshman year and instantly became best friends and we were both

really obsessed with starting a business. And we're initially really focused on kind of immediate things on campus that we could do. Like let's start a laundry service. One didn't exist at Williams. Really basic things that we thought we could do relatively quickly and then be done with when we graduated school. And as we were doing this, my family has been in the beverage alcohol industry for four generations. And so I grew up drinking a lot of really bold spirits and we were mixing all these cocktails and drinking them as we were sort of brainstorming what kind of business we want to start.

Nate couldn't drink any of the cocktails I was making because Nate's a type one diabetic. He was an athlete in college and I never realized this, but all the cocktails I was having were 300 calories, 30 grams of sugar, 30 carbs, and Nate just couldn't have them. And so we sort of created in our dorm room the same cocktails, but with zero sugar, all natural ingredients. and they were delicious. did you do that? it was really simple. Honestly, we just swapped out like

Josh Felgoise (07:39.342)

club soda for zero sugar club soda. We bought a bunch of ingredients off of Amazon, and started tinkering around until we had delicious taking, tasting cocktails. remember we bought like a big beaker and we were playing around in our dorm rooms, literally freshman year of college. And we started bringing this out just for the two of us and a few of our friends before we would go out. And as we were brainstorming different business ideas and before we knew it,

We were making this for like 40, 50, 60 people each weekend. That's crazy. Sort of started to realize that we are onto something and maybe this was the business idea that we should go after. so this was just before the White Claw craze. We created what's called Sesh. It was the first zero sugar, all natural ingredient, better for you can cocktail brand. Um, I think so. mean, maybe one or two is out there, but we like to the first, we'll claim credit until somebody else does.

And the only real can cocktail brand at the time was called Cutwater and about 400 calories, 40 grams of sugar, and 35 carbs per cocktail. so we had a real niche as the first only better for you can cocktail at the time. And we built that brand over about four years and then sold it in November of 2022 to a larger beverage alcohol company called Next Century Spirits. and we worked there for about a year afterwards. And as we were, were building the absorption company.

and then launched that in January of this year. Congrats. That's amazing. So are you still working on the last company as well? We spend some of our time advising and consulting with our previous company and working with them, but we're no longer there full time. OK, so so now you brought it up. So we'll talk about the new company, which is AbsorbMore. So tell us the absorption company. The absorption company. Our Instagram is AbsorbMore. Our website is AbsorbMore. It's kind of like our brand tag. OK, but the company is the absorption company. So tell me about that. Yeah. So

It is a really cool, really cool concept and it really originated with all of our passion for health and wellness. When I say all of us, mean, the four co-founders. So Nate, myself, and then we have two other co-founders named Ian Sommerhalder and Nikki Reed, and we all met about four years ago. and we were all bonded over this idea of the fact that supplements aren't working and the supplements you're taking aren't feeling like they're doing anything. so we.

Josh Felgoise (09:52.302)

set out to understand why. And what we learned very quickly was that they're actually not working. And the reason they're not working is because there's very low absorption and bioavailability rates. And that means that less than 15 % of the nutrients we actually take with our supplements are being absorbed by our body, which is really shocking to think about. It's huge, huge waste. so people are spending $50 billion a year in America every single year on supplements. And $45 billion of that is getting completely wasted. And so we set out to solve this problem.

And we created the absorption company, which is the first line of supplements entirely focused on absorption and bioavailability. And so we have four initial SKUs, energy, sleep, calm, restore. And they're all targeted use cases that are formulated to feel. So you take them and you'll feel them pretty instantly and you'll know that they're working and you'll feel the absorption and the bioavailability. And we have an incredible technology that allows us to improve the bioavailability. And what this does is.

It converts lipophilic nutrients into water soluble nanometric powders. And basically that is fancy scientific terms for taking things that are only available in an oil and turning it into a powder that dissolves in water. And while it does that, it increases the absorption rates of the nutrients by about 500%. Makes them way more bioavailable and puts them in a way more consumer friendly format because instead of only being an oil, they can now be in a convenient powder that dissolves in water. Right. So.

I have a thousand questions. So I'm going to go back a little bit into dropping out of college because that's, that's where I'm really interested. So how did you feel confident enough to drop out of college based on the company? Like what, what, what were you, and I'm thinking back into like what we were just talking about, like what the audience would ask from this. How did you feel confident to do that? And like, how much money were you making at that time to do that? Yeah. So we unfortunately chose an industry that is very capital intensive and it's not really something that you can just start.

and bootstrap and get going, which is something we didn't know initially. And we learned as we, as we sort of got along. so initially we were doing this completely at night, after classes, before classes, and building a business while we were going to school. But very quickly, what we realized is that if we actually wanted to launch a business, we would have to run a production run in order to run a production run. You have to pay upfront for a huge amount of ingredients and the minimum order quantities are very, very high.

Josh Felgoise (12:19.832)

and so we knew we would need to raise money. And so we sort of had to ask ourselves, do we want to actually do this or not? And we knew if we were going to raise money and take on the responsibility of other people's money, we knew we had to do it full time and drop out of school. And so we asked ourselves some really, really hard questions. and we decided that we wanted to go all in in this and really build the business. I truthfully think that the fact that COVID happened around the same time was a really compelling factor in this as well, because you

we didn't feel like there was as much of a reason to be going to school when it was zoom school. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and it really gave us an opportunity to spend a couple of years just heads down focused on building our business. So how did you go about raising money? Like, what was your first, who did you go to first? What'd you do? We initially started by going to a couple of like previous mentors that each Nate and I had worked with or met in the past. Um, and we basically,

told them our idea and asked them for advice. And I think that was the first thing we did was before we even started raising money, we wrote down a list of probably the 30 people who we thought were smart, relevant, and relevant to the category and knew something about the space and would respond to our emails. And we just sent them emails saying, hey, we're 20 year old kids working on this business. We'd love to get your advice and pick your brain.

and then we set up a bunch of meetings and ask them to introduce us to people who could potentially invest. Half of those people ended up saying, I'll invest. and then half of them would introduce us to two or three people. And we would sort of repeat that asking for advice, asking for introductions. And through that built a network of a huge, huge amount of both seed investors, but then pretty quickly worked towards people that were actually very strategic in the category knew what they were doing. and ended up raising money from some really strategic people who.

had either founded alcohol businesses before, had big alcohol distribution businesses in their family, or other strategic investors in other ways. So we were really, really lucky and got an amazing group of people together. Amazing. And then how did you know when you wanted to sell or get rid of that company, start a new one? So we were introduced to this company called Next Century Spirits after about three years of building our business. And we shared a couple of investors with them. And so we were introduced to them and

Josh Felgoise (14:40.472)

told to start connecting and seeing if there's anything to do together. And at the time, they had an amazing distillery in North Carolina and a couple of great brands that they were building. They also had a great sales infrastructure of salespeople out in the market. And we're looking to do more celebrity deals. And we had a really interesting opportunity to do a celebrity partnership, which didn't end up coming to fruition. But it would have been a

Hasmanyan whiskey with Chris Hemsworth, which would have been, it would have been awesome. we were really excited about it. it didn't end up happening, but we also knew that for a project of that scale, we didn't have the infrastructure to support it. And so we went to next century and we said, you know, would you guys like to do this in a joint venture with us? And they were super excited. We started working on a potential joint venture for this. And some point along the way, they kind of came back to us and said, no, we really like working with you guys instead of doing this on a joint venture. Why don't.

We just acquire you guys. You can work on this project and bring your brand into our portfolio, have their distribution, expand it, and then also launch a bunch of other celebrity partnerships together. And so that was a really exciting opportunity. We did that. We spent about a year working with them, working on a couple of their amazing celebrity partnerships. And then we still work pretty closely with their management team wherever we can add value and have since left our full time positions there to found the absorption company. What were some of those celebrity partnerships?

They're working on a couple right now that are still in development. So I don't know that we can share the details, but they'll all be launching probably 2025. There are three or four really cool brands that they're working on all in the spirit space that'll be coming to market and we'll do a follow up interview and we'll keep you posted. Deal. So what did you learn about business and about yourself from the first company in the first cell in the first venture? It's a really good question.

Most important thing I learned about myself, and I think if Nate were here too, he'd say the same thing, is that we don't like being CEOs and we're not good CEOs. We're great founders and that's a very different skillset. And so when we founded the absorption company, we purposefully did not make ourselves the CEOs of the business. We hired an amazing leader named Ben Garner. He was the president of our business. He has 25 years of experience operating CPG businesses, putting processes in place, running teams. And we entirely trust him to kind of run the day to day of the business.

Josh Felgoise (17:00.398)

Um, and then it frees us up to really add value where we are most able to, um, whether that's on, you know, Nate spending time on the operations, manufacturing, product innovation side of things, and really formulating the best possible products out there with our science team. Um, or whether that's myself on the investor, fundraising, strategic side, um, we're able to really focus on the areas where we add the most value and then let Ben kind of run the play. And it's, it's been a really great learning from our last business. Um,

And something that's really, I think allowed this one to scale much faster and much better. And then what about like yourself? Like how did you manage or, or kind of balance relationships and friendships and, like dating and life while creating a business? Like how did you do that? Yeah, it's hard. And again, I come back to COVID as being a really helpful time for us with the first business because it really gave us a

six, eight month period where we had no life other than being locked in and building. we were entirely focused on building this business. And I actually think it completely kept me motivated and happy throughout COVID. And I would have been, you know, in a really bad way without this, but it gave me something to be focused on, motivated about and excited about the whole time. And so that was incredible. And then as we were building this one, definitely things got

pushed aside and we made sacrifices to be able to really work on this, especially, you know, while we were still working on, um, you know, helping out at our previous alcohol business, was a lot going on. Um, and so was a really, really, really busy few months as we got this off the ground. Um, but, know, we really enjoy the work and it gets us excited, gets us up out of bed every day. And so we wouldn't trade it for anything. Yeah. So how, how do you manage like stress or balance your mental state and mindset?

with, I just take a calm. Does it actually, does it actually work? Does it actually do that? Yeah, no, I mean, calm is it's unbelievable. And it's actually, I think the one people are most hesitant to try and probably doubt the most. And I think the one that you will feel the most, it is incredibly effective both when you take it for the short term, but also if you start taking it consistently, there's an ingredient in there called liposomal saffron, and it's been proven in 13 different human clinical studies.

Josh Felgoise (19:17.07)

to be as effective at reducing symptoms of anxiety and depression as certain SSRIs. And so this is, you know, no side effects like certain prescription pills and has a huge amount of benefit when taken consistently as well. And so I think calm is amazing. To answer the question actually, I, I, but to actually answer the question in addition to taking calm, I like to hang out with my family and nothing special.

You know, I'm a little bit of an introvert and so for me it's kind of like if I had a super stressful day, I'd love to just sit in bed, watch an episode of my favorite Netflix show and wake up the next day better and ready to do it again. Right. Right. So, okay. We'll go back to the absorption company now. Right. Right. Name the absorption company. You it. Okay. Got it. So how did you meet Ian Somerhalder and Nikki Reed? If you don't know who that is, Ian Somerhalder was an actor and he was on it on vampire diaries, probably his most successful show. Right.

And Nikki Reed is his wife and also a famous actor in her own right. She was on Twilight. and they're both health and wellness experts. and have really been public leaders around health and wellness, Nikki more on the sort of millennial, female and Ian one, like biohacker side of things. their first date was actually in a hyperbaric chamber. What is that? it's like a, I'll send you to remedy place and you'll try it out. That'll be our next podcast. It'll be fun.

And so Ian and Nikki are our co-founders. We were introduced to them about four years ago by investors in our previous business. And they knew we were really interested in the supplement space, had been exploring ways to improve the bioavailability of supplements for a while. And Ian and Nikki totally separately had been on the same journey because Ian and Nikki had for years been taking tons of supplements just like us, had the exact same reaction of these aren't working. And before they went to have their first kid, they got a bunch of blood work done.

And the blood work results came back and showed that there's a huge amount of toxic buildup of cadmium lead, mercury in their system. And it led them to want to create better supplements. And so they'd been working for a couple of years when we met them on developing a way to create better supplements. We had also been working on this. And so our investors put us together and said, Hey, you guys should connect, see if there's a way to do this together. And it was sort of like this light bulb moment went off and the four of us have been working on it ever since together.

Josh Felgoise (21:43.674)

and it's not like they are celebrity co-founders. This isn't a deal where Nate and I created a brand, went to WME or CAA and said, you know, what celebrity can we attach to this and nothing against those partnerships, but this is a true authentic co-founder relationship. The four of us built this together. The four of us operate this together with our team.

And they are involved because they are partners not because they're celebrities, right? Cuz I look at look at it from the outside It does it can sometimes look like some of these brands like you put a celebrity on it like a George Clooney alcohol or something like that Like you're like, okay, there's somebody running that company, but he's the celebrity behind it So what does the day to day look like with them? Yeah, so again, we don't want to be a celebrity brand. We don't see ourselves as a celebrity brand, right? Ian and Nikki are in almost all of our meetings. They you know attend

marketing calls there on. have a weekly founder call with them where we touch base on all the things going on in the business. We have deliverables that we have to do every single week and they have deliverables that they have to do every single week. We all check in on the performance of those deliverables. We run all key decisions by them. They come to us with ideas and partnerships all the time. It's really what you would expect out of a partner and co-founder rather than somebody who's a celebrity. And that's really cool. Yeah, that's really cool.

that's, that's not what I expected, honestly, from where this was going to go, but that's really cool. so tell us about the launch. How did it go? Yeah, the launch was awesome. It was really exciting. It was a fun couple of months. we did something kind of unique with the way we launched the brand. And so this was actually mostly Nate's idea. And what we did was we basically announced on Ian and Nicky's Instagram that we are working on something, but it was a secret.

And if people wanted to learn more about it, they could follow a private Instagram account. And so we went in and one by one accepted 200,000 people in that first week that requested to follow this private Instagram account. And we started posting behind the scenes content. We posted content of us all in branding meetings with Ian and Nikki talking about, you know, the vision for the brand and what we wanted it to be. And we posted, you know, sneak peeks of packaging and other behind the scenes content. And then after about two weeks, we announced a pre-sale.

Josh Felgoise (23:52.916)

Only to this audience, only to this private gated community. within the first 36 hours, we were entirely sold out of what we thought was gonna be a three week supply. And so we shut off orders and it was really, it was amazing. We weren't sure how it was gonna go and we were blown away. So we shut off orders. We turned them back on on February 6th, the same day we launched an Aero on where we're now the number one selling brand in our category, which is really exciting. Thank you so much.

Um, and it's been a wild ride ever since then. Um, the growth's been amazing and it's all been organic. We have not spent any money yet on paid. Um, we haven't started spending money on acquisition. has all been advertised at all. have not done any advertising. It's all been driven through organic content, short form content, um, viral, tick tocks, Instagram's influencer. Um, and it's been no paid influencer, all organic. So it's been, it's been amazing.

I saw the TikTok you were in. Your dance was very funny. thank you. Yeah, it's definitely I'm a budding TikTok influencer as well. Wait, so how did you get into Erewan, which tell people if they don't know what that is, tell them about what Erewan is. Yeah, so Erewan is an amazing supermarket chain in LA. There's 11 locations, super high end and one of the best places to discover new brands. If you haven't been, I'd highly recommend it.

they are an amazing partner of ours. there were a launch partner, the only retailer we're currently in. and we reached out to their owner Vito through Ian. It's another amazing value ad that he brings to the business. he goes to Arawan all the time and has a great relationship with the team there. And so he just said, Hey, I'm working on something new. We'd love to talk to you and set up a meeting for us with the owner guy named Vito.

And Vito loved the vision for what we were building. And so we partnered on launching this brand with him. And so we have amazing retail displays at all of the Aero Wands. If you walk into any of the supplement aisles at Aero One, you'll see a huge absorption company display that says 84 % of your supplements are not being absorbed and talks about why and explains that our supplements have the most bioavailable nutrients out there. And it's been a really amazing partnership that has got us a lot of traffic, a lot of attention.

Josh Felgoise (25:57.334)

So who are your biggest competitors? Cause if I look at your branding, I would think it's like a liquid IV, but it's not, right? Like it's supplement brands and it's other companies like that. So who are your biggest competitors? And you've talked about how different you are, but I want to hear who they are. Yeah, I would say our biggest competitors are probably brands like Symbiotica, who are doing interesting things with liposomal nutrients. Brands like Thesis, who are doing interesting things with Neutropics. Brands like Momentis, who are also doing really interesting things.

when you think about who we want to be though, you know, liquid IV is the hydration company. These can be the nootropics company and we're the absorption company for a reason. And it's because we focus on one thing and that's bioavailability and absorption. and we think that's a through line that applies to almost every health and wellness product, because if you're not absorbing the nutrients, no matter what they are, whether it's a product for your hair, whether it's skincare, whether it's energy, whether it's sleep, if you're not absorbing it, it's not working and you're not going to get the benefits. so.

We believe that bioavailability absorption is the next frontier in health and wellness, and we want to own that category. So we're building a platform about bioavailability and absorption. We think that's a through line through a ton of health and wellness products. Sounds amazing. Let's do it. Let's do a live taste test. have some water here and we have the four, four, right? Four. Okay. So we have sleep, calm, restore and energy. And you said your favorite is calm or that's like.

My favorite is sleep and you can definitely try sleep. You just have like a sip now. I won't put you to sleep Don't worry. I'll go energy first. Perfect. Yeah, let's start energy restore calm and sleep. Okay would be my recommendation Okay, and if you're interested I can talk a little about the ingredients talk about while I try them awesome. Energy was really powder. Oh, no worries energy was really formulated to be the perfect product to not just

give you a boost of caffeine, also keep you focused and simulated throughout the entire day. And so it has nanometric caffeine in it, which is put through our proprietary process. what that does is it increases the onset time. So you'll feel it faster. and then it also reduces, the crash from the caffeine. we also include other ingredients like Ashwagandha. Thank you so much. Really good. Well, it's a fruit punch flavor.

Josh Felgoise (28:10.03)

Delicious I was not expecting it to be so good all of them taste good I would say that of all the flavors is probably the worst you'll like the others better. Okay, we're gonna do it in ascending order Cuz liquid IV like some of them I'm not comparing them them just like some of the flavors when you pour something in the water like are just like yeah, and by the way liquid IV is About 90 % sugar and 10 % electrolytes. So there's a lot better ways to get hydrated than you know, having 11 grams of sugar Okay, so you said energy. Yeah, then restore restore. Okay. Tell me about restore

Restores and when would I take each like what am I taking energy when I'm restore energy you would take any time you want energy So that could replace an energy drink a coffee, you know, if you have a long day of work I wouldn't recommend taking it in the afternoon, but anytime early in the day Energy is great Restore is really for a couple of key use cases workout Hangover travel immunity. That's really the key use cases for it. Anytime you feel like you're getting sick it's basically if you combined a liposomal glutathione

a liposomal vitamin C, an electrolyte packet, and a B complex into one. So it's the perfect product for immunity, hydration, recovery is really the three things that it's meant for. That flavor is way better. Mango lemonade. Really, really good. Yeah. And it's so like hangover cure. So like that's exactly what someone would take that for. Yeah. I mean, you could absolutely take that for hangover cure. We don't really market it as a hangover cure product, but it absolutely, I mean, it has

700 milligrams of electrolytes it has liposomal glutathione, which is the most important liver support and detoxing ingredient And then it has liposomal vitamin C to help with your cellular restoration. So absolutely Okay. Okay calm Calm is awesome. So calm is really really good. It's a mango lemonade. Sorry the restore is mango lemonade. It's a Watermelon lemonade and it's my probably second favorite flavor

Um, what's really cool about this is it works both in the short term and the long term. So you'll feel the calm within the first, you Hour to two hours of taking it. You'll feel that immediate mood boost and calming effect. But then if you take it every single day over the course of 14 to 30 days, you'll start to feel incredible compounding benefits as well. And that's really, really amazing. One of my favorite things about the calm. I'm shaking it up a little bit more. Cool. Let me know your thoughts. Okay. Here we go.

Josh Felgoise (30:31.884)

The flavors are better and better. Yeah, they really are. This one's awesome, right? Yeah. My personal favorite is the sleep, but I don't know if you have another water bottle. I have mine I brought. I'll pour a little bit into There we go. This is your favorite flavor or your favorite? Both. Yeah, both. The flavor's amazing. I've talked about it on this podcast. I struggle with my sleep a lot. Yeah. And I don't have a good solution for it. And yeah, so go ahead on it. I have the exact same issue. And every single sleep product I've ever had...

either doesn't put me to sleep or leaves me feeling groggy in the morning. And so we specifically formulated this to both put you to sleep, but then also wake you up refreshed and restored. so, this is an incredible blend. It's chamomile lemonade flavor, which also helps cue kind of sleep. and it has really just an amazing stack of ingredients that knock you out.

Hmm, how about how long before I sleep would I take this 30 to 45 minutes? So similar to like a melatonin. Yeah, exactly. There is no melatonin in that though specifically why not melatonin especially for kids but for everybody has kind of two Big negatives we want to avoid the first is it can be habit-forming and so you're gonna have to increase your dose every time and we've Spoken to a ton of people who end up taking, you know five ten different pills of melatonin every single night just to try to get to sleep

But then the other issues has a lot of hormonal issues. It really is your hormones. Thank you so much No, no worries, but yeah melatonin impact your hormones. And so it's not great for kids, especially but really anyone Doesn't want to be messing with their hormones. Okay, so my the fruit punch is my least favorite flavor. Yep And then I would say hold on This is which one calm okay, and this is restore

Tom's favorite, then restore, then sleep, and then energy. Yeah, I would say that's a pretty universal opinion. We're actually working on the energy flavor right now. So we're running a production run in two, three weeks, and when we do, the energy flavor will be improved. Okay, well they're really, really good. How do you guys make them? Are you involved in the taste testing? Tell me about that. Yeah, Nate and I and Ian and Nikki really do that, the four of us. And so we have an amazing partner.

Josh Felgoise (32:46.432)

out in New Jersey that we work with on the flavor side of things. And we go there in person after we've tried a couple of rounds and narrowed it down a little bit. And we sit there for a full day and we try tons of different flavor combinations. Then we give feedback and they have this amazing kind of sensory evaluation form that really helps you describe what you're feeling because it's incredibly difficult to describe a taste and what you want something to taste like. And so they've done a really good job of preparing kind of a

system to get that communication and feedback across. And now that Nate and I have done this a hundred times, we've gotten really good at kind of communicating how we want to improve the flavors and where we want them to be. And so we go out there, we sit for a full day and we try a thousand different variations. We make tweaks. They go back into the lab and they literally adjust the flavors on the spot. And then they come back out. You try them.

And you keep tweaking until you get the perfect flavors and it's a really fun process What is your dream? Addition to the four you have so far. We're working on a couple of other skews right now We're working on and we don't know which one we're gonna launch yet or what timing we'll be doing it But we're looking at immunity. We're looking at hair skin and nails. We're looking at gut health There's a lot of different cat health is very popular right now. Yeah, definitely So we want to do all of those we have

Laundry list of innovation things we want to do We have to hold ourselves back and be disciplined and make sure that we're really winning with the skews we have right now But we're really excited about all the innovation future potentials. So it's really really cool and it's especially cool because you're 24 Yeah, yeah, so we're the same age and it's really cool to see somebody my age like just killing it and doing something that's like very innovative and very different So how do you hold yourself accountable like on a day-to-day basis? Like how do you?

Make sure that you're getting the stuff you need to get done for the other co-founders. You're working for yourself, right? Like, so how do you do that? I think having co-founders is the most important thing for that. And it's a big reason why I think all four of us really appreciate having the others around the tables because it's not just me working for myself. I'm also working for Nate and I'm working for Ian and I'm working for Nikki. And now that we have a team, I'm working for our five team members as well. And so it holds me accountable even more than if I had a boss, I think, because I'm

Josh Felgoise (35:03.2)

responsible for these, you other people as well. it's incredibly important to get the work done. and then obviously having an amazing group of investors and an amazing board who also hold us accountable and push us to be the best operators we can be is really important as well. And we're very grateful for them. So what are your hours like? They really fluctuate. we, most of our team is based in LA. So we work pretty late in the day because we're on

meetings pretty late in evening for LA time. We live here in New York. but the mornings are pretty flexible. So we usually do like Nate and I usually do a 7 a.m. workout. and then we spend the first couple of hours, take me through a day routine. Let's hear it. Average day. We do a 7 a.m. workout with my uncle Strauss Zelnick at the program. It's an awesome, good shout out and it's an amazing group of, know, I think there's 150 people on this WhatsApp group that sign up every week for, for workouts and

put us through an amazing, hit workout. Nice. And so we usually start our morning there, 7 a.m. come into the office after a sauna, and spend the first two, three hours of the day catching up on emails, getting any of the sort of individual work we need to get done done. and then we're usually pretty back to back on zoom calls from about 11 or 12, through, you know, six, 7 p.m. and then spend, you know, the rest of the afternoon, evening, catching up on anything throughout the day.

sending out any last emails. Um, and then usually Nate and I will, you know, grab dinner, watch a TV show or something. Um, maybe get a second workout in. Um, and then, you know, we usually end up at like nine 30, 10 PM sitting in our apartment because we also live together and we end up very helpful. Um, like brainstorming and strategizing for, kind of bigger picture stuff late at night. you and Nate and Ian and Nikki ever disagree?

How do you especially living with me like you guys ever getting like a big fight about all this stuff and like how do you? Deal with that. Yeah, absolutely Nate and I definitely disagree sometimes but we always come to an agreement we never Sort of will end the discussion with one person saying no, still disagree The person can say I still disagree but I trust your decision and I'll let you make this one Yeah, and so takes us a while to work through that but we always get to a point where one of us says you know what I don't agree but

Josh Felgoise (37:25.228)

I trust your decision here and go run with it. We each have clear kind of ownership lanes. And so when it comes to something innate ownership lane, whether that's production, ingredients, manufacturing, product innovation, nine times out of 10, I'll defer to him. If it's something in my lane, he'll usually defer to me. And then when there's times that we can't make a decision, that's why we have a board. That's why we have investors. That's why.

You know, Ben is an amazing partner. He's the president of the business and he really makes most of the day to day decisions. And so it's great to have kind of all these other people to be able to help clear up any of those decisions. did you find Ben? We were introduced to Ben also through one of the investors in our previous company. He had been Ben's boss at Coca-Cola and he told us, if you hire one person, it has to be Ben. And so we tried to hire him three years ago to work with us at SESH. He wasn't really interested in the job and

We stayed in touch, we're close with him over the years. He was kind of an informal advisor. And then when we were building the absorption company, we went back to him and we said, you interested in building this with us? And he was really excited about it at the right kind of moment in time for his career. And it was the perfect timing for us. And so it worked out really, really well. Yeah, that's awesome. What is the most like interesting or something you didn't expect about starting this brand?

Josh Felgoise (38:44.982)

It's a really good question. the first thing I'll say is just how fun it is to be in this space versus the alcohol space. and, you know, Nate and I live this lifestyle. We work out every morning. We love sauna, steam, cold plunge. we both take a lot of supplements. And so it's fun that the meetings we take get to be in the gym or right, you know, over a sauna or something like that, instead of in the previous business, every meeting was let's meet at a bar and have drinks. And so.

We definitely enjoy the people we work with. enjoy the stuff we get to do. We enjoy all the events we get to go to. and that makes it a lot of fun. in terms of surprises, I think we learn new things every single day. So it's hard to say like one thing that's been a huge surprise, but one of the things that shifted from pre-launch to post-launch was our focus on retail versus direct to consumer.

And Nate and I both come from a retail background. Our previous business was 99 % retail. Ben's previous experiences, almost all retail as well. And so we really thought we were going to be building this as a retail business. And the more we learned about the category, the more we spoke to our investors and the more we spoke to founders of other businesses we look up to in the space, the more we learned that at the first year or two years, this is really going to be an e-commerce business. And so that was a big shift and we've had to shift our thinking, our business and our organization around that.

And where, where do you want to take this? Like what, what's your kind of big goal for the absorption company? We want to build this into the preeminent platform for bioavailability and absorption. And we believe that that is the next, not just billion dollar category, but real frontier in health and wellness that is going to define the next 10 years, 20 years of health and wellness products. And so if we can really make ourselves the leader in that space, start not just having the best products, but also publishing research.

Um, really being the leaders in the science side of things, I think we'll have a really special position as, you know, the number one player in a massive, massive category. Um, and we can create a whole suite of products and a whole platform of health and wellness products all around this idea of bioavailability. Cool. Yeah. You gave a talk at Harvard business school. saw on Instagram. What did you guys talk about? Yeah, what we spoke about actually was the launch of the absorption company. And it was about that kind of private Instagram strategy and how it worked and.

Josh Felgoise (41:03.394)

The thinking behind it, we gave that talk on I believe January 23rd, which was about six days after the launch of our private Instagram. And so it was very fresh and we sort of gave a live update of how it was going. it was a big risk cause we had no idea when we agreed to do it, how it would go. We could have had a complete flop and been up there and saying,

Actually, we learned a lot, but it didn't really go very well. we were very lucky that we got to stay up there, go get up there and say, this went super well. And actually, one of the people who was in that class ended up reaching out afterwards, works for an amazing VC fund called Springdale ventures and was the last investor into our round and is an incredible partner of ours who were so lucky to have on board. that's really cool. Yeah. And special, special opportunity that, you know,

We're very grateful to Matt Higgins, one of our investors who's the teacher of that class that allowed us to participate. So it's like, it's very rare to have like so much success at a young age. mean, we're 24. Like it's not, we're not, we're like nowhere near peak. So what advice do you have for somebody that's our age, maybe a little bit younger, like is considering taking a different path in life?

and has something they want to try, but just doesn't know where to go with it or, or if they like believe in themselves yet, like what, what do you say to that person? I honestly say that the number one most important thing is grit and persistence. And there have been a lot of times over the last six years where Nate and I have regretted dropping out of school and starting a business. And we wondered why we didn't just do the standard path. And we looked at all of our friends who were working in banking or private equity or consulting and had

regular jobs and regular salaries and we were pretty jealous but we kept pushing through and I would say about a year ago we got to a point where we were suddenly very very happy in the direction we had taken and so my advice would be like just keep pushing through and if you have that vision spark of something you want to do you're never going to be able to like be in the perfect position to do it so go do it

Josh Felgoise (43:16.352)

See what happens, keep pushing through. Even if at times you feel like it's not the ideal situation, I would keep pushing through and ultimately you'll get to a positive point. And even that doesn't mean it's going to be a home run success every time, but even when things aren't huge successes, there's massive amounts of learnings that come from it and like huge amounts of learnings that come out of it. Huge amounts of relationships and just growth that come out of every single experience.

I did an episode on comparing yourself to your friends and other people who, whether it's with dating, whether it's with jobs. mean, at this age, it's something that's so persistent that we're all comparing ourselves to everybody else. And I'm sure there's somebody out listening to this right now that's probably comparing themselves to you. Like, I wish I started something earlier, or I wish I could believe in myself to start that thing. Like talk about a little bit, like where you were in that head space of like,

Because it's funny to hear you say that you were envious or jealous of the friends who had the corporate jobs. I'm sure people listening to this are not going to be thinking like are thinking the exact opposite of you. So I like it's great to hear that you're on the other side of that. But like let's dig into that a little bit. Like when you were there what why were you jealous of those people and like like what what was going on then? Yeah a few things. First of all we

throughout this have never really taken salaries from the companies we've started. We've always wanted to put as much money back into the business as possible. so seeing our friends who are making a lot of money, even though, know, relatively speaking, they're early in their careers, they're already making, you know, relative to us, a huge amount of money. so that was definitely a factor that I think we were a little jealous about early on. But more than that, I think it was the structure and the mentorship and being in an organization that

they were learning like hard skills. And for us, it sort of felt like we were sometimes a bit lost and didn't really know what we were supposed to be doing and didn't have anyone to turn to to sort of give us instructions. And so I think we were a little bit jealous of people who had people to learn from in a way that we didn't. looking back on it now, I don't think there's

Josh Felgoise (45:23.53)

Any question we learn 10 times more than we ever would have in a corporate job. we've now built for ourselves an incredible group of mentors and people who we can go to to ask questions and help us think through things and push us to really learn and be better operators and be better founders. so I think we had definitely a turning point, but there have been a lot of times when we've been jealous. And even now there are times when we look at friends who have cool jobs and think, you know,

We wish we were doing something different, but we love what we do and we have a lot of things that we want to do in the future that we're working towards and you know, Are very excited for it. And it's, totally like exactly on that same wavelength of what you're saying about like the structure. That's kind of where I was thinking about it because I would, I assume in my own job, then there's times I'm like, it's almost too structured and I wish I had more of what you have. It's like the flexibility to go to the gym at whatever time you want and like be able to take the meetings wherever you want and all that on all that.

great stuff. it's funny because everybody's always comparing themselves to each other, especially at this age. And it's, it's cool to, mean, it's not cool to see, but it's, good to know that like somebody who is in a period of success is also going through that same thing. Yeah. and I very much, thrive on structure and I, mean, that's why I come into an office every single day. Like I need kind of the routine of getting up, going to the gym, getting to an office. And that's one of the things that Ben really brings to our company, which is amazing is

that structure, putting that process in place, something that Nate and I are not naturally super good at. Yeah. And it's, it's just, it's cool to hear that. And like, one of the reasons I like doing this podcast so much love doing this podcast so much is bringing on so many perspectives of guys who are my age, younger, older, but just like people who are doing different things and can bring such different perspectives on it.

but at the end of the day, we're all going through the same thing. all share the same emotion and the same anxieties and stresses and jealousies and worries. it's cool to have that conversation with you about that. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. 100%. Well, this was really cool. I love the product. I literally like what you guys are doing. I believe in it. I've tried Symbiotica before. I've tried those other products before.

Josh Felgoise (47:37.686)

And when you said that like and I've I learned them through podcasts and this may be not be interesting to some people listening right now But like I heard them through this skinny confidential podcast. I'm in her show with Chervin is their founder, right? I think so. I'm not sure exactly. Yeah, okay But I took them for a little while and I was like, don't think they're doing anything like I don't feel a difference Yeah, so I want to just like end on that note of like how long should somebody take these to start feeling a difference like

Where if somebody is leaving this podcast and is like I like Zeke I believe in this product Where should they start? What should they do and how long should they take it for? Yeah, you should go to absorb more comm you should order a little bit. Yeah And you'll feel them within an hour. These are we like say they're formulated to feel so all of these are meant to be felt immediately That's why we built them with these ingredients And so we think that not only is it really important for people to actually feel the supplements know they're working

But it builds trust in the brand and reinforces that absorption message and makes people know that the bioavailability is actually there. And so they're all formulated to feel you'll feel them within an hour. Try them at absorb more.com and I'm sure you'll love them. Great. Thank you. And the flavor is really good. So, so try my favorites were the, what are these two flavors? Calm and restore. Common restore. My two favorites and restore is for hangovers. Not officially, in my mind, that's going to be a recommendation I put on my website too. Cause I really like it. Yeah, that's great.

Uh, well thanks for doing this. This was awesome. Thank you so much having me. It was a lot of fun. Yeah. And we'll do it again when you drop more flavors. Perfect. And we'll bring on we'll do it in a sauna. Yeah, we'll do it. And we'll bring on Nate too. Amazing. Sounds good. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for listening to the first episode of Season 2 of Guy Set. If you liked this episode, really hope you did. Please like, subscribe, give this episode five stars, give it a review, send it to your friend, your enemy, your mom, your cousin, whoever the hell you want to send it to.

If you have any questions, anything you me to talk about, that should be talked about, send it to my email, josh at guyset.com, j-o-s-h at g-u-y-s-e-t.com. Put your email down below in the show notes to receive the weekly newsletter and I will see you guys next Tuesday. See you guys.