Glacéau founder and CEO shares tips for start-up success
Homa Mojtabai, WG'08
Issue date: 12/4/06 Section: News
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Glacéau was born out of a Manhattan water contamination scare, with Bikoff wondering why there was no bottled water available for sale with added nutritional properties but has since expanded throughout the world. Smart Water, the firm's signature product, is vapor distilled with added electrolytes. Glacéau is experiencing a period of remarkable growth - the company recently closed a $677 million deal with TATA India, and, according to Bikoff, is closing in on a billion dollars in revenues.
You don't have an MBA, what value then do you think the degree brings?
I have often though about how great it would have been to have gotten an MBA, and I just never had the time... to do it. It's an amazing head start for people. We obviously have a lot of MBAs in the company, and I would say that the people who have gotten the best education are way ahead of the game when it comes to their analytical skills and ability to really assess a situation.
The one thing that I would say might not come from a purely classical education is your ability to... kind of trust your instincts and not get too caught up in process and what the so-called experts think. I think that part of being an entrepreneur is going against conventional wisdom. If you're too steeped in an appreciation for conventional wisdom, it's kind of hard to break away from that.
What advice would you give to a Wharton student with a bright idea? How to graduate in debt and still get a business off the ground?
The idea is certainly the seed, the root of success. Without the idea, no matter what you do, it's probably not worth the level of sacrifice you need to make. So you definitely want to rally behind your own great idea."
Given the lessons that being an entrepreneur have taught me, you really have to be prepared to do the tough jobs, and the unglamorous jobs, you're not going to be an executive overnight. You may be the founder and CEO of your own little startup, but that doesn't mean that you're not going to have to do the hardest jobs that nobody else in the business really want to do. For me when I got started that meant walking up and down the streets of Manhattan with a cooler bag on my back with samples of Vitamin Water in it trying to convince people in delis to buy it who were rejecting me one after the other after the other.
And today in our business that's still the hardest job and that was the job that I knew I had to do better than anybody, long before I knew we had success... After you've gotten an education and think you have all these great tools at your fingertips [like OPIM models, perhaps?] it's hard to step back and do the dirty work.
What do you think has been the most critical factor to you success?
The most critical factor has been building a great team. It's really hard to sometimes appreciate the need to invest in great people. You know everybody talks about investing in their brand and investing in real estate and investing in this and that, I think the best investment I ever made is in people... We've got just an amazing group of people that do an outstanding job everyday of keeping the brand so relevant that we're growing explosively.
I read recently that you sold part of Glacéau, and I was wondering how you felt about bootstrapping, venture capital and financing?
VCs aren't going to be throwing money at you until you prove you've got some sort of scalable revenue stream. So you do have to bootstrap at the beginning and that requires a lot of sacrifice. There were years when I was sweating every payroll. I'm not saying there's anything you can do about it, you've just got to accept it. That's part of the experience. It [bootstrapping] is painful while it's happening but after that you're okay. Venture capital is a double-edged sword and ... you definitely need it to grow. On the other hand, the horror stories that everybody talks about are absolutely true... we were very careful when negotiating with VCs to give them all of the downside protection they insisted on but we negotiated the inverse of that. We negotiated upside protection. So as we performed, we were able to get back more and more of what we had given up... Today TATA has a 30% minority stake, but... it's a pure minority stake and the company is controlled by me and the majority shareholders.
What's the most valuable characteristic for an entrepreneur to have?
The common denominator for most of the successful entrepreneurs that I've seen is what some people might consider either fanaticism or... control-freaks - that whole sentiment... the best word I would use is 'passion'. You really do need to go into your market with extraordinary passion because there are so many opportunities to be overwhelmed and distracted and undermined. The thing that really, really, really keeps you going is that passion that burns deeply within you. And that means you need to pick something that you can be passionate about. So I would caution against picking something purely to make money. The money will come, in my opinion, if you pick something that you can really give it everything you've got and not feel regrets.
So you how do you manage to balance family, personal life, and work you are passionate about?
It's really hard. In my case, there's very little distinction between my professional life and my personal life: everything is kind of intertwined. I met my wife at one of these conferences. It's all kind of enmeshed. My best friends are my colleagues... I guess I'm never really not working. It's just that work and life are one.
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