Cold Cycle Coffee, Inc.

University of Texas at Austin, McCombs School of Business 

Industry: Food Tech

MBA Founding Student Name(s): Samuel Stein, Bruce Boville, Monika Rao

Brief Description of Solution: A simple all-in0one solution to make great cold coffee without a 24 hour wait or arduous cleanup.

Funding Dollars: $600,000

What led you to launch this venture? I fell in love with coffee while I was installing thermometers in an Italian oil and gas refinery in 2016. However, I fell in love with cold brew coffee when I came back to Texas and espresso was too hot. I started drinking Cold brew even though it did have its problems. It was high risk with an expensive brew process, hard to clean, and it took 24 hours. This meant I would be undercaffeinated when my roommate drank the last sip and left me none before work. Using my mechanical engineering knowledge from the job, I created a new process that solved all three of those problems.

What has been your biggest accomplishment so far with venture? Creating a team of strong marketers and finance leaders is what I am most proud of doing. Getting Bruce to lead in sales, business modeling, and organization changed the idea from a nerdy-garage fascination into a business. Further, Monika leading in fundraising and marketing changed us from some weird dudes giving away free coffee into the future of cold coffee. This company is nothing without the team, and I am so proud to have met them and brought them on this journey with me.

What has been the most significant challenge you’ve faced in creating your company and how did you solve it? The most significant challenge I have in the company is not letting perfect get in the way of progress. I am starting to understand my desire for perfection. This includes all the bells-and-whistles, graphs, charts, and science behind a good idea, not to mention when a Minimum Viable Product (or MVP) is much more useful (and often cheaper!). The business pressures to keep my team intact, sell product, and move forward have taught me testing an MVP is better than adding another feature and losing precious time, money, and sanity. It feels weird to thank constraints for creation, but the fear of Bruce and Monika getting other jobs pivoted this company onto a more successful track.

How has your MBA program helped you further this startup venture? Besides the obvious – meeting my cofounders who were as ambitious and caffeine oriented as me – I appreciated the perspective shift the MBA allowed. The MBA program helped me to move from an engineering mindset, where risk is not tolerated and disclosed in painful detail, to a business mindset, where risk is celebrated and accounted for in models, tests, and multipliers. This shift helped me share my invention and get the word out to my friends, family, and colleagues. Sharing helped me get support and support led to the growth we are seeing today.

Which MBA class has been most valuable in building your startup and what was the biggest lesson you gained from it? New Venture Finance with Josh Alexander made us recurringly pitch our companies with business plans as our understanding of how startups are funded grew. My team, including cofounder Bruce, pitched Cold Cycle Coffee, which had to adapt to hit more ambitious targets, increase a marketing budget, and pay back VCs who needed 25x returns. This changed how I looked at the company and taught me how I needed to grow the business.

What professor made a significant contribution to your plans and why? Concurrently, Bruce and I were enrolled in an HR statistical class with Professor P. J. Green. A picture of a friendly coffee competition and a home-roaster in syllabus day icebreakers led me to know PJ was going to be a fantastic resource for Cold Cycle Coffee. It helped convince Bruce that coffee tech was a great industry to enter. We worked with him on understanding the industry, market drivers, and how to influence coffee nerds – and we still use him as an expert today.

How has your local startup ecosystem contributed to your venture’s development and success? Austin, Texas is a fantastic place to spread your idea to interested markets, investors, and consumers. There are gigantic conferences, such as SXSW and F1, tech giants like Dell and Tesla, and local clubs like the Red Fridge Society and Rice Alliance Austin. Here, our business has had a platform to pitch and share our coffee since our current prototype was introduced to the market. The University of Texas did a fantastic job of training our team to pitch at public events such as the Longhorn City Limits Showcase and the John Brumley Texas Venture Labs Pitch Competition. These events quickly segued into introductions that brought us to the people we needed to raise capital and hype for a successful company.

What is your long-term goal with your startup?  Cold Coffee takes up about a fifth of the $80-billion-dollar coffee service industry and is growing to a third of the industry. Cold Cycle Coffee makes a better, faster, cheaper cup than the current convention, and we hope to be the primary extractor of this type of coffee. Expect to see us in your offices, bakeries, homes, and especially your coffee shops very soon!

Looking back, what is the biggest lesson you wished you’d known before launching and scaling your venture? The idea for Cold Cycle Coffee happened eight years ago, and my approach to starting the company was to be trained by various companies, like a commercial rugged keyboard manufacturer, a manufacturing consultancy, and a clean room engineering job. I chose to use my time to study manufacturing over business for far longer than I needed to start this company. I wish I had gotten my MBA sooner, and hired an engineering replacement. As the saying goes, the next best time is now. If I hadn’t taken so long, I wouldn’t have an established market, and I wouldn’t have gathered this fantastic team, so it all worked out!

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