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Seth Goldman and Craig Dubitsky both know a thing or two (or three) about launching and leading fast-growth consumer brands. After all, they’re both successful serial entrepreneurs.
Goldman co-founded Honest Tea, which landed on the Inc. 5000 seven times before being acquired by Coca-Cola in 2011. But in 2022, Goldman got the news that Coca-Cola was discontinuing the brand he had spent over two decades building. Two weeks later, he was back in the tea business as the founder of Just Ice Tea, which landed on this year’s Inc. 5000 at No. 88 after growing revenue by 3,750 percent over the past three years. With that rapid trajectory, the company is already larger than Honest Tea was in its 10th year, says Goldman.
Craig Dubitsky co-founded EOS, the personal care brand best known for its spherical lip balm containers, in 2007, and by 2012 he was on to his next venture. Dubitsky founded Hello Products, which became America’s fastest-growing oral care brand before it was acquired by Colgate-Palmolive for a reported $351 million in 2020. Four years after that exit, he teamed up with Academy Award-winning actor Robert Downey Jr. to co-found the coffee brand Happy, which has scaled to more than 60,000 distribution points, including Target, Walmart, CVS, Sprouts, and Amazon.
The secret to emulating their success? The two serial entrepreneurs say their playbook comes down to a simple mantra: Be the kind of founder people want to work with again. Or even more succinctly, as Goldman put it: Consider karma.
“Try to put the right intentions into what you do,” says Goldman, who spoke at the Inc. 5000 Conference in Phoenix on Friday. “Try to do things the right way. There’s a lot that comes back 100 percent.”
For Just Ice Tea, that included Honest Tea’s entire supply chain. Growers, suppliers, bottling plants, retailers, and retailers reached out to offer expedited terms and future shelf space—before Goldman even had a working product. His former employees came back too.
“A lot of the Honest Tea people had moved on to their career, and they said, ‘I want one last ride.’ That was just really gratifying,” says Goldman. “The network came to us.”
Dubitsky had the same experience when he launched Happy last year. He recruited his former team, which had worked together for over a decade and spanned supply chain, logistics, finance, research and design, graphic design, and industrial design.
“My key peeps all came because we worked together for 12 years. People had babies. People got married. They had milestone birthdays. We were in it,” says Dubitsky. “So when it was time to start a new thing, they were like, ‘Yeah, we’re all in,’ and it gave us such a leg up.”
To instill that sort of deeply embedded culture and sense of ownership over their work, both Goldman and Dubitsky offered their employees equity.
“That for us has always been a mainstay of how we get people empowered and fired up,” says Goldman.
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Ali Donaldson
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