Drew Taggart

But at the time, I was like, this is the coolest company ever.

It's actually changed my life and my friends' lives.

I want to find more stuff like this versus another beverage company or something like that.

We were very lucky with Poppy.

And Poppy, to its credit, reinvented what the soda category looked like and will probably look like in the future.

That was a really nice blend of technology and forward thinking and messaging.

And then as it relates to marketing and distribution, whereas I think a lot of like CPG is just distribution and kind of marketing.

Kind of reminds me of being like your assembly in middle school, high school, where like every now and again, they would bring in like a professional.

They would speak about their career to the audience for like an hour.

And you'd be like, that guy actually did this shit.

This is really interesting and exciting to me to learn from versus like the events like a teacher that's just like, here's my perspective on something that happened or a career.

In venture, you get to sit down for half an hour, an hour of

hopefully many, many times with like a founder that's like, I've studied this space.

I've lived and breathed this business.

And I'm going to tell you everything about it right now.

For someone like me, that's the coolest thing to spend five or six hours a day learning from an experienced person in a technologically exciting area.

Obviously the evolution of Mantis has like changed.

I don't want to say changed dramatically, just evolved a lot.

I mean, I remember like on our first partner call, they were like, so how much are we going to raise?

And someone was like a hundred million.