Spindrift: Bill Creelman

How I Built This with Guy Raz

• Episode: Spindrift: Bill Creelman
• Website: How I Built This with Guy Raz
• Feed URL: http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast.php?id=510313
• Duration: 01:06:42
• Published: 2020-01-13 06:01

Bill Creelman graduated from college in 1996 with a business plan — to sell smoked fish from Nantucket. But over time, that idea morphed unpredictably into a brand that sold cocktail seasonings and supplies. After selling that company to liquor giant Diageo, Bill wanted to stay in the beverage industry. As a way of kicking his Diet Coke habit, he started making sparkling water with a fresh squeeze of lemon or grapefruit. That deceptively simple idea grew into Spindrift, a beverage that came with huge production challenges. Today, the company has an annual revenue topping $100 million. PLUS in our post-script "How You Built That," Gaurav Chawla loved home-made chai but hated how long it took to make. So he quit his engineering job and started the five-year process to create Chime — an automatic chai brewer that uses tea and spices from India.