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Today’s Not Boring is brought to you by… Cometeer

Whenever I have a sponsor, I say “This week’s Not Boring was brought to you by…” In truth, every Not Boring is brought to you by Cometeer. I write seven days a week, waking up as early as 5am before the baby gets up so that I can get some work done before the day’s craziness. Every day, without fail, I drink three Cometeers to keep me going. 

Normally, when I tell people about Cometeer, I leave them hanging. The company has had a pretty tight waitlist until now. But today, exclusively for Not Boring Readers, they’re opening the floodgates. Use this link to skip the waitlist and get 50% off your first box (you can share it with friends, too). I’m biased, but I think you’d be crazy not to take us up on this. 

Try Cometeer

Read on to learn about the $94 billion coffee market, why I drink three Cometeer special, and why Starbucks tastes like ash…

Hi friends 👋 ,

Happy Thursday!

I’ll keep this intro short. I love this product, and I can’t wait to tell you about it. I’m a Daily Active Drinker (DAD) and Cometeer is to thank for the 10k+ words that hit your inbox every week.

Important note: today’s post is a Sponsored Deep Dive — you can read more about how I select which companies to work with here — crossed with an Investment Memo. I am a proud small investor in Cometeer, and this post is part of the reason they let me invest in the last round.

Let’s get to it.

A New Day on Earth of Coffee

Cometeer: The Official Coffee of Not Boring

With Stripe Sessions kicking off this week, one question is on everyone’s mind: what coffee do the Collison brothers drink? 

That’s easy. Cometeer, of course. 

Patrick Collison @patrickc

After seeing this tweet, a few people pointed me to cometeer.com. Basic idea: frozen capsules of concentrated coffee that you just add to hot water. After several days of consumption, can confirm that this works exceptionally well.

Patrick Collison @patrickc

Every morning, I get up and am excited for many things (another day on the planet and all that jazz), but the very best part of a new day, at least in the immediate term, is the chance to drink more coffee. ☕️🥰

October 17th 2020

20 Retweets518 Likes

Cometeer grinds, brews, and flash freezes coffees from some of the country’s best roasters to preserve the full complexity and deliciousness of each cup until you’re ready to drink it. This is not instant coffee, which is brewed and dehydrated coffee; this is brewed and flash frozen coffee that you melt. To make that happen, they’re solving a whole bunch of challenges that have plagued the coffee supply chain, and delivering my favorite cup of coffee in the process. 

Drop the puck in a mug, pour hot water, and voila. The Cometeer I make at home in 30 seconds is better than the vast majority of pour-overs I’ve had in NYC.

Cometeer is great for iced coffees and espresso-based beverages, too. Really, the taste is as good if not better than barista-quality, and even I can whip up the fancier ones with minimal effort. I didn’t even know how to brew a pot of coffee until a couple years ago. 

The Collisons are just two of the company’s high-profile fans. Cometeer has confirmed that it’s raised over $50 million from a stacked list of venture funds, founders, DTC experts, coffee connoisseurs, and celebrities. 

Institutional Investors include D1 Capital, Elephant, Tao Capital, Addition Ventures, Avenir, Greycroft Partners, and TQ Ventures. Coffee-related backers include the founder of Keurig Green Mountain, the former President of Nespresso, and lead investors in Blue Bottle.  Celebrity backers include models, celebrity chefs, actors, and musicians ranging from Maroon 5 frontman Adam Levine to Breaking Bad star Aaron Paul. Notable entrepreneur investors include the founders of Allbirds, Android Mobile, Better Mortgage, Candid, Daring Foods, Dollar Shave Club, Gloss Genius, Flatiron Health, Harry's Shave Club, Materialize, Morning Brew, Omaze, Parade, Snorkel AI, Scopely, Stripe, Ramp, and Warby Parker, to name a few.  In fact, over twenty founders of billion-dollar businesses sit on the cap table.

Not Boring isn’t a billion dollar business (yet), but I’m investing too, because I did the math. I drink 3 Cometeers per day on average. That’s 1,095 Cometeers per year. Count ‘em:

At $2 per capsule, I’ll spend $2,190 on Cometeer this year. And assuming that I drink this stuff ‘til I die (I give myself a good 50 years), my lifetime spend on Cometeer is going to be $109,500. It seems high, but I get three coffees for less than the price of two from a decent coffee shop, and it’s in a whole different league than other capsules or pods in terms of taste and caffeine levels. 

What it all comes back to is the fact that the coffee is really good. I’m biased and not an expert, so don’t take my word for it. Cometeer won Best New Product at the Specialty Coffee Expo in 2019, the Expo’s most prestigious award. That’s an event at which people normally run away from anything in a capsule or a pod, and Global Coffee Reports Magazine noted, “Just went you thought you’d seen it all, the Cometeer Coffee Capsule, winner of the Best New Product open class category, had fans flocking to the product like seagulls to a chip.”

So this is a post about coffee, as a product and as a business. We’ll treat this post like an Investment Memo, and answer the question: why am I, and so many other investors, so excited about what Cometeer’s brewing? 

• Founding Story and Team: Cometeer Co-Founder and CEO Matt Roberts used to be a Dunkin’ guy, until he went abroad and met George Howell, who turned him  on to the good stuff. He and his Co-founder/CTO Doug Hoon have built a stellar team.

• Market: Coffee is a $94 billion market in the US alone, and there’s a lot of room for improvement. Cometeer has the chance to do to coffee what craft beer did to beer. 

• Product: Cometeer is legitimately great coffee. The magic is in the how. 

• Mission: The why is important, too. Cometeer wants to pay farmers more, promote independent roasters, and stop throwing pods into landfills.  

• Challenges: Brewing and sourcing great coffee at scale is hard. Cold supply chain is hard. 

• Opportunity: Cometeer has the chance to redefine normal peoples’ expectations around coffee and become a platform for the world’s best coffee.

When Austin Rief first told me about Cometeer and its valuation, I thought it sounded a little crazy. “Just try it and let me know what you think.” 

I’m going to write a bunch of words today, but to really understand it, I’m going to tell you the same thing that Austin told me: you just need to try it. Everyone drinks coffee. You should drink the good stuff. Use the Not Boring link to jump the waitlist and get 50% off your first box, just $1 a cup, and let me know what you think.  

Try Cometeer

Cometeer is delicious, patent-protected, and creating a new market within a massive market that’s ripe for innovation. Put down that burnt Starbucks and let’s learn about coffee.

Founding Story & Team: Inspiration from Abroad 

Investors who’ve been doing it for a while like to talk about their ability to “pattern match.” Borrowed from computer science, pattern matching for investors means noticing similarities between things they’ve seen in the past and things they’re seeing now. If an investor, for example, found success six out of six times she invested in someone with purple hair, she’ll take the next purple-haired founder she meets very seriously. 

Well, there’s a pretty clear pattern of successful coffee brands inspired by European travel. 

In 1975, a young Nestlé engineer named Eric Favre took a trip from the company’s headquarters in Vevey, Switzerland to Rome, Italy. At the time, Nestlé made the popular Nescafé instant coffee, and Favre was tasked with building a machine that would, “combine the convenience of domestic coffee with the quality of an Italian espresso bar.” Wandering the streets of Rome, he noticed one café with a line snaking around the block: Sant’Eustachio Il Caffè. The secret, he discovered, was that while other baristas pumped the piston on the espresso machine once,  Sant’Eustachio baristas pumped it repeatedly, pushing more water and air into the beans, which drew out more flavor and produced more of a crema on top. He went back to Switzerland, and spent the next eleven years creating what would become the Nespresso machine. 

While Favre and his team were in the lab, a young man from Brooklyn’s Canarsie neighborhood, Howard Schultz, took a job at a young Seattle-based coffee company called Starbucks, as its Director of Retail Operations and Marketing. Two years in, in 1983, a trip abroad turned his profession into a calling. As Mario Gabriele wrote in Starbucks, a Tech Company: 

Like so many before him, Schultz took a trip to Italy and fell in love with the country’s culture. As you might expect, he particularly marveled at the quality of the espresso, and even more importantly, found himself captivated by the “romance” that illuminated Milan’s coffee bars.

John Sylvan spent the late ‘80s and early ‘90s tinkering on a product that would solve the all-or-nothing nature of coffee -- brew a full pot and leave some sitting out, stale, or don’t have coffee at all. In 1992, he landed on a single-serving pod of coffee grounds and the machine to brew it, brought on his college roommate, Peter Dragone to help him build an actual business, and the two launched Keurig. 

Keurig wasn’t born abroad, although the name came from looking up the Dutch word for “excellence” in the dictionary. It was born in Boston. 

It’s poetic, then, that the next big thing in coffee was born during a Massachusettsan’s semester abroad in Spain. 

Matt Roberts grew up outside of Boston, loving coffee. But by coffee, he meant something weak and watery, loaded up with cream and sugar, like an adult milkshake. Then in 2012, Roberts, a computer science and economics double major at Bentley University, studied abroad in Pamplona, Spain. When he got there, he couldn’t find anywhere that would serve him his sugary, creamy iced coffee. 

So he did what entrepreneurs do: he experimented with ways to make his own iced coffee at home. While he was tinkering in Spain, he made a discovery that he continued pursuing when he got back home, and continues pursuing to this day. He froze his coffee into ice cubes.

Matt knew he was on to something, so he filed some patents around his process and started meeting people, one of whom was George Howell, the founder of Coffee Connection and the inventor of the frappuccino. Howell was a coffee legend. When they met, Matt made him a frappuccino, because that’s what you do for the frappuccino guy. He spit it out, and instead introduced Matt to a delicious Ethiopian roast. After tasting great coffee, he knew that he had to pursue that level of quality. 

This was his insight: combining the convenience of the melting ice cubes with the quality of specialty coffee would be a home run... if it was possible. 

Up until that point, people who wanted to drink great coffee had a couple of choices: go to a great coffee shop or buy good equipment, get good beans, and do it yourself. The former is great if you live or work near a great coffee shop and want to spend $3-5 a few times a day, and the latter is great if you’re one of the handful of people who’s willing to put in the time to learn how to brew a great cup of coffee. 

But nothing on the market combined convenience and quality. That was Matt’s opportunity. He raised some money, met and partnered with great chemists and engineers, and went into the lab to create the perfect coffee capsule. 

He believed that if he were able to perfectly roast, brew, and deliver the world’s very best coffee, from a variety of roasters all using a variety of beans, drinkers would come to appreciate the many regions, styles, and flavor profiles of coffee, like they do wine or craft beer. 

To learn about the coffee market, how Cometeer makes its coffee, the challenges it faces, its mission, and the big opportunity…

Continue Reading Online

Thanks to Puja for editing, Austin for the intro, and to Matt, Zach, and Christina for letting me tell the Cometeer story.

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Thanks for reading and see you on Thursday,

Packy