On this episode of “Bruin to Bruin,” Aidan Teeger interviews Moshe Kashani, a UCLA alumnus who founded Driply Coffee, a small-batch cold brew coffee brand. Kashani shares his entrepreneurial journey, from selling lattes in his dorm room to securing shelf space in retailers, such as Erewhon and the UCLA Store.

Aidan Teeger: Welcome to Bruin to Bruin, where we tap into the wisdom and insights of the UCLA community. Today’s spotlight is on Moshe Kashani, who graduated in 2019 with a major in history and is now the founder and owner of Driply Coffee. Moshe, thank you for joining this week. Before we start talking about your company, Driply Coffee, do you think you could give a brief timeline of your history at UCLA?

Moshe Kashani: I started at UCLA a while ago. I had actually started at SMC. I spent two years there, and then transferred to UCLA, spent two years here, and then graduated in 2019. My major was history, but with a focus on pre-med, which is an interesting background, because I didn’t really have a strong high school background in terms of secular education. I had started at SMC with kind of the intent of just getting my feet wet with higher education and college in general. I had started with the intent to go for engineering, and from there I met some people who were pre-med, pre-dental, pre-health, and they had a very clear path ahead of them. From there I made friends with that group, and it made a lot of sense to follow that path. It was a very clear path. It had a lot of structure to it. I decided to pursue the medical field.

At SMC, I think I first started as a chemical engineering major. You don’t really declare a major there. It’s more informal—it’s not the most official thing. And then as a transfer, I was looking over the stats with acceptance rates for UCLA and discussing with my friends. And as far as the medical path goes, you don’t actually need a major that’s relevant to anything in the medical field. As long as you completed your general eds and your credits, you could transfer. A couple of my friends were doing history, and I said, “You know what, why not? It’s a lot less competitive.” I applied as history, and I thought I would just change it to engineering once I got into UCLA. I ended up just never doing that. I basically finished all my history requirements as well as doing all my pre-med requirements, doing all those classes—the chemistries, the biology classes, etc., getting all that done. And yeah, completed all my coursework and graduated.

AT: You finished with a bachelor’s in history, correct?

MK: Yes.

AT: So did you end up making the decision to continue and finish with history because history was interesting, or because you discovered that for you, pre-med was disinteresting?

MK: So, yes and yes. I did find history interesting to the point where I kept the major. It was fun. A lot of people say, “Oh, history is very easy,” but it’s what you make of it, you know? It’s the work you put in, what you get out. I did find history very interesting. It’s not the deepest passion of mine. It’s not something I really seek out for recreational reading, but it was very enjoyable, and I said, “You know what, I’m gonna stick with it.” I did all my requirements, I enjoyed a lot of the classes. It was more about being part of the UCLA community. Being a student, the history major, or just any major, allowed me to be on campus and take some elective classes. I found my pre-med classes very interesting as well. I kept all those credits. I took all my pre-med classes at UCLA. Those were very interesting. I liked all the biology classes. I got good grades in them. In fact, I did better in my pre-med classes than in my history classes. But the major part of it was just, “It works, I like it,” so I went on with history and took that degree.

And from there— my final quarter, I believe it was winter quarter, I took off and dedicated that quarter to studying for the MCAT. Then I came back in the spring and had a couple of history classes left, a couple of GE requirements, or not even GE, just elective credits. I completed those, and right there at graduation, I started applying to medical school. I had my MCAT score, and I started doing applications. There was a school in Israel, Technion. They had a recruiter who happened to be at an event I was at. He was basically out there recruiting, giving his spiel on how good the school is and getting the students to enroll and all that, and then at the end of his presentation, he mentioned they had a couple of spots left for students who had their prereqs and an MCAT score already. That’s a requirement, to already have an MCAT score, because a lot of students don’t get that till after they graduate. He said “If you have any friends like that, let me know”. And, at the end of the presentation, I went up to him and said, “Hey, I have an MCAT score and I have my prereqs.” He said, “OK, session starts in five weeks, send in your application, and I’ll push it through.” Short of it is, I got accepted to Technion in Israel the same year I graduated—2019. I was accepted for the class of 2023, and I spent one semester and I decided that the medical path wasn’t for me. And that’s when I came back. That was right when… so, at the end of the first semester there, I remember the date, I think we had our last final day before or maybe a week before–I was vacationing around the country, doing some touring, and I remember it was March 18th, 2020, I came back to my apartment to find my roommate packing his bags. He said, “COVID’s here, they’re closing down the city, I’m getting on a plane,” and he left. And I was like “Oh, OK”.

AT: “Here I am”

MK: Yup. Here I am. So I pulled out my phone, looked up flights, and said “Hey, there’s a flight in four hours.” So I packed up my stuff, got on a bus to the airport.

AT: Amazing

MK: Yeah, I haven’t looked back since.

AT: Where did you go?

MK: Los Angeles.

AT: Okay, so you went straight back to Los Angeles?

MK: Yes, straight back to LA.

AT: Okay, is that where you were from, initially?

MK: Yup, born and raised here, spent my whole life here, two years of high school in Cincinnati, but the majority of my time has been in LA.

AT: Okay, and was that the end of your academic era? Did you do anything beyond that?

MK: Academically, no. That was probably the end of it.

AT: That was it, no Master’s?

MK: No, I haven’t. Maybe in the future but since then I haven’t pursued a masters or any other education.

AT: Now, talk to me about coffee. Where did this idea come from? Why coffee?

MK: Great question. I started running a coffee business out of my dorm room. I would sell lattes–I would literally make lattes, put them in a cup, and sell them to other classmates. That’s kind of where I first started the concept of selling coffee?

AT: And why do you think people opted for buying your coffee versus going somewhere else?

MK: It was convenient.

AT: Convenient?

MK: Yeah, I’d deliver it. I think it was a dollar or a dollar twenty-five, and I’d bring you a hot pre-made cup of coffee.

AT: Fair enough. What year was this specifically?

MK: I was looking through my Google Drive a while back and found an old logo I designed.

AT: Oh really? Was it Driply back then?

MK: No, it was called Cash Coffee.

AT: Do you think, at that point, you could have foreseen turning it into a business beyond college?

MK: No, not at all. It was just a high school hustle. A lot of people had high school hustles. There was a guy selling hot dogs and burgers out of his dorm room every Thursday night.

AT: Doesn’t sound very sanitary

MK: It was great, he had a George Foreman (Grill).

AT: Oh really?

MK: Yeah It was great he set up like a whole little kitchen there.

AT: Okay. So what does the timeline look like from finishing at UCLA and then subsequently the university in Israel, and then coming back here, setting up Driply? Did you work on that through the early period of COVID?

MK: Yes. So, early period of COVID, I had gotten back here. It was a very depressing time. It was dark times. Nobody was seeing other humans. It was a very lonely time. I was kind of weighing out my options, trying to meet up with friends, just discussing life at the time. I was still considering pursuing engineering. That was one thing I was doing. I think I ended up starting an IT company where we did low voltage work, so that includes things like surveillance cameras and access control systems. I’d look for projects where people were either building houses or offices and then install security cameras, networking, access control, like key cards, that kind of stuff. I did that for a little bit, but it never really popped off, so we fizzled it down. I have a friend, he still kind of runs it. He got a corporate job, but he still has the side business for small projects.

And I got a corporate job myself at the time. So this was somewhere between, I think, maybe 2021, where I had run into these guys who owned a business for… I don’t know the exact category, but it was shampoos, conditioners, essential oils, that kind of stuff.

AT: Beauty products type things.

MK: Beauty products like the rollers, that kind of stuff. That was their main business, and hand sanitizer also falls under that category.

AT: Oh yeah, he did well, didn’t he?

MK: Oh, they did extremely well. So I got a job there as an executive assistant/operations manager. That was my first corporate job out of college, nine to five. My training was in Gardena, and I would run the daily operations there. I learned a lot about running a business—how invoicing worked, negotiations, suppliers, distributors, logistics, all that kind of stuff. I stayed there for a while, and after about six months to a year or so, I left. I just didn’t really like it there. It was a far drive, it wasn’t very… entertaining. What’s another word for fun?

AT: Amusing wouldn’t be the right word.

MK: I didn’t find the work very enjoyable.

AT: Yeah, you can imagine that something like that does become stagnant after a while. A lot of people with an entrepreneurial tendency tend to look for challenges and ways to stretch themselves a little bit more.

MK: Right, so, back to coffee.

AT: Right. I’m holding one of the cans right here. You’re in Erewhon, you’re in the UCLA Store, so you’ve clearly been able to produce at scale by this point. And we’re not talking about a long time from concept to now. When do you think you really started working on Driply as a brand?

MK: Right, so… I started working on it around December of 2022. That’s when I decided, I said “you know what, I’m doing this.” I filed the LLC, got the trademarks, the bank accounts, all that—the website. So December 2022 was when I made that decision to go forward with it.

AT: December of 2022, okay. Do you think you learned how to do all that—get a business up and running—because of your prior experience working in a startup, if you want to call it a startup?

MK: I would say a bit of it helped. I did have prior experience, even way back at UCLA. Oh my god, how did we forget this. I had started a company as a student. It was called Fizzy Tops, and we opened an LLC.

AT: Fizzy Tops?

MK: Yeah, Fizzy Tops.

AT: Fizzy Tops. Okay, I was trying to guess what that could be. Go on.

MK: So, at the time, the Juul e-cigarette was very popular all over campus. It actually wasn’t my idea at all. A friend of mine came to me and said, “Hey, I have an idea. People are putting wraps on these things; they’re putting stickers. Let’s make a piece that goes on top of the mouthpiece, like a sticker, but with different colors, shapes, and all that. We can also market it as a hygienic thing because people were sharing them. You could swap your tops.” We actually got a patent on the design. He came to me with the idea, and I said, “Fine, I’ll design it.” I had three 3D printers at home at the time.

AT: Why do you need three?

MK: I build them for fun.

AT: You build 3D printers?

MK: Yeah. Like I said, I always wanted to pursue engineering, and that’s been my outlet. Back in the day, I would tinker with those machines. So, I had a bit of experience in production and that side of things. And I had built some machines and put the product together. Anyway, we tried marketing it, but it never went anywhere. But that’s something that happened, some entrepreneurial background. So I did have some background in running things. At least with a failed business, I knew how to make websites and all that. Now, as far as working at the corporation, at that startup, there were a lot of small details that did help me out—like negotiations, paperwork, and that kind of thing.

AT: Right, the thing with students nowadays, especially at UCLA, is that they’re quite ambitious. There are a lot of people with a lot of ideas, but they also don’t want to put aside their academics at a number two on their priority list. From the sounds of things, you were able to balance that quite well. What was the key for you, being able to go after these side hustles, end up getting a patent in a pretty short period of time, and continue with your academics?

MK: I think for me, it was the irregularity in my schedule that made it possible. So, instead of having a 9 a.m. class every day, I would have a 7 a.m. class on Monday morning, then a 2 p.m. or 3 p.m. class, and then Tuesday completely free. And then, back Wednesday, I’d have a sporadic schedule again. I think having random bursts, as bad as that might be for your anxiety and mental state, it does give you random bursts of free time as well. I’d have deadlines I’d have to grind, let’s say I had an essay due Wednesday night or Thursday night, whenever it was. But, as soon as I turned in that essay, in the middle of the quarter, I would just have a free day with absolutely nothing because there were no deadlines and no other classes I had to worry about, or there were no other projects. So I think the irregularities in my schedule made it easier to focus on these side projects, or rather, I filled my extra time with these side projects.

AT: So fast-forwarding to now, you must have recognized at some point that coffee is a pretty competitive domain.

MK: Yes.

AT: Yet, you’ve managed to find shelf space. What made you daring enough to go for that in the first place? What did you know?

MK: I figured that being so competitive and being such a mature market, if you can break in, you’re in. Meaning, if you pass the high barrier to entry, you’ve earned your place, you’re more likely to succeed. Versus, something with a lower barrier to entry, the challenges come later on. Versus, the challenges come upfront.

AT: So there would be less people that may want to emulate what you’ve done, that would succeed, because the barrier to entry is higher? And there’s more security in that?

MK: Exactly.

AT: OK, and what is it about your product—besides the fact that I’m a big fan of the label here— what is it that differentiates your product? Is there something besides the cool aesthetics and the fact that it’s in Erewhon and the UCLA Store, making it convenient for students who are surviving purely off caffeine and stimulants?

MK: Well, our product is… I guess the biggest differentiator right now is that we’re small-batch roasted, produced locally, and we’re still very hands-on with the product. There’s a lot of coffee on the market, but not much, just pure canned cold brew. There’s a couple big players and they have their place, what differentiates us is we have a lot of care and control down the chain. We’re very hands-on with our supply chain.

AT: So you understand what’s being produced and where?

MK: Exactly. Being so new and being so small allows us to really make sure there is quality control. We have a higher level of quality control throughout our supply chain. And, as far as coffee goes, most brands you would think of that are producing coffee beverages are using what’s known as commodity-grade coffee, which is the second pick from the farm. Our beans are specialty-grade. There’s a grading system where they grade the coffee at the farm, and they select the higher quality beans from the lower quality beans. They are sorted for defects and are usually known as ‘Single Origin.’ They’re origin traceable, so we can tell you what farm they came from, what country, etc. Now, if you look at a can from a competitor, they’re using commodity-grade beans from multiple origins, so they will take the runoffs from whatever farm didn’t make the cut, blend them with a bunch of other farms, over-roast them to mask the different flavor profiles, and the coffee sits in a warehouse, getting stale. That results in an inferior product.

AT: Your thing is quality.

MK: Our thing is quality, yes.

AT: And I would say over quantity. But are you planning on taking this—let’s start with this—can I ask what you guys have done in sales so far this year?

MK: We’re about 10x growth over last year.

AT: And is your intention that this stays a relatively niche product or, given more time and presumably future success, do you plan on producing it at bigger scales?

MK: So we definitely see ourselves growing and producing at a bigger scale. We, of course, would maintain the same quality, same supply chain, and all that. I do want to touch on the vision—there is a much grander vision behind Driply, and I skipped over that when we were discussing. So during the time I spent at medical school in Israel, I noticed something as a coffee lover. I had always known this because I packed my own coffee gear for medical school. It’s funny. I usually don’t pack my own coffee gear, but I knew I would need to. I had packed a Chemex, coffee filters, grinders, like an entire setup for making my own pour-over coffee.

And, the thing is, they have a ton of coffee shops across the country. All decently developed countries have coffee shops, but I could not find a cup of coffee, and it was driving me crazy. And you’re going to ask me, “What do you mean you couldn’t find a cup of coffee in a coffee shop?” If you walked in and asked for a cup of coffee, they’d look at you like, “What do you mean?” And you’d say, “I just want a cup with coffee in it.” And they’d say, “Do you want a latte?” No, I don’t want an espresso shot with milk and foam. I just want a cup with coffee. Then they’d ask, “Do you want an Americano?” No, I don’t want an espresso shot with water. I want a cup of coffee.

This repeated through every coffee shop I went to, and it was nearly impossible to find basically just a cup of coffee, like what you’d get if you walked into a Starbucks in the U.S. You walk in and say, “Can I have a coffee?” and they serve you a cup of coffee. That was my original inspiration for Driply – that lack of having just a standard cup of black coffee. Nothing special, like lattes or cappuccinos of any of that, just the lack of simple cup of black coffee – that really sparked my vision for wanting to have my own coffee shop with a focus on just the classic cup of coffee. And that’s how Driply was born from those times.

AT: And how important, in your view, is having an ethos for your brand? Quality will never be compromised, in your case. It sounds like you have every intention of sticking to that. How important is it that prospective entrepreneurs at UCLA don’t just rush into it without thinking about principles they’re going to stand by?

MK: Well, you need to be willing to evolve. You need to know that whatever your product is, or whatever your service, whatever you are providing, whatever you’re making, it needs to fit a specific world, and that world is changing. So you need to be able to evolve that, whatever it is you put out. That being said, you need to know exactly what your ethos is—what you’re not willing to compromise on and what it is that you are selling. Otherwise, change is going to come, and you say, “OK, we need to adapt,” or you don’t adapt and you just die. But you’re going to need to adapt, and if you don’t know what your values are, everything just falls apart.

AT: So tell me more about how you ended up obtaining shelf space in such a competitive market for your product.

MK: So we started off—the first retailer we ever had was Pink Dot Xpress in West Hollywood. I was walking by, and I had a can on me. In my head, I thought, “Oh, it’s not even worth pitching to this guy.” But I had this little urge inside me to make a U-turn, and I have a rule for myself—if there’s an urge to make that U-turn, something good is going to come from it. So I made the U-turn, walked up to the guy, and asked, “Hey, do you sell coffee?” He said, “I sell coffee beans, but no one buys them.” So I asked, “What about cold brew?” He said, “Yeah, I’m interested in cold brew. Do you have any?” I said, “Yeah,” and pulled out a can to give him a sample. He said, “Okay, I’ll try it and let you know.”

I think I saw him the next day or two days later, and he said, “I like it. I want to carry it.” That was our first time getting the coffee on a shelf. The next retailer was either Erewhon or Farmshop—I’m not sure which was first. The story with Erewhon is very interesting. I walked into Erewhon, I didn’t even have a product at the tune. I only had a concept for a canned cold brew. I was with a friend, and we were walking around Beverly Hills when we saw Erewhon and decided to check it out for a fun experience. I went to the drinks fridge and loaded up a rendering of my can on my phone, stuck my phone in the fridge, and said, “Hey, look at that. This is where the coffee would be if we got into Erewhon.” It was completely joking—never imagining we’d actually get in.

I actually took a picture. With my friend’s phone, I took a picture of that. As I was about to walk out, I saw a guy standing there with a clipboard, looking all official. I thought, “This guy looks all official. What the heck, shoot my shot.” I walked up to him and asked, “Hey, how do I get a product in here?” He looked at me with this authoritative stare and said, with an assertive voice, “It doesn’t work like that. You don’t just ask someone like that.” Almost angry. I asked, “How does it work?” He said, “There’s an application process. You have to go online and fill it out.” So I said, “Okay, can you show me the website?” He said yeah, and we loaded up Erewhon.com. He couldn’t find the form at first. He takes my phone and starts scrolling around the website, and he said, “Yeah, I don’t see it,” but he kind of starts poking around, got a coworker to help, and we eventually found the page. There’s an application on Erewhon’s website to submit a new product. And, I had that page loaded up. I was like, “OK cool,” and I left.

A couple weeks later, well actually a while later, because I had the product already. This was after we got into Pink Dot, Pink Dot Xpress, and I was sitting at the Starbucks in Westwood here. I do a lot of work around local coffee shops, and I had the page just loaded on my laptop, and it was just open.

I actually, I’m one of those people who actually doesn’t have a million tabs open. I usually close all my tabs when I’m done with them, but I was never done with this one and it was just there. So, I sat and I said, you know, what the heck, like. You have to at least try. You have to submit, like, fill out the form and submit the paperwork.

So I just filled it out. I actually don’t remember what I typed in, because it was completely not serious to me. I think at the time, Starbucks had just started having WiFi, because Starbucks in Westwood had not had WiFi for years, and they had just started having WiFi. And I remember it had a box that said, like, It basically said pitch, it said like, “Tell us why your brand is fit for the Erewhon standard and it had a 300 character limit,” which is basically one sentence.

AT: Right.

MK: And I don’t remember what I put in there, at all. I don’t remember what price I put in, I don’t remember anything I put in there. I just remember I clicked submit and walked away. And then, it was about, I think, four weeks later, I got an email, and it just said, “Hey congratulations.” Oh, no. At the end, at the end of the application, it says thank you for submitting, and it gives you an address to send samples to in downtown LA. So, I think a week later I mailed out the samples, and I think two weeks after that, I got an email saying congratulations, your product’s been approved.

AT: Two weeks, that’s not very long.

MK: Not very long at all. No, I think it was about four weeks total. It took me like a week to pack it, like a week to get around to packing it, and then took like a week to actually ship it out. And then like two weeks for them to review it.

AT: And do you think it helped from the outset that you weren’t that serious? It started as a joke. And then, you know, you filled out the application, you’re at a Starbucks, like you said, you don’t even remember what you wrote. So it probably wasn’t that, didn’t give that much thought to it. Do you think that was an asset?

MK: Yeah, I think it could, yeah, I think it definitely did help a bit. You know, you brought up the first place I actually ever pitched to. I was very serious about that; it was at Earth Bar. I was actually thinking then, before I even came up with the cold brew concept, I was thinking, hey, this place doesn’t have any kind of caffeine options that are really simple and clean. They have Celsius and energy drinks, but those have a bunch of stuff in them that aren’t very clean energy drinks. And I had emailed them, and they had gotten back to me with the automated response like, “Hey, we’re not taking on new products right now.” And I went back to, I think, every single Earth Bar in Los Angeles. I’m pretty sure every Earth Bar manager knows me by name. And I had asked each one and basically harassed every Earth Bar to kind of, like, get me in contact with someone who could get the product in. Eventually, one manager said, “OK, I’ll take the product into my store, and we’ll do like a trial run, and you know, we’ll see how it goes, and corporate will get back to you on that.” We gave them a free fill, gave them a case to start. After about a week or two, they had sold out, and I said, “Okay, so are you guys going to order more? Like, are you guys going to put the SKU (stock-keeping unit) in the system?” And they just wouldn’t get back to me. They wouldn’t get back to me on emails. Eventually, I kept harassing them and going to other Earth Bar staff, really getting the attention of corporate. Eventually, someone emailed me back and said, “Hey, we appreciate your persistence. I forwarded your information to the right people, and we’ll get back to you by the end of the week.” So they had finally acknowledged Driply at the time. And a week later, they just emailed me and said, “Hey, yeah, we’re not interested.” So that was kind of a bummer.

AT: But it doesn’t sound like it sort of blunted your confidence too much.

MK: No, that’s their loss Right.

AT: Absolutely and the UCLA Store. What happened there?

MK: UCLA Store. So that’s a whole story. I was actually on campus for… I had a friend, a friend of mine, who had posted that she was going to be on a panel speaking for a UCLA entrepreneurship club.

AT: Very quickly, was this a friend you met while you were a student here?

MK: No. This was a friend I met later on. She’s actually a cycling instructor.

AT: OK.

MK: And she developed an app for cycling music, for music to play while Instructing cycling classes.

AT: Very interesting.

MK: Yeah. So she was talking on a panel, and I saw her post on Instagram, and I said, you know, I’ll show up. I’m close by. And I was here at the, it was in Haines, I believe, and is it still called Haines?

AT: Yeah. I don’t know if they do the same stuff. I think now it cases more to the social sciences, but yeah, I think,

MK: I think it was social sciences as well at the time.

AT: Right. It’s an older building. So I would think so.

MK: Yeah. But yeah, so I had met a couple of other entrepreneurs there, and there was another girl there with a beverage brand. And we started talking at the end. I said, “Hey, I have a beverage brand.” You know, we were talking amongst students as well about what the students wanted to see. And one of the students mentioned, “Hey, you guys should sell on campus.” And I was like, huh, okay, maybe, like, that would be nice. Like, that’d be amazing, you know, to get that. And I kind of dismissed it. And then the next morning I woke up, and I was like, you know what? I’m going to try, just like we did with Erewhon. I’m going to try with UCLA. And I ran up and down the campus to every store until I figured out there was one guy who’s in charge of all the UCLA stores, and his office is in Ackerman. I went down to Ackerman to find the guy, and the guy wouldn’t come out. They had his staff come out and say, “Hey, he’s busy. He’s not seeing anyone.” I said, “Look, let me just talk to the guy.” “Nope. Here’s his card. Email him.” I said, “OK.” I left, I emailed him. No response. Nobody ever responds. Nobody is ever going to respond to an email for sales, by the way. That’s a tip right there. I mean, maybe, but never in my experience unless there was a handshake or something before.

AT: I’ve heard something similar.

MK: Here is the text with just the grammar and spelling corrected: Yeah. So I kept showing up, leaving samples, like nothing. One day, I was sitting in my car, and I had his card right there next to me. I was like, you know, let me dial the number. So I dialed the number, and, uh, the guy’s name is Jose. So, I dialed the number, and someone goes, “Hey, this is Jose,” and I was shocked. I did not expect anyone to pick up. I don’t know what I was expecting, but he picked up, and I was like… “Oh, hi.”

AT: Great first impression.

MK: Yeah. Yeah. Super nice guy, by the way. He was just really busy at the time, but he picked up, and we talked. He said, “Okay, what’s the product?” And he mentioned some changes he wanted. One of them was, if you can see, there’s actually a sticker on the can. One of them is he wanted the caffeine content written on the can.

AT: For anyone listening, I’m holding up the can right now, it says 180 mg. That’s pretty decent.

MK: Yeah.

AT: For any Caffeine fiends who are interested.

MK: Yeah, so that was one of the things I remember he wanted on the cans. And he said, “Okay, it sounds like you’re getting it all sorted out. Come back with a new sample when you’re ready, and we’ll talk.” So I said, “Okay, I’ve got the new run done.” And it’s kind of a minor story, but it’s interesting. I got the new cans, I walked down to Ackerman, and I’m about to hand it to one of the managers there to give to Jose. Her name’s Yammy. And I go up to Yammy, I’m about to hand her the can, and I’m holding the can just like this, and I’ll just show you. This entire panel was blank. And I’m like, “See, we added the…” about to point, and I see it’s completely missing. The labels were misprinted, and nobody noticed up until that second where I was about to hand it to her. There were no barcodes. The entire side panel was just missing on the label.

AT: Sort of reminds me, very quickly, of Elon Musk showing the Cybertruck. I don’t know if you know.

MK: With the glass. Yeah, bulletproof glass.

AT: Right. It gets to the main stage and there’s uh… there’s a problem.

MK: Yeah. But anyways, I literally, like, I grabbed the camera and I was like, “Oh, never mind. I’ll be back.”

AT: Did they know at this point? Did they see you take it off and, you know, your eyes widened and they just really like…

MK: I mean, she was just like, whatever, like, all right, you’ll be back. So I had stickers made, stuck those on, and I showed up. It took me, I don’t know, like a week to get the stickers done. Came back, gave it to them. And then again, nothing. Didn’t hear anything back from Jose. No emails. I would call him, he’d pick up the phone and say, “I’m busy, not now.” So eventually, I actually didn’t even know what the guy looked like at this point. Eventually, I kind of figured out who he was. I just spent so much time in Ackerman, I’d see this guy walking in and out. And I saw one day he said good morning to the security guard and was shaking his hand, like they looked like they were buddies. So once he went in, I went up to the security guard and said, “Hey, are you friendly with Jose?” And he’s like, “Yeah, I’m pretty friendly with him.” Then I was like, “Listen, I’m trying to get a hold of this guy for a few months. Could you just tell him I’m here waiting for him?” And he’s like, “Yeah, absolutely.” He goes in there, and Jose comes out, and he’s like, “You have 30 seconds.” I’m like, “It’s coffee, it’s good, you’re going to sell it.” He’s like, “Okay, email me.” I said, “I emailed you a hundred times.” He said, “Email me again, right now, so it’s at the top of my inbox, and I’ll email you back, and we’ll schedule a time to meet.” I emailed him on the spot, he emailed back, we scheduled the time, and yeah, I went in, we had the meeting, and we negotiated a price, a retail price, a wholesale price, and all the other logistics that go with it. And that was that. There were a few more small bumps in the road, but we got it up on the shelf.

AT: Persistence pays off. You waited, what, three months between first considering, “Oh, maybe I should put it in the store,” to it actually…

MK: It was a while, yeah. It was a good amount of time.

AT: It’s funny how for both Erewhon and the UCLA Stores, the genesis of the idea came from just a suggestion that you didn’t take seriously, and then you kind of went into the store and messed around a bit. And yeah, it just kind of happens like that.

MK: It’s really a spectrum. Like another one of our retailers, Vicente Foods, it was another U-turn situation. I drove by and I see a sign that says Vicente Foods, and I’m like, oh, it’s a grocery store. And I’m driving, and my brain is like, “You should make a U-turn,” and I was like, “Yep, we’re making a U-turn.” I made that U-turn, I walked in, and I said, “Where’s the grocery buyer?”

And the guy says, “That’s me, I’m the beverage buyer.” First guy I talked to, and I said, “Do you have coffee?” He goes, “Yeah, I’m interested in coffee.” I pull out a can. He didn’t even say anything, actually. He just said, “I’m the beverage buyer.” And I literally pull out this can from my pocket, and I go, “It’s coffee in a can, comes in a case, do you want it?” He picks up the can, doesn’t open it, doesn’t try it, doesn’t ask me how much it is, looks at it, and goes, “How many cases do you have on you?” Like, right there. That, I think those were the first words out of his mouth.

AT: That’s a man who likes his job.

MK: So it really is a spectrum on, you know, getting into places, but it’s always a good feeling when you get that email from Erewhon saying, “Hey, congratulations, your product’s been approved.” I actually have a friend I met while doing sampling events at retailers. She’s got like a vinegar brand, and she called me a couple of days ago. She was super excited because she had just gotten the email from Erewhon, and she wanted to discuss it with me, like, “Oh, what do I do? They said respond within 72 hours, help me out,” and I discussed it with her, like, “Hey, you need to get a distributor,” and all the ins and outs of it, and it’s exciting.

AT: Mm. It sounds sort of nerve wracking in a sense, but it’s probably insanely rewarding when you do get that email.

MK: Yeah.

AT: You know it’s going to be rolled out.

MK: They really throw in that 72-hour thing just to, like, make you nervous. Just to scare people. Yeah. It’s like, “Oh, if you don’t respond in 72 hours, I guess you’re just not going to be in Erewhon.”

AT: So here is the question. You can take as long as you need to consider it, that we ask all Bruins who come on the show, if there is a piece of advice, a key insight that you can give to other Bruins who may want to emulate what you’re doing, become entrepreneurs, pursue their passions, what would it be?

MK: It would be: say yes, just do it, whatever it is, say yes to it. Opportunities come up throughout life, and you could be thinking, “I want to open a coffee shop,” and you could sit around for years analyzing and considering it, and maybe do it, maybe not. The thing is, the worst-case scenario is that you fail, and when you fail, you end up right back where you started. So, just say yes and just do it.

AT: And students who might tilt towards a fear of failure, how do they overcome that?

MK: Well, failure can be scary, but failure is success in itself. The fact that you fail at something means you learn, and you had a journey, you did something, you were part of the process, and that in itself has value. So yes, it could be scary, but it’s still worth trying because you can still take something away from failure. And, you know, if you’re going to be successful, you’re going to have failures. Nobody ever makes it. Nobody has a perfect track record of doing things 100 percent or getting things right the first time. I saw a clip of Mark Zuckerberg talking once, and he mentioned that, you know, everyone asks him about, “Oh, you just made Facebook.” And he said, “No, I programmed, I think, hundreds of games or websites or apps before that. Facebook was just the one that was successful.” And he goes on to mention that without those failures, he wouldn’t be the success he is. So yeah, don’t be afraid of failure. It’s a learning experience. You can always gain from it. And who knows, you might be successful.

AT: Solid, OK. Moshe, thank you for coming on. I really appreciate it. I think these insights are going to be immensely valuable to the cohort here, and I wish Driply all the success in the world.

MK: Thank you. You’re very welcome.

AT: As we enter the fall 2024 quarter, Daily Bruin Podcasts are ramping up production. Expect a new episode of Bruin to Bruin every Monday, and check in with our Instagram account for updates on upcoming miniseries.