11/21/2025
The drink tasted terrible. No one would sell it. He built it into an 11 billion can empire anyway
A toothpaste salesman bet his entire life savings on a Thai energy drink nobody wanted.
Dietrich Mateschitz was 40 years old.
Working for a German company. Selling toothpaste. Making good money.
Living the safe corporate life everyone told him to keep.
Then on a business trip to Thailand in 1982, jet-lagged and exhausted, he tried a local drink called Krating Daeng.
It worked. The jet lag disappeared. His energy came back.
And right there, drinking that syrupy beverage in Bangkok, he saw something nobody else saw.
A global business in a bottle.
Everyone thought he was insane.
“Energy drinks don’t exist in the West.”
“That stuff tastes terrible.”
“You’re going to quit your safe job for this?”
“You’re too old to be an entrepreneur.”
He didn’t care what they thought.
Here’s what Mateschitz understood that everyone else missed:
The drink wasn’t the product. The lifestyle was the product.
So he found the Thai manufacturer, Chaleo Yoovidhya. Convinced him to partner up. Each put up $500,000. Split the company 50-50.
But Mateschitz didn’t just copy the Thai formula and sell it in Europe.
He spent three years perfecting it. Changed the taste. Carbonated it. Made it work for Western palates.
Then came the hard part.
No distributor would touch it. No retailer wanted it on their shelves.
So he built his own distribution. Targeted nightclubs. Gave it to bartenders. Got it into the hands of students pulling all-nighters.
Word of mouth. Grassroots. Underground.
The opposite of how beverage companies operated.
But Mateschitz wasn’t building a beverage company.
He was building a media company that happened to sell drinks.
Red Bull didn’t just sponsor extreme sports. Red Bull owned extreme sports.
Cliff diving. Air racing. Formula One teams. Space jumps. Music festivals.
They didn’t advertise at events. They created the events.
In 2012, they sent Felix Baumgartner to the edge of space and had him jump. Eight million people watched it live on YouTube.
That wasn’t a stunt. That was a statement.
“We don’t follow trends. We set them.”
Today, Red Bull sells over 11 billion cans a year.
In more than 170 countries.
Creates more content than most media companies. Owns sports teams. Operates music labels.
All because a 40-year-old toothpaste salesman saw potential where everyone else saw risk.
He proved that the product doesn’t matter as much as the story you build around it.
He showed that you don’t need to play by industry rules. You can write your own rules.
What safe corporate job are you staying in because everyone says entrepreneurship is too risky?
What idea are you sitting on because the market doesn’t exist yet?
Mateschitz quit his job at 40 to sell a drink that tasted like cough syrup.
Spent three years perfecting it. Built distribution from scratch. Created an entire category.
Because he understood something most people never learn.
You don’t wait for the market to be ready. You create the market.
You don’t follow the playbook. You write a new one.
Stop listening to people who think playing it safe is the smart move.
Start thinking like Dietrich Mateschitz.
Find your opportunity. Perfect your product. Build your own distribution.
And never let conventional wisdom stop you from building something that doesn’t exist yet.
Sometimes the biggest businesses come from the smallest insights.
Because when you see what others miss, you build what others can’t imagine.
The world didn’t need another soft drink. But it needed what Red Bull became.
Your idea doesn’t need to make sense to everyone. It just needs to make sense to you.
And when it works, when you prove them all wrong, they’ll call it luck.
But you’ll know the truth. It was vision. It was work. It was refusing to play small.
Think Big.
