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TAIKA | San Francisco (Onsite) | Head of Business Ops (1st Employee & Founding Team)

We help people live a healthier lifestyle by redesigning consumer products most of us consume daily to be both delicious AND good for you. Our first product is coffee that gives you superpowers: delicious cold brew in cans with natural plant extracts for a calm, smooth focus.

I'm YC alum from W17 and ranked 9th best barista in the world. My co-founder started the mobile team at FB in 2008. We closed a large seed from top tier VCs and are now hiring Head of Biz Ops as our employee #1 with extremely generous equity and solid salary.

This is an amazing opportunity for a non-technical candidate interested in becoming a founder to be in the founding team while solving a massive, lucrative problem.

Learn more and apply here: http://bit.ly/taika-HBO

I never finished my undergrad. Just got my EB-1 GC after having an O-1, didn't seem to be a problem at all.

Also had some help with Peter in the process - thanks!

This is really cool, and I love the name and its connection to Airbnb founding story

Email me and I make get you a travel box

We've been planning a pop up for a while now. First one will probably be in SF, then hopefully around the continent!

Totally agree with you! Email me if you're interested in staying in loop with our decaf version

...yet there's a lot of research showing that sugar IS helluva drug.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2235907/ https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/jan/05/is-sugar-wor...

This is really great to hear. We've had a good amount of demand for decaf option and are working on it. Email me and I'll keep you in the loop

We're hearing this from more and more people. Luckily, there are some great decaf whole bean coffees but if something sucks it's the decaf instant coffee. We're working on a decaf version that will taste awesome, so stay tuned.

We're decidedly anti-artisanal coffee. Our mission is to take really good coffee and make it accessible and approachable to the mainstream coffee drinkers. My 83-year-old grandmother's friends in Finland are subscribers because they love how easy it is.

Instant coffee is liquid, brewed coffee that then gets dehydrated.

1) grind the coffee 2) brew it however you like 3) cool the coffee from 90C --> cold 4) freeze the coffee 5) freeze dry for 24-48 hours

Fundamentally this will work but you're likely to run into a few problems. Your yield is going to be pretty low - one batch will likely get you ≈10-15 cups. Secondly, that coffee is really hygroscopic, meaning that it's so dry that it will absorb any moisture from the air. Unless you keep it in vacuum pouches it'll turn into a rock within days.

Luckily there are so many great roasters with online stores now that getting fresh beans has never been easier.

The cool thing with instant coffee is that the whole concept is something that just works much better at scale - sourcing, roasting, brewing etc. We have solid plans to bring the cost down while improving the quality as we scale. At some point we'll build our own mega factory.

We hear this a lot. Same goes for me - I wake up before my wife and she's really happy when I'm drinking Sudden at home instead of grinding and brewing.

Email me and I'll fix some for you

Here's a short review by Oliver Strand, the coffee critic at NYTimes: https://nyti.ms/2mK8Frw

email me and I'll send you two!

+1

This it the whole idea - we don't try to replace all your coffee rituals but rather help you drink great coffee when you otherwise wouldn't be able to.

Thanks for giving us a try!

Hahaa! Awesome. The circle or die cut one?

When I was starting to work on Sudden I knew that the biggest challenge would be around the perception of instant coffee. It's a lot of work but we have a pretty solid plan and traction right now!

drinking water is but hot water for brewing coffee comes from big tanks that get really gross

Currently we promise 4-6 month shelf life. We recently started to flush the tubes with nitrogen. As long as you keep the coffee in dark, cool and dry place it will last probably longer - we're still not sure since the oldest samples haven't gone bad yet!

Edit: when you open a tube it will age much faster.

As a barista, the most important thing to me is that you're happy with whatever your drinking :)

Working on it. We do individual servings because they preserve freshness - that's the only reason we do it. It's hard for us to do compostable since we are still very small compared to your average consumer good, but we are 100% committed to doing it when we are big enough. We even have 2 sustainability advisors involved with the company.

We haven't measured them but they should be equal to any high-quality specialty coffee. I know that regular instant coffees have considerably higher levels of acrylamides that are caused by poor quality coffee and processing at extremely high temperatures.

Working on it. We do individual servings because they preserve freshness - that's the only reason we do it. It's hard for us to do compostable since we are still very small compared to your average consumer good, but we are 100% committed to doing it when we are big enough. We even have 2 sustainability advisors involved with the company.

Email me and I'll see what we can do ;)