What do you do when you’ve already won, and still can’t stop building?
Sean Frank and Matthew Bertulli sit down with Mike Beckham, Co-Founder & CEO of Simple Modern and Simple Ventures, to unpack what happens after you climb the mountain. Mike shares how Simple Modern grew from a bootstrapped “Yeti knockoff” to nearly $200M in annual revenue, paid off all its debt, and suddenly found itself generating more cash than it could reinvest.
The conversation covers Mike’s framework for capital allocation when the obvious moves run out, including why he launched electrolyte brand Trevi (and what the $2–3M learning curve actually bought him), how Simple Ventures is building a portfolio of lean, AI-powered businesses with single-threaded leaders, and why Mike believes now is the single best moment in history to be a builder.
From the counterintuitive case for being 13th in a massive market, to rewiring your brain around what AI makes possible, to why physical goods aren’t going anywhere — this one goes deep.
Chapters
00:00:00 Simple Modern at $200M
00:08:03 Why Being 13th Is a Win
00:08:52 Market Is Everything
00:14:05 Never Carry Personal Debt
00:19:37 How Trevi Got Started
00:21:03 New Brands Beat the S&P
00:29:10 Cap Table Buy-In
00:33:34 Trevi’s 500% Growth
00:37:32 Gatorade Wins Marketing
00:41:52 How Much Trevi Cost
00:42:42 The 50 Cents Strategy
00:46:35 Amazon vs DTC Brands
00:49:48 Simple Ventures Roadmap
00:53:20 Real Risk of Failure
00:54:44 Shared Services Setup
00:57:44 10x Team, No New Hires
01:00:03 AI Speeds the Portfolio
01:04:51 Good to Great Is Dead Now
01:06:39 Capital Is the Last Moat
01:09:11 Builders Just Keep Building
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