This Entrepreneur Raised $225 Million To Revolutionize Craft Beer For The Modern Adult

In a world where adult beverages have long been synonymous with alcohol, Bill Shufelt saw something different—a cultural and economic opportunity hidden in plain sight. He successfully navigated the startup ecosystem–scaling, manufacturing, building, and financing his company.

Bill’s journey from a Wall Street hedge fund to founding Athletic Brewing, the pioneering non-alcoholic craft beer company, is more than just a story of entrepreneurship. It’s a lesson in patience, passion, and purpose-driven business building.

Listen to the full podcast episode and review the transcript here.

From Finance-Obsessed Teen to Hedge Fund Pro

Bill grew up in a tight-knit, finance-heavy town in Connecticut, just a short drive from New York City. Surrounded by investment bankers and private equity executives, finance felt less like a choice and more like a default path.

“We came from a wealthy town, but my family definitely wasn’t wealthy,” Bill recalls. “The people doing well were in finance, so I aspired to that.” Naturally gifted in math and science, Bill attended Middlebury College, where he doubled down on his ambitions of having a career in finance.

Internships and recruiting opportunities with companies like Goldman, Lehman, Morgan Stanley, and Bank of America, among others, led him straight to Wall Street. He cut his teeth at Knight Capital Group, a fast-paced trading shop where he fell in love with the energy of the markets.

Later, Bill joined Point72, one of the top hedge funds led by legendary investor Steve Cohen. Bill thrived in the competitive atmosphere, which perfectly matched his personality.

“At Point72, I was surrounded by the smartest people I’ll ever be in a room with,” Bill says. “It was intensely merit-based. You showed up prepared every day, and you were rewarded based on performance. That kind of culture stuck with me.”

Looking back at his time at Point72, Bill remembers being exactly where he wanted to be—at the top of the investment process. The firm had a high turnover, a lot of trading, and was very intellectually challenging.

Bill’s key takeaway from Point72 is that a merit-based opportunity-driven culture is probably more important than a great culture. Getting opportunities and feeling good about the work you’re driving forward shapes careers. His bosses believed in his potential and encouraged him.

The Lifestyle Shift That Changed Everything

Twelve years into a successful finance career, Bill began to feel misaligned. The typical Wall Street lifestyle—late nights, happy hours, and boozy client dinners—started to wear on him. At 29, as he prepared to get married, he took a hard look at his life.

“My family, my health, my career—alcohol was probably holding all of those back,” Bill realized.
He stopped drinking. The results were immediate and profound: better sleep, better eating, better performance, better relationships, sharper thinking, and more energy.

“It was the biggest life hack I’d ever discovered,” Bill says. He developed an interest in long-distance running and although he was still doing three to four work dinners a week, he switched to a standard brown level or brown bottle, non-alcoholic beer.

But there was one glaring problem—there were no great-tasting non-alcoholic beverage options for adults who still wanted to enjoy the ritual of drinking without the alcohol.

The Spark Behind Athletic Brewing

As Bill continued his alcohol-free lifestyle, he began to notice just how underserved the market was. He started exploring the stats and found that 60% of adults have less than one drink per week.

“Why is alcohol the default functional ingredient in all adult beverages?” Bill wondered. Although moderation aligned perfectly with modern health standards, it was out of reach and not on the menu.

That question sparked a two-year business planning journey that would ultimately lead to the creation of Athletic Brewing. Rather than rushing to market with an MVP, Bill meticulously built a business plan while still working full-time.

“There were weeks I didn’t touch it and others where I was on fire,” he says. That long planning period allowed him to define core company values and develop a mission, employee handbooks, and culture for the company’s foundation.

Eventually, Bill found a technical co-founder: John Walker, an award-winning brewer from Santa Fe, New Mexico. Together, Bill and John spent months homebrewing non-alcoholic beer in Gatorade jugs—batch after batch until it wasn’t just “good for non-alcoholic beer,” but good beer, period.

Creating a Meaningful Impact and Teaming Up with John Walker

More than the economics of the project, Bill was concerned about the meaningful, fulfilling impact his idea could have on potentially tens of millions of people. He underscores that they are not anti-alcohol or trying to bring back prohibition, but rather, Athletic seeks to provide an alternative.

Hundreds of thousands of people die from alcohol every year. 5% of cancers are attributed to alcohol, and 40% of incarcerated people were drunk when they committed their crimes. Bill and John wanted to give people the option to be moderate when they wanted.

Considering that 15 million people are in documented recovery in the U.S., they wanted to make moderation accessible rather than anonymous and hidden. Bill reflects on this decision to team up with a co-founder to materialize his idea into an actual product.

Bill had extensive experience and a robust foundation in finance, sales, and marketing. He was capable of handling HR and the legal elements of the business. However, he lacked technical skills, knowing nothing about beer-making or running a manufacturing facility.

Before meeting John, Bill pitched the concept to hundreds of brewers but faced constant rejection. John is not only talented but, like Bill, a lifelong learner. Bill appreciates finding someone who matches his vision and enthusiasm, and a business partnership that complements their skills.

As Bill points out, alcohol has been the tag-along adult beverage for 5,000 years. Adults use alcohol as a meal pairing, refreshment, and de-stressor. Athletic Brewing is essentially revolutionizing beer for the modern adult.

Brewing Without Compromise

From day one, Athletic Brewing committed to something radical: owning their own manufacturing. While most consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands outsource production, Bill insisted on building their own breweries.

He wanted to develop an award-winning beer that could compete with any other alcoholic beverage. Until then, non-alcoholic beer was heavily imported and in the contract-brewed category. Bill wanted to make it in the U.S. and achieve the ultimate differentiator in quality.

“Every beer that goes out our door undergoes over 55 quality tests,” he says. “We weren’t going to compromise.” That decision turned off many investors early on. “We’d get to the part about manufacturing, and people would literally stand up and walk out,” Bill laughs.

Hundreds of millions of dollars were needed to build the manufacturing plants. But in the long run, vertical integration became one of Athletic’s greatest advantages—especially during COVID-19, when supply chains collapsed and outsourced brands struggled to deliver.

Hitting the Pavement—Literally

Bill and John launched Athletic beer in local liquor stores in Connecticut, starting with Whole Foods. They also convinced a local distributor, Star Distributors, the biggest beer distributor in the state, to stock their beer, which was a huge win. However, the rate of sale had yet to pick up.

Bill realized that no one had been looking at the non-alcoholic set for 50 years. People were just not aware of the availability of their product. With no major marketing budget in the early days, Bill took an unconventional route: he started showing up at local races across Connecticut.

“I’d run the 5K, then be behind a table handing out beers,” he says. Bill estimated that he could interact with 300 to 500 people in a 20 to 30-minute period. That strategy helped build grassroots awareness and generate word-of-mouth momentum.

Distribution was a significant challenge that Bill and John had to overcome. They had to find distributors and stores every few counties, let alone states. To build a national DSD beer network, they would have had to have 270+ distributors, which would have taken multiple years.

Bill came up with a great solution. He launched an e-commerce site, something unheard of in beer then. “People said I was an idiot—no one’s going to buy beer online,” he remembers.

Within months, they were shipping hundreds of orders a day. That direct-to-consumer channel gave them priceless first-party data, another huge differentiator. Bill had opened a national taproom where people could order in minutes and have their orders mailed to them.

Soon, John started making a different, unique, limited-variety beer every week for a category that had never had any variety. People could sample double IPAs, Goses, pumpkin beers, and other innovative, limited-time offerings. Athletic quickly outgrew its first brewery—within just 10 months.

Scaling, the Hard Way

Bill recalls how they raised their first angel round of $3M to build the first non-alcoholic production brewery in the country. At the time, the category did not exist and had no momentum. They went through 120+ meetings, facing 90% rejections in the first 50.

However, once the Athletic concept caught on, Bill and John started getting inbounds. They ended up with an angel team of about 70 people, and that first round helped them build the first brewery. This group also helped carry them through three financing rounds.

Since then, Bill has raised upwards of $225M from private investors rather than traditional venture capital. Over $150M went directly into building four state-of-the-art breweries across the U.S. They also built a national sales force and marketing channels.

Storytelling is everything that Bill Shufelt was able to master. The key is being able to capture the essence of what you are doing in 15 to 20 slides. For a winning deck, take a look at the pitch deck template created by Silicon Valley legend, Peter Thiel (see it here), where the most critical slides are highlighted.

Remember to unlock the pitch deck template that founders worldwide are using to raise millions below.

That commitment to infrastructure didn’t always align with the fast-return mindset of institutional investors and venture capitalists. “We had to find investors who believed in multi-year timelines,” Bill says. “But we were extremely disciplined stewards of their capital.”

Scaling manufacturing came with its challenges. Bill candidly shares how early financial models didn’t fully account for low utilization rates, skyrocketing logistics and shipping costs, and the complexities of shipping beer nationwide.

Further, Bill’s original business model was not built around e-commerce, but it accounted for over 50% of the business in the early days. At one point, they were losing more money for each package they sold than they were making profits.

“There’s such a short window when your brewery runs at full capacity before you build the next one,” Bill says. “I was almost at economies of scale for ingredient costs from the start,” he added. Scaling, manufacturing, and utilization are crucial facets to get right.

Bill remarks that experience has helped when building the third and fourth breweries. They built them in staged processes, having utilization thresholds that trigger to unlock the next build.

The Vision: A New Kind of Beer Culture

So, what does success look like for Athletic Brewing? “It’s when you can open a menu at a bar or restaurant, look at both the alcoholic and non-alcoholic side, and be equally excited about both,” Bill says. “We’ve broken the barrier to that happening in society.”

Today, Athletic isn’t just a non-alcoholic beer brand—it’s a movement. With a fast-growing national presence and a clear mission to make moderation accessible and enjoyable, the company is redefining what it means to drink as an adult.

Bill’s Advice to Aspiring Founders

If Bill could give his younger self one piece of advice, it wouldn’t be about fundraising tactics or product-market fit.

“The passion has to be there,” Bill says. “It’s going to be the hardest thing you ever do, so if you don’t absolutely love the idea, it’s going to be almost impossible to push through the lows.”

He also stresses the importance of investor alignment, transparent governance, and financial discipline—especially when building something as capital-intensive as manufacturing.

But at the end of the day, it comes down to showing up daily, solving problems, and moving forward purposefully.

In a world obsessed with hypergrowth and software scale, Bill Shufelt built something rare—an authentic, values-driven U.S. manufacturing business from the ground up—one Gatorade jug at a time.

Listen to the full podcast episode to know more, including:

• Bill Shufelt left a successful Wall Street career to build Athletic Brewing after realizing the power of an alcohol-free lifestyle.
• A two-year business planning phase and mission-driven vision laid the foundation for long-term success.
• Vertical integration and owning manufacturing became Athletic’s key quality and supply chain advantage.
• Grassroots marketing—like sampling at races—and e-commerce innovation jump-started early customer adoption.
• Raising capital for a manufacturing-heavy business was challenging but ultimately successful through disciplined, aligned investors.
• Scaling manufacturing requires careful planning around utilization, logistics, and operational costs.
• Deep passion for the mission enabled Bill to endure entrepreneurial lows and build a brand that reshaped modern drinking culture.

 

SUBSCRIBE ON:

For a winning deck, see the commentary on a pitch deck from an Uber competitor that has raised over $400M (see it here). 

Remember to unlock for free the pitch deck template that founders worldwide are using to raise millions below.

 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | TuneIn | RSS | More