Raising the bar: griffin spolansky, Founder, mezcla
In this episode of There Is No Alternative, Tina Bou-Saba, founder of CXT Investments, sits down with Griffin Spolansky, co-founder and CEO of Mezcla, to talk about building a protein treat brand from a UVA lacrosse locker room into a fast-growing presence in over 10,000 doors nationwide.
Griffin started Mezcla in college after a chance hallway conversation with a guest speaker turned into a year of nightly recipe sessions in her kitchen. What followed was a year and a half of trial and error to commercialize a product, a launch funded by friends and family, and a fundraising philosophy built on never juicing the numbers, even when other founders told him it was the easier path. Griffin brings the discipline of a Division I athlete to building a company, and this conversation is full of concrete, hard-won lessons on team culture, capital efficiency, and what it takes to scale in one of the most crowded categories in consumer.
In This Episode:
The four months he spent pitching a manufacturer in person before they would take a chance on a 25,000-unit minimum run
Why he refused to juice his numbers for investors, and how that decision turned a $50,000 first check into $3 million reinvested by the same investor over time
The "team, not family" culture he built directly from his lacrosse locker room, including two-way accountability and a depth chart mentality
Why athletes make some of his best hires, and what competitive sports taught him about taking criticism and pushing through rejection
His framework for the growth-versus-profitability tradeoff: margin has to be right before you ever pull the growth lever
How Mezcla has stayed lean at around 12 people while scaling into 10,000+ doors
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🎙️ There Is No Alternative: Lessons in Entrepreneurial Leadership with Tina Bou-Saba