Eight minutes into his interview for this story, Victor Guardiola had to leave. “Sorry, I’ll be right back.”
The van driver waiting behind the South Austin warehouse needed to load up. Guardiola walked out of the conference room and into the warehouse, climbed onto a forklift, skewered a pallet of Bawi Sparkling Agua Fresca, and loaded it into the van outside, which sank 8 inches on its shocks with its new payload. Constantly juggling responsibilities, from fundraising and promotion to driving a forklift, is all part of the deal for a young entrepreneur, and 27-year-old Guardiola, B.S. 2020, is neck-deep in it.
But it’s paying off. This year, Bawi topped $1 million in sales and is poised for a new round of funding and an exponential growth spurt, possibly including distribution in a major grocery chain. Four employees are spinning plates as fast as they can.
The well-rehearsed business case rolls off Guardiola’s tongue automatically: “Now that we’ve proven to the market that this better-for-you, mass-market, culturally differentiated beverage is showing signs of product-market fit, it’s a question of what recipe do we have from a growth perspective to scale to Chicago, San Francisco, LA, etc. How do we rinse-repeat that in other markets?” he says in his relaxed, articulate way.
In this story of a precocious immigrant boy now on the verge of major success, The University of Texas at Austin played a big role. “I love UT so much,” he says. “I’m so grateful to have gone there, legitimately.” Asked why he chose the University, he pauses, then says, “It was not linear.”
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Guardiola was born in Monterrey, Mexico, and moved to Waco at the age of 2, when his father, José Guardiola, moved the family to earn a Ph.D. in mathematics at Baylor University. He describes his father, who finished high school at 14, as “a mathematical savant” from rural Chihuahua. “My dad and I did not play catch; he would tell me about Issac Asimov’s science-fiction novels,” says Guardiola. Three years later, the family moved to the Corpus Christi suburb of Portland, where Victor grew up.
The first book his father gave him, at age 9, was “The Tao of Warren Buffett.” Victor began reading business magazines at the age of 10, and by 12, he was emailing their editors with pitches for stories he wanted to write. This was not solely the result of precociousness but was motivated in part by fear about his family’s finances. What normally would have been a comfortable middle-class upbringing sustained by his father’s career at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi had been stretched thin by raising three children, family health problems and sending money back to family in Mexico. “We were under an incredible amount of financial pressure, and I, as a child, thought I could solve it — or help to solve it.”
Though bright, Guardiola did poorly in high school and was over-involved in extracurricular activities. Upon graduation, he moved to Austin and entered Austin Community College. There, he figured out how to be an “academic weapon,” studying and getting good grades. The next year, he applied and was accepted into UT’s Moody College of Communication, where he majored in public relations.
“I loved going to Moody. In terms of the entrepreneurial skill set you need to have — what makes any sort of offering valuable? — my education at Moody was really good at that.” Professors Lisa Dobias and Tamara Bell in particular prepared him for his career “in a really profound way.” “I was under no impression that I was going to work in the PR industry when I went to UT, but the ability to learn how to effectively communicate was paramount to my ability to package my story as an entrepreneur for fundraising and to write effective emails to get people to listen to me. I owe a lot of my success to my education at Moody specifically because I learned how to be a super-effective communicator and to condense all of this word-vomit I wanted to spew out to prospective investors to a punchy, six-to-eight-sentence email that delivers value.”
He also minored in business, allowing him to take basic courses such as accounting and finance and earn a business certificate. At the McCombs School, he took a Food and Beverage Entrepreneurship Practicum, which he describes as “a super high-powered, 12-week entrepreneurship summer program with a crazy faculty-to-student ratio”: one professor (Marissa Epstein), two teaching assistants and eight students. “I couldn’t believe the caliber of speakers coming in. It was insane.” Many of these guest speakers went on to become his investors. He also was able to access the McCombs School’s expensive research databases.
Imposter syndrome at UT? Not a bit. When he arrived, he noticed “no one there was any better than I was to any discernible degree. I realized pretty quickly I could apply myself here and really compete.” He recalls thinking, “Nothing makes these kids, who have had every advantage in the world, different. That is something that was so life-giving to a young adult — being like, I can play ball here!”
I was so grateful to be [at UT]. I just had an incredible sense of gratitude — like, I’m going to squeeze every drop out of this opportunity I can...
He says, “I was so grateful to be there. I just had an incredible sense of gratitude — like, I’m going to squeeze every drop out of this opportunity I can, and I am so proud of that younger version of myself for squeezing every drop out of that. For staying after class. For talking to the founder of C4 Preworkout because I had a chance to. How crazy is that, especially coming from a small town in South Texas where my only discernible career path would have me on an oil rig or in commercial real estate? Especially seeing my dad and mom go through all the stuff they went through for us to get here, I was like, I am not going to take this [stuff] for granted at all!”
The Big Idea
During his senior year, Guardiola and a friend from ACC, Jordan Hicks, conceived of a drink business that nodded to traditional Mexican beverages but with drinks significantly less sugary.
Jarritos flavored sodas (slogan: “The Official Drink of Tacos”) or cane-sugar Coca-Cola (a.k.a. Mexican Coke) are favorite pairings with Mexican food, and he himself enjoys those on occasion, “because they’re delicious!” But sugary drinks are among the worst drivers of obesity and diabetes, which disproportionately plague Hispanic Texans. A bottle of Jarritos weighs in at 90-150 calories and Mexican Coke at 150 calories. “What could a better-for-you version of a Hispanic-nostalgic beverage be?” he wondered. Cans of Bawi, which do have a little added sugar, range from 40-60 calories.
Beyond the health question was one of cultural representation. Given that Hispanics compose the state’s largest racial or ethnic group (40%), he was surprised at the lack of offerings “outside of chips, salsa and tortillas.” The Garza family of Siete Foods is a notable exception, he says, and has been an inspiration. The play to Tejanos is plain: On the Bawi website, readers can select English, Spanish or, as a salute to South Texas, Spanglish, which pervades Bawi’s marketing.
How To Make a Can of Agua Fresca
They started by juicing fruit in a commercial kitchen on Friday nights and selling it on tap the next day at Barton Creek Farmers Market. The first batches were from his mother’s pineapple agua fresca recipe that he grew up drinking. In addition to La Piña (pineapple), there are now three other flavors: El Limón (lime), La Maracuyá (passionfruit) and his personal favorite, Guayaba (pink guava).
But within five months, COVID-19 hit and shut it all down. He graduated two months later. Guardiola’s job applications were passed over by numerous companies, but he finally landed a job at Golden Ratio, an Austin coffee startup. This not only allowed him to start making money that he could invest in Bawi, but, being the right-hand man of founder Clark Nowlin, he learned the fundraising process: the Excel sheet he used to track his conversations, how he approached initial emails and calls and follow-ups. “He had worked in real estate sales before he did this, and those cats are different beasts when it comes to following up! They’re super persistent and relentless,” Guardiola says.
To make their first canned batch, they used a local brewery and learned a hard lesson. “I had shipped out 100-plus cans to incredibly wealthy individuals, potential investors,” but the first canned samples were spoiled. Bacteria were feeding in the cans and creating gas. “I remember getting pictures of their pantries with exploded cans. I remember being in my living room, with a stack of probably 300 cans and hearing the metal creak. I was so embarrassed and upset, but you move on,” he says.
“It’s exhausting,” he says of entrepreneurship. “I’ve certainly cried more than I’ve laughed in these first few years.”
It was Guardiola’s 13th email to a potential investor when that recipient agreed to a meeting. It was another Moody College alumnus, Patrick Terry (B.S. Advertising 1980), owner of the 37-restaurant juggernaut that just celebrated 20 years, P. Terry’s. Several conversations later, Terry became Investor No. 1. The amount was enough for the two co-founders to quit their jobs, after 10 months at Golden Ratio for Guardiola, and pursue Bawi full time. (Cofounder Hicks is no longer with Bawi.) Soon, the founder of Torchy’s Tacos, Mike Rypka, wanted in, and Terry brought in another friend to invest. Before they knew it, they had raised more than $100,000.
His time at Golden Ratio was important for another reason: The startup had contracted with Jill Talcott, the former head of beverage development at Starbucks. She became Bawi’s first food scientist contractor. Developing Bawi flavors involved a lot of glass bottles shipped back and forth between Austin and Seattle. One goal, and a major challenge, was to produce a drink with a “clean label,” that is, with as few ingredients as possible. The average number of ingredients for Bawis is four.
The spoiled-batch fiasco taught him the importance of the pasteurization step. Each shipment of pineapple juice, for example, comes with a microbial report detailing molds, bacteria and microbes commonly found in the juice and the time and temperature tables used to heat the product in order to achieve purity. “So, then you start to titrate the time and temperature based on how the output of the product tastes. You could cook it for a really long time at a low temp, or you could flash it at a super-high temp, and what happens to the taste afterward? There are so many samples, you’re like, ‘I preferred 168 at 14.’”
[Learning] how to effectively communicate was paramount to my ability to package my story as an entrepreneur for fundraising ...
Then, he had to find a manufacturer. “Almost no manufacturer will speak to you unless you can afford a day of their line time, and for most manufacturers that have the pasteurization technology needed, you’re talking about tens of thousands of dollars to start without even taking into account your raw material and ingredient costs. Before you know it, your first production runs are $100,000. Who is going to front that? It’s really tough!”
He sold the first can of Bawi in April 2022.
Already Giving Back
Guardiola had always assumed that once his ship came in, he would start giving to the causes he had always believed in.
This changed after a conversation he had with his therapist as an 18-year-old having just moved to Austin. She asked him about charity, and he said, “‘I’m a broke college student. Why are you giving me flack about not donating to charity? There’s, like, $33 in my bank account right now!’ I literally pulled it up on my phone and showed her. She said, ‘Victor, you need to practice who you want to become.’”
He estimates he now mentors someone at least weekly, whether a phone call or speaking to a class. Only last week, he started his “office hours” as an homage to his dad, Professor Guardiola.
His work as a mentor springs directly from his own difficulties. “It became clear to me that there is a whole cohort of investors who don’t have a care in the world about talking to people at the beginning of their journey. That was so upsetting to me that I wanted to do something about it, and as I started getting a little bit of traction, it became really important to me to share these life lessons,” he says.
“I really think it’s important to show these minority entrepreneurs that I mentor that — yo, if I can do it raising zero dollars from family and friends, there is a way to punch your way into these circles, and that’s where I get so much of my satisfaction.” One organization he supports by sharing networking and fundraising skills is Mas Cultura, a non-profit that, among other things, raises money to buy bikes so that folks in East Austin then can teach kids how to ride. “It’s the coolest thing ever!”
He says the biggest thing he’s learned from Patrick Terry is practicing the type of leader you want to be. “If I were to describe him — and if he reads this, please don’t be mad — he’s like Mr. Rogers but with a really big stick. He has an incredibly kind affect and personality, but he’s fiercely competitive. He’s super humble but incredibly well educated within his craft. He’s often the smartest person in the room, but he will never make anyone feel lesser than.”
What has been central to his entrepreneurial efforts and mentoring of others is seeing how many great ideas there are out there and how many of them die of cold starts unfortunately because of systemic issues. “There’s a Stephen Jay Gould quote that encapsulates most of this: ‘I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.’ [“The Panda’s Thumb”] That became really important to me at a young age, and it’s been central to my mentorship work and wanting to have a more diverse retail footprint.”
Guardiola has now sold millions of cans of agua fresca at places such as Central Market; Sprouts Farmers Market; Tom Thumb; Whole Foods Market in northern California, Chicago and Texas; through Amazon and Instacart; and at Torchy’s in Austin starting in September. “It’s a pure meritocracy,” he says of this business. “You perform or you die.”
