John Coogan is the founder of Soylent (a meal replacement shake) and Lucy (a nicotine products company selling nicotine gums, lozenges, and pouches to help people quit cigarettes and vapes). He also runs a popular YouTube channel where he researches and produces long-form video essays on topics ranging from business to politics. This conversation covers the stark regulatory differences between food and nicotine products, brand-building philosophy, co-founder dynamics, YC experiences, and the near-death moment Lucy faced in 2022 when the venture market collapsed.
Regulatory Landscape: Food vs. Nicotine
Food products like Soylent face minimal regulation: As long as ingredients are “generally recognized as safe” (GRAS), no FDA pre-approval is needed. You simply combine known-safe ingredients, add a nutrition label, and go to market. This is how grocery store pre-made salads, protein shakes, and most packaged foods work.
Nicotine products now require full FDA pre-approval: Since 2016, when Obama-era legislation gave the FDA authority over nicotine-containing products, every new product must go through a rigorous application process involving ingredient disclosure, scientific testing, consumer testing, and stability studies before a single unit can be sold. This is similar to how drugs like insulin or cancer treatments are regulated.
The transition created a closed window: Before 2016, anyone could launch a vape or nicotine product without oversight, which led to an explosion of brands like Juul. That window is now closed. Companies like Juul have had their applications denied, Zen is still awaiting approval, and Lucy has had some products accepted while others remain under review.
Cost of market entry is enormous: Bringing a new nicotine product to market can cost anywhere from millions to hundreds of millions of dollars, comparable to biotech drug development. This high barrier reduces competition and favors well-funded companies over time.
Lucy’s regulatory constraints directly shape its brand: Because Lucy’s nicotine gum is not yet FDA-approved as a smoking cessation aid (unlike Nicorette), the company cannot say “quit smoking with Lucy.” It can only make vague, factual statements like “tastes great” and “contains 4mg of nicotine.” This regulatory straitjacket makes it much harder to build a sharp, distinctive brand compared to an unconstrained category.
Brand Building: Start Niche, Then Cross the Chasm
The two-part branding framework: First, appeal ridiculously to a very small niche audience. Second, design the brand so it can grow beyond that niche to appeal to everyone.
Soylent’s niche was Silicon Valley hackers: The brand naturally spoke to software engineers and startup founders who didn’t want to think about food. It was an “anti-brand” in a market saturated with hyper-masculine, testosterone-driven products like Muscle Milk. It became a status symbol for a specific type of person.
Crossing the chasm: Red Bull sponsors extreme sports and skydiving, but you don’t need to be an extreme athlete to drink one—you just need to think skateboarding is cool. Liquid Death targeted metalheads but broadened to anyone who thinks heavy metal is funny. Celsius broke out of CrossFit into the mainstream. The pattern is: own a niche, then make the brand aspirational rather than exclusionary.
Why big tobacco companies care less about branding: Legacy tobacco companies have billions in cash flow from cigarettes and a monopoly on physical retail distribution. Cigarettes are sold in nearly 300,000 US stores (compared to ~100,000 for protein shakes), and federal law prohibits online cigarette sales. They can win on distribution and price wars alone, making brand differentiation less critical for them.
The “literary life” example from Warby Parker: Warby Parker’s entire brand is built around the concept of “the literary life”—a bookish person reading in a coffee shop. Every color, website design, and popup shop flows from this single idea. It works because it taps into who people want to be, not just who they are. Coogan contrasts this with Ray-Ban, Oakley, and Prada, which all occupy completely different brand territories in eyewear.
Why Lucy’s brand is harder to nail: Beyond regulatory constraints, nicotine marketing must avoid appealing to youth. Sponsoring extreme sports or youth-culture events risks being framed as marketing to kids, even if the actual audience is adults. This forces a more conservative, “bland” brand approach—something Coogan admits may be partly a copout but reflects real risk.
Soylent’s Origin and Viral Growth
Soylent started as a cost-saving hack: Coogan and his co-founders were burning through runway on a previous startup and needed to cut costs. Making their own food was cheaper than eating out, which led to the idea of a complete meal replacement.
The original formula was deliberately simple: They put 100% of every FDA-recommended daily value of protein, carbs, fats, and micronutrients into one product. This was a marketing differentiator—most products make selective choices (high protein, low fat), but Soylent just did everything.
The launch went viral on Hacker News: Co-founder Rob Rhinehart blogged about living exclusively on Soylent for 30 days. The post went massively viral, generating huge press coverage and $1 million in sales the first month.
The name “Soylent” was a deliberate provocation: It’s a reference to the 1973 movie Soylent Green (and the Harry Harrison novel Make Room! Make Room!), which involves cannibalism. Every time they posted on Facebook, people in the comments would angrily explain the movie reference, which boosted engagement and made everything they posted go viral. This was peak “Boomer Facebook” era.
Packaging design by artist Ryder Ripps: They hired controversial artist Ryder Ripps, who was doing web design consulting for Google and building experimental interactive websites. He put the nutrition facts on the front of the package—every other brand hides them on the back. This became a defining design element, appearing on t-shirts and making Soylent’s packaging look completely different from the typical “chocolate splash with a jacked bro” protein shake aesthetic. The logo also has an ellipsis (Soylent…) which was meant to feel ominous and intriguing.
YC Experience and Co-founder Dynamics
YC is primarily a forcing function through competition: Everyone is on the same timeline—build traction, present at demo day, raise money. Seeing other founders working through dinners while Mark Zuckerberg speaks on stage creates intense pressure to keep up. It compresses the “zero to one” decision into a single quarter.
YC acts as a union for early-stage founders: It established baseline founder-friendliness in the VC community. Bad-acting VCs can get banned from demo day. News of a VC screwing over a founder spreads rapidly through the YC network. This rebalanced power between founders and investors, though Coogan acknowledges the latest bubble may have swung too far in favor of founders.
Coogan has declined investors based on YC community feedback: He can point to at least one fund that was known for investing in American startups and cloning the ideas internationally in a predatory way. Early enthusiasm for taking their intro faded once the community made the pattern clear.
Co-founder relationship with a lifelong friend: Coogan’s main business partner since preschool—they went to middle school, high school, and college together, started three companies together, are both married, live in the same town, and share family friends. This creates powerful social forcing functions against screwing each other over. They were even rival Counter-Strike team captains in high school.
The CEO must have final decision-making authority: Even with multiple co-founders, identifying a single CEO early and empowering them to make gut calls, take risks, and own consequences is critical. Committee votes slow progress dramatically. The buck has to stop with one person.
The 2022 Near-Death Experience
Lucy had raised $10 million in December 2019 and was growing as an e-commerce brand through COVID. When 2022 hit, the venture and stock markets collapsed. Meta’s stock dropped roughly 70%. Coogan realized there was zero chance of raising another round.
They had three months of runway left and were in a category many VCs already found controversial (nicotine/addiction). Unlike enterprise SaaS or AI, it required months of education for investors to understand the regulatory landscape.
The pivot to profitability was drastic and immediate: They cut all underperforming marketing agencies, slashed ad spend, raised prices, laid off staff, and reduced executive compensation by more than two-thirds. Coogan credits advice from YC’s Dalton Caldwell to “make one cut really deep and then start building back.”
The turnaround took 3-6 months because ad bills from campaigns run two months earlier kept coming in even after they stopped spending. But by late 2022 they were profitable, stayed profitable through 2023, and the business is now in a strong growth position.
This was Coogan’s first time running a truly profitable business after a decade of venture-backed, cash-burning companies. He found it less stressful because no one can shake you down when you’re not on a clock to raise the next round.
YouTube Channel and Content Philosophy
The channel serves multiple purposes: Meeting people (he wouldn’t have met the host without it), learning through teaching (the Feynman Method—researching a topic, writing a script, and recording a video forces deeper understanding than passively consuming content), and economic value (ad revenue, hiring, networking).
Coogan sees himself as a “tourist” in YouTube: Unlike most YouTubers who optimize for fame and love the craft of video-making itself, he views personal branding as a necessary evil—a high-leverage tool for achieving other goals rather than an end in itself.
He’s fascinated by the scale of internet content: A video getting 2 million views at 40 minutes long means more people engaged than attend some of the world’s largest protests. This kind of reach was impossible 100 years ago.
Content format freedom: YouTube allows anything from 1-second clips to 12-hour deep dives (he references a 12-hour analysis of Star Wars Episode I). The creative problem-solving of what to make and how to structure it is itself an interesting challenge.
Broader Philosophy and Long-Term Vision
Driving motivation: Pursuit of information, understanding base reality, solving puzzles, and learning. These serve a broader goal of expanding humanity—more people, more GDP, higher life expectancy, climbing the “cosmic scoreboard.”
He’s drawn to misunderstood, non-consensus topics: Nicotine is one of them—still controversial and widely misunderstood after eight years. Arbitraging what people think versus what’s actually true is a recurring theme.
On speciation and the future of humanity: He references a theory that humanity may fracture into “adventurers” and “wireheads”—people who jack into a Matrix-like existence of AI-generated pleasure versus those who physically explore and expand into space.
Space colonization requires a critical mass: He estimates roughly a billion people are needed to maintain the economic and industrial base required to get to Mars and beyond. SpaceX’s supply chain alone depends on everything from aluminum manufacturers to HR software. If population collapse or mass “wireheading” reduces the exploratory population too much, expansion becomes impossible.
Life extension doesn’t require living forever: If you can extend your lifespan faster than time passes (living a year in a day of subjective experience), you enter a compounding cycle that could theoretically let you reach the stars.
30-year vision: Continue being an entrepreneur for three more decades, found a very large and impactful company, run it for a long time, and maintain a loving family and close group of friends. He doesn’t think about legacy or being known for things—he wants to know things and solve puzzles.
