@theventure: This guy quit a $100 million investment fund to sell coffee and built a $500 million empire ☕💰 At 18, Vinay Menda moves to New York and starts raising money from friends and professors, betting on startups out of his dorm room. That experiment becomes Reshape Ventures, a real fund with $100 million behind companies like Reddit and Sweetgreen. But in 2019, Vinay asks all his friends about their favourite coffee, and every single one says the same thing: they'd rather have Blue Bottle, but they always end up at Starbucks because it's just more convenient. So in May 2020, he quits the fund, buys a coffee cart, and parks it on a Brooklyn street corner. He runs it with one employee and a Swiss espresso machine pumping out 700 drinks an hour. ✓ Makes each store the size of a parking spot ✓ Pays $3,500 a month in rent instead of $115,000 ✓ Sells a cappuccino for $3.50 while Blue Bottle has to charge $5 ✓ Turns every New York location profitable within a month Leaves a $100M fund → everyone wants good coffee but picks convenient → parks a cart in Brooklyn → shops the size of a parking spot → rent that's a fraction of the rest → 90 locations in four countries and a $500M valuation. Sometimes you win by attacking the one cost that forces everyone else to charge more. What hidden cost could you cut to beat everyone else on price? 🤔 #Business #BlankStreet #Coffee #Success #Entrepreneur @Blank Street @Vinay Menda

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Thursday 30 July 2026 13:50:34 GMT