Bevi was founded to enable a permanent transition away from single-use bottles and cans in order to make an environmental impact. The company built and sold thousands of IoT-enabled smart water dispensers that offered filtered, sparkling and flavored water on tap. Bevi's machines have helped save over 150 million bottles and cans from ending up in landfills. This case explores Bevi's product roadmap, market structures that impacted the company's growth and the complexity of pursuing a dual distribution model in the beverage industry. The case also highlights issues of leadership management and retention in high-growth startups, as well as the strategic decisions the company faced along the way.

After graduating from Stanford Graduate School of Business, Nicholas Heinrichsen and Christopher Coleman launched Carlypso, a peer-to-peer marketplace for selling used cars. Carlypso hoped to disrupt the $400 billion used car market by making it easier and more convenient for both sellers and buyers. However, Carlypso ran into difficulty trying to scale its operations, and pivoted to a reverse auction model, where Carlypso worked with leasing and rental companies to make the inventory that was selling at non-public auctions available to its customers. The new model showed some initial promise, but once again, scaling operations was a challenge. Carlypso worked with lenders who were lenders who were unable to finance subprime borrowers, which drastically reduced the size of the addressable market. After struggling to find product-market fit on their own, the founders of Carlypso sold the company to Carvana. After three years of working at Carvana, the pair is ready to try a new entrepreneurial endeavor.