AeroPress $70M Acquisition

Andrew Wilkinson shares how he acquired AeroPress, a coffee maker company, after a 4-year pursuit.

"4-5 years ago I was making coffee with my AeroPress. We had one at our office someone brought in 10 years ago. I looked down at it and wondered who owned this. Started googling and realized the founder still owned it - an 80-year-old serial inventor living in Palo Alto.

I sent him an email through Voila Norbert asking if he'd explore selling. He wasn't sure about selling but agreed to meet. Chris and I flew down and spent a whole day with him talking about the business.

It's a crazy business - zero marketing spend, yet it's sold in pretty much every gourmet coffee shop in the world, from Blue Bottle down to little independent ones. It's a category-defining brand - no one searches 'pneumatic tube coffee maker,' they just search 'AeroPress.' It's even written on coffee grinders as one of the settings.

I spent 4 years trying to convince him to sell, emailing him every single month. I call this the 'dentist menace' approach - I had an email reminder in Superhuman and just kept asking. Finally, over the last 6 months, we negotiated a deal and got it done for $70 million.

The business runs with sub-10 employees, managing distributors and manufacturing. Only about 3% of sales are online right now. Our idea is simple - keep the business as is but focus on adding a D2C strategy to scale that channel."