For many entrepreneurs, building a unicorn company (worth over US$1 billion) It means betting your own money long before any big returns appear. Poppi co-founder Allison Ellsworth became a multimillionaire after selling her prebiotic soda brand to PepsiCo for $1.95 billion — but just a decade ago, she and her husband were maxing out their credit cards to get the business off the ground.
“I remember the first time we realized we had a business,” Ellsworth recently told The Wall Street Journal. “We were at a farmers market. We had just bought a house, I was three months pregnant with my first child, and I said, ‘We need to go all in on this.'”
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“My husband said I was completely crazy, but he trusted my vision,” continued the co-founder. “So we maxed out our credit cards, sold one of our cars to buy bottles [e] We opened our own factory.”
The 39-year-old entrepreneur said she and her husband, co-founder Stephen Ellsworth, invested about $90,000 in the business in the first year. And this not only required giving up possessions and financial stability, but also time and energy.
Ellsworth said her husband worked temporarily as a waiter before getting a job on night shifts and weekends to pay the mortgage on their home. And the intense routine of parallel work — along with operating the business at the fair — ended up paying off. Within 18 months, the healthy soft drink brand “Mother Beverage” had generated $500,000 in revenue.
The Poppi co-founder said that, as with many entrepreneurs, “you practically work two jobs” during the growth phase. She spent a decade growing the brand into an industry-shaking company; Ellsworth began developing prebiotic drinks in 2015 and founded the business just a year later.
And the entrepreneurial couple’s participation in the Shark Tank program in 2018 really put the company on a new trajectory. They struck a $400,000 deal with investor Rohan Oza in exchange for a 25% stake in the growing business and changed the name to Poppi.
Over the next eight years, the brand built a loyal consumer base by promoting itself as a healthier alternative to traditional soft drinks and using TikTok marketing to reach millions of customers.
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And in May of last year, PepsiCo officially completed its $1.95 billion acquisition of Poppi, putting more than $100 million in Ellsworth and her husband’s pockets.
Since then, she’s spent on image consultants and lavish vacations — but when the money hit her bank account, the multimillionaire said the move wasn’t a lifestyle shock.
“People think you make a big sale, get a huge amount of money, and your life completely changes,” Ellsworth continued. “But at the end of the day, we were still in the same house, with the same car, at the same schools, with everything the same.”
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Unicorn founders who struggled before becoming billionaires
Even the most successful founders in the world have had to make sacrifices to get to the top.
Billionaire businessman Jay Chaudhry put his own livelihood at risk when he began his journey as a serial entrepreneur. Fascinated by the dot-com boom in Silicon Valley in the mid-1990s, Chaudhry decided to leave his executive role at IQ Software to build his own company.
His wife, Jyoti, also quit her job as a systems analyst, and the couple invested $500,000 of their savings in cybersecurity startup SecureIT. A few years later, Chaudhry sold SecureIT to VeriSign in an all-stock transaction valued at nearly $70 million, and in 2007 he also founded the successful cloud security company Zscaler, now valued at $24.3 billion.
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Brian Murphy, co-founder and CEO of ReliaQuest, also faced financial difficulties on the way to building an information technology unicorn company.
In late 2007, Murphy left his accounting job to turn his vision into reality — but the financial crisis and a string of turbulent years put the business at risk.
Murphy even took out a second mortgage on his house, maxed out his credit cards and cut his own salary to keep ReliaQuest alive. Today, the company, valued at US$3.4 billion, is a leader in the B2B cybersecurity operations sector.
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Even Apple’s late co-founder, Steve Jobs, gambled his own financial security to achieve success. In his early 20s, Jobs was obsessed with the idea that everyone should be able to have a personal computer at home.
But he didn’t have enough money to turn his vision into reality — so he sold his Volkswagen van, while fellow co-founder Steve Wozniak made money by selling his programmable calculator, raising $1,300 to pay for prototype parts.
And the sacrifice was worth it: A local computer retailer placed an order for $50,000 for 100 units, raising enough money to create the mass-market Apple II. A year after its release, in 1977, it made almost $3 million.
“I was worth more than $1 million at age 23, more than $10 million at 24, and more than $100 million at 25,” Jobs told PBS in 1996. “And that wasn’t that important, because I never did it for the money.”
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