Loonen is bottled water that starts at a spring, moves in stainless steel, and goes into glass and only glass, never plastic. Every batch is tested by an outside lab for more than 350 contaminants, and the results are behind a QR code on the label. It launched at the end of last year, is now in Sprouts, and has turned into the bottle influencers and celebrities can't help posting on social.

Behind it are two people who came at this from opposite sides of the table: Clara Sieg and David Kimmell. Clara spent over a decade as a venture investor. Loonen came out of her own experiences during IVF and early motherhood. For the operating half, she called David Kimmell, who was on the founding team at Spindrift and spent nearly a decade running operations and R&D there.

In this episode we get into:

• Why Clara calls having a kid an accelerant, not a tradeoff

• Picking a co-founder whose skill set barely overlaps with yours

• The two painful days of questions they ran before signing anything

• How they handle it when they disagree, and the trade show Clara lost the argument on

• Betting on something new with a family at home, from a basement over General Mills to leaving a stable career

• Trading the investor seat for the operator seat, and the back office for a public one

• Deciding for three years out when everything pressures you to solve for three months

• Work-life integration over balance, and the hours neither of them will touch

• What they didn't see coming, including shipments that arrived as ice cubes and glass shards

• Where the name (with extra letters) comes from, and why a bird is also a sourcing standard

More:

• Find Loonen: ⁠www.loonen.com

• Read the Loonen Founding Story from Clara here