Greg Lavecia is sitting on the grounds of a large English manor, 31 years old, running a company on track to clear half a billion dollars in revenue this year, and his opening move is to tell the next generation of entrepreneurs that none of that is actually the point. The wealth, the company, the freedom: every piece of content about entrepreneurship sells you the outcome, he says. What nobody sells you is the person the fight turns you into. And that person, unlike the money, cannot be taken away.
The voice in your head is writing your future
The first lesson Lavecia delivers from that English field costs nothing and changes everything: watch what you say about yourself. When he was younger, he would joke openly about his low IQ, his ADHD, how clueless he was about running Bloom Nutrition. It felt like a defense mechanism, a way to cushion the embarrassment of potential failure. What it actually did was train his internal monologue to flinch the moment a real challenge appeared. ‘Greg, you’re too dumb to take on that challenge,’ the voice would say, and he had written the script himself. He reversed it deliberately: speaking about himself as someone capable, someone who goes after the challenge. The bravery, he is careful to note, is not the absence of fear. It is going anyway.
The second wall is internal, not external. Lavecia is blunt about the ceiling most people hit: it is not their bank account, their network, or the size of their market. It is the story they have been telling themselves since age 16. He walked into launching Bloom not knowing how to start an LLC, build a website, or open a business bank account. His wife Mari and he took their first orders through Instagram DMs and collected payment via PayPal, emailing PDF guides in return. ‘I promise you, if I was able to figure it out, you are capable of doing it,’ he says. ‘I am no better than you at literally anything.’
Logic over emotion, subtraction over addition
Lavecia has switched his primary business eight times in roughly a decade, moving from PDF fitness guides to resistance bands to pre-workouts to protein powders to a greens business he bootstrapped to 180 million dollars, and now a full beverage portfolio. Each time, the move felt like betrayal of something he had built. His test was simple: am I being emotional or am I being logical? When greens powders approached their ceiling as a category, he looked at the multi-billion-dollar energy drink market and the math settled the argument. He still checks himself by asking his wife Mari and his best friend and co-founder Leo Walter whether a given decision is toxically competitive or genuinely generational.
He is equally direct about addition versus subtraction. ‘Some of the biggest jumps in my life have come from removing things, not adding things,’ he says. Removing the booty band identity. Removing the pride of being a bootstrapped founder, which he finally buried in 2024 when Bloom sold 30 percent of the business to an external partner and put its cans into 70,000 doors worldwide. The bootstrapped identity had to die before the beverage company could live. Each of those transitions, he calls a funeral. Each funeral preceded a larger arena.
The company raised its first outside capital at 180 million dollars in revenue. Before that, the pitch that secured a 90 million dollar check came before the energy drink concept was even fully formed. The investors were not buying a product. They were buying conviction in a room.
One man on a manor lawn
Lavecia at the end of this is not summarizing a framework. He is sitting outside, alone, on grounds he could not have imagined from a Philadelphia college dorm room a decade ago, talking about the 75-year-old version of himself in a rocking chair and what stories that man will want to remember.
The manor grounds stretch out behind him, unhurried, exactly as present as everything he has already burned down to get here.
