He Bet on a ‘Super Fuel’ Nobody Had Heard Of. Now Ketone-IQ Is a $100 Million Company.

Most founders chase a trend and try to flip the company before it fades. Michael Brandt did the opposite. The Stanford computer science grad and marathoner was deep into biohacking. That led him to discovering ketones, a backup “super fuel” your body makes by turning fat into clean, steady energy. The catch is it only kicks in when you starve it, during a long fast or a hard workout. To get the benefits, you basically had to deprive yourself to make it.

“I thought, what if you could take this and make a bottle of it?” Brandt says.

This was around 2014. There was no market, and barely any customers who knew what a ketone was. One investor put his odds of success at less than 1%. A decade later, his company Ketone-IQ is a $100 million business. The sugar-free, $5 shot sells direct to consumers and on Amazon, and it has rolled into retail locations like Target, Sprouts, and Vitamin Shoppe. The company is backed by Andreessen Horowitz, with investments from Chris Hemsworth and Jake Paul. UFC champion Jon Jones is a co-owner. Joe Rogan is among its many fans and talks it up on his podcast.

Brandt joined me on the One Day with Jon Bier podcast to discuss how he scaled the company, the challenges of being first to market and why he actually wants competitors to copy him.

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Ketones are fermented, so they have a really strong flavor. In the early days, Brandt embraced this. “It tastes like it works,” he says, comparing it to early Birkenstocks campaigns that bragged about how ugly the shoes were. That logic landed with his first customers, who were Navy SEALs and Tour de France riders, people for whom a weird taste was almost a badge of honor.

Going mainstream changed the math. “It really matters that you taste good,” Brandt says. The company later launched fruit flavors like Green Apple and Raspberry Lemonade.

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Taste was far from the biggest challenge. “It’s not easy to be the first tracks in the snow,” Brandt says. There was no supply chain to plug into and no customer who knew what a ketone was.

His fix for the supply problem was to become the supply. The company coordinated production itself, and Brandt now claims it makes up “80% of the ketone market.” To him, that’s the real moat. “There’s no what without the how,” he says.

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Marketing was the second problem. Almost nobody knew what a ketone was, and the few who did only knew it from the keto diet. So he stopped selling the science and started selling the sensation.

“I don’t think we’re selling ketones. We’re selling a feeling in a bottle,” he says.

That feeling, he argues, is unlike anything else on the shelf, not caffeine, not nicotine, but its own thing. Inventing a sensation that didn’t already exist was the whole appeal.

Customers didn’t need a lecture on metabolism once they drank the shot and felt the difference. Brandt decoupled the product from the keto diet entirely and sold it as a focus play instead, an everyday “brain fuel” you take no matter how you eat.

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Ketone-IQ has built relationships with a who’s who of the performance and longevity world, from neuroscientist Andrew Huberman to Harvard aging researcher David Sinclair. But no one has moved the needle for the company quite like Joe Rogan..

What makes Rogan so powerful, Brandt says, isn’t just the ad read, it’s everything around it. You can’t pay your way onto Rogan’s good side. He doesn’t need the money and won’t back a product he doesn’t actually use, so when he talks about one, listeners trust that it’s real.

And Rogan was using Ketone-IQ before any deal existed. He still talks it up unprompted, on the show and off. The founder of an electronic music festival reached out, Brandt says, simply because he was friends with Rogan and had heard about the shot from him.

“He’s a force multiplier,” Brandt says.

Brandt also says Rogan is one of the easiest people in media to work with. “He doesn’t have to take feedback, but he’s the most flexible partner to work with.”

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Brandt admits he never really doubted Ketone-IQ would succeed, even when the odds said it wouldn’t. He traces that conviction back to running. He started as a regular guy, not a college athlete, with what felt like an impossible goal of holding a six-minute-mile pace for a full marathon. He kept training, and the impossible slowly became routine. He eventually ran a 2:35.

“You wake up every day and chop wood and carry water, and you can do the impossible,” he says.

Revenue is now in nine figures, and by his own math, a brand like his is worth several times that. Brandt is about to be a wealthy man. Ask what he plans to do with it, though, and the answer isn’t a yacht.

“Mo money, mo problems,” he says. “To me, it’s control over my own time.”