Repole has explained the coaching turnover, the general managers, and the four-point field goal in football interviews. Last week he explained the thinking underneath all of it somewhere else entirely.
Repole sat down with Hannah Mullaney for the Founders series on BBC Business Daily to talk about Glacéau and BodyArmor. The league gets one glancing mention — Mullaney lists "a football league" among the things he owns and moves on. Repole never picks it up. Nobody says "UFL" at any point.
What he does instead is lay out, at length, the rules he ran two billion-dollar companies by.
"Every business is borderline bankrupt"
The short version is familiar. Repole told Adam Breneman earlier this year, "I wake up bankrupt every day." The BBC version is older and more specific about what he means.
Mullaney asked how he handled criticism of Smartwater's health claims. Repole answered about payroll.
"And every business is borderline bankrupt before it becomes a success. Okay? And many times in every business, like, are we going to make payroll? Are we going to be able to make it? Are we going to be here in 6 months? And you just figure out a way, man. It's — failure is not an option."
He was 29 when he co-founded Glacéau with J. Darius Bikoff in 1999. It sold to Coca-Cola for $4.1 billion eight years later.
On Hiring
"I don't think I realized that until the end of Vitaminwater, but the people and the team are more important than the brand because the people and the team will figure out the mistakes. They'll figure out the evolution, they'll figure out how to get better, and they'll figure out a way to get out of that adversity and bounce back."
"People are the secret formula," he said. "That's the difference between a brand becoming a billion-dollar brand or a company being successful or not."
Worth noting he says he didn't work this out until the end of a company that sold for $4.1 billion.
On Changing a Product Everyone Already Understands
Mullaney asked how a water brand stands out on a crowded shelf.
"People say don't reinvent the wheel. I kind of agree with that, but you can evolve the wheel, you know, you can make a spin off the wheel, right?"
Glacéau added vitamins and electrolytes to bottled water and built the enhanced water category from nothing. The scale of that is in how Repole describes it: "When we did $1 million in sales, it became a million-dollar category. When we did $10 million in sales, it was a $10 million category." There was no category. He created one by selling into it.
Per ESPN, the four-pointer came out of Repole watching Brandon Aubrey hit a 63-yarder rather than out of a rules committee.
On Kobe and Brady
Both were BodyArmor partners. Bryant invested in 2014 and died in January 2020. Coca-Cola bought the remaining stake in BodyArmor in November 2021 for $5.6 billion — the largest brand acquisition the company had ever made.
Asked what the two of them brought to the business, Repole skipped the endorsement answer entirely.
"You know, Kobe's missed more shots. You know, Tom Brady's lost 3 Super Bowls. ... And I think I learned their mentality. They failed on a public stage. You know, if I went bankrupt with Vitaminwater, nobody would've known. It's that mindset."
What His Employees Got
Every Glacéau hire received stock options on their first day. When Coca-Cola bought the company, Repole says 300 of the 600 employees made over $1 million and the other 300 made over $100,000.
"They weren't employees, they were owners. ... I was very upfront with them, very honest, told them what the highs and lows of the company whether it was their department or not."
There is no equivalent on the football side. UFL players sign one-year deals, and Repole has said he wants them leaving for the NFL after a season.