The Journey
From a van and a mini-storage unit to managing a fund
I started delivering beverages out of a van, with the inventory in a mini-storage unit, and I now manage a twenty-million-dollar fund and build AI agents. The distance between those two sentences is a set of decisions, each with a price, and if you allocate capital the decisions are more useful to you than the ending. Here they are in order, with what each one cost and what I kept.
Decision one: deliver it myself
The van was the business plan. In San Diego I built a wholesale distributor with my own trucks and my own reps and grew it from five hundred accounts to seventeen thousand. The cost of that decision was years of five o’clock mornings and a receivables book I carried personally. What I kept was the only education in consumer goods that cannot be bought: I know what a store owner says when a case arrives late, what a rep does on a Tuesday, and what a brand is actually worth to the person who has to shelve it. Every investment thesis I hold today starts from that dock.
Decision two: cross the border
I held the Miller Beer distributorship for the state of Baja California and the exclusive for 5-hour ENERGY in Mexico. With my partner Sandro Piancone I grew a distribution and export company to a hundred million dollars in sales, carrying more than two thousand products to distributors, restaurants, bars, hotels and supermarkets across Mexico. The price was learning two regulatory systems, two currencies and two sets of relationships at once, and paying for every mistake in the harder one. What I kept is a network on both sides of the border that is now the foundation of everything I do in Mexico, from consumer brands to power for data centers.
Decision three: make the products, not just move them
Running distribution showed me what the shelf wanted before the brands did, so I started making it. More than a thousand consumer products, most of them in the years I owned the distribution business. The best-known story is the product I put into four thousand Walgreens stores without corporate approval, one store manager at a time. The cost was that I spent years as a manufacturer’s bank, financing inventory for retailers who paid in sixty days. What I kept is the thing investors now pay me for: I can look at a product and tell you its cost curve, its margin ladder and its first buyer before the founder has finished the sentence.
Decision four: go public, twice
Sandro and I co-founded two public companies: Green Globe International, through a reverse merger, and Hempacco, through an IPO onto NASDAQ. I will not put a valuation or an exit number here; the ledger I keep for this site does not carry them, and the numbers that circulate are not the point. The point is the cost of the decision: a public company is a second full-time job of disclosure, audit and investor communication layered on top of running the business. What I kept is fluency in the other side of the table. When an analyst asks me a question now, I have answered it from the issuer’s chair.
Decision five: manage other people’s money
CPG Life Fund I is a twenty-million-dollar private equity fund that backs consumer brands before they need a traditional investor. I manage it with a team that has done the operating work the brands would otherwise have to hire. The price of this decision is the one every operator pays when they become an allocator: you stop being able to fix the problem yourself at six in the morning, and you have to pick founders who will. What I kept is the discipline of writing the thesis down before the check, which is also why this site exists. Nothing here is an offer of any security; the fund is described as what I do.
Decision six: build the AI myself
When AI arrived I did not hire a consultant. I founded Guz.ai and built the agents with a small team: a founder app that runs my playbook in my voice, then a press release ranker, a website ranker and builder, a sales agent, a video machine and an ad machine. Seven product lines, used every day in my own companies, including to build the page you are reading. The cost was a year of learning a field from the inside while running everything else. What I kept is the thing I now bring to AI founders and to the early-stage AI fund I am building: I know what the tools cost, what they can do, and where the demos end.
What this road is for
Every one of these decisions was expensive, and every one of them is now a lens. The distributor’s chair reads a consumer deal. The border reads Mexico. The product bench reads a cost curve. The issuer’s chair reads a filing. The fund reads a founder. The lab reads an AI pitch. I write the letter to give you those lenses without the twenty years, and I keep a ledger of every number on this site so the story stays checkable. The rest of the road is on the journey hub, and the operating manual is in Build Your Beverage Empire.
Frequently Asked Questions
How did Jorge Olson start in business?
Jorge Olson started by delivering beverages out of a van with inventory in a mini-storage unit, then built a San Diego wholesale distributor with his own trucks and reps from five hundred accounts to seventeen thousand.
What companies did Jorge Olson take public?
With his partner Sandro Piancone, Jorge Olson co-founded two public companies: Green Globe International, through a reverse merger, and Hempacco, through an IPO onto NASDAQ.
What does Jorge Olson do now?
As of 2026 Jorge Olson manages CPG Life Fund I, a twenty-million-dollar private equity fund for consumer brands, founded the AI laboratory Guz.ai, advises an energy infrastructure company in Mexico and is building an early-stage AI fund.
How did Jorge Olson get a product into Walgreens?
He put a product into four thousand Walgreens stores without corporate approval, one store manager at a time, by proving it sold in each store before asking for the next.