The Next Generation Of Premium Spirits With Nick Papanicolaou Of No Sleep Beverage

No Sleep Beverage is redefining what it means to invest in and build the next generation of premium spirits brands. Founder Nick Papanicolaou shares how his experience in global finance and the beverage industry shaped a hands-on venture model that blends smart capital with mentorship and strategic discipline. Through No Sleep Beverage, Nick is betting on long-term value over quick exits, focusing on brand authenticity, cultural relevance, and operational excellence. In this conversation, he unpacks what investors often get wrong about timing and risk, how the right partners can amplify impact, and why conviction—and a clear vision—still win in a volatile market.

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The Next Generation Of Premium Spirits With Nick Papanicolaou Of No Sleep Beverage

We’re going to delve into another investor in the spirits and food and beverage space. We’ve had a few before and we’re going to have another. We’ve got Nick from No Sleep Beverage. It’s a venture fund with a consulting arm focused on the premium segment of the beverage alcohol industry, particularly spirits and target brands with $1 million to $10 million in sales, primarily in the United States.

The company differentiates itself by offering hands-on support to its founders, helping to de-risk their ventures and increase the chances of success beyond just providing capital. The fund believes that many negative headlines about declining alcohol consumption are exaggerated. Drawing parallels to past misinterpretations of Millennials’ drinking habits, No Sleep Beverage emphasizes its team’s extensive experience in both large and small companies within the beverage alcohol space.

Despite a challenging market environment, expend for the next 1 or 2 years, the company sees this as an opportune time to invest due to lower valuation and the ability to acquire strong brands. Read my interview with Nick with No Sleep Beverage and I’ll be back with some feedback and takeaways from my interview.

I’m really excited to introduce Nick Papanicolaou of No Sleep Beverage.

It’s a pleasure to be here. It’s nice to be on the show.

From Investment Banking To Beverage Entrepreneurship: Nick’s Journey

Awesome. Thanks for joining us, Nick. Before we get into No Sleep and what you’re doing in the beverage space, share a little bit about your background prior to starting No Sleep and where you were, what you’ve done before.

My first career was in investment banking. I spent about 6, 7 years at 2 different banks. I learned a tremendous amount was raising money for companies, learning how to value companies, advising companies on capital raisings or M&A and loved it. Ultimately, about six years in, I realized I don’t think this is the rest of my life. I hope it’s not. I learned a lot, but what am I passionate about? I actually took two years and went back to school, did an MBA. Tremendous learning experience, but I came out of it being really attracted to, number one, the world of entrepreneurship. Number two, food and beverage, particularly alcohol beverage, just realizing what it did to people in terms of bringing them together.

I’m half Greek, as you can tell by my last name, and half American. Food and beverage is a great way to bridge cultural divides to get somebody in one culture to step out of their own shoes and into somebody else’s shoes for a day, for a second, for a drink, for a meal, whatever it is. I really fell in love with that. I came out of business school and ended up launching two companies. One is completely unrelated to beverage alcohol. I was fortunate to merge with a competitor, which was a pretty decent outcome.

The other was the beverage alcohol product. Unfortunately, that was not a financial success, but I learned so much in the 2 years of launching the business and about 2 years of actually having the business in market, so 4 or 5 years or so. I learned a tremendous amount and I guess you could say I learned the 10,000 mistakes of what not to do when you launch a beverage alcohol brand.

That actually put me in a great position to then get hired by a company called Pernod Ricard, which is the second largest wine and spirits company in the world. They liked my profile with the investment banking valuation experience, but also with the entrepreneurial experience. They gave me a mandate of helping that large, I’d call it in some ways sleepy, slow-moving company, help them be more entrepreneurial.

I joined them in 2015, spent seven years there, did a bunch of different roles, but mostly around the early-stage side of things, investing in small brands and sitting on the boards of those brands as we kept the founders on, growing those small portfolios. I really loved it. The last three years I spent as CEO of a division of a company we purchased with about 8 or 9 brands.

I’m giving you the full picture. That brought me from the transaction work M&A to then advising as a board of directors or board member and then finally to actually C-suite CEO of a portfolio myself. It gave me the whole spectrum and it was really an amazing experience. I left in ‘22 to launch what we’re here to talk about, No Sleep Beverage. I think you could say No Sleep Beverage was the culmination of two insights.

Number one was as an entrepreneur, it’s incredibly difficult in beverage alcohol to make it on your own. How can you create a portfolio approach with some scale, some size, some resources and capabilities? Number two insight was when I was at Pernod Ricard, where we had a portfolio and capabilities and capital, you realize that as hard as they try and as good as they are at many things, they’re good at building and protecting market share big brands.

They’re not necessarily good at growing agile, disruptive risk-taking creative entrepreneurs and brands. To me it was how do you meld those two visions together, a portfolio approach with capabilities, but capabilities that are more geared towards the world of entrepreneurship? That’s what No Sleep Beverage is. We’re a venture fund with a consulting arm to help de-risk it for entrepreneurs.

First of all, why No Sleep Beverage? Talk about the name first.

I’m glad you asked. We often get, “Do you work all night? Do you party all night?” It is none of those. I guess to an extent, we certainly work hard and we enjoy good food and beverage, but it has nothing to do with that. It really has to do with this concept of cultural exploration. We call ourselves culture seekers. The brands that we invest in usually play into some really cool cultural zeitgeist that maybe nobody else is talking about or speaking to.

Therefore, the consumers of those brands typically also would be called culture seekers. This is again about getting somebody who may never have had a mezcal product, getting them to step out of their own skin or shoes for a minute and experience the culture of Oaxaca and taste the terroir, maybe even visit the distillery there. That’s really what No Sleep Beverage is about. It’s by culture seekers and for culture seekers.

Investment Thesis: Identifying Gaps And Exit Opportunities In Premium Spirits

Let’s delve a little bit more into the thesis of the fund. Obviously, you’re heavily involved in alcohol. Maybe talk about specifically at what stage, what type of companies are you investing in in the alcohol space? You mentioned culture and we can talk about that in a minute, but talk about a typical investment or a typical founder that you invest in.

We definitely focus on the premium segment of beverage alcohol and mostly spirits within beverage alcohol because that’s really what we know best. I’d say the thesis really focuses around 2 key things or 2 white spaces, if you will. The first white space is what we see as gaps in consumer needs. In other words, what products are out there speaking to major consumer needs or pain points that are not currently being met by the existing landscape. Those are the types of products we want to invest in because, again, they’re filling a need in the market.

The second white space is I guess you could say we work our way backwards. We look at it from the exit opportunities. Where’s the white space in the large suppliers or strategic portfolios? Meaning which brands or products are most likely to have an exit because there’s a major gap in the portfolio of that large acquirer. That’s the thesis in terms of the criteria. We look at brands doing about $1 million in sales, up to $10 million in sales, largely US-focused. At least 51% of their revenue coming from the US if not more.

Even within the US, the US is 50 states, I think it’s almost a $300 billion retail market for beverage alcohol. It’s huge. We don’t like brands that are in all 50 states. We like brands that are in 2, 3 or 4 and have really proven it there and we can help add some gasoline to the fire and maybe tweak a few things to improve the efficiency of scaling.

It’s interesting you mentioned that being in a few states versus many. I spent some time in the music industry and radio promoters would love to have the band’s music spin in radio in all 50 states. Most record labels didn’t care if you had four spins in Bozeman, Montana. They really wanted to make sure you had some real fan base in LA, New York or Chicago. I appreciate that philosophy on concentration. Let’s talk about the trends. Obviously, post-COVID, there’s been a declining trend in alcohol consumption, especially for younger generation. How has that impacting how you invest and what you’re doing going forward?

I’ll start with there’s a lot of talk and a lot of headlines and a lot of therefore headwinds towards beverage alcohol. We think actually a lot of the talk is quite exaggerated and we issued a report on this called the Eyes Open Report back in March 2025, which I’m happy to share with you or any of your readers.

We basically did a much deeper dive into this and we found again that the headlines were exaggerated. As one quick example, we looked back ten years ago to what all the media headlines said about Millennials. Millennials are not drinking, Millennials turning to cannabis, Millennials abstaining. Five years after the bulk of those headlines came out, Millennials were the highest or the over indexing age demographic of beverage alcohol consumers. The same is our suspicion with Gen Z.

We said this in March 2025 and then I think a few months later, IWSR, which is one of the big data media publications in the industry, came out and said that Gen Z actually surprised everybody and is also over-indexing. I think what’s happened is a lot of the data is just not a very thorough picture. As a one quick example, when people talk about Gen Z, a high percentage of them are still underage. I don’t know your age, but I’m going to take a guess.

You and me, when we were growing up, it was a lot easier to sneak into our backyard and drink a beer or to sneak out of the house. Now there are cameras in the backyard. Now there are trackers on our iPhones. Now there’s TikTok that if you have a few drinks as an underaged eighteen-year-old and you look drunk, that’s not going to bode well for your career and for many social aspects of life. I think it’s a lot harder to get away with, to be incentivized to drink underage and that that’s totally fine. I think, again, that’s playing out or manifesting in the environment. We see that’s probably to some extent what happened with Millennials and we certainly think is happening with Gen Z too.

Beyond Capital: No Sleep Beverage’s Hands-On Value-Add For Founders

Talk about the value add. The reason why we set up this show is to cast a light on lesser known and specialty venture capital funds and because we find in addition to better alpha. They’re just more hands on. Maybe share either from a portfolio company standpoint or a consulting standpoint, what are the value adds? What things can you bring to the table that these entrepreneurs need besides capital?

Yeah, that’s a great point Scott, because again, it’s a big part of our thesis. Just taking a step back, we don’t invest in 30 brands and hope that 1 hits and pays for the whole portfolio. We’ve invested in eight and we told our LP base, so we’d invest in 8 to 10 brands. We’ve already achieved that milestone. With 8 to 10 brands is for a reason because we want to roll up our sleeves and get dirty alongside that founder. We want to help them. We want to de-risk it. If you think of just pure numbers, we don’t need 1 in 30 to hit when we think we can improve the chances of success typically in the industry or 1% to 5% success rate is really low. If we can bring those up to 15$ to 25%, we don’t need to invest in 30 brands, we need to invest in more like 10, how do we do it?

I’d say as a general rule, we look for capabilities or skill gaps that we can fulfill. We might see an entrepreneur that is incredibly creative and talented and has come up with an amazing brand. Maybe they came from the fashion world and therefore, they do not know the regulatory side of beverage alcohol, they don’t know the distribution side. We can plug and play our skills, our people, our fractional will even act as a fractional C-suite for some of these founders. It’s not a cookie-cutter approach.

Each founder has their own needs. We’ll plug in what is needed for each of those brands. That’s a general philosophy. It’s mostly advisory work. We’ve actually began, which is a differentiator for us, hiring salespeople. We’ve got salespeople in Florida and Texas. We don’t plan to launch too many states, but it’s a great solution for a brand that says, “I’m based in Nevada and I want to expand to Texas and I don’t want to pay a full-time person $150,000 a year.” We can be that fractional service to them and our incentives are aligned. We want the brand to work, we’re not trying to lead them drive cashflow, so we do it in an economically advantageous way for the founders as well.

You mentioned the eight companies that you’ve invested in so far. Let’s talk about some of the success stories, some of the brands that you’re really proud of.

Yeah, I’d love to, Scott. Anybody in this world of venture capital would say a real success story is an exit. We do not have an exit yet. Just as context, we raised a small round in ‘23 and then we raised another round in ‘24. We began deploying a little bit in ‘23 and mostly in ‘24. We’re 1 to 2 years into deploying capital. Unfortunately for the readers and for us, no major super sexy success stories, but what I can speak to is more around the value creation. Without naming names, I should be a little careful here, but the brands in the portfolio, one of them was having difficulty, had probably hired a little bit too quickly with salespeople and they were not profitable.

One of the things we did is a reorg plan, which is not typically what we do. We’re not headcount cutters, but we felt there was a better way to reallocate resources and we brought that brand as of July of 2025 back to profitability. This, to us, in this environment where less M&A deals are happening, inflationary environment, if you can be EBITDA positive or profitable, I think you just give yourself so many more options.

That’s a fantastic thing. I think the founders are super proud of that and we are instrumental in helping them get there. Maybe one other example, which actually I won’t share the brand because this is one we might make an investment in, but we’ve been advising them and actually similar to the first one, they also expanded way too quickly.

I’m going to make up the state they’re in, let’s call it Nevada. They expanded way too quickly and we put a lot of pressure on them to retrench and refocus on their home state of, let’s call it Nevada. They really did that. They were hesitant because they said, “Our revenues are going to drop. This isn’t going to look good for our investors.” There was a slight monthly drop in the early months and then a year later, actually their revenues in fewer markets is higher than it was before.

To us, again, that’s an example of too many brands spread themselves too thin. We just said, “It’s working in your home state and a few surrounding states. Let’s focus not just our sales personnel or headcount SG&A efforts. Let’s focus our marketing spend in just 2 or 3 markets and see if it works and we’re getting better retention, better velocity, etc., in those markets. Those are just some of the examples of the value levers that we try to pull to create value here.

The Makeup Of Current LPs: Who Invests In No Sleep Beverage?

Let’s talk to potential LPs and people that want to invest with No Sleep. First of all, what’s the makeup of the current LPs now? Not by name or title, but who are they?

We’re 35 LPs, roughly. I’d say the bulk of them are high-net-worth individuals, often successful businessmen, successful people from the world of finance. They’ve seen the George Clooney multiples of Casamigos. They’re excited not just from a business proposition and our vision, but also, it’s a fun industry to be able to be a part of a brand and watch its growth and maybe to get some of the perks of that. I think the real reason is they buy into the vision.

Outside of the individuals, we’ve got a few family offices, so we’ve got a billionaire family office from outside the US that’s an investor that’s been involved in the beer world. They’ve seen beer slowing down and they’ve seen the higher growth with spirits and the better margins of spirits. I think that’s one of the reasons that attracted them to us. We’ve got one small strategic player, call them like a co-packer, that doesn’t necessarily develop their own spirits products, but does a lot of canning packaging for spirits players. I think there’s some synergistic value add on both sides, hopefully.

You just mentioned George Clooney and celebrity brands. Obviously, you’ve seen a lot of celebrities in brands, a lot of alcohol brands. How does that factor into them as being a potential LP or being a potential portfolio company? A celebrity involvement, is it good for the investment or are they good LPs? Let’s break each one down.

I think that it’s good in the sense that it creates a lot of buzz and attracts a lot of investors. We are very upfront with our investors as I will be with you right now. In general, a celebrity attachment to a brand is probably more often than not a negative versus a positive. I think there are lots of entrepreneurs that can come into the industry without knowing a playbook of how to work. It’s even worse when they’ve slapped a celebrity name onto the brand without also figuring out not just how to grow a brand in the market, but how and why that partnership can be optimized.

Somebody talks about George Clooney and Casamigos multiples. We’ve got 60 tequila brands on a list, on an Excel spreadsheet that were started by celebrities or had the celebrity as a main investor. I think if you ask the average consumer, they might know 2 to 4 of them, not all 60. The others are all, honestly, failures. I think people just don’t think through why the celebrity is involved. Does the celebrity have a good match to this brand? In other words, is the DNA of that celebrity similar to the DNA of the brand? Do people buy into the story?

Also, is the celebrity putting skin in the game and how incentivized are they to grow the brand over time? Celebrities are approached all the time with different propositions and if they lose focus on your brand, you probably paid them some money and or gave them some equity and it might not be paying off. Usually, it’s a negative, Scott.

The reason I ask is, again, I won’t name names, but many years ago, I invested and helped raise money for a winery out of Napa who had a very famous race car driver on the namesake of the wine brand. Effectively, it was $9 bottle of wine that they put his name on and charged $100 for it and it had a nice pop and then collapsed very quickly, so I appreciate your candor on that.

I sympathize with you with that story.

Why No Sleep Beverage, Why Now? A Contrarian View On Spirits Investment

People reading that are potential LPs, potential investors, and No Sleep or advisors that recommend them, I always like to ask this question, why your fund, why now?

I guess two questions in there. Why us? This might be the braggadocious part, but we know what we’re doing. Whether you look at the specific beverage alcohol funds or consumer players that play in beverage alcohol, I think we’re the only team out there with both big company and little company experience. I’ve launched my own brand and I’ve sat on the other side of the table running the M&A team, acquiring brands. We’ve got a spreadsheet of 1,500 brands in an Excel tracker where we’re constantly looking at why is this brand working, why is it not. We have the startup experience, we’ve launched brands, we’ve been part of large companies, importers, distributors. I ran the M&A team at Pernod Ricard.

I think we also know the competitive landscape. We know the CEOs of many of these large public companies. We know the heads of M&A. What does that mean? It means we know how they think. We know how they think about value in the companies, we know they think about how they’ll add value. We know they think about the strategic value that they might extract from an acquisition.

I think that puts us in a prime position, not just to help these brands scale, which will add value along the way, but to optimize the value at exit because we can play that game very well. I think in summary, I’d say why us? We do three things very well. We know how to buy attractively, we know how to develop and execute a proven playbook of value creation and we know how to optimize those values at exit. I think that’s what you want in a venture partner focused on the space.

Why now? Why is this a good time to vest in alcohol and spirits?

I do think it’s a good time. I’m going to start with a negative. We talked about the negative headlines earlier. I think our whole team thinks that remainder of ‘25, 2, 3 months left here into ‘26 will continue to be a very challenging environment in the world of beverage alcohol. We’ve heard every year a lot of people in the industry say, “It’s getting better this year.” It’s not, and I’m just going to put that out there. It is not. Inventory levels are still at all-time highs from August of ‘22, from the COVID overpurchasing there is a little bit of a hangover from the consumer perspective. We talked earlier about some maybe abstaining and moderating a little more. I’m sure some of the cause of that is the COVID excess.

We think it will be a very tough environment over the next, call it 1 to 2 years. That might sound shocking. Why are you in the business then? As you probably think like we would, that makes it a great time to invest. I think we can look at opportunities where maybe the valuations are lower. Maybe people have a great brand and great business model. Maybe they’re great founders.

Their problem is raising money in this environment. That’s something that’s not inherently wrong with the brand or business model. It’s a capital markets issue. I think we look at that as very positive and for us as a good opportunity to step in. I’ve been in the industry since 2009 or ‘10. I’d say this is the best time to invest since the last ten years. Probably 2015, ‘14 was another great time to invest.

We think we’re in that period right now. Hopefully, I’m not repeating myself too much, but we’ve got a contrarian view of the headlines of the market of younger generations not drinking and all that’s in our Eyes Open Report. In short, good time to buy brands that attract valuations. We think we can execute on this playbook in an under the radar way when a lot of people are ignoring the industry. Over the coming 1 to 3, maybe 5 years, begin to exit some of these brands as the market regains the tear that it was on pre-COVID.

Future Growth Strategy: The Platform Play And Launching New Brands

Anything else you want to share with our readers that we haven’t covered yet?

Yeah, thanks for the opportunity. I’ll tease one thing right now, which is we’ve talked about the venture fund and the consulting arm adjacent to it that adds value to those venture brands. We are actually not fully deployed, but almost fully deployed and we’re thinking as a next vehicle rather than raising a larger venture fund, doing more of a, you can call it many things, I guess a roll-up, a mini private equity, a platform play, if you will, in the coming months or maybe into 2026 at least.

The idea would really be to acquire controlling stakes in brands, synergize the revenues and the back office functions across the portfolio and then begin adding new brands into that platform as you get it up and running. This is the interesting part. Those new brands can come from continued acquisition or what we think is really interesting is potentially launching our own brands into that platform.

If you think of that crazy number I said earlier that failure rates are 95% to 99%, which statistics you look at, if you can launch a brand into an existing platform, or I’ll use the word infrastructure that already exists, that has salespeople, that has the compliance back office, that can do a lot of the things that take away from the founder building a brand, then we think your chances go up dramatically. That’s the idea and part of our whole thesis, how do you de-risk the journey or launch to exit? The next vehicle would probably be something that both acquires brands and eventually launches brands.

We’ll have to come back and have you on once that gets fully baked.

We’ve got to do it over a drink next time, Scott.

Yeah. Absolutely. Come out to Florida.

I’m on the East Coast.

I’m in St. Pete, so we can meet somewhere, for sure. Nick, where can people learn more about No Sleep Beverage and get in contact with you?

Yeah, so our website, NoSleepBeverage.com. We are on social media, really just LinkedIn. We’re not really on Instagram or Facebook. No Sleep Beverage is the holding company or the fund or the portfolio level. People are more interested in hearing from our brands and hearing from us, but we do have a presence on LinkedIn and that’s probably the best way. There’s also an email address that goes to our entire team, which is EyesOpen@NoSleepBeverage.com.

Fantastic. Nick, thanks again for being on the show and everyone reading, I encourage you to like, follow share this show and watch for the next thing coming up. Nick, thanks for being on the show.

Scott, thanks so much. All the best and hope to see you soon.

Take care.

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It was a great interview with Nick from No Sleep Beverage and it’s a trend in philosophy that I’ve seen with a lot of the investors that we’ve interviewed on the show. In the spirit space, he’s focusing on the premium part of the market, which I mentioned before, and his hands-on approach to de-risk the opportunity to be more focused, fewer investments, but with an opportunity to find better opportunities to exit.

The one thing I liked and we’re finding in a lot of these emerging managers, is a contrarian market view. He holds a review that is counter to what the media says about consumption of alcohol in this age range, in this age group. He sees as a good time, like any investment, to buy low and sell high and take advantage of the contemporary downfall and decline in the industry to take advantage of the growth.

The one thing he mentioned in the episode is his future growth strategy. They’re currently exploring this platform play that’s the next vehicle by acquiring, possibly acquiring, controlling stakes, synergizing operations and more of a private equity approach where you consolidate a number of brands and put them under one organizational umbrella to create more efficiencies and more profits.

I think that’s really going to be an interesting strategy that I’m looking forward to see it take place. For founders that are looking to go to No Sleep for an opportunity, you have to be within the right criteria. I tell entrepreneurs all the time, “Pick the right investor at the right stage.” If you’re a premium band doing sales from $1 million to $10 million, they’re probably the place to stop. If you want value-added support, that’s what they do.

Their consulting side provides C-suite level support with regulatory issues, distribution, other areas that can make not only the capital be more efficient, but the returns be more effective. They have a focus on profitability and getting an exit. I tell people all the time, “Putting the money into the investment is easy part. Getting the money out is the more difficult part.” They understand how to build a business and exit a business in the spirit space.

It was really interesting. I asked him about celebrities investing in brands like George Clooney and others, and he said, “Caution.” I think the reality is it might be a good idea in the beginning, but you need to make sure that the DNA is right with the celebrity and there are clear incentives and long-term growth with this celebrity involvement in these high-end, high-quality spirits brands. This has been the third investor that we’ve interviewed in the space and there’s probably going to be some more. We’ve got a lot of other great ones coming up in food and beverage, cybersecurity, AI and others. I look forward to you to reading those and I’ll see you next time.

Important Links

• No Sleep Beverage
• No Sleep Beverage on LinkedIn
• No Sleep Beverage Email
• Nick Papanicolaou on LinkedIn
• Nick Papanicolaou on Instagram