Rashad
Hossainbrews the impossible

A coffee guy who quit coffee

Rashad Hossain wakes up and drinks mushrooms. Cordyceps, Lion's Mane, Reishi, Shiitake, Turkey Tail, King Trumpet - six of them, ground into organic arabica, poured before most founders have answered their first email. It is the product he sells, and it is also the reason he sells anything at all. RYZE Superfoods, the company he runs as founder and CEO, exists because Hossain got tired of the morning he used to have.

That old morning came courtesy of The Kraft Heinz Company, where for three years he marketed some of the most recognizable coffee brands in America. It was a good job. It was the wrong job. He was selling a daily ritual he had quietly come to distrust - the crash, the anxiety, the 3 p.m. collapse - while marketing products that had nothing to do with the healthy life he wanted to live. So in 2019, on a string of long phone calls about health hacks with his old Harvard classmate Andree Werner, he stumbled onto functional mushrooms. The two were not trying to start a company. They were trying to feel better.

Built in his mother's basement

The romance of the startup origin story usually skips the part where you are broke. Hossain does not. He launched RYZE in March 2020 from his mom's basement, nearly out of money, with a friend's small check covering the first round of ads. He had no growth team, no agency, no playbook. He had Reddit threads and YouTube tutorials, and he read them the way other people binge television - learning ecommerce, paid media, and direct-to-consumer strategy one late night at a time.

It worked faster than it had any right to. By October 2020, seven months after launch, RYZE was being called one of the fastest-growing brands in its category. As a two-person team, Hossain and Werner pushed past 40,000 customers and seven figures in revenue inside the first year - and stayed profitable while doing it. The thing about teaching yourself the entire business is that nobody can take that knowledge back.

The RYZE machine

The Harvard kid who built an app first

Hossain did not arrive at entrepreneurship through RYZE. He arrived as an undergrad at Harvard, where he studied economics with a focus on Swedish - the kind of detail that tells you he was never going to color strictly inside the lines. While still a student he founded Keepspace, a social journaling platform, won a $50,000 innovation award at the Harvard i3 Challenge, and earned a slot in the Harvard Innovation Lab's Venture Incubation Program. Years later, that journaling instinct resurfaced: Keepspace evolved into the HOW I RYZE gratitude app, the reflective sibling to the coffee.

It is a useful through-line. Long before he was blending fungi, he was building tools for people who wanted to be a little more deliberate about their days. The coffee just made the habit drinkable.

A timeline, in cups

• 2012-2016Studies economics (with Swedish) at Harvard; founds Keepspace and wins $50K at the i3 Challenge.
• 2016-2019Works at Kraft Heinz as Associate Brand Manager for Coffee and a Revenue Management Senior Financial Analyst.
• 2019Health-hack phone calls with Andree Werner lead the two to functional mushrooms.
• March 2020Launches RYZE Mushroom Coffee from his mother's basement.
• Oct 2020RYZE is hailed as one of the fastest-growing brands in its space.
• 2021Raises a seed round from PS27 Ventures' Rhea Fund.
• 2022Named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in Food & Drink.
• 2024Expands the lineup and distribution onto TikTok Shop and Amazon.

What riles him up

Ask Hossain how he keeps going and he does not reach for a productivity system. He reaches for his parents, who immigrated from Bangladesh with very little, and the quiet refusal to waste what they built. "Find things to motivate you," he says. "Find things that rile you up. It's different for everyone." For him the fuel is legacy, not metrics - the conviction that an average life would be an insult to the people who got him here.

The other half of his answer is stubborn optimism. He and Werner kept hitting goals other people called impossible, and the lesson stuck: belief plus a willingness to experiment is most of the game. "The impossible is possible," he says, and from a man who turned a basement and a borrowed ad budget into a Forbes-listed brand, it reads less like a slogan and more like a lab note.

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