
He learned rejection door to door in Argentina, built NFC experiments in a Utah garage, and moved to San Francisco to help local businesses become legible to machines. Now the Cheers co-founder is betting that a five-star review can be both a thank-you note and a data point.
Brooks Powell is the founder and CEO of Cheers (formerly Thrive+), a Houston-based consumer health brand built around DHM, a plant extract he first read about as a Princeton sophomore writing a neuroscience paper on alcohol. He licensed a permeabilizer technology from the university, launched in 2017, pitched on Shark Tank, and grew the company past $25M in revenue and 13M+ doses sold. A former religion major and Division I swimmer, he turned a class assignment into a category and earned a spot on the Forbes Next 1000 list.