He left the best job a graduate could ask for because the output was invisible. Now you can hold it in two ounces.
// William Hicks. The banker who decided coffee deserved a rival.
Dispatch
Most people drink the second cup and pay for it by 2 p.m. William Hicks looked at that crash and decided it was a design flaw, not a fact of life. Magic Mind, the company he runs, is a small brown bottle that goes down after your coffee and is built to do what the third espresso never could: keep you present instead of jittery. The bet is that over-caffeination is the enemy of good work, and that a blend of twelve nootropics, adaptogens, vitamins, and antioxidants can carry the focus without the spike.
Inside the bottle
The Magic Mind formula leans on three pillars rather than one big slug of caffeine. A rough read on the philosophy:
Illustrative emphasis based on public product descriptions, not exact dosages.
The Arc
Hicks did everything the resume asked of him. Princeton, cum laude. An internship parsing energy policy at CSIS in Washington. Then a seat as an analyst at Barclays, the sort of investment-banking job that college career offices frame on the wall. By his own account it was the best job he could have hoped for. It also felt soulless. The hours produced spreadsheets and slide decks, and nothing he could point to in the world and say: I made that.
So he left the certainty for the opposite. "I started my own businesses to have the results of my daily work show up in a tangible way in the world," he has said. The first tangible thing was a bean. With BRAMI he helped bring lupini, a Mediterranean snack legume most Americans had never heard of, onto US shelves, raising roughly $10.8 million along the way. It was unglamorous, plant-based, and real. You could eat it.
Around 2020 he joined forces with James Beshara to build Magic Mind. Beshara, who had founded the crowdfunding platform Tilt before selling it, became the company's executive chairman and resident podcaster. Hicks took the CEO seat and the daily operating reality that comes with it. Their shared premise was almost contrarian for the energy aisle: less, dosed smarter, beats more.
The work since has not been a clean climb. Hicks talks openly about the parts founders usually launder out of the origin story. Firing friends. Long stretches of solo travel. Markets that lurch without warning. His survival mechanism is almost stoic: keep what he calls "90-day trailing average emotions," because the swings of building a company are too frequent and too violent to feel in real time. Ride every hump of the roller coaster and it will crush you.
What keeps him in it is the count. Tens of thousands of people now reach for Magic Mind every morning, and that number is the tangible output banking never gave him. "I go to sleep proud of slogging through the mud," he has said, "knowing that there are tens of thousands of people taking Magic Mind every day." The mud is the point. He measures a good day by the slog, not the calm.
He does not do it alone, and he says so. The CPG founder world is unusually generous, and Hicks credits the operators behind Dr. Squatch, Javy Coffee, Kettle & Fire, and his own BRAMI for the advice that got him through the worst stretches. It is a fraternity of people selling soap, coffee, bone broth, and beans, trading hard-won lessons like recipes.
Try to have 90-day trailing average emotions. The ups and downs of entrepreneurship are so frequent and violent that they can crush you if you ride every hump in that roller coaster.
— William Hicks
Receipts
The Operator
A standing wall against the calendar. The day is reserved for deep, flow-state work, the same state the product is meant to sell.
He will admit it freely, which is a strange confession for a man building the perfect morning routine for everyone else.
The whole pivot from banking turns on one need: to see the result of a day's work show up somewhere real.
Leans on a tight circle of CPG founders. Soap, coffee, bone broth, beans. The advice travels well.
Refuses to feel the daily swing. Smooths it over 90 days so the violence of the ride doesn't decide his mood.
Defines a good day by the mud he waded through, not the comfort he avoided. The grind is the reward.
Margin Notes
Filed Under
Magic Mind, billed as the world's first productivity drink, in a full episode feature.
The Productivity Drink (YouTube) →