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Brian Tate is the kind of American who takes risks, bets on himself, and turns a corner nobody else saw into a business. A former professional poker player who says he banked nearly $10 million in his twenties, Tate walked away from the tables and plowed his winnings into a kitchen experiment that became Oats Overnight. That leap from cards to commerce is the purest form of entrepreneurship — private capital, sweat equity, and a refusal to wait on anyone else to give permission.
Today that gamble is paying off in a big way: Oats Overnight is pulling in more than $200 million in annual revenue and Forbes pegs the company’s worth in the hundreds of millions, even as it navigates the messy business of scaling and profitability. This is a real-world example of market demand answering louder than the hand-wringing of doom-and-gloom pundits who think consumers only buy things on price alone. Americans are voting with their wallets for convenience and quality, not for the sameness served up by legacy corporate brands.
Tate didn’t get here by sitting in a boardroom; he bootstrapped the operation with roughly $500,000 of his own money, honest toil, and a family that pitched in — his mother handled fulfillment and friends helped with manufacturing when the company was making a few hundred units a day. That’s the backbone of small-business America: people putting their own skin in the game and figuring it out on the fly. It’s a far cry from the handouts and subsidies that swamp too much of today’s economy.
He built the business around a subscription model, listening to customers, iterating flavors, and using retention as the key metric rather than fawning over flashy launch parties. The result was hundreds of thousands of subscribers and a product that evolved because it had to survive in a competitive marketplace. This kind of customer-focused, data-driven capitalism is what creates jobs and innovation, not top-down mandates from Washington.
When growth required capital, Tate took it on the chin and brought in outside investment — raising tens of millions to scale production, including a notable $35 million round tied to a well-known hospitality investor — then put that money into a 310,000-square-foot facility in Ohio to ramp up output and cut shipping costs. He says the company became profitable this year, proving that rugged investment and expansion can lead to real returns and sustainable American manufacturing. That’s the pattern conservatives should champion: reinvestment, scaling, and accountability to customers and the bottom line.
Not everything was a win; a viral marketing stunt inviting Gen Z influencers to “scam us” blew up when refund requests surged and the company took a six-figure hit. Still, Tate shrugged off the loss like a bad poker hand and kept moving — a reminder that entrepreneurship is about taking calculated risks and owning the consequences. If anything, that episode exposes the lawlessness of influencer culture and the need for businesses to be shrewd, not sheepish, in protecting consumers and shareholders alike.
The bigger lesson for patriots is simple: let people build. When Americans with grit and capital are free to innovate, they create products people want, hire workers, and rebuild local industry. Celebrate the gamble, the bootstrapper, and the family who packs boxes in the trunk; oppose the politicians who want to tax, regulate, and micromanage that success away. This is how our country gets stronger — by rewarding risk, not by rewarding excuses.
