Built Restless: How Daniel Medina ('27) Bet on Himself
- Cathy Campo
- Apr 26
- 6 min read
Updated: Apr 29
By: Vidhur Potluri, Staff Writer & Finance/Sponsorships Director
Do the classes we take, the people we meet, and the clubs we chair here at Kellogg truly prepare us for the world of business? Can we really build products that customers love, outrun competition, and create something that lasts? We've all had these doubts, and we’ve all made a significant gamble to be here. And if we’re being honest, most of us won't know if it pays off until long after we've left Evanston.
But what if we didn’t have to wait? What if we could check in on the experiment while it's still running? Daniel Medina (2Y '27), a first-year student who built and launched a product before ever even setting foot in Evanston, has come up with a blueprint just to do just that. Daniel made a different kind of bet: investing his life savings into a product he believes in, launching it, and selling it before coming to Kellogg. He came here not to find his path, but to make sure the one he’s already on leads somewhere.
The Entrepreneur
Daniel didn't grow up expecting to go to college. His family was hit hard by the Great Recession and hadn't fully recovered by the time he was finishing high school. Then a Marine Corps recruiter showed up at his door with a scholarship offer. "I was very fortunate and blessed to have that opportunity," he tells The Kelloggian.
He accepted the scholarship and once he got there, he never looked back. Seven years in the Marine Corps followed: financial management officer, Deputy Disbursing Officer deployed to Kuwait, leading 67 Marines on a humanitarian support mission at the southern border, then Series Commander responsible for turning civilians into United States Marines, Company Commander overseeing 30 drill instructors and up to 600 recruits at a time, and eventually Operations Officer coordinating across four agencies and more than 1,300 personnel.
“You get to go through challenges and grow through them,” he says. “You’re placed in leadership positions really young, so you get a lot of opportunities to serve people and help people.” He loved that part—he chance to be put in uncomfortable situations, to figure it out, and to bring people along with him.
That mindset is exactly what drew him to Kellogg. "High impact, low ego," he says, when I ask what made the difference. Everyone here is incredibly competent and hyper-competitive—but genuinely willing to help. He saw it mirroring the best units he'd served in. "It doesn't have to be a zero-sum game," he says. "If we're all helping each other out—why wouldn't you?" He also came for the entrepreneurship ecosystem specifically—the Garage, the CPG-focused resources, the pre-accelerator Jumpstart program, which gave him $10,000 over the summer and helped him bring on an undergraduate student to lead marketing and brand activations.
But underneath it all is something simpler. He grew up watching people work incredibly hard and get very little back for it. He joined an institution built on exactly that kind of sacrifice. And now he's at one of the best business schools in the world, building something designed to help those same people. "Kind, caring, capable without ego being involved," he says, describing what he thinks people should be. It's a good description of the culture he sought out. It's also, not coincidentally, a pretty good description of him.
The Idea
In his last position before Kellogg, Daniel watched Marines work up to 140 hours a week. To put that in perspective, there are only 168 hours in a week. “Sleep, if at all,” he says. What kept people going were energy drinks like Monster—quick bursts of energy followed by crashes, jitters, and long-term health consequences no one wanted to think about yet.
He’d seen the same pattern his whole life. His dad leaving for construction sites before 6 AM, driving two hours each way, coming home exhausted and going straight to bed. His brother, now a police officer, running the same cycle. “I want people to go home after a long day and actually enjoy time with their family,” he tells me. “That’s what this is really about.”
His answer is Restless, a human performance drink built for the military, first responders, and anyone grinding through a demanding life. The formula pairs 120 milligrams of caffeine with 240 milligrams of L-theanine, a 2:1 ratio designed to deliver steady energy without the crash or jitters that often come with caffeine alone. It also includes fiber, beets, anti-inflammatories, and antioxidants.
I then asked him the obvious question: does something like this already exist? He pauses for a second, then answers by drawing a contrast. AG1 is a different pitch entirely—feel good, look good, “pretty.” The healthier energy drink alternatives, he says, aren’t much better: green tea caffeine, B vitamins, maybe some electrolytes, often in minimal doses. “I think it’s pretty disingenuous,” he says. Restless, he explains, is built for a different kind of person—someone who doesn’t need to be sold on wellness, just something that helps them get through the day. “Attack the day without crashing,” he says. “That’s the whole thing.”
The Process
Restless is no longer just an idea. Daniel built the company in September 2024 and launched it early last year. It's a bootstrap operation—one SKU, 1,840 units of inventory, processes in place, and a summer of brand activations ahead. Although not yet available in retail, but Daniel is working toward that by Q4. You can find his product at restlessco.co or on Instagram at @restless.energy.
For a first-year MBA student, that's a lot to manage. And Kellogg, he'll tell you, has been more useful than he expected. The Garage, a student entrepreneurship space tucked into the parking structure by Henry Crown, gave him access to workspace, resources, and, as he puts it, "free coffee, which is dope." The Tinker program got him in the door, which led to a resident spot, which led to Jumpstart, a pre-accelerator that provided him $10,000 over the summer and helped him bring on an undergraduate student to lead marketing and brand activations.
The classes have been equally translatable. He's currently enrolled in Selling Yourself and Your Ideas—"very translatable," he says, for someone literally trying to sell a business. "I'm trying to find a way to feed every class into Restless," he says. Courses like New Venture Launch, built for teams with an existing product and early traction, reflect the kind of hands-on, build-as-you-go approach that mirrors how he’s operating.
And then there are the people. Classmates have jumped in to help him build in real time—offering ideas, feedback, and hands-on support in ways he didn’t fully anticipate. “People are excited to do that,” he says.
Asked about work-life balance, he laughs:"There is no balance." There's just overlap. He's up at 6:30 AM for jiu-jitsu with a buddy from the Kellogg Veterans Association—social life and training in one. When he's with classmates, he tries to be fully present. He's not going to make every TG or every cocktail hour, and he's made peace with that. "I'm not going to be able to index on these incredibly social gatherings." His classmates spent fall quarter deep in recruiting. He spent it building. "Accept the trade-offs, make your priorities," he says.
The Dream
By the end of this year, Daniel wants to sell through 1,840 units. Not because of the revenue, but because of what it proves. "That shows we have the processes in place to begin scaling," he says, "and that there's something that actually helps people." After that, retail by Q4 or early next year. Then a sleep formula, built for the same audience: people pushing through long days who still need to recover at night.
Longer term, he envisions products integrated with wearable technology. Your Whoop translating stress, sleep, and recovery into what you should take as a supplement. An app closing the loop between physiology and consumption. And beyond that, preventative health, intervening earlier so people aren’t paying the cost of depletion decades later. “I want to stop people from paying dearly when they’re older,” he says. “That’s what this is really about.”
It’s an ambitious roadmap. But it already reads less like theory than extension. The company exists. It’s shipping inventory. It has a hire. It has funding from Jumpstart. It has classmates feeding into it, classes feeding into it, and a system slowly taking shape around it. “Your future trajectory is going to be so much greater,” someone told him early on, “because you’re being exposed to so many ideas and people you just never would have.” He’s already testing that in real time.
Which brings the story back to its original question. Do the classes, the people, and the institutions here actually prepare you for the world of business? For Daniel, the answer is already taking shape, not in a return offer or a signing bonus, but in a product on the market, a grant in the bank, and a vision that keeps getting bigger.
The experiment is still running. But the early results look promising.
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