Nick Kuelbs
Nick Kuelbs grew up around the companies his family ran, which is a particular kind of education. You learn early that a business is a set of decisions made by people, most of them unglamorous, and that the difference between a good year and a bad one usually comes down to a handful of them.
He started his career inside one of those companies — digital strategy at Funimation, in the years before its sale to Sony — and went on to help build Masterpiece Spirits.
Then he built one of his own.
Latin Gin
Nick is co-founder and President of Latin Gin, which he built with Ivania Sher and John A. Kuelbs. The idea was to bring the flavours of Latin culture into a spirit made with generations of Italian craft — four expressions, vacuum-distilled in the Italian Alps at a family-run distillery founded in 1906, around botanicals drawn from Italy and Latin America.
The brand now reaches more than twenty countries and 2,500 premium accounts, and is distributed in the United States by Southern Glazer's and RNDC. Forbes named him to its 30 Under 30 list in 2024 for the work.
The gin taught him the thing the family already believed: that distribution is where consumer businesses are actually won or lost, and that a brand only exists once someone has decided to stock it, pour it and reorder it. Getting into twenty countries is a sales problem before it is a marketing one.
Ventures
At Kuelbs Family Office, Nick leads the venture side of the portfolio — companies being built around technology, industrial innovation and ambitious new markets. It is the part of the work where the family follows an idea beyond the industries it knows firsthand, and the judgement it asks for is the same one that runs through everything else here: whether the people building it are worth backing.
He is a member of YPO Global One and splits his time between Texas and South Florida. Outside the office his interests run to the equestrian world — he is an investor in Royal Oak Equestrian and a partner at Wellington Property Partners.