With the guidance of a team deeply rooted in Texas, a plant that grows on its own terms is finding new life in Desert Door, a spirit crafted from sotol to carry forward what came before.
By Cara Clark
The story of Desert Door doesn’t begin with a bottle. It begins with dislocation — the realization that a life built on precision and command might still be unfinished, and a question of whether discipline can become something softer without losing its edge. This Driftwood, Texas–based company began, like many unlikely things do, with a step sideways.
That step took shape a decade ago when three veterans — retired Marine Corps pilot Brent Looby, Navy service member Judson Kauffman, and former U.S. Army service member Ryan Campbell — met at the University of Texas McCombs School of Business. What followed was a gradual recalibration of identity after years defined by structured service and technical expertise.
Looking back on that transition, Brent frames it less as ambition and more as uncertainty about what comes after mastery of a single track.
“How did I even go to business school?,” asks Brent Looby, CEO and founder of Desert Door. “Most people in my line of work, after 20 years, are only good at one thing, so you follow the path of least resistance. I’m an engineer by degree. I’d been flying airplanes for 20 years, which means you’re really only qualified to fly airplanes. But I didn’t want to fly for the airlines. I started wondering how to translate those 20 years into something in the private sector.”
That search set the stage for something neither the classroom nor the participants initially recognized as permanent. Business school, after all, was not supposed to be an origin story. It was meant to be a structured pause between defined chapters, but in that controlled environment, something unexpected took root.
In an elective course called New Venture Creation, the three veterans were placed together on a team. What began as an academic exercise — a structured pitch designed for evaluation rather than execution — started to resemble something more durable.
“What would become Desert Door was just a class project in the summer of 2016,” he says. “We weren’t trying to start a real company — just get an easy A and have fun. But we got the highest grade in the class. At the award ceremony, a judge said if we were serious, she and her husband wanted to talk about investing. That’s when we looked at each other and realized this might actually be real.”
Even then, the idea was still fragile. It had momentum, but not yet clarity. What followed was a period of testing whether it could survive outside the controlled logic of the classroom.
“In class, we weren’t Desert Door yet,” he says. “We were called 100 Proof, and the spirit was 1836, the year Texas won independence. But once we decided to pursue it, we realized we had gaps in what we knew. Even the name became an issue — there was already a similar brand, and we needed to differentiate.”
