Kelly Gasnik and Jill Burns

KELLY GASINK and JILL BURNS are seasoned entrepreneurs, fundraisers and siblings who co-founded Austin Cocktails.  Austin Cocktails is a line of natural, bottled, craft cocktails developed to make a beautiful, complex cocktail as easy as nice wine or craft beer. The seed of Austin Cocktails was planted by their hardworking, farming grandfather who started “Cocktail Time,” an inviolable, family tradition of having kids and adults drop everything at 5:30 on summer evenings to enjoy a fresh cocktail. While this lifelong, family ritual of making time for joy and connection was critical to the creation of Austin Cocktails, it is the co-founders’ very diverse backgrounds, expertise and personalities that would bring their company into reality and put them at the vanguard of overhauling one of the most stalled categories in CPG. Gasink graduated from Stanford with a degree in economics, and also earned an M.A. in public policy at Harvard.  She was part of the exciting dot com era and sold two of her startup ventures to publicly traded companies.  For her entrepreneurial successes, the Wall Street Journal named her one of its “Faces of a New Generation of Leaders and Entrepreneurs.” Burns graduated from Santa Clara University where she played on the golf team.  She had career in marketing and PR, which she developed while working for legendary sports agent, Leigh Steinberg.  Later, she started her own marketing and PR company that helped launch a number of brands such as StubHub.  Burns primarily handles all marketing and consumer facing aspects of Austin Cocktails.  @austincocktails