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People pursue a higher education to specialize. You pick a lane, you earn the degree that proves it, and it becomes the thing you are.

earned a degree like everyone else. His just refused to pick a lane. With a BSBA in finance and international business, paired with Latin American and Iberian studies, he covered as much ground as he could from the start.

It set the pattern. Hatton doesn’t specialize. He accumulates, and he lets whatever he's curious about pull him toward the next thing.

It was that instinct that initiated his pivot from finance, because he wanted to do more than analyze brands from the outside. He wanted in. So in 2019, he moved to Colorado with his sights set on the outdoor industry. He immediately took the first door that opened, which was a part-time job on the sales floor of a North Face store on Pearl Street.

However, moving up inside someone else's company was never quite the point. He wanted to build something of his own. The evening MBA program at The Leeds School of Business gave him the room to try, and when an entrepreneurship class asked him to pitch an idea, he already knew where to look.

The strongest ideas tend to start not with a gap in the market, but with a gap in your own life. That’s exactly where Hatton went.

Built for the Teen He Once Was

is a physician-formulated nutrition drink built for active teenagers. Hatton calls it a foundational fuel, which is closer to a meal rather than typical protein supplements. It sounds simple, until you realize almost no one was making it.��

As a teenage athlete, sports were how he defined himself, and he could never quite stay fueled. He turned to whatever he could find, and none of it fit. The products were built for adults, sometimes for the elderly, and he ended up taking them mostly for the calories while the rest of the formula was meant for someone three times his age.

“There were products out there that were kind of what I was looking for, but they weren't designed for me. They were expensive. They had some of what I was looking for, but not all of it.”

It wasn't until years later, after working with a pediatric gastroenterologist, that he understood what had been going on. Adolescents carry nutritional needs unlike anyone else, especially athletes. Their bodies are growing fast, and for most of them it's the most active stretch of life they'll ever have.

That's why the formula was non-negotiable. In a category thick with misinformation, Hatton earned a sports nutrition certification to keep up with the science, then put medical doctors at the center of the work.

Each pouch carries 18 grams of protein and 220 calories, with the protein coming from real sources like nonfat milk, oat milk, and egg whites. That's not an isolate. That's a meal. He even chose to have VUUR regulated as a food rather than a supplement, so parents and teenagers could trust exactly what was in it. It was the harder path to take, but trust was the entire point. It is, in the end, the product he went looking for as a kid and never found.

Course Correction

For most of VUUR’s life, the idea was always solid. However, producing that idea proved to be much more difficult.

A few months before launch, Hatton had a purchase order in with a large manufacturer and a formula he thought was finished. Then he looked at the ingredient list as a whole and barely recognized it. The changes had come in quietly, one at a time.��

"I woke up one day and looked at it and thought, wait, this has strayed pretty far from what we originally intended."

A supplier discontinued an ingredient here. The manufacturer pushed an in-house substitute there. Something got added to move the mix through the machinery faster. Each compromise was small enough to wave through on its own. Together they had pulled the product away from the thing he set out to make.

So he canceled the order. He went back to the doctors, kept the core of what worked, and reformulated until it met the standard he started with. Then he found a manufacturer in Denver willing to build the product his way rather than the way that was cheapest or easiest for them.

He only caught the drift because he understood the formula well enough to see it slipping. This is where the generalist pays off. Hatton didn't come from a nutrition background, but he made sure he understood his product better than anyone. So when it started to wander, he was the one who noticed.

He didn't do it alone, and he's quick to say so. Colorado’s support system of food talent, outdoor and fitness industries, and entrepreneurial ecosystem played dramatic roles in VUUR’s development. Across the street, the Deming Center and other campus entrepreneurial initiatives offered resources he admits he underused as a student. He came back to them once he was building for real, including the Entrepreneurial Law Clinic through Silicon Flatirons, which helped him handle the parts of a company that have nothing to do with the product itself.

Now the product is made, the logistics are ironed out, and after almost three years, VUUR is days from being something a person can actually buy.

The Only Lane He Needed

Hatton is about to find out what happens when the thing you spent three years building finally meets the people you built it for.

Throughout his career, he's never had a single emphasis. He kept expanding his knowledge, and all of it led him to his own company, where he has to understand every part of the business himself.

With the launch of VUUR, Hatton will be at the center of one of the top entrepreneurial ecosystems in the country. He’s got the knowledge, he’s got the resources, and now it’s time to execute.

When asked about what success looks like, revenue is not his first thought.��

"Success for me — even if it's a small niche of customers — is that teenagers go out looking for a product and find VUUR and say, ‘wait, this is actually designed for me.’"

That’s the same sentence he spent his younger years wishing he could say. By solving an old problem with everything he'd taught himself along the way, he’s created something with the hopes of helping others.

People pursue higher education to specialize, but Hatton spent his career proving you don't have to. He never needed a single lane.��

He just needed to keep building.