John Sylvan

John Sylvan worked at Keurig in the 1990s when he devised a simple product that could create a small mug of coffee out of a plastic pod. Originally aiming it at office workers, Sylvan said he thought the product might have some appeal to people who would normally go to coffee chains in the morning. "That would make it environmentally neutral, because you wouldn't have those Starbucks cups [everywhere]," says Sylvan. "The first market was the office coffee service market," he said, adding he is "absolutely mystified" by his product's popularity in homes.

According to a wildly popular ad campaign against the product, there are so many discarded K-Cups that if you lined them up it would be enough to circle the earth more than 10 times — and that's just from one year's worth of coffee pods. To this day, he still doesn't understand why people like them. "I find them rather expensive," he said. "From a personal standpoint, it saves 20 seconds of your day," he says. "What's that worth?"