Transcriber: Veronica Muntean Reviewer: Rhonda Jacobs
So, I grew up in the forests in Ohio, and I lived for nature.
I loved it; I spent every day in the woods.
And one of my earliest inspirations was a quote by Thoreau from Walden:
"To be awake is to be alive."
And through that and my life there, my dream over time
became to create a new connection between humans
and this little slice of rock hurtling through the sky that we call home.
So in pursuing that dream I went to college,
I studied marine biology.
In fact, I wrote my thesis on crabs,
the kind of crabs you find in a marsh.
(Laughter)
We all have many dreams, and they change and flux of over time,
and over the course of time those plans fell by the wayside.
I ultimately didn't want to work in a lab,
and what I came to through my studies was realizing that my greatest dream
was finding a new way to sync humans with ecosystems
and really align that connection.
So in college I traveled to Ecuador, visited the jungle,
and I actually visited the Kichwa people in the Amazon.
While there and seeing the rain forests and being marveled by that,
my dreams and their dreams intersected, and really I was changed forever.
The Kichwa get up early every morning,
they sit around the fire and they gather,
and they share their myths and their stories and their legends.
It's a really powerful ritual.
And while they do that they drink a tea from an Amazon "super-leaf,"
we made up that name, called guayusa.
With Tyler, my best friend from college, who also became my business partner,
I was lucky enough to take part in that ceremony, and it blew me away.
Sitting there really early, I mean like 4:00 in the morning,
sharing guayusa,
we were marveled by both the tradition and the power of guayusa -
gave a great boost of energy, it tasted amazing,
and as we later learned it was a health powerhouse.
Through that process of drinking guayusa and sharing their dreams,
the Kichwa connect as a community.
It helps them transition from the dream state,
which dreams are super important to them,
into their waking life and go about their day.
It's also how they become what they call runa,
which literally in the Kichwa language means fully awake and alive human being.
And when I learned that, what that meant, and I thought back on that Thoreau quote,
"To be awake is to be alive,"
I realized that there was something that had changed me forever,
and that I'd found a calling.
So we drank guayusa and we talked with these communities,
we sat around the fire and listened to them,
and learned about their amazing forests and the depth of their culture,
but also about the challenges they face.
They have very few opportunities to access income,
so oftentimes if they're trying to buy medicine or textbooks
or clothing for their kids and push comes to shove,
they had no way of getting money,
they'd have to cut down a few trees.
Can't say that's a great situation,
but I also can't say I [wouldn't] do the same thing in their shoes.
And we realized that there had to be a better way.
But what Tyler and I also realized was the answer wasn't more talk
or more plans and endless talking and more charity,
because they wanted a way that actually develop a business
and share their amazing traditions their plants with the market
in a way that drove livelihoods to their families.
So thinking about that and thinking about the context of natural products
and the way the markets were booming,
we realized that guayusa could be a means to that end,
and we decided to build a business and a value chain
that would share their traditions, their plant and guayusa with the world.
And that's how RUNA was born.
I could talk about that for an hour,
unfortunately, I don't have an hour and I think you'd all get a little bored.
But to fast forward to today,
we work with 2,600 farmers in the Ecuadorian Amazon.
The ones that we work with and who we buy guayusa from,
we've raised their incomes by 30 percent or more.
And in our plans we hope to be able to triple that
over the course of the next three years.
We actually buy guayusa directly from them every day,
paying a fair price, part of a social premium fund,
we built a foundation,
and we actually do it in rainforest gardens
that mimic their natural structure
and help preserve and grow the Amazon rainforest.
We also produce tens of thousands of pounds of guayusa per month
that we export and make hot teas, bottled beverages and energy drinks
that we sell in over 7,000 stores nationwide,
including one around the corner actually.
But the real lesson I want to share is actually about following my dream.
Or should I say dreams, plural.
I went into this expecting
that I would spend most of my time thinking about forests.
Actually, I spend most of my time figuring out how to sell beverages
or carrying hundreds of pounds of product.
Not what I was expected, but I'm beyond grateful
because the most exciting part for me
is waking up every day doing something completely new.
And sometimes not even knowing where to start.
Through that process my dreams are constantly evolving and growing,
and that's what makes me feel awake and alive and invigorated,
that and all the guayusa.
Looking back on all we've done,
I don't think we could have made it any more complicated had we tried.
It's like waking up every morning and fording a river.
For example, we changed our business structure four times.
Originally, we were non-profit then we were for-profit,
and now we have both,
before we settled on a model that actually works
and worked for the farmers,
and was slightly less complicated than rocket science.
Also, creating a beverage out of a tea that no one had ever used before
with no experience, straight out of college
with degrees in marine biology and creative writing,
(Laughter)
probably not the easiest thing we've ever done.
Honestly, though, it's that variety and the unique challenges
that make this worth doing, that and all the fun people you meet.
The best things in life take work and keep you on your toes.
On any day, I switch between thinking about reforestation, global retailers,
natural products, making sure we actually have product on the shelf
and new and unique ways to make bad jokes about tea.
(Laughter)
Even with this one big problem we have,
there's a hundred different ways to get there.
And in life I don't feel like I'm going to have one single dream
or even one dream at a time.
I think we're going to have multiple purposes
and multiple ways of getting there,
because there's multiple ways of going after different problems,
you can't just pick one solution or one problem.
It's all interconnected.
That's what we saw with the Kichwa,
and that's why we built a whole partnership
that addresses their whole value chain.
The world is going to change around us and us with it,
just like the Amazon is changing,
and we adapt our work as we go through it.
And that's what fuels my dreams and gives me hope.
I love the work we do in Ecuador, but I don't do it every day.
In fact, I don't have that much direct involvement on the ground.
But you know what, that doesn't matter.
And it doesn't even matter if our customers know about that either.
What's much more important is that we love a product
that provides great clean energy to people everywhere.
And we are driving livelihoods for the Kichwa,
and we're making that a success.
Every bottle drives that dream a little bit closer.
We're moving towards that dream fulfilling our own
and theirs of being fully awake and alive.
Every day, for us, for our customers, for the Kichwa.
And to me, that's living.
So thinking about all that I want to bring together
some of the life lessons I learned from the Kichwa
and in my time drinking guayusa.
Every day I try to remind myself that what I'm doing is important
and it feels good,
and that I feel like I'm making a difference
and it's not just something I'm doing for my own ego.
Even if sometimes it's a smaller piece
and a much bigger picture that goes beyond us.
I try to know that what I'm doing is something the world really needs,
and not just something that I'm doing to bring attention to myself.
And most importantly, what's important to me
is that my work has a real benefit that people can feel,
both the Kichwa and the people who drink our products.
It makes a dramatic difference in their lives
and that we have a real and authentic story
that people can believe in and know is true
and understand just by looking at it.
And most importantly that I feel alive and awake doing it.
And if I stop doing it tomorrow, I'd be glad I did,
because we know that the impact we made will last beyond us.
I've tried to follow those lessons
throughout the five years that I've been doing this.
And in that process I feel like I've become a runa, fully awake and alive,
just like that Thoreau quote I remembered from a kid.
I do that in a hundred different ways every single day,
and I feel like I'm fulfilling my life's purpose,
or, as I like to think about it now,
fulfilling all of my life's purposes.
Thank you.
(Applause)