How did it move from classroom idea to viable business?
During time off from Brown, I worked at the Clinton Climate Initiative and engaged in the concept of how business models can be used to solve social and environmental problems. When I returned, I took an entrepreneurship class at Brown with Tyler [Gage] and Charlie [Harding], [two Runa co-founders]. We were all passionate about sustainable and social development, and didn’t want to be working on some tech website. Tyler had been working with Ecuadorian shamans in California, and threw out the idea of guayusa. While our original intention was an academic exercise, the more that we worked on it, the more we realized that what could make guayusa a real success was to build a market in the U.S.. In Ecuador there had been similar concepts with selling shiitake mushrooms while respecting forest ecosystems but the missing ingredient was having a U.S. brand. We’d done so much research, had begun to build what could become a great board, and came to the conclusion that we needed to run it ourse
