Fully Alive: Using the Lessons of the Amazon to Live Your Mission in Business and Life - Hardcover

Gage, Tyler

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1501156020 ISBN 13: 9781501156021

Publisher: Atria Books, 2017

Synopsis

Fully Alive tells the story of an astoundingly successful young entrepreneur’s immersion in Amazonian indigenous spirituality, its life-changing impact on him, and how he integrated the lessons he learned to build a successful, socially responsible company, live a purposeful life, and make a difference in the world.

Building a start-up is like being thrust into the middle of the Amazon rainforest: living every day on the edge of your comfort zone, vulnerable to the unexpected challenges constantly being thrown your way, and constantly shifting to meet daily demands and do everything and anything you can to survive, let alone thrive.

Vulnerable, raw, and deeply transparent, Fully Alive reveals powerful tools and lessons that can teach all of us how to grow toward and beyond our personal edges, no matter our circumstances.

Tyler Gage shares his spiritual adventures and the business savvy that helped him create RUNA, a pioneering organization that weaves together the seemingly divergent worlds of Amazonian traditions and modern business, demonstrating how we can dig deeper to bring greater meaning and purpose to our personal and professional pursuits.

From suburban youth to immersion in the Amazon to entrepreneurial success, Tyler's journey clearly shows that passion and opportunity can be found in the most unexpected places. Captivated by a rare Amazonian tea leaf called guayusa that had never been commercially produced, Tyler started RUNA to partner with the indigenous people of Ecuador to share its energy and its message with the world.

Using the spiritual teachings, lessons, and healing traditions of the Amazon as his guide, Tyler built RUNA from a scrappy start-up into a thriving, multimillion-dollar company that has become one of the fastest-growing beverage companies in the United States. With the help of investors such as Channing Tatum, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Olivia Wilde, RUNA has created a sustainable source of income for more than 3,000 farming families in Ecuador who sustainably grow guayusa in the rainforest. Simultaneously, RUNA has built a rapidly scaling nonprofit organization that is working to create a new future for trade in the Amazon based on respectful exchange and healing, not exploitation and greed.

Practical tools and lessons are woven throughout the story of Gage’s successes and failures, offering guidance on how to relate to obstacles as teachers and how to accomplish our personal and professional goals in the often uncertain circumstances we find ourselves in.

About this title

About the Author

Tyler Gage is the cofounder and CEO of RUNA, a social enterprise that makes energizing beverages with guayusa, a rare Amazonian tea.  RUNA now supports more than 3,000 farming families in Ecuador who grow guayusa organically, and RUNA products are sold in over 10,000 stores across the U.S. and Canada. For his work on RUNA, Tyler has been named a Forbes “30 Under 30 Entrepreneur” and the Citizen Leader of the Year by the Specialty Food Association. He is also the founder of PlantMed, an organization dedicated to building the world’s first centers for the practice, research, and preservation of Amazonian plant medicine. Gage and RUNA have been featured by ABC’s Nightline, National Geographic, Fast Company, and in Richard Branson’s book Screw Business as Usual.  

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Fully Alive Chapter 3

Speak to the Invisible

I arrived back at Brown shortly before the fall semester of 2008 to spend some time with two of my best friends, Nat and Pat. Nat, also of Quaker descent, had spent the summer working for a clean technology investment fund in Thailand, and Pat had biked 1,500 miles across Laos, Burma, and Thailand. Every time I returned to Providence, I felt disconnected and questioned why I had come back, but sharing tales of misadventure and discovery with my friends always provided a reassuring bridge.

As we hiked through Lincoln Woods just north of the city, the conversation became very “Brown” as Nat and Pat plotted a variety of seemingly high-minded business ideas called “social enterprises” that they wanted to launch after graduation.

“So, social enterprise,” I asked. “Is that, like, a thing?”

“Yeah, dude,” Pat said. “It’s social entrepreneurship: basically, the idea that business can be used as a tool for social good by trying to find innovative methods to solve environmental or social problems in ways that nonprofits or governments suck at.”

My wheels started turning.

Pat continued: “There’s an economist from Bangladesh, Muhammad Yunus, who started something called Grameen Bank, which gives loans to poor people who wouldn’t normally qualify. He pretty much began the whole thing. I have a book that talks about him and other social entrepreneurs I’ll give you when we get back to the house.”

Later that day he handed me How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas by David Bornstein, which tells the stories of social entrepreneurs from around the world. I started it at about 10:00 p.m. that night and finished by 5:00 the next morning, unable to put it down. After every chapter I couldn’t help but reflect on the challenges I’d seen in the Amazon: the deforestation in an endless quest for hard currency, the encroachment of oil companies ever farther into the jungle, the almost impossible tightrope walked by indigenous people who wanted to preserve their traditions but also have a foot in the modern world.

Over the last few years I’d run across numerous well-intentioned nonprofits that had high hopes for saving the Amazon. Each was trying to work with local communities to protect their culture and the environment, using a variety of tactics from ecotourism, to planting some hot new commodity crop, to this nebulous concept they called “capacity building” that I could never fully wrap my head around. Unfortunately, when the tourists never showed and the global price of coffee plunged, the indigenous communities were left holding the bag.

The common denominator seemed to be that the nonprofits hadn’t thought through the potential markets for the products or services they were promoting, nor had they taken a rigorous business approach to make sure that each project was actually . . . well, sustainable in the truest sense of the word. This social enterprise concept seemed to address some of the shortcomings of the nonprofit approach and offered me a totally new way of thinking about how you can try and make a difference.
An Energy Drink?

Brown has a “shopping period” during which you can sample classes at the start of each semester. On the first day of school I went to check out a class on social entrepreneurship that Nat had mentioned to me. My good friends Charlie Harding and Dan MacCombie were also shopping the class. When it finished, they were both heading to another business course, something called Entrepreneurship & New Ventures. It was going to be a hands-on course about building a business from the ground up. They said I should come.

My college coursework up to this point had included not a single math, science, or business class; instead, I tended to take courses like Ecopoetics, or Witchcraft in the Middle Ages—interesting, for sure, but not exactly the foundation of many thriving capitalists. I thought the social entrepreneurship class would be plenty for me, but Charlie and Dan persisted. Aden Van Noppen and Laura Thompson, two of our good friends who were also interested in international development, were also taking it, they said, and the professor was supposed to be great. I relented and decided to skip going to yoga to join them.

Danny Warshay, a successful serial entrepreneur who had cofounded and sold start-ups to companies such as Apple, was teaching the class. He told us he was going to lead the course in the style of a Harvard Business School seminar, with a focus on the practical nuts and bolts of getting a company from idea to execution. In addition to reviewing case studies in every class, the backbone for the semester would be the creation of a business plan, working in small teams to create the idea, write the plan, and then pitch it as the final.

Danny came across as such a caring, knowledgeable, and focused teacher that I forgot all my reservations about taking too many business classes and instead felt a blast of enthusiasm. The newness of the language, tone, and types of students in the class also intrigued me. I saw it as another form of cultural exploration.

Charlie, Dan, Aden, Laura, and I formed a group. We all knew each other and were friends to varying degrees. Dan and I had met the first week of freshman year (although neither one of us can remember exactly how or where, which indicates the state of mind we were probably in when we met). Charlie was a year behind us, but the three of us had all gotten close the year before in yet another quintessentially Brown class called Introduction to Contemplative Studies, in which our lab work was to meditate.

Our newly formed team came up with some really dubious business ideas over the following weeks, including an automated payment system for parking on campus, and a Fair Trade café and showroom concept. Charlie had an idea to somehow create a validation system–driver’s license type thing for hitchhikers to make ridesharing easier and safer. I thought it was a terrible idea. Three months later Uber was founded with a perfect solution to essentially the same problem, just approached from the driver’s side and not the traveler’s side.

At the time I was trading emails with a friend in California named Jonnah. We’d hit it off after we were introduced through mutual friends over our shared interest in South America. A sweet, thoughtful, spiritually inclined guy, he had developed a passion for guayusa, the tea that I first drank in Costa Rica with Joe. Jonnah had spent time in Ecuador with an indigenous family learning more deeply about guayusa’s roots. He wanted to work with that family to import and sell guayusa tea in the U.S.

I wasn’t surprised by his idea. In addition to Jonnah and Joe, I had met several other people throughout my time in South America who toyed with the idea of selling guayusa in the U.S. It was an appealing concept: the tea tastes great, gives you an uncommon boost of energy, and has a deep connection to the roots of Amazonian spirituality.

The major complication was that no one had ever commercially produced guayusa. The only ways to buy guayusa at that point were from an artisans’ market in Ecuador that sold piles of whole, dried leaves; from a small Ecuadorian tea company that offered a rinky-dink tea bag product; or from a few sketchy websites that sold dirty milled leaves in Ziploc bags. This meant that anyone looking to get into the far-from-burgeoning guayusa business in a serious way would have to build an entire supply chain from scratch. Not an easy task by any means, and especially hard if you were something of a hippie, as was the case of almost everyone interested in selling guayusa in the U.S. (myself included).

Given that we were having a hard time coming up with a good idea for our class, I suggested to the group that we write a business plan for Jonnah and give it to him at the end of the semester to run with. Everyone agreed.

Following Jonnah’s lead, our first idea was simple: work with a few indigenous families in Ecuador who would farm the guayusa that we would then sell out of a loose-leaf tea house. Danny shook his head when we ran it by him. “Think bigger!” he ordered. Our plan, he said, sounded like a lot of work to sell a few thousand dollars’ worth of tea every month. He was hyper-focused on challenging his students to craft ideas that could be scaled into large businesses.

Crammed late at night in a tiny conference room at the SciLi, one of Brown’s main libraries, we brainstormed.

“Guys, what if we made a powdered guayusa product, put it in little white packets that said in big letters, ‘DO NOT SNORT THIS,’ and sold it on college campuses? It would crush it!” Dan joked.

“We can have different flavors, like Coco-Caine and MDMAango!” Laura said, running with it.

“THChocolate!” Charlie added, not missing a beat.

“Good morning, Mr. Venture Capitalist,” Aden said, as if she was making a pitch. “Our company makes ‘nasal’ energy drinks inspired by hard-core drugs . . . riiiiiight.”

Maybe it wasn’t so far-fetched, since Four Loko, an energy drink with high amounts of caffeine, alcohol, and wormwood (the main ingredient in absinthe), was an underground success at the time—though it would soon be outlawed in several states.

“What about just making an actual energy drink?” Charlie asked.

“Sure,” I laughed, thinking of aggressively in-your-face brands such as Red Bull and Monster. “That sounds like a really high-integrity social enterprise.”

The rest of the group was silent, though, thinking it over. I backtracked a little. “I guess an energy drink that was actually good for you and really helps people would be something new, but isn’t the idea of a healthy energy drink basically an oxymoron?”

I’d drunk a total of two Red Bulls, and both times were two of the worst nights of my life (longer stories there). As someone whose usual liquid consumption revolved around massive amounts of herbal teas such as turmeric, ginseng, hibiscus, and tulsi, consuming chemicals such as acesulfame potassium, Creatyl-L-Glutamine, and calcium disodium didn’t go over too well with my body. And it certainly wasn’t a product I would want to take to the market.

We did a quick Google search for “energy drinks” and one of the first images that came up was an ad that featured a zoomed-in picture of a woman’s butt à la “I like big butts and I cannot lie” with a can of Monster attached to her hip, held in place by a G-string.

“Welcome to the world of energy drinks,” Aden quipped.

However, a little further research revealed that we actually might be onto something: approximately $3.2 billion of energy drinks were sold in the U.S. in 2008, and the market was forecasted to grow 25 percent annually. Even better, it turned out that the other segment of the beverage industry that happened to be growing exponentially was . . . tea. Specifically, ready-to-drink teas sold in bottles and cans.

To round things out, our idea also hit the other trend sweeping the world of consumer packaged goods: we had a product with an authentic story that was organic, healthy, and made from simple and novel ingredients. As one market research report we read noted: “The major trend across all beverage categories is a new focus on the inherent goodness of a product.”

Danny’s reaction when we ran the idea by him? “That’s it!”

He was fond of citing Doug Hall, an author, entrepreneur, and consultant, who says you should identify three things when you’re thinking about starting a business: the first is the overt benefit your product offers; the second is that you must offer people a real reason to believe; the third is that there has to be a dramatic difference from other products on the market. If you start a business without knowing where you stand on all three of these criteria, you may succeed, but it will be much, much harder.

We’d hit all three, Danny said. We had a leaf with high amounts of caffeine that also tastes great—our overt benefit. The fact that the indigenous communities had used this leaf for thousands of years and that each sale of our drink would give them economic alternatives to cutting down the rainforest was a real reason to believe. And, finally, we would have the simplest, most natural ingredients of any energy drink on the market, which was our dramatic difference.

Our enthusiasm swelled as we spent more and more time on the project and many of the pieces started to fall into place. Like many of the rabbit holes I’ve launched down in my life, I can’t say my head understood what was going on, but in retrospect my heart definitely did. It took a while before I stopped to think about why Charlie and I started staying up most nights until 3:00 a.m. working on the business plan; why I stopped paying attention in my Ecopoetics class so I could finish reading about supply chain innovations at Pepsi; why I started drinking about a gallon of this stuff a day; why my ruminations and research of Amazonian plants shifted from esoteric healing plants like ajo sacha to things like rubber, chocolate, and soy.

I’d learned a shamanic belief that it is possible to invoke and pull different realities closer to you via techniques such as meditation and prayer. In other words, as we make our intentions explicit, we work to bring them into the world. The deeper we dove into this crazy guayusa dream, the closer I could feel its future potential.

Danny recognized our growing dedication and nudged us even further. He introduced us to Bob Burke, the former VP of sales for Stonyfield Farm yogurt, one of the first successful large-scale organic food companies. Charlie, Dan, and I drove up to Bob’s home in Massachusetts to brew him some guayusa and get his take on our idea.

Bob, with his sharp, professorial manner, heard our pitch before responding. “This product is perfect for where this industry is going,” he said. “Organic, sustainable, healthy products with good stories are exactly where the opportunity is. You guys could really have something here. But beverages are tough. Really, really tough.”

Encouraged by his response overall—focusing more on the “really have something here” comment over the “really, really tough” part—we decided to go to the Natural Products Expo East trade show, a yearly gathering where hundreds of natural foods companies showcase their products for store buyers from across the country. The expo is not open to the public, so we posed as buyers for the Brown student café to get in. (I don’t recommend subterfuge, but sometimes you have to improvise). Dan, Charlie, and I walked around gorging ourselves on samples of gluten-free cookies, almond milk, açaí juice, vegan protein powder, and these new coconut water drinks we hadn’t seen before. (This was just before coconut water became “a thing.”)

To our delight, we found that most of the companies brought far too much product with them for sampling and had no desire to haul it back, so we spent the last hour of the show loading Dan’s car with crates of olive oil, vegan chocolate bars, organic blue corn tortilla chips, and everything in between. We did learn a handful of useful insights about key distributors and the challenges of getting new products on stores shelves, but our main t...

Edition details

• Publisher: Atria Books
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1501156020
• ISBN 13: 9781501156021
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 272