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In its own inevitable life cycle (whether decades or centuries) , an industry meets the limits of its own design. Efficiency begins to consume itself. Coffee is arriving at that moment, five hundred years of cultivation, commerce, and culture converging on a single inflection point.

The roots of coffee’s power

The modern coffee economy was born inside plantation systems built on enslaved labor. In the eighteenth century Saint Domingue, now Haiti, produced vast amounts of coffee with enslaved Africans working in the mountainous interior under some of the harshest regimes in the Americas. The Haitian Revolution upended that order and buyers shifted ever more toward Brazil, which did not abolish slavery until 1888. The people who controlled land, credit, export houses, and state policy carried that power forward. Coffee’s global rise rode on extraction and coercion, and the echoes set the stage for who holds value today.

By contrast, crops like grapes evolved through systems where farmers retained far more market power. Centuries of regional winemaking and direct trade shaped a culture of price integrity and quality differentiation, showing what happens when growers, not empires, define the terms of value.

The past is never far. It moves through our hands, our habits, our morning cups. It lives with us this very hour.

The machinery of efficiency

Over time colonial force gave way to corporate structure and commodity finance. Most arabica pricing still references the New York futures benchmark that the trade calls the C price (note: ICE is replacing this model a bit), with many quality premiums calculated as a differential on top. That means volatility and incentives from the commodity core still shape specialty outcomes.

On the supply side a few producers dominate volume. The USDA projects Brazil around sixty five million sixty kilogram bags and Vietnam about thirty one million for 2025 crop years, with Vietnam remaining almost all robusta. The pattern is concentration and scale.

The agronomy trap

Coffee evolved as a forest shrub. Shade moderates heat, buffers moisture, and invites biodiversity that can stabilize farms. Twentieth century modernization pushed full sun systems to chase yield. Sun systems often rely on more fertilizer, pesticides, and fungicides. They remove canopy that supports birds, insects, and soil life. The result is more volume in the short run and more fragility in the long run. Shade systems consistently show higher species richness and can moderate microclimates that help the plant cope with heat.

Disease pressure keeps rising. Coffee leaf rust has expanded with shifting temperature and rainfall. Many growers answer with more fungicide cycles and higher costs even as climate instability undercuts returns.

The consumer race to the bottom

Downstream the market optimizes for speed, certainty, and price. The United States is the largest single coffee market in the world. Starbucks defines much of that landscape, operating tens of thousands of stores and serving as the model of consistency and efficiency that global consumers have come to expect. Its size and pricing power have trained the U.S. consumer to expect a particular price band for a latte or brewed coffee, even as input and labor costs fluctuate worldwide.

Across the Pacific, Luckin Coffee in China has built a model that mirrors and intensifies that efficiency. With more than twenty six thousand stores driven by app ordering, digital coupons, and rapid openings, the company’s pricing strategy undercuts competitors and has sparked a race to the bottom in urban coffee consumption. In recent months Luckin has begun deploying into the United States with cheap pricing incentives and algorithmic discount systems, forcing Starbucks and even independent specialty cafés to respond. What began as a regional pricing experiment is now influencing how global chains think about market share and discount elasticity. The result is a worldwide race downward that pressures farmers, roasters, and cafés alike.

When the world’s largest and fastest growing markets compete on convenience and price, the pressure radiates backward through the entire supply chain. Consumers get cheaper cups, but the cost is shifted to farms and ecosystems. Distributors push for lower green coffee prices. Producers stretch chemicals, fertilizers, and labor to meet yield targets that hold retail prices steady. Efficiency on the consumer side multiplies exploitation and chemical dependency on the producer side.

It is like the $0.99 two-taco deal that a well known fast food chain uses to get you in the door. At that price you are not really buying food, you are buying a funnel. The company hopes you will also buy the high margin soft drink. The tacos themselves are not the kind of food anyone should want to eat (it’s not possible to bring a taco, let alone two, to market for $0.99, buyer be warned). In coffee the same logic applies. The loss leader is the cup. The pressure rolls backward through the chain, reaching farmers, chemicals, and ecosystems that carry the hidden cost. Food media in China has already chronicled price wars that pushed lattes down to single digit Chinese yuan during promotions. It may look like a deal for the consumer, but someone always ends up holding the bag of excrement, I mean the bill. And its usually not the corporation, but the farmer, the land, or the future generation that pays the hidden cost.

The climate squeeze

Climate change tightens the vise. Multiple studies project that by 2050 global land highly suitable for arabica will shrink drastically, by about half, with suitable zones moving upslope and many current areas becoming marginal. Robusta has gained ground in part because it tolerates heat better (but is still a shrub, so not great), and Brazil is closing the gap with Vietnam in robusta expansion (By the way, robusta is a harsh flavor on its own, its prevalence contributes to conventional coffee’s further bitterness and increased caffeination).

When weather shocks hit, the default response in commodity systems is more inputs, more irrigation, more robusta, and more consolidation. The system that produced abundance loses the ability to adapt.

The singularity moment

This is the singularity. A supply chain born in plantations and refined through commodity finance and software now races to the cheapest possible cup. Sun systems lean harder on chemicals to survive rising heat. Coupons and apps drive price as the governing truth. The system keeps cups cheap by externalizing ecological and human costs.

The lab grown fork in the road

Another piece of this singularity is the capital pouring into synthetic and lab grown coffee. Researchers in Finland documented a proof of concept for cell culture coffee and published a process overview. Venture backed companies are scaling beanless formulas and ingredients. Atomo announced new funding in 2025 and claims large water and carbon savings per cup. Compound Foods is now supplying lab-grown coffee ingredients to other companies, positioning itself as a buffer against volatile supply chains. This is not science fiction. It is happening now.

There are tradeoffs. If synthetic options capture share, millions of smallholders may lose markets. That is not only a social hit. Or a way of life and culture hit. It is also a climate hit. Coffee agroforestry sequesters carbon in trees and soils and supports biodiversity. If economic value detaches from living farms and moves to labs, we lose livelihoods and we lose the carbon bank that shade coffee and even sun coffee partially represents. Even advocates acknowledge the need to confront the livelihood risk.

My position is clear. Innovation has a place. But a future that sidelines farmers and forests misses the point. We need farming systems that work for people and for living landscapes. And isn’t it just more delightful to know your coffee was grown with the rhythm of the seasons, shaped by the rains, picked by hand, by a far off exotic sounding place?But I digress..

What comes after the singularity

A better path looks like agroforestry and permaculture rather than bare sun. It looks like traceable and transparent trade rather than anonymous lots tied to an exchange ticker. Studies show shaded systems store more carbon and support wildlife while buffering heat. Some work even finds that medium shade can align with strong productivity at the right elevations and management. This is not romanticism. It is a practical design for resilience.

It also means broadening the genetic base. Arabica and robusta will remain giants, but the world is beginning to rediscover the liberica complex, including Excelsa, which has now been recognized as its own species. Excelsa is the wild one. It thrives where arabica fails, tolerating heat, drought, and challenging soils. It grows best in diverse agroforestry systems (it is a 30 foot tree, with larger leaves, and a deep root system after all), rather than in sun exposed monocultures, and it carries a flavor profile unlike anything else. The taste is deep, fruit forward, and slightly wine like, naturally lower in caffeine, and often chemical free by its resilient tree-like nature rather than just marketing.

Recent genomic work confirms Excelsa’s distinct specie lineage within the liberica family, and field research continues to show its resilience in the face of a changing climate. To me, Excelsa represents what the future of coffee could look like. It is diverse, adaptive, and aligned with nature instead of fighting it. I’ve witnesses this in my travels: fragile pesticide smelling arabica and robusta shrubs suffering in the sun, neglected excelsa trees thriving on the farm’s outer parameter (let’s work on those!). A diverse coffee future is not only a hedge against a hotter planet, it is also an invitation to rediscover what coffee can taste like when it is allowed to stay wild.

The consumer’s role

Yes this path costs more. That is honest. The good news is that a meaningful share of consumers will pay premiums for sustainability. Products marketed as sustainable and regenerative have delivered an outsized share of growth in consumer goods. In other words the market signal is real when the offer is credible, and the conversion from shrub to tree is an easy visual sell.

There is also taste. If you care about what you put in your body you already know that taste can be trained. Coffee is a bitter beverage and bitterness is complex. During roasting, chlorogenic acids break down into compounds like lactones and phenylindanes that shape bitterness, and our perception adapts with exposure and context. The science on acquired taste is clear. Repeated exposure can increase liking, and genetics and experience both influence how we perceive bitter drinks like coffee and wine.

Here is my personal note. I switched to excelsa last year. The palate adaptation took time. Now I cannot go back. Last week I had to wake very early and grabbed a Starbucks on the road (I was hesitant but needing to make a long drive on little sleep). All day I could not get the taste out of my mouth. It tasted bitter and chemical and burnt. Wild coffee tastes living and layered to me now. More earth. Less of the synthetic edge that sits under the race to the bottom. Taste is not a small thing. It is the direct interface with our choices. It can change.

If you prefer a simple design language for life and pantry there’s a name for it in Japan. Kanso. Simplicity and intentionality. Fewer things of higher integrity. Apply that to your cup. Paying the real cost for something honest is always worth it.

The final thought

The old model is a collapsing star. It burns bright and cheap by consuming itself. The post singular model is slower and more intentional. It restores shade, protects farmers, and delivers meaning and flavor. We do not need everyone to switch. We need enough people who care. That is where excelsa and other diverse species grown in agroforestry and traded with real transparency can help build a better coffee economy one cup at a time… proving that a system built on care can serve people and planet for the next 500 years.

HTML source links

Smithsonian: Slavery and coffee in Saint Domingue
Oxford Research: Abolition of Brazilian slavery
Brown University: Brazil coffee chapter
Specialty Coffee Association: C market and differentials
USDA: Brazil Coffee Annual 2025
Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center: Shade coffee
Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems 2022
Luckin Coffee Q2 2025 financials
FoodTalks on Chinese price wars
World Coffee Research: Arabica suitability 2050
Reuters: Brazil robusta expansion
VTT Research: Lab grown coffee concept
Atomo Coffee: Funding and claims
Compound Foods: Ingredient platform
World Economic Forum: Risks of lab coffee
Frontiers in Plant Science 2024: Carbon reserves
Nature Plants 2025: Liberica genomic delimitation
NYU Stern Sustainable Market Share Index
McKinsey and NielsenIQ: Green product premiums
Scientific Reports: Bitterness and coffee intake
PMC: Phenylindanes in brewed coffee
ScienceDirect: Acquired taste study

In my younger years I was never financially responsible. I had bank accounts open with no money in them. I had crypto wallets scattered here and there, seed phrases stuffed wherever, investments here and there, retirement savings here and there. I had convinced myself I had net worth but in reality I was just scattering and diluting myself. My businesses were the same way, scattered and unfocused. I was always rushing to build something, but I had no real grasp of strategy or intuition. I was just always building, hoping something would stick.

I lived inside the mentality of fake it till you make it. I could act confident, I could talk like I knew what I was doing, but inside I was desperately trying to make something happen. I had debts. I had student loans, credit card debt, bills I could not keep up with. Many of my startups I funded myself by charging as much debt as the banks would give me, only to lose it all and still be paying it back while I was already chasing the next idea.

It all collapsed. I had several businesses at once and I was constantly shifting money between them, using funds from one to prop up the others. When the coronavirus hit, I had a factory in Wuhan. That single blow took me out, and when that went under, the rest of the businesses all failed. I had built a house of cards and I watched it tumble down.

I disappeared for a few years. Slowly I found stable income. Slowly I paid off every single debt. Slowly I learned the power of accountability. I created a spreadsheet that tracked every account, every bill, every budget, every piece of savings, every retirement account, every investment. I lived and died by that spreadsheet. For the first time in my life I was not pretending, I was not hiding, I was not hoping that some miracle check would come in and make all my troubles disappear. I faced it.

I used to think money would just show up one day. I believed that if I was scattered enough, if I was desperate enough, if I wanted it badly enough, somehow million dollar checks would come to me. But the truth is that even if they had, I would have diluted and squandered them as quickly as they came. I had no discipline. I had no accountability. I had no honesty with myself. More money would have only accelerated the chaos.

It took those quiet years to change me. It took a steady job, a stable paycheck, the humility of being a employee when my younger self had dreamed I would be so much more by now. I had to swallow my ego. I had to accept responsibility for everything. I did not blame the economy. I did not blame the government. I did not blame the president. I blamed myself, and I took ownership of every problem I had created. I chipped away at it excruciatingly day by day.

Through that process I learned accountability. I learned financial accountability, health accountability, wellness accountability, and accountability to others. I had to create a financial spreadsheet and share it with my wife. Every single detail had to be on it. I had to create a financial spreadsheet and share it with my business partner. Every single detail had to be on it. I had to live transparently in every way, to be held accountable for every single dollar spent, every single decision made.

It was through that accountability that I found stability. I built a foundation. I lost my ego, I lost my illusions, and I learned how to live with honesty and transparency. I looked like an idiot many times. I cried man tears many times. I had hard conversations I continue to have daily. I went through growth so painfully slow that I thought I would lose my mind. But through all of that I became reliable. I became someone who could be trusted. Someone whose word became unbreakable. I became someone who could shape and build my life into something bigger, because I now had a foundation that was unshakable.

And it was only then that the responsibility of Excelsa came to me. Excelsa is not just a business. It is a responsibility. It is a movement. It is something that will change lives and impact the world. It will help farmers, it will impact climate change, it will do something real for our health, it will create jobs and new economic models all around the world. That is not something that can be built on scatterbrain chaos. That is not something that can be entrusted to someone who is not profoundly accountable to themselves and to others.

For Excelsa to succeed I have to be one hundred percent self accountable, honest, transparent, and open. If I fall back into old patterns, if I dilute, if I act without discipline, this movement will fail or be taken from me. That is why I am so thankful for the lessons I learned the hard way. Every painful mistake, every collapse, every humiliating moment, every slow year of climbing out of holes I had dug for myself was worth it. Those years made me ready.

Now I know what responsibility means. Now I know how to live in accountability. Now I know how to receive capital and not squander it. Now I know how to build something that will last. The truth is that if I had been handed millions of dollars back then it would have evaporated. But now I am ready to receive it, to deploy it, to turn it into a global movement that cannot be diluted or deployed inefficiently.

That is why the years of hard lessons are worth it. They gave me the foundation to carry the responsibility of Excelsa, and to make sure this time I will not squander the chance.

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PS. In my darker days, when it felt impossible to crawl out of the holes I had created for myself, I leaned on a meditation from Saint Francis of Assisi. It says, “Start by doing what’s necessary; then do what’s possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible” Every time I wanted to quit I came back to that line. I would just do what was necessary (like pay off debts not chase a new idea), hundreds of days of just painfully doing what was necessary and it felt like forever. Now I get to live in what is possible, and soon I know I will be living the impossible. I am thankful for that meditation because it carried me here.

In the day to day it is hard to know how this is going or where it is going. Financially we have put in both capital and sweat equity, more money than at points in my life I ever imagined I would ever have, and our revenue to date is only a fraction of that. Some days we see big sales and it feels like we are finally breaking through the noise. Customers are happy, and it feels like momentum is building. Other days it is so quiet and cold that I feel like people have forgotten we even exist.

Social media has been the hardest part. We work constantly to break through but the numbers stay flat. People unsubscribe and unfollow almost at the same pace as people follow. I pivot again and again, trying new formats and new stories, never sure what will resonate. This is the largest story in coffee history but how do you break that into a bite sized message? It is hard being a forty year old guy trying to make content. I know it is not the most exciting thing, me being awkward on camera, figuring it out as I go. I bring other people in to create content too, but even then the results are mixed.

We have been at this for years now. It was five years ago that I first came across the research with Michael. I remember being on a ski trip with my dad in Tahoe, talking about how this might be something big. He was hyped, encouraging me to go for it. I agreed but at the time had no idea how to start. Four years ago we began taking it more seriously, and I have now been full time on this for about five months. Even so, the challenges have not lessened.

Looking back at our profit and loss statement for the last thirty six months, we have only shown profit once, in March. That was the month when press came out calling Excelsa the future of coffee. Some of it vanished later, including a Time magazine article. I asked a journalist at The Economist if this was common. She said edits happen often but entire articles disappearing is very rare. I still have screenshots, but there is no sign of it now.

This week I had to cut hours and one of our best people quit because I could not give them enough. It was humbling and painful. The next couple of years will likely bring more of that pain. Finances feel uncertain. I will be fine until spring, but after that we need to make real decisions about raising money or generating more revenue as we have huge plans for next year. It is daunting to think about the future. It is daunting to be forty and know how important financial stability and independence are for my family. I feel the desire to have a second child, but it seems compromised by the reality of doing another startup at this stage of life.

And then there are the mundane days, like today, when I am shoveling coffee greens into airtight bins to protect them from air and insects, standing in an office that feels as humid as Jumanji. That is what the work looks like. It is a timestamp. Years into this project, the highs are real but rare, and the lows feel heavy. We are still pre-traction, still unsure of what product market fit looks like, but the possibility in front of us still feels enormous.

What I hold onto is the foundation beneath all of this. Two decades of research. The lessons I have learned about go to market strategy. The reality of first mover advantage, unfair advantage, and economic moats that we have carefully built into place. These are not theories I am guessing at. These are frameworks I know and believe in. And I remind myself often that if no one else sees the vision, that is the chance you have to take. Because if someone else saw it clearly, they would already have seized it, assumed the product market fit, and built the economic case.

That is what makes me optimistic. That this could be massive. That this could be drastic. That this could matter for the world. The frameworks are there, the vision is there, and the need is there. But none of that erases the daunting reality of the day to day. None of it makes the fear go away. Here I am, years into making guesses about the future, hoping something lands. It is scary. It is hard. It is painful. But it is also exhilarating, because the potential is so vast.

So to be honest, it is hard to know what this is.

Building Excelsa has been a study in hard decisions, constant adjustments, and resilience. Among those lessons, expansion and contraction have been some of the most important for me to learn and understand. For so many years the central challenge has been how to bring this coffee to the level where it can truly be called the champagne of coffee. The work has been about getting the grade and the quality right, but at the same time we cannot simply disappear for three or four years, spend hundreds of thousands of dollars, and then hope we emerge with a product that succeeds. Without real time validation there would be no guarantee that the market would even want what we built.

So we build with what we have each year. We release coffee that is closer to where it needs to be, always hoping that this season is better than the last. Every year is about learning, adjusting, and moving a little closer to the target. At the same time every year we also need to generate sales, not just to keep the company alive, but because that feedback loop is essential. If we do not gather responses from real customers and continue to grow the brand, then after years of work and heavy investment we might discover that we never even had a viable business. This is why every cycle matters. We put our work into the market, we gather feedback, and we hope we do not burn the brand too much before the coffee reaches the level where it speaks for itself.

Our goal has always been to make Excelsa both the best cup of consumer coffee in the world and a regenerative force. That means sweetness through brix levels, sugar content, healthy topsoil, proper grade, careful processing, and above all consistency. It also means protecting farmers from climate change, keeping coffee out of laboratories, and ending the destructive cycle of monoculture. Excelsa must stand as a regenerative and restorative model. We do not expect to replace all of coffee. Perhaps in a century that will be possible, but today the target is more grounded. If we can establish regenerative systems across the world and capture even one or two percent of the global market in the next decade, that would be an astronomical success. It would not only validate Excelsa but also provide a roadmap for the future of coffee.

This year was the first time I decided to test our efforts with real marketing. After years of silence I wanted to see what we had. One day someone walked into the café with far more talent than the role she applied for. Within minutes of talking with her I could see she had talent that reached far beyond that role. She had industry knowledge, marketing instincts, and a perspective on influencers and sales that was rare. What began as a short interview turned into a conversation that lasted six or seven hours. I decided to take a chance and bring her into the marketing effort, even though it disrupted the structure of the company and stretched my own ability to manage.

The summer that followed was full of energy. We hosted events that drew more than one hundred and fifty people. We created campaigns, ran influencer activations, worked with PR, and built new social media content. We met with over one hundred cafes, twenty or more roasters, multiple distributors, influencers, photoshoots and more. She poured herself into the work, and the results showed.

Yet the truth remained that the coffee was not ready. She was trying to sell something that was not yet at the standard we are pursuing. While she made remarkable progress, I had not set her up for success. That responsibility falls on me.The champagne of coffee cannot be forced into the market through effort alone. It has to reach a point where people come to us because the quality demands it. The goal is not to beg for a place at the table. The goal is to create something so valuable that the world insists on being part of it.

This week I had to face the difficult reality of contraction. I told her that we need to shut down the marketing push. It was not because she lacked value, in fact she was extraordinary, but because efficiency is survival. A bootstrap company cannot afford to spend energy in the wrong places. I told her she could pick up hours in the café, and that we need to focus again on generating steady revenue while we work toward better grade and quality for the next season. Expansion brings energy and momentum. Contraction brings discipline and focus. Both are essential I am finding.

It is painful to contract, especially when it means risking the loss of someone you trust, and all the hard work and relationships (and fun) that has gone into what’s been done. It is hard to ask someone who has been leading exciting campaigns to go back to square one. I do not know if she will stay. She will probably need other work. That is the hardest part. Finding people you can trust is rare, and losing them hurts. But this is the reality of the company today.

Contractions are never comfortable. They are always difficult. Yet I’m learning to embrace their reality and discomfort as part of the process. Next year will bring another chance. We will continue to work toward a product that sells itself… like the ‘champagne of coffee’ does. We will continue to move toward the day when marketing is not about convincing but about managing demand. That is the point when Excelsa will succeed. We cannot compete with the global coffee industry as it exists today. The entire industry we are stepping into is trapped in a race to the bottom, a pricing war where cafés and distributors are forced to cut margins and chase volume simply to stay viable. That is not a game we can play. What we can do is something entirely different. We can introduce a premier cup of coffee that protects farmers, restores the land, and shifts the paradigm so that people understand why it is worth more. That is the real work in front of us. It is not just about building a product, it is about building a future. That is the work we must do to save coffee itself and to do our part to save the climate.

This is the journey I am learning. Expansion and contraction are not just business cycles, they are the rhythm of building something new. They are uncomfortable, painful, but they are also necessary. The lesson I’m learning is to embrace both sides, to carry the contractions with directness and dignity, and to see them not as failure but as part of the work. Expansion brings energy and possibility. Contraction brings clarity and discipline. Together they move us forward. I hold onto the hope that better days will come, that the discomfort will give way to growth, and that each step takes us closer to building the champagne of coffee.

I always had this idea about building something big.

Not just a company, but a vertically integrated brand that stretched across continents. I loved the thought of finding a product being manufactured or grown in a faraway land, bringing it to market, and then wrapping it in story and brand. The dream was never just about importing or selling. It was about piecing together a puzzle of culture, logistics, storytelling, and consumer behavior into something people could feel a part of.

But the puzzle is harder than it looks. It is not enough to have a product or even a vision. There are economic moats. There is market saturation. There are first mover challenges. There are distribution and supply chain hurdles.

For almost two decades I obsessed over those pieces. Supply chain. Warehousing. Branding. Marketing. Storytelling. Sales. Sourcing. Finance. Every time I thought I was close, something slipped through. I would put everything into an idea only to watch it falter because I didn’t fully understand the invisible walls, the economics of scale, the importance of iteration, the patience required for true financial management.

I probably tried a hundred ideas over the years. Each one taught me something but none of them held all the pieces in place long enough to stand.

Then came my co-founder.

We met about ten years ago. He was not the person I would have expected to build with. His mind was always racing with futuristic concepts like Bitcoin, lithium mining, blockchain, AI, 3D printing, always years before they became mainstream. I admired his ability to see ten years down the road, long before the rest of the world could.

We started running together. Once a month or so I would call him and ask to meet. Those runs became a ritual. I never wanted to ask for too much time, but every time we ran I felt invigorated. He had a way of making me feel like the future was wide open.

What I noticed early on was that even though he was financially successful in his real estate business, it was not where his passion lived. He had big, bold ideas but none of them had broken through. He wanted one of his visions to matter. He wanted to see something he dreamed of become part of the zeitgeist.

He had the financial success, but not the creative expression. I had the creative adventures, the failures, the travels, and the hard lessons, but not the financial success. He wanted the feeling of building something the world would notice. I wanted the chance to finally line up all the pieces I had been gathering for twenty years.

It took us years to realize how complementary that was.

After enough runs and conversations, we began sharing office space. We knew we were both looking for a co-founder. We circled around ideas together like lithium mining in the desert, blockchain, AI, public domain concepts. But it wasn’t until Excelsa coffee came into focus that everything clicked.

For him it was another vision of the future. He saw a species of coffee ignored by the industry but brimming with potential. He imagined a world ten years from now where Excelsa was known as a climate resilient, chemical free alternative to Arabica and Robusta. For me, it was the missing piece. All the supply chain lessons, the go-to-market experience, the scars of first mover attempts, the years of working inside brands like Chosen Foods, it was all finally useful.

That is where the partnership really formed. He kept me disciplined on patience and iteration, reminding me not to move too quickly. I kept him grounded in how things actually get built like the warehouses, the certifications, the sourcing, the building a brand. Together we found a rhythm.

It has never been easy. Every day has been a struggle. But every day has also been progress. There is a deep respect that comes from two people walking such different paths and realizing they could only meet at this point in time.

He spent twenty years, despite many worthy successes, unable to bring his most biggest world changing ideas to life. I spent twenty years putting all the pieces together but never finding the one idea that would bind them. Excelsa became that bridge.

That is why this company feels like more than just another startup. It feels like a once-in-a-lifetime convergence. It is not just about coffee. It is about two journeys finally meeting in the middle, each incomplete without the other.

And that is why I am so excited for the future.

My entire life, as far as I can remember, has been about dreaming up new startups.

As much as buying an existing cash-flow business and improving it is the recommended path — and one I would strongly advise for any fledgling entrepreneur — there is nothing more fun than a true zero-to-one startup. To ideate something from the ether, find product–market fit, and bring that vision viably to life.

But it turns out, at least for me, that is incredibly difficult to do. They say 9 out of 10 businesses fail, so just start 10 and one will stick. But in my nearly 20 years of entrepreneurial pursuits, I think I’m closer to 100 startup ideas I’ve worked on. Some with much more varying degrees of resource and investment input.

It is much harder than I ever imagined it could be to start a business that can have lasting impact.

During each failed attempt through the years, I would always learn a lesson — or a framework, rather — that would inform my next hypothesis of what business to start.

I knew, in exploring my next business, that getting 2–3 of these frameworks right would make a decently successful business. But during the couple of years I spent researching Excelsa coffee, I started to realize all 10 frameworks were lining up for me — as if by some cosmic, divine force — and it made me realize this endeavor could be far larger than I ever dreamed of.

So without further ado, here are the 10 frameworks I have learned through years of hardship and work that are aligning for me to go all in on my next startup: Excelsa Coffee.

1. Have a Black Umbrella (An Insurance Policy)

Things will inevitably go wrong, and insurance is your way to not lose it all. I have a vivid memory of my business college professor lecturing this 20 years ago.

It should be assumed, as the little guy in business, that any product–market fit you validate with your idea will be taken by a much more capitalized organization who will put you out of business.

With Excelsa, we acquired the IP (trademarks and domains) in advance, leveraged AI for SEO and content, to ensure our multiple internet assets will be top of Google, ChatGPT, Amazon, and Walmart for the next century.

If and when Nestlé or Starbucks jumps on the Excelsa bandwagon with their billion-dollar investment, squeezing all of our supply, I already know 30% of organic internet traffic (millions of people) will be funneled through these IP assets by reverse engineering their long established behavior.

So we can move forward being viable as a specialty coffee company (fun!) or have an exit to sell to the big brands — because we have an insurance policy of capturing a vast amount of organic search traffic forever. (What is 30% of internet traffic worth to a big brand entering a billion-dollar space? A LOT.)

2. Be On Time, But a First Mover

This is incredibly hard to time. Being early is just as damaging as being late. But over time, after enough lived experiences, you start to see patterns and oscillations in the evolution of businesses, news, and their life cycles.

You want to be ahead of the news cycle so you can actually be part of the narration of the news and take control of it. Being early entrenches the moats of unfair advantages, and market efficiencies that make up the mix of our reality.

Being early means you are wasting time and money, getting burnt out. Being late means you are chasing the competition and spending money inefficiently. Because a subset of every customer you acquire will go through you to the best seller (the first mover) in perpetuity.

We spent almost a year holding out on incorporating our business. I was convinced everyday I’d wake up to someone beating us to the punch. But the timing was perfect, and that patience saved us thousands and thousands of dollars.

3. Have an Unfair Advantage and Economic Moats

When we named our company Excelsa Coffee and launched ExcelsaCoffee.com, it was a massive economic moat and unfair advantage based on those assets’ ability to acquire search traffic for excelsa coffee from Google, ChatGPT, Amazon, and Walmart (a bulk of total internet traffic).

For every subsequent Excelsa coffee brand that launches, it builds validity, and search volume traffic to our original internet assets which outrank as the incumbent.

We further launched ExcelsaCoffee.org and ExcelsaCafe.com to further entrench an unfair advantage — leveraging the internet (a tool billions use per day) to capture a bulk of that traffic and to be able to tell the story we wanted to put forth around Excelsa (to further propagate narratives being written so we can control much of them).

It would have been an uphill battle to start an Excelsa coffee company without these powerfully relevant unfair advantages and economic moats.

4. Entropy and the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics

Business and consumer behavior are human activities. Human activities reflect nature by their very essence of being part of the natural environment.

Entropy explains how time can only move in one direction (forward), and how disorder/fragmentation will always increase — because it’s overwhelmingly more likely it will.

When looking at a large macrocosmic consumer trend, if we apply an entropic lens by saying “general coffee” is low entropic, and that the rearranging of its inner constituents is more likely with the passage of time to become highly entropic, then the end result of the coffee movement is to be specialized and nuanced.

Coffee becomes Excelsa, Liberica, Geisha, and so much more. Excelsa, as a constituent within an industry of low entropy, is likely to become more centered and forefront with the passage of time.

Wine, beer, spirits, cooking oils all went through this entropic transformation. I would never bet the highly nuanced wine industry will default back to consumers just saying “red” or “white” wine like they did 100 years ago.

The only challenge: we don’t know how long the timing will take (it might not even happen in our lifetimes — see item 2). But its inevitability is literally baked into the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Seeing these oscillations and potential opportunities is important in the dark days when your work shows no output and no one sees your vision. Use the physical laws visible now, to envision a possible future world before anyone can see it.

5. Efficiency Rules the World

Without going too far down the rabbit hole, even concepts like socialism and capitalism are just labels people fight over that mask an underlying and purely objective efficiency of the universe.

Most people think there is a man somewhere pulling all the strings — when it’s in fact a bunch of powerless people thinking there is a man somewhere pulling all the strings.

More than anything, the world is ruthlessly efficient and no one is in control. All the IP, trademarks, patents in the world won’t protect your moats faster than the sheer efficiency of the markets, people, behaviors, et al.

If peanuts grow in California’s Central Valley, and you want to sell them to the California market, no amount of IP or moats will protect your business if you want to run your office in Europe. Markets always become most efficient.

Geography is a massive driver of this efficiency. Being in Southern California is a powerful efficiency for coffee grown in Southeast Asia, brought to a port near our house, and distributed to the USA market. The coffee is going to cross our neighborhood whether we do business or not because thats its most efficient path. That is a huge advantage for us to choose a business that is done already most efficiently where we live.

6. Total Available Market

It’s likely I’ll never be able to take more than a fraction of a percent out of my business each year as my salary without causing damage or incurring deep inefficiencies to my operations.

Therefore, whatever I pursue needs to have a prerequisite total available market — before I even start ideating or deploying a strategy — that’s big enough to make it worth the work. That makes worthy pursuits few and far between.

If I wanted a million-dollar-a-year salary one day, then my business needs to be doing far more than $100M a year in revenue — probably closer to $200M+. In the $150B/year coffee space, I only need to conquer 0.13% market share to be able to ask for the salary I want. Not easy at all, but at least possible.

7. A Disruptive Go-to-Market Strategy

Think of consumer behavior as a giant brain, with neural pathways of repeat behavior that get baked into concrete over time they way habits in your day cause repetition.

No one is looking for a new iPhone company — Apple solved that problem in 2009 and we moved on. I don’t care to buy a different car than a Toyota because I trust that brand and don’t want to think about which car to buy.

The more problems I solve with what I already trust, the more I can move on to the next exciting thing.

But disruptions are patterns — very predictable ones (see item 4) — if you focus long enough on a category. As a disruptive product, you need to move quickly, ship something great, invite competitors into the market to validate your contrarian view, and then attack the incumbent.

With Excelsa, climate issues are hitting monoculture coffee hard, and demand for nuanced, specialty flavor is growing. We ship quickly, build loyalty, invite others in, and don’t wake the giant until it’s too late.

Seems obvious, but it’s hard. Good marketing can only carry a bad product so far. Eventually, efficiency beats even the most brilliant marketing.

8. A Good Product

I had a compostable plastics company once. It felt good — until I found out each product contained PFAS, a forever chemical. Greenwashing. I folded before I became the one holding the bag when the music stopped.

Excelsa is the opposite: genuinely better coffee, and I believe that with my whole heart.

9. Vertical Integration

For centuries, the proprietor was the USP — it was hard to source quality materials, make the product, and distribute it with meaningful marketing, and once achieved it was a trade secret. Now? Everything’s accessible. White-labeling a gadget just validates it for a more capitalized company to copy.

The only defense is vertical integration: doing something efficient, unfair, and first from manufacturing to the end consumer— so you can’t be instantly replaced.

10. Altruism and Purpose

I left this for last because, as a personal driver, business has to be more than the bottom line.

My biggest failure would be to be rich and old, sitting in a lonely house, with no one visiting me because I only served myself.

Altruism solves real problems — waste, inequality, biodiversity loss — and, when truthful, it becomes one of the most powerful foundations for a brand.

Coffee’s industrial complex keeps farmers in poverty and fills our bodies with chemicals. Excelsa can fix pieces of that — creating a better cup, a better livelihood for farmers, and something I can feel proud of.

So those are my ten frameworks from 20 years of entrepreneurial trials. Even getting a few right gives you tailwinds. But to have all ten align? That’s rare.

That’s why I decided to go all in on Excelsa Coffee Company — to create something that can last 100+ years.

Coffee is crowded. On every level — brand, roaster, café, franchise, heritage name — the space is overflowing.

The moment a message resonates with consumers, “big coffee” can amplify it louder, faster, and cheaper, thanks to their scale and lower cost of goods. At best, the smaller company has simply spent its capital to validate a message for a bigger company to take. Breaking through that noise is almost impossible.

But I believe there’s a massive gap emerging.

The industrial monoculture that dominates coffee has forced reliance on unregulated, heavy chemical use. It’s vulnerable to disease. It’s already seeing production declines.
We’ve seen this story before — in beer, wine, spirits, even cooking oils — as once-commodity products evolved into specialty categories. Coffee might be the last big commodity left to make that leap.

Excelsa could be the bridge.

It’s not Arabica. It’s not Robusta. It’s a separate species — a coffee tree with deeper roots, thicker leaves, and natural resilience that requires little to no pesticides. It harvests on its own cycle, supports biodiversity, and produces a bright, complex cup unlike anything else.

The challenge? Almost no one knows it. And once they do, they don’t remember it. Even people I’ve crossed paths with for years — watching me build this company day in and day out — still get the name wrong: Excelsor, Excelsia, Excelsior… anything but Excelsa.

Consumers expect coffee beans to be identical in size and perfectly free of blemishes — the result of decades of industrial sorting and spraying. Excelsa looks different. Because it’s wild.

When we started, we were literally paying people to climb trees and mail us whatever processed Excelsa they could find. Quality control didn’t exist. We’ve fought to improve it with every harvest, and we’re convinced we’ll produce the best Excelsa in the world. But we’re still asking consumers to try a coffee that’s not yet “perfect” by industrial standards — while trusting that the journey toward higher consistency is part of the story.

That’s the risk. If we go viral too soon, demand could outstrip supply or the quality curve, and consumers might turn away. Excelsa isn’t a fad. It’s a crop that can help solve the crisis facing global coffee producers — while offering consumers richer flavor, fewer chemicals, and naturally different caffeine levels.

So how do we bridge the gap between “good enough to launch” and “world-class,” without losing the audience along the way?

We make the wildness the point.

Our positioning — rewilding coffee — connects two truths:

• Coffee needs biodiversity and regenerative agriculture to survive.
• Consumers need to understand that visual “imperfection” is a sign of authenticity and health, not a flaw.

Excelsa beans don’t all look the same because they’re not part of the chemical-driven industrial complex. That’s not a weakness. That’s the premium. Like champagne, the rarity and exclusivity of the cup come from its origin — and in an era of GMOs and lab-grown food, wild matters more than ever.

Framed this way, the message becomes bite-sized for consumers while carrying real weight for producers and the planet. And “wild” unlocks an entire blue ocean of marketing white space — stories rooted in regional cultures, ancient wisdom, and heritage traditions — all running counter to the homogenized sameness of the Anthropocene. It also makes the brand more fun — creating provocative, exciting content that taps into coffee’s humanity and ritual, and using that energy to build campaigns that actually break through the noise.

We’re not just here to sell coffee. We’re here to rewild the world — starting with your morning cup.

My first business out of college was a digital agency focused on early ecommerce, branding, and marketing. This was nearly 20 years ago. My business partner handled the design and coding. He came from a well-connected tech family. I took on sales and operations, carrying $85,000 in student loans and the quiet pressure of parents who actively discouraged me from pursuing entrepreneurship. I was hungry to prove them wrong. I wanted out of debt. I wanted to make a mark.

After a few small projects in the $2k to $5k range, I was desperate to land bigger clients. We got our shot when a bi-coastal investment bank from New York reached out with a request for proposal. On the drive over, my partner and I argued about pricing. He begged me to stick to our usual range. In their boardroom, I didn’t. I quoted a price ten times higher than our biggest project to date. My partner visibly flinched. I stomped his toe under the table to stop him from speaking. The room got tense. I held the silence. Then they agreed to the terms.

On the way back to the car, my partner quit.

I had no backup plan. No cash. Just a deposit check and a massive commitment. I scrambled to build a team, hired designers, outsourced development to India, and charged forward. I thought the project was a windfall, but it dragged on for months. I ran out of money. Took on credit card debt. Moved back home. My chest hurt every day. I lost hair. I had no margin. But I delivered a new site, launched a rebrand, wrote a 60-page style guide that still sits on my desk, and made sure every person who worked got paid.

During those sleepless nights—handling designers by day and developers in India by night—I came across a new song from Arcade Fire. It was called Intervention. One lyric from the chorus hit hard:

“Hear the soldier groan, we’ll go at it alone.”

It stuck with me. It became a mantra.

When I felt alone. When I didn’t know what would happen next.
That line anchored me.

Years later, I had co-founded a charity that trained lifeguards across 25 countries. We’d been building it for seven years. We had a team. We had resources. Then the Syrian refugee crisis hit. I saw images of drowned children in the media. Lifeguards we’d trained in Greece and Turkey reached out and asked us to help.

I sat in my office in Los Angeles and felt the weight of it. I knew stepping in would overextend our nonprofit. I knew it would drag us into territory we weren’t prepared for. But I also knew if we didn’t do something, no one else would.

We went. We poured everything we had into that year. We supported rescue missions. We trained teams. We coordinated gear, transport, and logistics in an active humanitarian disaster.

Over 2,000 lives were saved.

It was one of the hardest and most uncertain periods of my life. And again, that lyric came back.

“Hear the soldier groan…”

I wasn’t even sure what I believed in spiritually at the time. But I knew what faith felt like.

Years passed. Things stabilized. I had a good job. A six-figure salary. I walked to work. I had balance. Life was calm. But something in me was still restless.

Despite the comfort and the appeals of people who cared about me, I signed a lease 45 minutes south in a high-crime area near the Mexico border. A warehouse. My name on it. I sourced a product from a factory in Wuhan. The idea was bold. I believed in it.

Then COVID hit.

The factory shut down. Orders disappeared. I had to scramble to find new inventory, sourcing product myself from trips to Guadalajara and CDMX, Mexico. I kept trying to pay my employees, working late night shifts on the forklift myself. Trying not to default on the lease. I took on more debt. More investors. Long drives home. Chest pain. Sleepless nights. I’d left a good life for this. I’d risked everything.

Part of me was angry at myself. But the other part knew this was the path.

And that line came back again.

“Hear the soldier groan, we’ll go at it alone.”

Now there’s Excelsa.

This coffee variety is different. It’s resilient. Pesticide-free. Chemical-free. Beautiful. A chance to serve farmers. A chance to offer something better to people. A shot at real climate impact and meaningful ritual.

There are amazing people doing work with Excelsa—Ron Dizon’s Teofilo in Los Angeles, who showcases all four coffee species as Philippines coffee heritage. Taste and See in Camiguin Island, who opened the world’s first Excelsa-only café. Dr. Aaron Davis at Kew, doing climate-resilient research. Excelsa café in Dubai serving all four bean types (and our own Excelsa cafe serving exclusively excelsa in California). Women owned farms in South Sudan growing Excelsa. It’s inspiring. But there’s no coordinated push to bring this to the world at scale.

That’s what I’m doing now.

A full, intentional effort. To scale farms. Integrate supply chains. Bring Excelsa to direct-to-consumer, to cafés, to retailers like Sprouts and Whole Foods. To tell the story right. To do it in a way that honors the farmers and the land.

If someone else were already doing this, and I could support them, I would. But they aren’t. So I am.

It’s not about being the hero. It’s just about listening to what keeps calling. About knowing what your work is, even when no one else sees it yet.

This is the fourth time that lyric has carried me through. Maybe the most important yet.

And once again, I hear it.

“Hear the soldier groan, we’ll go at it alone.”