How Two Entrepreneurs Used Their Complete Lack of Business Experience to Their Advantage

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The following edited excerpt is from Tyler Gage’s Fully Alive: Using the Lessons of the Amazon to Live Your Mission in Business and Life.

My co-founder Dan MacCombie’s thesis had been on marsh crab habitats in New England. Mine had been a magical realist novel. We’d been friends since the first week of our freshman year at Brown University, and now, one week after graduating, we found ourselves in Ecuador with the dream of co-founding a business together. And not your everyday sort of business, but one that would require us to build a supply chain for a rare Amazonian tea leaf called guayusa (pronounced “gwhy-you-sa”) that had never been commercially produced before.