The Mind of TCHO

It’s no secret - I am a rower and in many ways, it is my life.  I have a t-shirt that says “I can’t, I row” and it’s true.  I row in big boats—fours and eights—and often use my rowing experiences to help me in other parts of my life.

TEAM: There is no star on a rowing crew, no franchise player, no single person that makes the boat go fast or wins the race. In fact, the best boats are where everyone blends in and rows as one. The crew is responsible for the victory.

RHYTHM: It’s what drives a rower—the rhythm of the stroke, the rhythm of the water, the rhythm of your breathing, the rhythmic movement of your crew. Get in a rhythm—let it take you places.

RISK: Sometimes you have to take it, look over the edge, break out of the box, stretch yourself. Sometimes you fail but always your team is there to catch you, pick you up, help you understand the lesson you learned. Sometimes you succeed and again, your team is there to praise, applaud and remind you of the next hurdle.

We are currently in the midst of our sprint racing season, racing each other for seats in the best boats and racing other crews for positions on the medal stand. It’s the time of the year for high anxiety, excitement and that rush of adrenaline.

I have that same feeling about where we are with TCHO. So much happens behind the scenes in preparation for sitting on the starting line. Every day, we get closer and the anxiety builds. I could get anxious about being anxious. I could believe that everything is falling apart. I could stress about things not being finished, critical decisions being changed, and materials not being delivered. But, I believe that anxiety is really excitement disguised. I am incredibly excited to be at the starting line, the crew has done the work and now it’s time to race.

Science Daily reports on a technology partnership to sequence the cacao genome. With candy giant Mars supplying the money, the Subtropical Horticultural Research Station (Miami) of the USDA doing the research, and IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center using its Blue Gene supercomputer to do the number crunching, the results are destined for the public domain for any and everyone to freely use.

IBM’s
Blue Gene

The obvious goal of the research is to help create cacao plants that are resistant to the devastating diseases that cost an estimated $700 million dollars of damage annually and regularly devastate growing regions. Brazil, for example, is only now recovering from a Witch’s Broom infection which struck in the 1980s.

Around the TCHO offices, we’ve been speculating on other potential benefits, including designing plants that can grow in more stable political regions outside the tropics, or that bear fruit that doesn’t need fermenting, that have hyper-doses of polyphenols, or are caffeine-free, or that taste of the first kiss you ever enjoyed.

(Thanks and a tip of our hat to the ever insightful Kevin Kelly.)

I’ve been enjoying the Tour de France this year more than I expected to.  Monday’s stage in the Pyrenees had all the classic reasons why I love watching the Tour: the brutal and heart-wrenchingly beautiful geography, the live chess game of the peloton, the camaraderie, the combativeness, the surprise heroes.  And most of all the pain-defying athleticism that is almost impossible to wrap your head around.

A lot has been written about the terrific performances by Team Columbia and Team Garmin-Chipotle so far and the fact that both teams are at the forefront of anti-doping with massive internal testing programs.  These teams had the foresight to make investments early on to ensure their riders are clean and be able to prove it.  What’s great is that they’re proving that transparency and doing the right thing is also a sound strategy.  They’ve been able to get sponsors, reduce their risks as organizations and are now showing the world how much more exciting it is to watch clean riders winning stages in the Tour.

To me, the Tour this year is a parallel with what being a sustainable business is all about - being smart about systematic investments in transparency and doing the right thing also happens to reduce your risks, attract capital, make you leaner and make you more competitive.  Any other strategy seems just about as boring and outdated as doping.  I’ll be watching Garmin-Chipotle and Columbia for the next couple weeks, and keeping my fingers crossed.

I smiled.
I cried.
And then I wanted to buy the world a Coke.

And now why I love the internet:

Two Saturdays ago my friends Evan and Onnesha invited me to go with them to a special place on Capp Street: Oddball Film+Video. Every Saturday the director of Oddball, Stephen Parr, puts on screenings. He selects a handful of films for that evening from the thousands of reels he has stacked to the ceiling.

A fraction of all the stacks:

Still from “Dudin” (1955). “Find out how city folk vacationed in 1955’s America’s wild West.”

Evan and Onnesha on Capp Street as we leave Oddball Film+Video.

“You can play as well as you can imagine. Believe it then see it.” - Derek Robins

Being from Santa Cruz, I thought for many years that disc golf was just a Santa Cruz thing. For years many of my friends, as well as me, went up to De LaVeaga to play (for those of you who have not been to De La…

not exactly the best map, but you get the idea), and many of us were unaware that there were courses outside of SC. After moving to Austin Texas, I found out that there were courses all over.  I think there is something like five or so in Austin—and that it really had quite the following.

Now to present day, I’ve been finding myself enjoying the great outdoors—especially in the summer months—playing here in the beautiful course here in San Francisco. Granted, the course here isn’t quite like the one in Santa Cruz; the terrain is much more forgiving—many of the holes in Santa Cruz are well over 350’ (vs. 250’ in SF) and there aren’t any steep gullies to lose your disc in.  The weather is however quite similar (avg. temp for June is around 70 degrees). But the view from the “Top of the World” (the 27th hole) is quite the sight…on a clear day you can see all the way to Monterey.

My mother is Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey ( woolsey.house.gov ). She is pictured above (with the green lapels) with former Congresswoman Pat Schroeder (pink lapels) at a fundraiser for my mom this past weekend.

Indeed these two amazing women look alike, sort of. Silver white bob and all. But mostly they act alike. They are both total crack pots. My mom, still stopped now and then in DC by people who mistake her for the honorable Mrs. Schroeder, thought it would be a hoot to dress as twins and celebrate their collective fabulousness.

It literally brought down the house.

Pat Schroeder was in congress from 1972 until 1996 (thirteen terms!).

My mom has been in Congress since 1992 and is about to embark on her ninth term.

Another thing these amazing women have in common—stamina.

As the daughter of a congresswoman I can tell you—Congress is a drag. Imagine swimming up stream in the ultimate bureaucratic environment riddled with democrat wishy-washiness and republican heinousness (my words - not hers)—and you know what—my mom rocks it.

Amongst a billion amazing things she does and has done—she (as of July 2) has presented on The Floor 270 (her guestimate) 5 minute speeches on how and why to end the war in Iraq. This is a record. No member of congress has ever used the much unknown “take 5 minutes at then end of every session and talk about whatever you want” opportunity to make such a statement.

It is on the record—forever and ever. Just like how I love my mother—forever and ever.

The world of New Product Development at a newly forming chocolate company is a sweet but busy world. There is a huge list of yummy products to launch in the coming months — and they are all at various stages of development.

As the person wrangling all these products — I am constantly interacting with various teams to strive for timely launches. I say ‘strive’ because in actual fact, our two launches to date have not quite met our original schedule. I will say it has all been a learning process; everything seems to take so much longer than anticipated.

At times it can feel like an elaborate team dance and I am the choreographer, trying to keep each mover in motion and coordinating with the others. Or maybe it is more like a symphony orchestra; each team here is a different instrument section filling a critical role that contributes to the overall sound, playing at times separately or in unison, each dependent on each other for the end result:

• The Cacao Sourcing team brings in cacao bean samples and final orders from all over the world
• The R & D team tests all the cacao, recording and archiving all quality notes and deciding what is superior enough to purchase
• The Operations team ensures timely production schedules and accurate inventory records
• The Marketing team ensures we have effective product launches — with great packaging, a cool website, successful public outreach activities and good media buzz
• The Sales team sells it all

Of course every single person in our team in some way is contributing to any launched product (where would we be without our brilliant engineers who are building out the factory?) — but the peeps above are the ones I most commonly interact with.

A typical conductor’s score for a symphony orchestra can include the notes for 10 - 20 different “voices” all playing at once. The conductor’s role is to follow the music for each player, keep the tempo, communicate incessantly with everyone, listen critically, and respond constantly to keep all of the voices working smoothly together, thusly:

So, imagine Cacao Sourcing (violins), R & D (violas), Operations (cellos), Marketing (bass), Sales (horns) — and more — all working in unison to propel each launch.

There are certainly lots of interacting moving parts in a newly emerging chocolate factory — and when it works smoothly I bet it will sing; but we are still working out all the moves. If we were a symphony, I would say we are still tuning our instruments and learning how to play together. New protocols are constantly evolving and I am incessantly considering how everything can improve for the next launch. The sheet music is being written as we grow and learn.

For now, we are busily working to launch our new Fruity chocolate and there is an exciting crescendo of activity around here.