Opening General Session - Barista to a Billion - My Journey and What I've Learned So Far
(Room Platinum 6)
18 Nov 19
3:45 PM
-
5:15 PM
At the age of 17, Todd Carmichael left the farms of Eastern Washington with a box of clothes, $200 and a unrelenting drive for adventure. Today he sits at the top of one of the most celebrated and fastest growing coffee companies in the country, La Colombe, having navigated the company from an unlikely bootstrap startup in 1994, to a fully realized, fully integrated five category business with an estimated value of one billion dollars.
Driven by the notion that opportunities reside in the fact that “nothing is ever finished,” Todd puts this thinking into practice daily, breaking the classic boundaries of the C-suite by rewiring the construct of how a company should operate to personally inventing such things as the dragon brewer, draft latte on tap, and the draft latte RTD to name a few.
Ask Carmichael for his best advice and he will say “Work your hardest to evolve what interests you the most – in the most disruptive and irreverent way possible. After all, if your energies are going into preserving the past, it’s only a matter of time before you too are history.