Paul Evers, the founder of Riff, is a natural-born problem solver. He saw a problem with the coffee industry when it came to the wasting of the cascara fruit. Did you know that as much as 70% of it is thrown out? This very sweet and citrusy fruit is being wasted, so Paul found the solution. He created a cold-brew drink that would use that coffee fruit, and it became a success.

Join Elliot Begoun as he talks to Paul about his entrepreneurial journey from advertising to cold-brew beverages. Discover Paul’s long entrepreneurial road that is full of pitfalls and find out how he overcame them. Learn about the importance of finding your purpose and why it’s necessary to build meaningful relationships. Listen to know what the true meaning behind Riff truly is today.

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Listen to the podcast here

Riffing On The Entrepreneurial Journey With Riff’s Founder, Paul Evers

We’re doing something somewhat different. This time, we are going to spend a little time in conversation with some of our entrepreneurs, talking about the journey, the good, the bad, and the ugly. The things that motivate you to get up every day, you take to bed every night with worry, the doubt, and everything in between. Joining me is Paul Evers of Riff. Let’s start with introducing yourself and Riff, and we’ll dig in.

Thank you for having me. I’m willing to be vulnerable and open. I’m looking forward to having an honest conversation with you about the full spectrum of the experience and being an entrepreneur and trying to launch a beverage brand. I studied Fine Arts in college. I was fully convinced that I was going to become a fine artist, and I started thinking about the economics of it. I transferred over to commercial arts and reapplied my skillset, so I did study some Graphic Design and Marketing in college.

I got a job with an agency. I was fairly successful in marketing and advertising. My wife and I were living in Southern California. We wanted to raise our kids in a community that was real, small, and also offered opportunities, so we ended up in Bend, Oregon. I was working at a pretty impressive agency here. We handled some state-wide accounts, tourism, Oregon Lottery, and local resorts in Bend.

It was the only agency in Bend that was a good fit for me. I realized that was the only job in Bend that was a good match for my skillset. We started looking at other larger major metropolitan areas for potential opportunities, but we fell in love with Bend. The quality of life, what it offered our kids, real community with accountability rather than anonymity.

I struggled for a number of years trying to figure out what to do, how can we make a living, and also support this idyllic lifestyle? I ended up reapplying and starting an agency with a couple of good friends. It was a scary time at that time. I was nervous, afraid, and paralyzed by failure. I went and saw a counselor help me have the right mindset.

What was driving that fair, do you think? You said failure but was there any specific aspect that was more terrifying? I was the same way. When I started this business several years ago, I had that same incredible sense of fear. I couldn’t get it out of my own way. I jokingly would say because my wife was going about life like it was perfectly fine. I was like, “Please have some doubt. Why do I have to have it all, and you have none of it? Can we share?” Was there any specific part of it?

It was an intense time. We had three small kids. What I was afraid of is I’d be too lazy. I wouldn’t be able to do the heavy lifting that’s required every day, we would lose everything, and we’d have to declare bankruptcy. I was able to finally, through some help from the counselor, name what the real fear was, not just failure but having to declare bankruptcy and lose everything.

After having clarity on that, I wouldn’t have an anonymous conversation with my wife, who’s an amazing human being. I would not be able to be an entrepreneur without the support of my wife. Her name is Mary, and I said, “Mary, I’m afraid of doing this thing on my own. Here’s what I’m afraid of. I’m afraid I’m going to fail, not going to be able to deliver, do all the heavy lifting, and we’re going to have to declare bankruptcy. How are you with that?”

She said, “We made it this far. I have full faith that we’re going to continue to make it.” She’s extraordinarily idealistic and values relationships over anything. That gave me the freedom then to move forward. I didn’t fully understand FTRs, “Nothing greater to fear than fear itself,” until that moment. It freed me up to name the monster, my greatest fear, face it, and move forward.

That resonates with me. I remember vividly I was sitting at the breakfast table one morning, cinching up my tie, about the throw on my jacket to go off to my job as a corporate hack. I had, on the surface, achieved all kinds of successes corporately, but you’re always somewhat of a pariah. I had no idea I was an entrepreneur.

When you’re innately an entrepreneur and you’re in a corporate environment or in an environment where there are walls, I was miserable. My wife looked at me and said, “If you think you’re faking it, you’re wrong. I can read it. You’re miserable. Get out of the corporate life. Go do something on your own.” I’m like, “We can’t do that now. We have two kids in college, one in high school at the time.” It is true. We tell ourselves this narrative.

We adopt this set of beliefs without any substantiation.

They seem real and visceral, and then we don’t do it. Next to fine arts, the other way not to make any money is to become an entrepreneur, and you chose that.

I look at it as replying myself, and there was good reason to doubt. In this small town and agency, in order to support the level of work they were doing, they were recruiting talent from outside the market. There’s not a huge talent pool here in Bend, Oregon. At that time, the population was 18,000 people. They’d bring in some heavy hitters from outside of the market who would run into what they consider to be the end of their prospective career at that agency.

Many people before me, creative types, had left the agency and decided, “I’m going to try and go out on my own. I work directly with clients and do freelance people outside of the area.” With the exception of only a couple of people lasted six months, and they moved back to a major metro area. They didn’t do it. For me, when we started the agency, we were overwhelmed with the demand for our services. One of the things that were a gift that we didn’t realize is that we didn’t know what the hell we were doing.

We were not tied to any specific business model that was a standard for the advertising industry. We were solving creative problems. We could have made a lot more money if we had more business acumen, but we are creating effective work. It didn’t take too long before the ski resort here in Mount Bachelor, “We want to work with you.” The major resort in the area is Sunriver Resort.

That led to a wonderful craft brewery here in Bend called the Deschutes Brewery. They were looking to restage their brand. They liked some of the work that we had done for the city. We started having a conversation, and before you know it, over the course of a decade or so, we developed a specialization in craft beer. We were pitching clients all over the world during the surge of the craft beer category. We would promote 1,000 craft breweries across the US to 2,500 in a matter of 1 or 2 years.

How did you evolve from that to going to starting your own brand?

At the agency, one of the things that were frustrating about running a services business was we were doing brand work for clients that were realizing significant success, but we were getting paid by the hour for the work that we’d done. There’s no real scale available to you when your business is services. We have a finite number of hours.

When you’re selling time for money, your limit is time.

Your limit is time and talent. Being in a small market exacerbated those challenges. I began wondering, “Is there a way we can take the brain trust of the agency and applied to something that does have a scale?” We did some experimentation. One was, we were doing licensed posters for sports events, like the national championship for college football. We did the Daytona 500. We created a sub-brand with a couple of other partners. It was called Ideology.

We developed conceptual concepts and licensed them to poster printers, calendar makers, mousepad manufacturers, and puzzle makers. We had some success and demand. We were selling these concepts, which were a combination of photography and copy. They were clever and we were celebrating different sporting activities that people would be interested in.

It’s like the success stories poster line, where you have a phrase and an image that pays that off, but it was focused on different recreational activities like fishing and golf. What I didn’t realize naive going into that is that you got to invest in new concepts every year because the next year, they’re looking for new stuff. The level of investment that was required to maintain that business didn’t make sense. We held on to it, but it didn’t go anywhere. We had some fun going to trade shows in New York City every year. That was a lot of fun.

The next idea that I had was to be intimately involved with the craft beer sector, and we saw trends. This is early on. Craft beer initially would’ve been porters and pails and styles like that, but we saw a movement toward barrel age and more complex beers. The opportunity that I saw was, “Wouldn’t it be cool if we built a brand and we contract routes?” We didn’t get into the operating side. We would work with an existing craft brewery, but we’d develop a brand that was about scarcity, super high quality, and complexity.

That started a meeting with the veteran from sales and marketing within craft beer, having conversations, he was on board. That led to an introduction to the brewmaster at the Deschutes Brewery. We worked on a plan. Kevin Smith, who’s one of my Cofounders at the Riff, had an MBA. He was the master architect of the business plan and helped significantly with pitching investors. That’s how we got into the more investor-funded entrepreneurial space. We were familiar with significant barriers that would be introduced along the way.

We started planning in 2017. 2018, we had a plan that we could pitch to an investor. We got a verbal commitment for funding of $4.5 million, and the economy collapsed. We entered into the Great Recession. We kept at it. We revise the plan five times after that. We’re taking it from a $4.5 million plan to ultimately a $1 million plan as we scaled back. We were doing that work for five years before we got funded and opened up.

All the while, we’re maintaining confidentiality for the other two cofounders because they were gainfully employed with notable craft breweries. That became the Crux Fermentation Project. In 2022, we’re going to be celebrating the ten-year anniversary of Crux, but that were tons of pitfalls with that whole venture. I learned from that experience to not give up.

I’m somewhat smiling because Mary unleashed the cracking. When she helps you get past that fear that was blocking you, you let your entrepreneurial freak flag fly completely deep. I’m always like, “Nature versus nurture.” That’s my question around entrepreneurship. I say this often that a lot of people think entrepreneurs are crazy risk-takers, the same people who do base jumping and that type of thing. I’ve come to see a completely different.

You could put entrepreneurs on the spectrum of risk, and they would fall with the same distribution as the rest of the populace. While the rest of the populace sees the risk in taking action, entrepreneurs see the risk in inaction. They still have the same worries about, as you said, mortgage payments and all of that stuff. Looking back, do you think you were you always been entrepreneurial, you needed to start the engine, and you’ve been ideated ever since?

I’m the youngest of nine kids. I grew up observing a lot because I didn’t have a valid voice at the table. That was a great learning experience. I also was in a dysfunctional family, alcoholism, and things like that. You learn to be a bit more intuitive and have those kinds of sensibilities in that environment, for which I’m grateful. That’s the way I am.

The primary characteristic in myself is being a creative problem solver, not accepting things for what they are but thinking beyond that, and learning about how do you solve problems when you get down to the bare bones of what the problem is. A lot of people are focused on solving symptoms rather than a disease as a metaphor. That maybe is my core characteristic.

I think at its core, that is not an entrepreneur. Your core is a creative problem solver who recognizes a problem and seeks solutions differently than anybody else. I can’t help but do that. I feel I’m the same way. You can’t if you see these things and you want to do it differently. We haven’t talked about the Riff yet. Let’s talk about the Riff and make sure we talk a little bit about the evolution there from Cold Brew to Energy+, how you saw the opportunity and solved a problem with the waste stream of the coffee fruit. Share with those readers.

Leading up to the Riff, we ended up shuttering the agency. It was a perfect storm, where a lot of our brands are being highly successful in needing to migrate funds from discretionary spending marketing to expanding operations and capacity. We were in the midst of the shift from more of a traditional approach to advertising where agencies were creating more permanent brand assets in the form of ads, where there are TV ads and print ads.

Social media was taking over the landscape and being the prominent way in which brands connect with consumers. That’s not about perfection and having something that would be shelf-stable. We have a long shelf-life. We had a little trouble making that transition. We ended up shuttering the agency at the end of 2015. I went and worked three-quarter time at Crux along with my son Bobby. That was a brand that had reached a certain maturity level. It wasn’t going to expand beyond the Pacific Northwest. I like to believe that it’s one of the highest respected and regarded craft beer brands. In the Pacific Northwest, we have an amazing tasting room facility that draws people from all over.

What I realized there is that I’m built to build things. That’s my orientation as a creative problem solver, not maintaining things. I miss the agency life where I worked on a broad sector of categories and problems, helping, guiding, mentoring, or supporting the team and exploring solutions. That aspect was significantly diminished.

I started thinking about doing something new and something that was not alcohol because I also was becoming more aware of the sense of ethics and responsibility when it comes to producing alcoholic beverages. I enjoy the community that forms around beer and the experiences that we’re providing, but I was looking to maybe balance that out.

I started talking to people within the beverage that were experts and had a control tower view of the industry. I heard the two most exciting categories at that time, which was 2016, were cold brew coffee or kombucha. We had helped build the Humm Kombucha brand. I was going to stay away from that category, but I started looking into cold-brewed coffee.

I was seeing some parallels between what was happening within the coffee, where coffee consumption was declining 1% year over year. Hot coffee consumption was declining almost at a high rate, 7%, 8%, or 9%, but cold brew coffee is a nascent emerging category within coffee. It was growing more than 100% year over year.

I was correlating that to what was happening in craft and intuitively seeing cold-brew coffee as being a disruptor within coffee and the innovation arm within coffee. The coffee category has been somewhat stagnant since Peet’s and Starbucks had brought to market the traditional Italian ways of presenting coffee. Before that, you pay $1 for a cup of coffee in a diner. That’s what got me excited, and I started talking to friends.

We launched a cold-brewed coffee company in 2018 with a product and market in mid-2018 that had a crap sensibility. We were all about introducing fun into the coffee. We wanted fun colors, persona, ethos, and culture, and we were inspired by the coffee’s flavor wheel, which was much broader than I had ever realized. When you apply a color spectrum to it, it’s vibrant. It’s like a rainbow because there are flavor notes of dried fruit and floral citrus. It blew my mind to learn more and more about coffee.

In late 2019, we had a craft sensibility. We’re borrowing from the playbook of craft beer. We started experimenting with coffee, fruit, or cascara, which is the fruit pulp that surrounds the bean on the plant. I was surprised by the exotic flavor notes of dried fruit, citrus, and pretty prominent sweetness. It’s caffeinated. We learned about the nutritional value. It’s loaded with potassium, magnesium, iron, and antioxidants.

We started wondering why nobody knew about this stuff and what were the traditional uses. We couldn’t find any existing study. We’re doing bench research and looking at other brands in the space that are using coffee fruit and cascara and seeing what they were claiming. It was indicated that there was a significant food waste issue within the coffee industry, and that piqued our interest in exploring and seeking credible research that had scientific rigor behind it. That is what led us into the beginning of this phase that was transformative for Riff as a brand.

It’s great when you find something like that. It’s a relatively untapped opportunity, the opportunity to bring in something that has a greater purpose in the circular economy. At the same time, you’re hoisting a heavy weight on your shoulders because now you have the weight of creating the category of educating the consumer, buyers, retailers, investors, and so forth. Looking back on that, do you think that was something that you were prepared to have that big of an uphill battle, or was that something you anticipated?

We used to celebrate the strength of naivete, which we phrased as the strength of naivete. With some naivete, if we all had the bumps and bruises of what it was like for those that preceded us in doing this work, we might not do it, but we had no idea how difficult it would be. We thought we had a pretty compelling story that people would get excited about. We didn’t also realize that there’s some baggage with cascara.

There’ve been lots of cascara brands. Traditionally, the form of this fruit is dried at the source. That’s important as what’s called cascara, which means the skin of the coffee fruit. We’re talking about the pretty pulp. That’s also part of that in coffee fruit, but we talked to buyers and said, “We’ve tried cascara brands before we tried selling cascara brands.” It was all like a steep tea. It was a still tea in glass bottles.

It’s earthy, funky, and exotic. If you are being purist, presenting and having the cascara flavor notes be the hero in the beverage, It’s not easy. It’s a foreign flavor. There’s that and the complexity of trying to retell the coffee’s story. The understanding of coffee is so deeply entrenched in the minds of everybody across the world. It’s every corner. In any commercial area, you’ll be able to find a coffee shop. You tell people that coffees are fruit and the fruity pulp has been thrown to waste. As much as 70%-plus of it has been thrown to waste every year for 400 years. Their mind is blown.

It’s a complex story. Once you reference coffee, people attach their preexisting idea of what coffee is. We had a lot of people trying to beverage, and they said, “I’m picking up on the coffee notes.” We say, “It doesn’t taste anything like coffee. It’s like an apricot. The fruit doesn’t taste like the pit.” That’s what this is like.

The complexity of the story has been challenging. Let’s make sure we don’t forget that this is all happening in the middle of a pandemic. We launched this product at Expo West in February of 2019. As an experimental product, we had prototypes of cans. We had product samples packaged in glass bottles that we were sharing with people.

We were 1 of 10 semi-finalists for Expo West Pitch Slam in 2020. We’re down in Anaheim. We’re ready to take the stage, crush it and celebrate the work that we were doing with cascara. Twenty-four hours before we were to take the stage, they postponed the show. I assume immediately it was canceled because how do you reschedule a show like that in a calendar year, especially with the uncertainty of what was happening with the pandemic.

We only thought 90 days, and we’ll re-emerge from this. You had little inkling that this was going to be something that became pervasive and changed everything that you were going to be doing for the next several years.

What we were bringing to corporate coffee was a craft sensibility. We had made a major investment in a taproom in Downtown Bend. Part of our strategic plan is there are 4.5 million unique visitors to Bend every year. This is like, “Come to the tap room. It is like going to a live concert, and when you go back home, you want to listen to the playlist over and over again.” If you’re familiar with Riff, most of the tourism traffic that comes to Bend is within a six-hour rubber tire radius.

You were comfortable with that too. You knew how to run a taproom experience. You knew what that meant to coalesce people. That was in the playbook already.

We had an amazing tap system, 30 taps highly innovated. Every tech tower was independent modular. We were doing experimental things like cold-brewed coffee cocktails. We had decaf coffee and a whole program around that. We had invented a hot nitro coffee. It was brewed cold, stored cold, and transferred to the tap tower cold but heated and nitrogenated in line before it was poured. It’s something that is more akin to a latte. The cascara beverage line launched there. We were brewing it in small batches, kegging it, and taking it over there. We’re getting a direct response from consumers and iterating and providing feedback back to the innovation team and saying, “It’s a little too earthy. A little this and that.”

That’s where the birth of that beverage is because we could do that. We’d do a small batch brewing, share with consumers and get direct feedback. That business also was operating at a loss in the first year because it was a highly experimental concept. We want to do something radical to shake things up. We’re starting to get media coverage. We’ve got a write-up in Forbes and in a major newspaper in the San Francisco area. It was starting to get noticed, and the pandemic hit.

Restaurants were one of the hardest-hit industries in the world. We’re trying to figure out how we shuck and jive, reprogram and figure out how we can pay payroll, cover overhead expenses, and fixed expenses like rent. It was incredibly challenging. We made the tough decision and the fall of 2020 at a strategic planning meeting that we were going to get out of the taproom, “It sounds like a great idea. Let’s do that, but how the hell are we going to do that?”

We were in year 2 of a 7-year lease term, and this space is quite large. It’s about 3,500 square feet. Initially, we wanted a smaller space and to make it intimate, and this opportunity came our way. We couldn’t help but take advantage of it. We did have a pretty favorable lease rate, which was great. That was a massive challenge. We’re like, “We’re going to get out of this. We can take all of our energy, time, and imagination and apply it to our core business, which is packaged, ready-to-drink coffee and related beverages.”

I started communicating honestly with the landlord. We’re not able to pay rent. It’s not working for us but I want to work with you. I am going to take responsibility, and we’re going to bring replacement tenant candidates your way. I want to drum up 3 or 4. That was all pie in the sky. It didn’t seem realistic at all. One of our advantages is that it was one of the best retail spaces in the city of Bend, the one that we occupied and were able to negotiate to secure.

It seemed impossible, but the Riff team was able to bring 3 to 4 prospective replacement tenants to the landlord. He said, “This is how it should be done.” Everybody else is throwing up the white flag and saying, “We can’t do anything.” They’re not helping to solve problems. We have an incredible relationship with the landlord because we sublet the space to Stoller Wine Group.

Alcohol was doing pretty good through the pandemic if you could figure out how to program it right with that space. We’re about to finalize a direct place. We transferred directly over to Stoller, and we will get out of the middle, but we’ve been able to maintain positive relationships that were through transparency, taking on a sense of responsibility, and doing our part to solve the problem.

Knowing you, that seems to be emblematic of the way you conduct business in general, work with investors, and so forth. Can you speak that to those reading? Sometimes, it’s frightening to be transparent and take on responsibility like that. Drop a little wisdom on this, Paul.

I don’t know if I’m going to drop wisdom, but I’ll drop my story. I was at a retreat. It was a business leader retreat in 2016, and it was great. We had great speakers, NASA astronauts, Drew Bledsoe, and a lot of inspiring characters get up and talk about leadership and business. In the end, they handed out a cedar plank to everybody and a Sharpie.

They said, “We want you to write your purpose on the cedar plank.” I’d been trying to solve that problem for probably a decade. What is my purpose? That’s what we did for brands. We’re doing brand strategy at the creative agency. It was all about distilling it down to what is your core purpose? That’s the brand strategy, and then you build everything off of that. Everything is expressive of that.

I said, “Why aren’t we doing that for ourselves individually?” I took it upon myself to have that as an assignment, which I didn’t pay enough attention to, but it would come into play from time to time. At this retreat, I’ve been trying to solve that problem for several years, and I’m like, “I got to write something down and make it public.” It came to me at that moment what my purpose was. I wrote it down on this plank. I don’t have it here because I’m at home, but at Riff, this cedar plank sits right underneath my monitor. It said, “Build meaningful relationships.”

My mantra is to be the same person, regardless if it’s work, friendships, family, or anything. When I was twenty, my mothers suffered from cancer, and she passed away. I had this a-ha moment. Her nine children were gathered around her bed when she passed away. That was all that mattered to her at that moment. Why don’t we adopt that value structure now while we’re living rather than realizing that the end of life that’s what life was all about? My core statement is to build meaningful relationships.

Let’s talk about that core statement. The journey you’re on is not easy, especially at this time. It’s hard raising money and getting retailers moving forward. There’s a lot of pushback, headwind, stress, struggle, strife, and whatever other ass I can think of. How does that purpose steady you? How does that play for you in those moments? It’s hard to show up every day, be true to yourself, and be in the same when the proverbial shit is hitting the fan pretty consistently.

It’s hard, and it’s also a lot easier when you have clarity on that.

Explain to me that. How is it both hard and easier? Intuitively, I understand it, but I don’t know if I can articulate it.

It helps you arrive at decisions that are pretty significant and quicker. My wife, when she was 45, we went and saw the movie The Way, and it was about hiking the Camino de Santiago. She said, “I want to do that when I turn 50.” I said, “You got it. I committed to that.” Right at that time, it would have been 2014 when she turned 50, Crux was going through a hard time. We had to exit one of the founders. The leadership structure was changing. It was somewhat tumultuous, but I had made this commitment to my wife, and I looked at my hands.

This is the way I see it. This is my family ring. There are five humpback whales on here. It was my wife, I, and our three kids. This is my wedding ring, and I don’t have any Crux rings, the agency TBD rings, or any of those. These things are my primary commitments. I said, “I’m sorry, guys, but I’m going to be doing this. We’re going to be gone for six weeks, and we’ll figure it out.”

We got back. We had an amazing time. I turned off all emails. I had an administrative assistant at that time. I had set up a separate email address. She was monitoring my email, and she would ping me if something were important through this one special email address. I dedicated that whole time to my relationship with my wife. The three kids came over and surprised her for her 50th birthday. I got back in, and nobody had died. The business was still going, and nobody was harmed.

I think about that as far as what is most important in life. For me, it’s relationships. That’s what also translates for me. It’s not about my personal relationships or my familial relationships, but it’s a relationship with the consumer, farmer, importer, all these investors that have taken the risk to back us, and everybody on the team. Those relationships, belief in people, working together and collaborating, and the ability to achieve far more as a team than what we can do as individuals, that idea and belief was the platform and the bloodline for what Riff is as a company and brand.

You’re able to still tap into that, or it’s always at the surface enough to be there for you in those high-stress priority-type moments.

I’ve had a lot of conversations with investors. I enjoy being transparent and honest. This is a high-risk category. Ninety-plus percent of the brands in beverage fail, so it’s up to you to decide if this is something that you want to take a risk with. There’s downside risk and there’s the possibility of upside risks. I support individual decisions. I don’t try and sell them on some idea that is a version of what is reality. It comes down to, more often than not, what they believe in is the people and the possibility.

I’m going to ask a question. That’s a little bit of a cliche or canned question, but to me, it’s super interesting, especially to ask you this. You’ve amassed a lot of wisdom, experience, and so forth. If you could go back to any point in intersecting with yourself along your trajectory and tell yourself something that you now know, when and what would that be?

That is if I’ve had the opportunity to speak to the college student with the Riff story. We have a great relationship with the University of Oregon. We’ve done some work for Riff and Oregon State University. What it had mentioned before is I dropped out of college as a junior because I was a commuter student at Long Beach State. I dropped out because I was the youngest, and my mother had contracted cancer was pretty severe. I dropped out to help take care of her, along with my other siblings. I couldn’t continue to go to school, and I never got back on that track.

College students have asked me this question time and time again. They said, “What would you do differently?” I have an education but I acquired it through the School of Hard knocks. It’s a lot more expensive and it takes a lot longer to graduate. I’m not even sure I have, but what I would do is I would go back to college. I would go to a four-year university and get a business degree.

Why would you go back in time and be that?

I would have become an entrepreneur sooner and had been better prepared.

I asked myself that about education. I went the four-year route and graduate school, and I wonder how much of it I use. Part of it was learning how to learn. I don’t think the actual skills or the knowledge necessary is carried forth, but the ability to consume information, synthesize it and use it. It also set me on the exact opposite path.

You do those kinds of things, and the next logical step is to walk into corporatedom and follow that trajectory. It’s interesting because a lot of the entrepreneurs who have had a much longer period of their life as entrepreneurs took the hard-knock route. They recognize that being restricted and contained to the vessel that is that type of four-year institution wasn’t ever going to work for them. It wasn’t how they processed.

The idea that a senior in high school can have some level of certainty as to what work they want to get into or how they want to apply themselves is a bit ridiculous to me.

At my age, I still don’t know what the hell I want to do.

You mentioned wisdom, which means I’m old. I’m 60 years old now in 2022. I used to be super frustrated with my work because it wasn’t where I wanted to be. We adopt these systems like you’re at a certain age or level in your career. You should be here, not there. That led to a lot of frustration. The thing that inspired me to continue forward and continue to be generative is adopting a lifelong learner mentality that you never arrive. Life is a continuous journey. We aspire to retire someday and take the level of stress down several notches, so we can enjoy life. I’ve never felt better or fulfilled in the work that I do than now because we at Riff were purpose-driven. We’re driven to solve some problems.

If you’re playing the odds, it’s highly likely that we’re going to fail, but if we embrace that as the probable outcome, then we will have failed at attempting to make a difference in the world to contribute to what is some aggregate effort to make a difference in the world and to tell the story. We at least have that obligation because we discovered something significant with the sustainability issue within coffee and nobody is telling me that story.

Having that purpose and a deeper sense of reason to give up makes it all more doable. It makes you far more able to have the necessary persistence and resilience that’s necessary. I’m trying to do more of these episodes with the entrepreneurs that we serve with this show. One of the things around this journey is that it can be isolating, or you’ve got two companions alongside on this journey on both shoulders. One is fear and the other is doubt. Speaking to your fellow entrepreneurs, if there’s anything that you want to share with them or say to them, what would that be?

What’s made a difference is understanding the why. Why am I doing this? Is it to create a life-changing financial event for myself? That would be nice, but it’s not why. Is it to achieve a level of success where you’ve got some identity equity because of what you’ve done? That’d be nice, but that’s not why. We can carry on and continue to fight this battle, which is a battle. We get a big boulder that we’re pushing up the hill, and we believe we might be able to do it. The only way we’re going to be able to know that is if we can do it is by putting everything you have into it and pushing it up and continuing to push it up the hill.

There’s the book, The Last Lecture, and one of the lessons there is seeing barriers is one more opportunity to prove how passionate you are about getting onto the other side of the barrier rather than being symbolic of defeat or another reason why you shouldn’t do it. It’s validating that this is indeed a 90% failure rate. My kids played baseball and softball. A great batting average is 300. 7 out of 10 times, you get up to bat, and you’re going to fail. If you focus on that, you are going to fail. I saw that. The intrinsic motivation to avoid failure that leads to failure versus the focus on the possibility and what you are able to do in a more positive mindset.

Let me ask one other question, and that is the stakeholder who is reading, the other constituency, who is our audience, the investors, retailers, and providers in this industry. As an entrepreneur, what should they know about the importance they play and the support that you need from them?

When you’re having conversations with investors, common sense says, “Don’t talk about how hard and impossible it is. Talk about all the possibilities and the upside.” The truth of the story is that it is hard. Not only do you need a sense of ingenuity, drive, being resourceful, and creativity, but you also need the system to work for you.

As you said many times Elliott, “This industry is conspiring against smaller brands every day.” You have to be highly creative and industrious to figure out how are you going to hack this system that is putting all these blockades up because it’s dominated by mature behemoth brands? We need to support Ukraine. We know what Zelinsky and the Ukrainian people are having to deal with on a daily basis. We believe they can win. We have to have that sense of support and understanding of what it’s like to be an entrepreneur. Of course, what we’re dealing with is nothing compared to that. I don’t mean to compare it.

It’s a good analogy. Now you’ve got to be the typical entrepreneur, what do you want people to know? You’re raising a community around WeFunder. How can the people reading here learn more about Riff, support Riff, and invest in Riff?

You can go to our Wefunder page. We love the idea of community in our crowdfunding because as much of a community-building effort as it is an investor capital-building effort. At Riff, we’re doing some things that nobody else has done in the category. We’re the nation’s first certified carbon-neutral energy drink. We got verification or certification for non-GMO. We’re also upcycled certified. We are working hard to keep human health and wellness at the forefront as well as the environment.

We’re making a difference, championing a story, and inviting people to be a part of it because we are determined to make a difference in this world. We see it as a beautiful overlap between an altruistic purpose of making a difference for the planet and for people but a perfect overlap between that and enterprise opportunity. We can’t solve the problem without scale. Our whole focus is making sure we’re translating coffee fruit into products that will appeal to a mass audience.

I’m a big fan of community or equity crowdfunding because it democratizes the process, and there aren’t any gatekeepers. It’s a way that we can all show each other support. Consider participating if you would. Paul, thanks for doing this with me.

We’re not going to end this without me expressing to everybody on the Riff’s team level of gratitude to you and the TIG team because you have been a huge pulley for us in the last several years that we’ve been engaged working together. You are amazing, and we cannot adequately thank you for all that you’re doing to inspire us on a daily basis. Thank you for all the work that you’re doing and how you’re championing all of us smaller emerging brands trying to make a go of it here and working our asses off. You’re doing more so for us, so thank you for that.

It’s an honor. We talk about this a lot internally, and the whole team wakes up with this fundamental belief that our role and position is to work and empower the entrepreneurs who are on the front lines of human health, climate action, justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion. The change agency innovators, that’s what all of you are. That’s how we’re going to create a better place. It’s an easy thing, and I’ll slip into $5 for the flood later.

Thank you for being a genuine champion.

Thanks, everyone, for reading, and we’ll see you all next time. Take care.

Thank you.

Important Links

• Riff

• Crux Fermentation Project

• Humm Kombucha

• Stoller Wine Group

• The Last Lecture

• Wefunder

About Paul Evers

A celebrated veteran in brand strategy, design and advertising— Paul led the teams behind the creative development of craft beverage brands such as Humm Kombucha, 21st Amendment, Deschutes Brewery, Odell Brewing and Crux Fermentation Project—which he co-founded, served as President and CMO. Paul co-founded Riff along with veterans from Stumptown and LinkedIn, launching product in market in late 2018. In mid 2020, Riff discovered a massive sustainability issue in the coffee industry which led to the development of Riff’s Energy+ line of sparkling beverages made from upcycled cascara, a needlessly wasted nutrient-rich byproduct of the coffee harvest.

Riff Energy+ launched in late spring 2021, and acquired carbon neutral certification and upcycled certification in early 2022.A celebrated veteran in brand strategy, design and advertising— Paul led the teams behind the creative development of craft beverage brands such as Humm Kombucha, 21st Amendment, Deschutes Brewery, Odell Brewing and Crux Fermentation Project—which he co-founded, served as President and CMO. Paul co-founded Riff along with veterans from Stumptown and LinkedIn, launching product in market in late 2018. In mid 2020, Riff discovered a massive sustainability issue in the coffee industry which led to the development of Riff’s Energy+ line of sparkling beverages made from upcycled cascara, a needlessly wasted nutrient-rich byproduct of the coffee harvest. Riff Energy+ launched in late spring 2021, and acquired carbon neutral certification and upcycled certification in early 2022.

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