Renewable energy
Flash forward one year: Brown’s class of 2010 crams for finals while sipping cool, refreshing tea drinks with a social conscience. The drinks contain a caffeinated holly plant called guayusa, grown in Ecuador and harvested in a fair-trade program designed by the nascent beverage company Runa LLC, co-founded by Brown students as part of a course.
“Runa was initiated in our entrepreneurship class last fall,” says Daniel MacCombie ’09, the company’s vice president and treasurer. “We sought various ideas, but we all knew that we didn’t want to go for an IT or tech-specific route – [we] had too many varied interests.”
Team member Tyler Gage ’09, who had worked extensively with indigenous groups in the Amazon region, brought the missing ingredient. “When [Tyler] was hosting a shaman from Ecuador at his house for an intercultural exchange,” MacCombie recalls, “[the shaman] shared his vision for an opportunity for sustainable development for his community. He hoped to share the traditional plant knowledge of his communities with consumers in the United States as a way to both connect globally and provide supplemental incomes for his people.”
The product is for real: MacCombie estimates that the energy drink may be in stores in the Northeast within a year and sold nationally within three years.
To create Runa, the student team had to research everything from bottling to beverage-industry trends and from community relations to Ecuador’s export laws. They did it well enough to win the Brown Entrepreneurship Program’s business plan competition ($25,000 in cash and in-kind services) and the student track of the Rhode Island Business Plan Competition ($45,300 in cash and in-kind services).
MacCombie, a marine biology honors concentrator who dreamed of a career in renewable energy, will head back to Ecuador after a summer of fundraising and beverage expos in order to run the company with Gage. “It’s wild,” he says.
Runa LLC is a for-profit business only in terms of beverage sales outside Ecuador, MacCombie stresses: “We have started a foundation – Fundación Runa – in Ecuador. All the money made from buying and drying guayusa leaves, making extracts, shipping them to the U.S., and selling them to the company will stay in Ecuador. We’re in the process of hiring an indigenous director of the Fundación,” MacCombie continues. “Eventually the majority of the board will be indigenous Ecuadorians so that this operation can truly be run for their benefit.”
Before Runa, MacCombie was an organizer of the Brown is Green initiative and its 2008 conference, working closely with Vice President Marisa Quinn, then executive director of the president’s office. “The students who led the conference were, in general, remarkable – as so many Brown students are,” Quinn says. "Dan exhibited tireless dedication and commitment to the issues at hand, and a refreshing balance of pragmatism and unabashed idealism that was the ballast for the conference.”
A glance at MacCombie’s LinkedIn.com profile illustrates the scope of his interests and his leadership qualities. In addition to playing key roles in Brown is Green and Runa, he has been treasurer and a national board member of Students for Sensible Drug Policy; a summer technology and markets analyst for the Clinton Climate Initiative, where he developed experience in international market trends and sustainability issues; and a research assistant for Brown’s Advisory Committee on Corporate Responsibility in Investment Policies. He was also co-director of the Political Theory Project’s Janus Forum, which seeks to promote political debate on campus.
MacCombie calls himself “a great example of what Brown can do for its students. I came in introverted, timid, and unsure of my future,” he explains. “I am leaving confident, proud, and excited about all the opportunities available to me, despite the economic downturn.” During his undergraduate years, “I organized two conferences on campus, helped introduce a bill in the State House, spent two summers working on research projects on both coasts, and started a business. None of this would have happened without Brown.”
When he first came to College Hill from Ohio, MacCombie was set on becoming a biologist. Then he took some courses in criminal justice policy and decided that his brand of science would have to be a “socially progressive” one. “Brown taught me to be conscious of all the opportunities I’ve had,” he says. “I learned this through my work in prisons and with drug policy and incarceration issues. This awareness of my privilege is something I hope will stick with me and prove valuable in Ecuador.”