Hi {{first_name|dear builder}}! Happy July.
It turns out that when they say “kids are expensive” they are primarily referring to berry consumption.
It also turns out this consumption is now a year-round phenomenon. When we were growing up there was a berry season and it was difficult/impossible to find fresh berries outside of that. Nowadays the berries are available and delicious all year long.
Last week the New York Times ran a fascinating article about how we got here:
In just the last decade, berries have completed the journey from fragile, local, seasonal treat to worldwide refrigerator staple and marketing juggernaut. Global production has tripled since 2000…and still cannot keep up with demand.
Most of that growth has been driven by Driscoll’s, a $7 billion California company that began as a multifamily farm in 1904, patented its first strain of strawberries in 1958 and is still controlled by family members. In 1989, its board made what the company calls the Meadowood Declaration, a resolution that seemed preposterous at the time: to make all four berries available, in every season, in every part of the world.
Today the company is the undisputed global market leader, shipping four billion containers of highly perishable fruit across 60 countries each year…Driscoll’s is now the second-highest-earning brand in American supermarkets, behind only Coca-Cola.
I love the idea that in 1989 the family made a “declaration” to make the four berries available all year round, and then they spent 30 years fulfilling that vision successfully.
To make a resolution like that, you have to be absolutely certain that by the time you come through on the big vision, the demand for that product will still be there. In this case, the Driscoll family believed that people would still want to eat berries all the time, and my children can confirm that belief was correct.
In this moment of intense short-term hype noise - IF YOU AREN’T RUNNING YOUR LIFE ON AI YOU ARE FALLING BEHIND - it is a good opportunity to make your own “Meadowood Declaration.”1
Which human appetite would you bet a 30-year resolution on?
This is the core investment principle for both Buffett and Bezos: don’t try to guess what will change in the next decades, focus on what WON’T change.2
At first when I was writing this post I thought I should probably come up with my own answer to this question. And then I remembered: I already did.
In September 2015 I was in San Francisco for my first Dreamforce, Salesforce’s annual 150,000-person conference. I was a few weeks into starting up OpenTent, and this headfirst dive into CRM-land was immensely overwhelming. I knew no one, and had little appetite for shouting at strangers during the big happy hour mixers.
So I took myself to sushi dinner at a place called Ozumo, sitting solo at the counter with my notebook and pen. I wrote about what I had seen that day: immense amounts of technology and money poured into the act of selling. Can we better predict who will buy which pair of jeans and when, and then send them the exact right targeted email at the exact right moment?
We should have the same tools for community engagement, I thought. For connections rather than transactions.
I wrote: I want to equip community builders with technology they love so that none of their work ever falls through the cracks of messy data. It should be as easy to measure and strengthen relationships as it is to measure and strengthen revenue.
It’s not quite as pithy as “all the berries all the time all the places” but my little Ozumo Declaration still fires me up, 11 years later.
Driscoll’s knew my kids were going to want obscene amounts of berries all year long. And I know that when those kids are grown, they will want to be woven into robust communities. I love working on enabling that vision and I love being “preposterous” about it because I know the demand will still be there on the other side.
Let’s plant seeds for the appetites that won’t change.
May your harvest be sweet.
Related to taking big swings in the tech/community direction: we’re still looking for a founding CTO for Community Builder Group. Do you know someone? Or know someone who might know someone?
1 I can’t find any more info on this Meadowood Declaration online besides the NYT article, but I did find this resort in Napa which seems likely to be the site where this board meeting took place.
2 Here’s a recent tweet with good examples - thank you Sara for sending to me