In 1998, Barry Nalebuff, a professor at Yale, and his former student Seth Goldman decided to launch a beverage company called Honest Tea, a company that sells ready-to-drink iced tea that truly tastes like tea. This should have been a recipe for disaster as neither Seth nor Barry had any experience in the industry or in running a business. They were going up against Coke, Pepsi, Snapple, … And yet the company grew (organically) from five thermoses to more than a billion bottles sold. In 2011, Coca Cola purchased the company. In this presentation, Barry shared his lessons learned, including:
How to use basic economics to identify market opportunities; How to evaluate holes in the market to determine whether they are an opportunity or a sinkhole; How to be a lean start-up; How to structure equity in a way that is fair to investors but doesn’t dilute founders; How to recognize the most import aspect of your business; How to communicate your mission; Most importantly,the topic also included how to create a successful mission-driven business without sacrificing one's ideals.

Barry Nalebuff is the Milton Steinbach Professor at Yale School of Management. An expert on game theory, he has written extensively on its application to business strategy. He is the coauthor of six books: Thinking Strategically and The Art of Strategy are popular books on game theory with over 400,000 copies in print. Co-opetition looks beyond zero-sum games to emphasize the potential for co-operating as well as competing. Why Not? offers a framework for problem solving and ingenuity. Lifecycle Investing provides a new strategy for retirement investing. Mission in a Bottle tells the story of Honest Tea in graphic format. A graduate of MIT, a Rhodes Scholar, and a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows, Nalebuff earned his doctorate at Oxford University.

Barry practices what he preaches (and preaches what he practices). In addition to his academic work, he has extensive experience consulting with multinational firms, from American Express and McKinsey to Google and Rio Tinto. He advised the NBA in its prior negotiations with the National Basketball Players Association and served on the boards of Nationwide Insurance, One Title, Q Drinks, and Trader.com. He continues to serve on the board of Calicraft and AGP. After Honest Tea, Nalebuff co-founded Kombrewcha, a line of low-calorie alcoholic beverages that was sold to AB-InBev in 2016. His latest ventures are Real Made Foods and Choose Health.