She Left Silicon Valley to Grow Coffee in Colombia
After six years as a product manager at two unicorns, Valentina Rios walked away from her San Francisco life and went back to her grandmother's coffee farm in Huila. What she built there surprised everyone, including herself.
Valentina Rios has a LinkedIn profile that reads like a tech recruiter's dream: Stanford MBA, PM at Stripe, lead product at a Series C health-tech startup. She also has dirt under her fingernails most mornings by 6am, standing in a coffee grove at 1,800 metres above sea level in southern Colombia.
"People in San Francisco thought I was having a breakdown," she laughs. "My manager offered me a sabbatical. My therapist suggested we explore my relationship with achievement. But it wasn't a breakdown. I just finally figured out what I actually wanted to build."
What she wanted to build was a direct-trade coffee business rooted in her family's land — land that had been farmed for four generations but had never seen the margins that specialty coffee commands in Western markets.
The supply chain problem
The fundamental issue was intermediaries. Colombian coffee farmers typically receive 6 to 12 percent of the final retail price of their beans. Valentina used her product background to build a traceability system — a simple web app that lets buyers in Europe and North America track their beans from a specific farm and lot. The transparency commands a premium. Her farmers now receive 38 to 45 percent of retail value.
"Tech taught me how to think about systems," she says. "Farming taught me that systems that don't account for soil and weather and human dignity tend to fail eventually. I needed both."