A Moment for Tea

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How Steve Schwartz, Founder and CEO of Art of Tea, innovated on 5,000 years of tradition to build a distinctive brand around ritual and resilience.

 

Episode Notes

When Steve Schwartz founded Art of Tea, it was with the belief that there was an opportunity to make people’s lives better through tea. His authentic yet innovative blends and passion for teaching ultimately gave rise to a highly successful B2B business through partnerships with leading restaurateurs, chefs, and hospitality brands - which grew into a D2C brand in the wake of the pandemic.

In his talk with Jesse, Steve describes his journey from inquisitive student to master tea blender to business founder. Follow him from the Ayurvedic Institute in New Mexico, where he studied plant alchemy, to tea-growing fields in Asia, where he first began to “believe in the leaf,” to make-or-break business meetings with some of the country’s most well-known chefs and restaurants.

Finally, learn how Art of Tea has adapted during the pandemic to help consumers continue to enjoy a delicious, time-honored ritual that gives at least a little control back to us in these turbulent times.

Guest Bio

Steve Schwartz is a Master Tea Blender and the Founder of Art of Tea, a hand-crafted tea purveyor based in Los Angeles. At Art of Tea, Steve applies his background in ayurveda to the creation of award-winning blends that showcase his passion for the alchemy of combining herbs and botanicals.

Steve’s drive and passion for expanding people’s knowledge of the history of tea has cultivated relationships with brands, acclaimed chefs and restaurants such as Google, Vera Wang, #Slack, The Peninsula Hotels, Huntington Gardens, Wolfgang Puck, Adam Perry Lang, Rustic Canyon Group, Craft Los Angeles and more.

Helpful Links

+ Episode Transcript

Steve Schwarz [00:00:07] My wife and I were having a conversation like, OK, I'll never know if I'm going to succeed or if I'm going to fail, but I guess we're young enough and sort of dumb enough where we could go down this path courageously. And Stewart, something that we haven't seen done yet before. We saw what happened with coffee. We saw what happened with wine, we saw what happened with beer. But is there an opportunity to impact people's lives through tea so like, let's let's give it a shot.

Jesse Purewal [00:00:49] From Qualtrics Industries, this is Breakthrough Builders, a series of conversations with people whose passions, perspectives, instincts and ideas fuel some of the world's most amazing products, brands and experiences.

Jesse Purewal [00:01:05] I'm Jesse Purewal. Today on the show, how Steve Schwartz innovated on 5000 years of beautiful tradition to build Art of Tea. And how deep human empathy, a commitment to sharing hard earned knowledge and a belief in the power of ritual empowered Steve and his team to discover new paths to growth amidst the pandemic.

Jesse Purewal [00:01:33] I am here with Steve Schwartz. Steve, thank you for joining me on the podcast.

Steve Schwarz [00:01:38] Honor to be here. Thank you,.

Jesse Purewal [00:01:40] Steve, you'll have to forgive me. I'm kind of a coffee guy by nature. I don't want to get things started off on the wrong foot, so I'll just say Namaste day for abiding my weakness to the other side of the caffeine.

Steve Schwarz [00:01:53] That's awesome. I go to the dark side from time to time to I definitely enjoy a well crafted cup of coffee, so I can appreciate that craft.

Jesse Purewal [00:02:03] So, Steve, I'm conscious that you named your organization The Art of Tea and as such, reckon that you have some very distinct perspectives around the art of it versus other elements of it, or only the tea itself, when you thought of that name and when you think about all that art implies. What does it mean to you?

Steve Schwarz [00:02:30] One of the major differences between a whole leaf tea and a traditional paper supermarket tea bag that's just powder dust is the quality of the leaf, the size of the leaf, the color, the texture. All of these go into sourcing beautiful, high quality ingredients that we then blend together. So there's art and not just how the blend is crafted together, but also watching that process unfold. There is an art form called The Agony of the Leaf, where as the tea leaves are being steeped in the liquid, you'll watch them dance, you watch the leaves unfurl and unfold, the oil start to release within the leaf. The hot water starts to penetrate through the cells and the leaf starts to open up and deliver just a beautiful display. So there's art in that process. If we if we allow ourselves to watch it and there is ceremony, there's ritual, and sometimes we think of ritual as being something that's far up. But really, it's it's there's a modern day ritual that we can have anywhere, regardless of where we're living in this world and have it apply to to us.

Jesse Purewal [00:03:41] Steve talked to me about as a as a tea guy, the importance of ritual ritual has got to be one of those things that right now you see so many people struggling to kind of get a handle on and trying to create or maybe recreate in this moment. Talk to me about how you see ritual and how you see us as human beings wired to kind of need it.

Steve Schwarz [00:04:04] Well, right now, when we enter this whole period of covid, there are things that we can control and there's things that we can't control in terms of time and space and the beauty behind ritual is that it allows us to bring back that ownership over our time and what we do with that time, and it's a whole paradox, right? Like, I don't know that I have time to breathe. I don't know if I have time to make tea. I don't know if I have time to work out. But the paradox is that when we commit to that ritual, those non negotiables whatever they might be for you, that you end up having so much more time, so much more clarity. And at the end of it, it's freedom. It's the responsibility of the ritual that leads to the cadence of freedom.

Jesse Purewal [00:04:56] Why is it that in these moments when it sort of feels like there's so much more that we have to get done, ironically, we need to take a step back and ask ourselves the right way to spend our time?

Steve Schwarz [00:05:10] The beauty behind creating a deeper sense of ritual is that it gets us a bit more myopic on creating centers of joy, and what I mean by that is sometimes it's painful, right? Like like even making a cup of tea. I find that people have sort of this aversion, like, I don't know if I'm going to do it right. I don't know if I'm going to mess up. And it's just leaves and water. If you're dealing with great quality crafted tea and purified great clean water source, you can create this delicious experience in this delicious ritual. And it also brings us back to the elements. And teas are grown in this beautiful, pristine environment where it's dependent on the sun. The fog rolls off around 10:30 in the morning, depending on where it's located, the elements of the soil conditions, how it's harvested, how it's roasted, the heating elements that are used. All this goes into crafting an incredible tea. And so by taking that time out, it gets us in that space. It gets us in that headspace where we can show up so much more for ourselves, for our loved ones, for our community. And just just add that bit of intention back into what we're doing.

Jesse Purewal [00:06:28] Steve, I want to take you back to your comment about tea growing in some of the most beautiful places on the planet. What was it that first ignited the desire for you, the the decision that you made to go and visit those places? And how did it become a part of your life? Early on.

Steve Schwarz [00:06:46] I got a full scholarship to go to college after high school. And six months into it, my mom got diagnosed with brain cancer. So I moved in with her to take care of her for the last 10 months until she passed. So that's what really woke me up into wanting to learn more about health and wellness and Ayurveda and plant medicine, there's a school that I went to called the Diabetic Institute in New Mexico and I studied with a gentleman named Dr. Vasant Lad. There's a wonderful documentary on him on Amazon called The Doctor from India. And I ended learning with him for a few years in New Mexico. And I was the only student advanced enough to work with the Masters at my school in how to blend and how to source. So I remember being the youngest student there and kind of, I guess, a little cocky and definitely engrossed and wanting to learn more about the alchemy of tea, I was on the phone with the supplier and he said, Would you like to order Gingko on an eastern slope or a western slope next to a river? And I said, you know what, that doesn't matter. I just need ginko and he says, No, no, sir, it does matter. You need to come here yourself and experience it. So I was intrigued. I worked four different jobs, saved up my money. I got a backpack and I started traveling around the world to find the best teas and botanicals possible, and this is before importing tea was a more legit practice. Places in Asia, many, many countries didn't export for multiple reasons. One major reason was there's such a strong domestic market. Why would they want to sell to the US market or the European market? Just that there wasn't that much of an opportunity for them. So I remember going to origin, and I was just bringing stuff back for friends and family and going off to some far off places, I didn't speak the local dialect and they didn't speak English. And so part of it was the adventure, just getting a moped, diving deeper into villages and eventually finding people.

Jesse Purewal [00:08:53] And was was the stuff that you were discovering and bringing back always tea or were you instigated to like, go investigate whole ranges of botanicals and all kinds of natural things? Like what was the specific role of tea and how did that evolve over time?

Steve Schwarz [00:09:08] Yeah, so I was so being a student of Ayurveda and a passionate life learner for understanding or wanting to understand the alchemy of plant medicine. In other words, how is it that one plant plus another plant? It could be the leaves of the stems. Different ratios blended together with other plants don't equal one plus one equals two. It's one plus one can equal six or 12. It magnifies the potency within that plant medicine. So I became very passionate about understanding plant the power plant medicine and how consuming it at different stages of our digestive system, even on a cellular level, impacts our lives. So I wasn't on a journey to discover Tea. More on a journey to understand the variety of plants that are out there in this world. And by the way, I grew up like drinking tea for me was like shitty. Know, you add a lemon and then honey and then milk and all this other stuff just to make it tasty. And so when I first had a delicious cup of tea, which was in some far out village in an Laos, there was the tea leaves that were like in this bundled cake and it was tied together and I never had. And I said, I asked the woman and said, What is this? And she said, it's tea. I'm like, No, no. Like what? What is it like what kind of botanicals? She's like, My dear, it's tea. I don't understand. Like I know you can make it like a tea, but like what she's like, listen, I get it from this farmer. You can go out there and you can try to find him if you want. And so I was intrigued because I just thought tea was in a bag and it was black and I didn't know that all true tea came from this evergreen shrub called Camellia Sinensis. And so my journey from this really kicked into wanting to understand, like, what is tea? And there's no major sources I can go to at that time to really help me unpack and uncover what is tea. So this this really kicked it off for me.

Jesse Purewal [00:11:08] Steve, I want to ask you a question about courage and conviction. We've talked to a couple of people in the show, Geetha Murali at room to read, left a private sector career to get involved in and help scale the nonprofit room to read. They've touched 40 million children. Kim Malek had a sense that perhaps a scoop shop could create community in Portland and twenty five stores later. I think she's proving her thesis right. But most people I think that have an inclination that they can intersect a career pursuit and their passions are for one reason or another, not going to take that first step. You took the first step. What was it that was the initial fire in your belly that allowed you to say, let me go take this burgeoning interest or this thought that I have around wanting to understand more about the intersection of leaves and water and eventually get going with it to the extent that you could make a career focus out of it.

Steve Schwarz [00:12:07] So I was at a crossroads. I was working a full time job in a very happy with the career path that it was on. I was working at a treatment center for kids as a spiritual counselor. I got offered a job, six figure job, recently married. And so my wife and I were having a conversation like, OK. I'm good at this path and I can continue on this path, this other path. I'll never know if I'm going to succeed or if I'm going to fail, but I guess we're young enough and sort of dumb enough where we could go down this path courageously and steward something that that we haven't seen done yet before. We saw what happened with coffee. We saw what happened with wine we saw what happened with beer. But is there an opportunity to impact people's lives through tea and plant medicine? So, like, let's let's give it a shot.

Jesse Purewal [00:13:01] Yeah, so who invested in you early on? And I don't just mean from the standpoint of providing you capital, but what kinds of people were compelled by and persuaded by and attracted to the story that you were starting to tell and the value proposition that it might have offered for them in their careers to come join you.

Steve Schwarz [00:13:23] So we had two investors coming in early. It was Aunt Visa and Uncle MasterCard, and we had like a thousand dollars that we borrowed from one and fifteen hundred that we borrowed from the other. And it was like, ah, let's pay it down at every month and we still pay our credit cards down, thank goodness, every month. And so we just be committed to that from a belief side. One was definitely having my wife there, but also I didn't have any one of my immediate corner that I could turn to for that. It started something and taken it off and really grown an impact. So I started to look at books and read autobiographies and biographies on people that lived hundreds of years ago or thousands of years ago or 50 years ago, just turned my car into a university. Who can I surround myself with, you know, sort of a mastermind of my car downloading stuff on my iPod. And then we did have one customer that also really helped make a big impact. His name was Benny Bomb. He was a general manager for a restaurant in downtown L.A. And I remember I packed my teas. I printed them out on like a Dime a label and sealed each bag and it brought it to him full of different samples. And he's like, wow, the packaging looks so authentic, you know, looks like it's you made the label look as if it was printed on a dime a label and said, well, thank you. But I got really into the teaching aspect. So is training its staff all on tea and so that passion for teaching and drive of knowledge, you're the gardens that we visited and I didn't know that people would be that into it. Here's the farmer that we work with and here's how we blend and craft our teas. And so that turned into igniting Wolfgang Puck and his fine restaurant group. And then Shutters on the Beach and it just sort of grew from there.

Jesse Purewal [00:15:18] What was your first break? Where did you feel like you had some early momentum and that the the start line was in the rearview mirror?

Steve Schwarz [00:15:26] It was Wolfgang Puck for sure. And I'd fly out. Some of the major decision makers were in Las Vegas. And so I'd fly out with whatever I can scrape. And I'd meet with one decision maker. And I'm like, What are you doing in town? I'm busy with some potential opportunities. It's like, oh, great. And it's like, well, you know, no one's here to meet with you right now, but you might want to come back in like a week or so, yeah no problem, I was driving my Honda Civic with, like, barely any tread on my tires, just driving out there over and over again. And then eventually it got to the point where some of the head decision makers are like, I'm the one that found this guy. And a lot of chefs, they love the story. They want to know that they're offering something authentic and unique where they can then share it with their service and that service. And this is the last experience that a guest is going to have a restaurant. So it's got to be special. You can have an amazing steak, but if you end it with a typical supermarket tea, it's just not going to make an impact. So I'd say Wolfgang Puck was it was a major stepping stone. And then the next piece, I'd say was Caesars Palace. I ended up teaching these beginning and advance blending classes at these big world conventions. They were sold out classes and teaching other tea companies and coffee companies had a blunt and Caesars Palace asked about teach the first tea sommerlier in the United States. And so that was a really big driver for us, just really solidifying a tea has its place and its stake in the market.

Jesse Purewal [00:16:59] But I can't imagine that the story that they were being enthralled by was the one about the alchemy of plant medicine, I have to imagine there was a lot more of a distinctive what's in it for the drinker, what's in it for the connoisseur, what's in it for the guest of the restaurant? Kind of a version of that narrative. So what was that narrative and how different is the story that you told, let's call it 15 years ago, from the story that you tell now?

Steve Schwarz [00:17:29] I'd say it's very much the same. So our mission is to create a delicious experience and we want to impact as many lives as we can through tea. So leading with delicious experience, it's here. Silver Needle, it's grown, in Fujian province of China, it's been hand harvested for the past eight hundred years, documented and originally it was reserved for emperors. And so leading with a story like that on the history and why it's so special and then walking through ninety seven percent of what you're drinking is actually water when it comes to tea. So you're looking for that three percent. And so those that hyper focus on the nuances and getting these tastemakers to really understand what to look for in a high quality experience, we've really found our place within within that space.

Jesse Purewal [00:18:25] And Steve, what were some of the setbacks that you had to confront as an entrepreneur and as a builder in maybe your early years? That. By navigating them either steeled you for kind of moving on and or gave you some lessons for just navigating difficulty and challenge in general.

Steve Schwarz [00:18:46] Wow, I can think of I could think of several the finance side funding it on your own is challenging, you know, and so landing someone like a big restaurant group, like where you go to a bank and you say this is what they promised to do. Can we work together? And so the funding pieces has been challenging. And we it's been organic growth. I'm not opposed to nonorganic growth in the future at the right time. But it's been organic growth, not selling to supermarkets or staying super focused in our lane on the direct to consumer space and the hospitality space. That's also been a challenge because not everyone heard of us, even though many people I've tried your tea before, I work at Slack, at Google or wherever it might be and I've had it, then they start to make those connections.

Jesse Purewal [00:19:35] And Steve, how did how did you make the call to begin to drive your growth through this avenue of partnerships and developing experiences for hospitality organizations and for for private companies and other types of customers versus going maybe more the direct consumer route or the supermarket route, if you will, early on what was true about you as a leader and maybe what was true about the business and the opportunity to lead you in that direction?

Steve Schwarz [00:20:08] So if I were to go back in time pre covid hospitality was and continues to be a very meaningful space for us. But the direct to consumer space is super meaningful for us on directly on our website ArtOfTea.com. For our learning platform, how to become a tea expert and all the different teas and blends that we have. That direct to consumer space is super meaningful for us where we can reach customers directly where they're at the partnerships really came in when we started doing custom blends for different organizations like the Peninsula Hotel in Tokyo for cherry blossom season, they said, can you create a custom blend for us? And so for their VIP guests and for the cherry blossom season, which only happens for a very short window, you're looking at maybe a week, maybe two weeks where they bloom and that's it. Or the Shangri-La Hotel or the Huntington Gardens here in Los Angeles or Slack creating a custom Slack blend. So the collaboration piece has been really fun and interesting, really understanding the ethos of who they are and where they're at and how they want tea to impact their tribe.

Jesse Purewal [00:21:17] How do you work to create, you know, one or a couple of of distinct blends that sort of meet the bar of the ethos of the experience the company's trying to provide while also maybe stewarding and respecting the individuality of the people whose palates this will touch.

Steve Schwarz [00:21:35] Yeah, so there's pre covid. There's also covid, so pre covid. It was going and visiting a place like the Getty Museum. We're looking at the coastal vegetation, seeing what could be wild craft and get a better understanding of the local botanicals and blend it with aa tea to create a signature offering that can only be offered at the Getty Museum. We're working with Maldives and for some of the hotel properties, creating a local experience, using different flavor profiles and different ingredients that can really complement that signature experience. Because with tea, you're bringing in all the senses. So people leave the Maldives, they want something that can bring them back to that space and want to bring them back. And tea is that carrier that is that distinct, immediate brain nose and aromatic impact back to the brain, back to that relaxation state, that freedom state and tea helps get you there and beautiful and meaningful ways.

Jesse Purewal [00:22:34] And so take me now to the the current day when you don't have the access you could you could still get in your Honda and put the miles on it, but they might not let you in the front door at one of the properties in Las Vegas. How have you, if you can even adequately summarize it, been able to address the challenge of locationing and the inability to get into a place? And more importantly, now, instead of 2000 drinkers of your tea showing up in one office on one Tuesday, you've got to try to reach 2000 people in potentially two thousand different places.

Steve Schwarz [00:23:11] So our teachable course, it's a course online and how to become a tea expert has really driven a very large audience of people that want to learn more about tea. It's a series of videos all about how to taste, understand, origin and craft. And so rather than going location by location, we had to think about, OK, people were having meetings. If you're working in a call center in Dallas and you're used to having an Art of Tea experience within this large American Airlines call center, like, OK, how can those people now still be able to have meetings over tea, so we started to create these kits for different offices where they could be delivered to people's homes and they can still meet over tea, still have these ritualistic experiences. So what are ways that we can continue to use technology in front of us and and reach a larger demographic of people that are thirsty for knowledge, thirsty for learning and knowing that we want to impact as many lives as we can through tea what can we do to amplify that voice and connect direct to consumer? So we're doing that online as best as we possibly can at this point.

Jesse Purewal [00:24:20] What have been some of the ways that you have helped maybe inculcate the ritual beyond sipping the tea and ingesting the tea? When it comes to preparation, when it comes to some of the ceremony and some of just the circumstance around, we are about to consume this drink that has been with us for 5000 years. And respecting that, have you been able to create an upstream version of of the experience for people here, or is that still kind of a next step in figuring out?

Steve Schwarz [00:24:52] So it's always a process. And I think having that startup mindset that keeps it fresh and dynamic also we what we found was that there was a big hurdle in terms of how people were making a loose-leaf tea experience. You had like some sort of metal ball that would create some Taman development or metallic taste or they'd have some other teapot with some sort of built in strainer or people were just afraid of making looseleaf teeth. So we needed to find a way to overcome that hurdle. So we developed a drawstring bag that's fully compostable, where you put the looseleaf inside and you cinch the bag. And this way you can make a teapot, you can make a cup. It's fully approachable. And the beauty behind how much to use is the word teaspoon actually came from how much tea you should be putting in. So it's a small leaf you use a level teaspoon. And if it's a whole leaf, use a full heaping teaspoon. And so it's so simple tips, it's a simple modifications and it continues to be this technology disrupter. It was originally discovered over five thousand years ago there was an emperor that was cooling his water after letting a boil and purify, and he put the boiling water on his windowsill to cool and a wind picked up a leaf, flew off the tea plant, blew into this pot of cooling water and not wanting to waste the water. He drank it and claimed its healing elixir. This was the first energy drink in the world. And so he became a poet and a philosopher and started to create these cultural gatherings around these leaves and around drinking and consuming it, and then trade started to come in so they would exchange tea for commerce. It was maybe you have wool and I have butter and you don't want butter, but I want your wool. Tea leaves is one way that we can easily exchange it along these beautiful trade routes. Just imagine all the different business negotiations and discussions that are had or love stories that are happening over tea even today.

Jesse Purewal [00:27:10] How do you analogize yourself maybe to other parts of the economy or other functions when it comes to kind of the stewardship of the the tea as a product, but also the story and the kind of individual personalization and experience you're trying to deliver?

Steve Schwarz [00:27:26] I'd like to consider myself a dream manager internally, meaning what are the dreams of the individuals that report to me directly and what could I do to help them realize their dreams? So it could be Steve, this is the perfect job for me. This is what I want to be doing. And I also want to help my parents who are aging and. OK, well, what does that look like? How can we get you there? And how can Art of Tea make that impact? Or could we see the want to create a skincare line and what can it do to get there? Right. So as a dream manager, I might help them outline some things that have worked for me to help get them. There could be a year from now or five or 10 years. From an outside perspective, knowing the deep impact that tea can have in people's lives and knowing that it's part of our mission to impact as many lives as we can through tea. I don't know that there's a title behind it. I would say an advocate of the leaf and chief believer, I don't I don't know if there's a title. I just know that I'm here for a short period of time in this planet and I know the power that this ritual of leaves and water can have on people. We have to show up for them and realize like this is an integral part of their ritual and their wellness and their life. So what can we do to really cater to their needs as best as we can in this process?

Jesse Purewal [00:28:57] Steve, I love your take on the dream manager. You know, the people that we interview on this show, they tend to have something that's true about them that makes them the one person in the world who can do what they do. What is it that you believe is your unique gift or your set of gifts? A set of talents, distinctive perspectives that make you suited for this and make you great and what you do?

Steve Schwarz [00:29:25] I have a taste memory and aromatic memory because 80 percent of what we taste is actually through a sense of smell that I can remember fragrances and that memory game. Right. I can do that with sense and and pull them together, remembering the sense and the fragrances, the earth and the floral and botanicals. So I'd say that the aromatic memory is one. The other is a passion for learning and growth. I'm thirsty for knowledge and I love sharing it. I love telling it and I love watching my team grow. I think that you could be working in a mission driven organization where there are hundreds or thousands of people working in that organization and still very much make an impact. You don't have to be a sole entrepreneur and go out on your own in order to make an impact. You can join forces with the team and really drive growth. We tend to romanticize entrepreneurship as being like the only way to really live a full, meaningful life. And I don't know that I agree with that. I think that, you know, you can join forces where you can you can reach a much larger audience together than you can going out on your own.

Jesse Purewal [00:30:43] I want to read you something that you said in a piece by Salty magazine there, Volume eight. It resonated deeply with me. You said, When we are in a constant state of pouring out and shifting from one task or problem to the next, we are stripped of our ability to connect with the present. And to me, that was a really fresh and insightful take on what makes this pandemic and this time so challenging. The idea that not only does our sense of time sort of seem discombobulated, like without it was that a week ago or was that a month ago? I don't know. And finding one's way to be present or to activate a sense of the present is actually really hard. So maybe talk about the connections between this challenge or this reality and where tea specifically can play a role in developing more of a sense of present.

Steve Schwarz [00:31:35] The beauty behind tea is oftentimes when people want to break, they go to Insta they go to Facebook, they're going to Snapchat, whatever it might be. And their brain is still wired for this instant processing. If we turn our phone off just for like seven minutes and we get the water ready, we hear the water boil. We get our cup ready select our leaves and being super hyper present in that process. And we go through this digital detox not all day, but for seven minutes. And we just allow that process in the water to get ready. The leaves and the cup, and as we're sipping, we feel the impact, we feel where it's hitting our mouth. You know how it's warming or cooling her body. And how it's allowing us to show up and be more present, that will impact your day significantly.

Jesse Purewal [00:32:36] Steve, if you could go back in time and go on a hike with or grab dinner with or maybe even a cup of tea with your 19, 20, 21 year old self. What advice would you give to that young man knowing what you know now about the journey you've been on?

Steve Schwarz [00:32:54] I'd say have patience. I have my mom I remember before she passed, she just kept saying, I have fun. Have fun, have bring joy. And I would add that to just be patient, you know? And so I just say just you're going to find your you're going to find your pace in your stride and just be patient.

Jesse Purewal [00:33:23] Well, Steve, thanks, it's been an honor and a pleasure to talk to you today, I somehow feel slightly more relaxed and aware of the moment than I might otherwise at 10:30 in the morning on a Tuesday. So thank you so much for sharing so much time and energy and candor with me and with our guests today. It truly is our honor.

Steve Schwarz [00:33:45] I can't wait to meet with you in person and share a pot of tea with you.

Jesse Purewal [00:33:58] Thanks so much for listening to Breakthrough Builders. You can subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed the show, I'd be grateful if you could spread the word by leaving a rating and a review. It really does help other listeners find us. And please tell your friends. Breakthrough Builders is a production of the Industries Team at Qualtrics. The show is written and hosted by me, Jesse Purewal. Mastering by Nate Crenshaw. Post-production and music by Clean Cuts Audio, part of the Three Seas Collective. Design by Baron Santiago and Vansuka Chindavijak. Website by Gregory Hedon and photography by Christy Hemm Klok. Special thanks to the entire Breakthrough Builders crew at Qualtrics, including Ali Rohani, Jeremy Smith, John Johnson and Kylan Lundeen.

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