Let 1,000 Unicorns Bloom

Entrepreneurs come in all shapes, sizes and cities. They don’t have to be in Silicon Valley to disrupt the world

- Kevin Maney

A CRAPPY CUP of airplane tea and the rise of Donald Trump led to the launch in May of an outfit with the wacky name of All Turtles, which might usher in a new way to think about tech startups around the world.

The All Turtles story began with Phil Libin, who used to be CEO of the app company Evernote and lately has worked as a partner at the venture capital firm General Catalyst in Silicon Valley. Last fall, Libin boarded a JetBlue flight from Boston to San Francisco. As the plane leveled off, he ordered tea. Libin plopped the tea bag in the hot water, then got distracted for about 10 minutes. By then, the tea was over-steeped, and he had the classic problem of what to do with a soaked tea bag while trapped in an airplane seat. “I got thinking that tea is kind of a crappy experience,” Libin tells Newsweek, using the type of language that usually leads people like him to think: How can I disrupt tea?

Libin’s mind wandered to how he’d fix the way the drink has been served since the invention of the tea bag in 1904. He’d find a mesh material engineered to seal up after being wet for a certain amount of time, so the tea would stop steeping, and he’d attach the bag to a swizzle stick that could be left in the cup. Libin concluded that to make and market such a thing would involve about 20 steps, including filing patents, working with a company on the mesh, building prototypes, seeking funding from venture capitalists and creating a whole company to carry out the idea.