In March 2019, I stood on a stage in Cape Town at the Young Presidents' Organization EDGE Global Leadership Summit — the world's largest annual gathering of chief executives — and gave a talk I called "Putting Down Roots."
I remember looking out at the audience and thinking: these are some of the most powerful business leaders on earth. They run companies with thousands of employees, billions in revenue, operations on every continent. And I am a Korean-American woman who moved to Rwanda six years ago to start a specialty coffee company.
What could I possibly tell them?
It turned out: quite a lot. Because the things that make LetSequoia work — the things I'd learned building from the ground up in East Africa — are the things that most scale-first, growth-first, exit-first business thinking actively suppresses.
"A Korean girl moving to Africa and doing what she can to create impact and fair trade across the coffee industry through global connections. That was the highlight of the day." — YPO EDGE 2019 Attendee
The Room
YPO EDGE draws the kind of attendees who don't usually describe a session as "the highlight of the day" unless something genuinely surprised them. These are people who have heard thousands of business talks. They are not easily moved.
What I've been told about that session — and I am genuinely humbled by this — is that it surprised people. Not because I presented a clever framework or a proprietary methodology. But because the story I told was fundamentally different from the stories they usually hear at events like this.
Most business talks at summit-level events are about scale. Growth rate. Disruption. The TAM. The exit. What is impressive is measured in dollars and multiples.
I told a story about seven-dollar investments. About farmers who pooled less than $10 each because they believed — despite every reason not to — that collective action could change their lives. About a washing station in Rwanda's Southern Province that exists because of that belief. About the Sequoia tree, whose roots are only six feet deep and yet holds up the largest living thing on earth.
What "Putting Down Roots" Actually Means in Business
The talk was built around a provocation: the business world has confused speed of growth with depth of growth. We celebrate companies that scale fast. We rarely celebrate companies that root deeply — that become so genuinely embedded in their communities, their supply chains, their ecosystems that they cannot be easily displaced.
A sequoia that has spent a century spreading its roots is more resilient than a fast-growing annual that shot up in a single season. The annual looks impressive in the short term. In a storm, the sequoia is still standing.
The coffee industry is full of fast-growing annuals. Single-season relationships. Spot purchases. "Partnerships" that last exactly as long as the price is favorable. These companies talk about farmer welfare in their marketing and move to a different origin when the numbers change.
LetSequoia is built to be a sequoia. Slow, wide, and deeply intertwined with the communities we work in. This is not romanticism — it is strategy. Deep roots mean better quality information from the farm level. They mean farmers who invest in quality because they trust the relationship will reward them. They mean washing station managers who innovate because they feel ownership, not just employment.
Deep roots make better coffee. And better coffee commands better prices. The loop closes.
What the CEOs Asked Afterward
The questions afterward were revealing. Not about the business model — about how I had sustained my own commitment over six years in a difficult environment. "How do you keep going when it's hard?" one asked. "What keeps you motivated when progress is slow?"
I think about this a lot. The honest answer is: I have never experienced what most people would call "motivation problems" with this work. Because I am not working toward an abstract financial goal. I am working toward something I can see and touch and taste.
I can taste it in a cup of Rwanda Inzere and know exactly whose hands picked those cherries. I can walk into Mivona in DR Congo and see the payroll — real wages, paid on time, going to real families. I can sit with a farmer's child in our Digital Center and watch them discover what the internet actually is.
Those things sustain motivation better than any equity stake ever could.
What I Brought Back to Rwanda
YPO EDGE gave me something I didn't expect: the conviction that the way LetSequoia operates is not naive. It is not the approach of someone who doesn't understand how business works. It is an approach that sophisticated, globally experienced leaders — when they hear it clearly articulated — recognize as genuinely sound.
The Sequoia model works. The roots are real. They hold.
And the farmers of Inzere and Mivona, who have never heard of YPO and wouldn't care if they had, already knew this. They've been practicing it for generations. I just gave it a name and took it to a conference.
— Anna Kim, CEO & Founder, LetSequoia · Kigali, Rwanda