The flight from Los Angeles to Kigali takes about 22 hours with a connection. I remember counting them — somewhere over the Mediterranean — wondering if I was making the biggest mistake of my life.
I was 20-something, Korean-American, fresh out of UCLA with a degree in International Development and a head full of ideas about how the world could be different. I'd read about Rwanda's extraordinary recovery, about its ambition, about the green hills and the specialty coffee growing at altitude. And I'd made a decision that most people in my life thought was insane.
I was going to move there. Alone. And I was going to build a specialty coffee company.
"I didn't know a single person in Rwanda. I had no distribution network, no supplier relationships, no office. What I had was a conviction that the coffee growing there was extraordinary — and that the world didn't know it yet."
What Nobody Told Me About Arriving
Here's what the entrepreneurship books don't tell you: the hardest part of starting a company in a foreign country isn't the business model. It's the first Tuesday afternoon when you have no meetings, no colleagues, no familiar coffee shop to sit in, and the weight of what you've done presses down on you like altitude.
Kigali is stunning. The city sits on rolling hills, and in 2013 it was already one of the cleanest, safest cities in Africa — a testament to what a society can rebuild when it decides to. But it was not Los Angeles. And I was not Rwandan. And no one was going to hand me anything.
The first thing I learned: relationships are everything. Rwanda runs on trust, and trust takes time. I spent months going to farms, to washing stations, to cooperatives — not to sell anything, not to sign contracts, but to listen. To understand what the farmers actually needed, not what I assumed they needed from 10,000 miles away.
The Sequoia Idea
The name LetSequoia came to me during one of those early farm visits. I was watching how the farmers supported each other — sharing tools, covering for each other during illness, pooling knowledge about pests and processing — and I thought about the giant sequoia trees I'd grown up near in California.
The sequoia's roots are remarkably shallow. But they spread hundreds of feet in every direction, intertwining with neighboring trees, sharing nutrients through the soil. Individually, each tree would topple in a storm. Together, they create forests that have stood for 3,000 years.
That was what I wanted to build. Not a company that extracted value from African farmers and shipped it overseas. A company that grew its roots into the community — that became part of the system, not separate from it.
Year One: Everything Wrong, Everything Right
I got a lot wrong in year one. I underestimated logistics. I overestimated how quickly specialty coffee buyers would pay premium prices for unknown African origins. I had moments of genuine despair.
But I also got things right. I found a washing station in Inzere, in Rwanda's Southern Province, where something remarkable was happening. A group of local farmers — each too small to be taken seriously by exporters — had pooled their own money. Two thousand, four thousand, six thousand Rwandan Francs. Less than $10 each. Because they believed that together, they could be something.
When I saw that, I knew I was exactly where I was supposed to be.
What 2013 Anna Would Tell 2025 Anna
Trust the discomfort. Every moment of confusion, of being the outsider, of not understanding the cultural context — those moments were teaching me things no MBA program could have. They were making me a better builder, a better partner, a better human being.
Don't rush to scale. The farmers who became our partners weren't looking for a quick transaction. They were looking for someone who would still be there in five years, ten years, twenty years. Proving that took time. It was worth every day of it.
And bring better coffee on the next flight. You never know when you'll need to impress someone.
LetSequoia turns twelve years old this year. I'm still in Kigali. The two bags have multiplied considerably. And the dream — the one about coffee that changes communities, about roots that spread and intertwine — is more alive than it's ever been.
— Anna Kim, CEO & Founder, LetSequoia