Companiesandme

It's hard for me to believe that the vision of Companiesandme is finally being unveiled today. That vision is to curate the rich stories of companies around us, and to bring us closer to the people behind them. As we unveil the site, I find myself completely inspired by the type of people who have taken the time to share their stories and engage in a real conversation with you. There aren't many places where...

People often ask me why I named my company Joie de Vivre. It's an unusual name for an American company, to say the least. It's French. It's hard to spell and to pronounce.  The name came to me when I was 26 and working as a real estate developer, my first job when I graduated from Stanford Business School. I was young and my future by all external indicators was bright, but I wasn't happy....

How I fell into tea? Many people ask me how I got into tea. Actually, the question is not so much how did I get into tea but rather how I got into tea after getting into art after getting into engineering. I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio after my family immigrated from Baghdad, Iraq when I was five. My father was a doctor who worked around the clock raising his children, putting them through...

Although the more drawn out story of Linden Street Brewery has chapters in far flung parts of the globe, it is right here in our own backyard that the true gold was to be found---gold in the form of a long lost brewing tradition just begging to be unearthed and brought back to life.  A golden glow, faded for nearly 50 years, that need only a little polishing and love to realize a new era...

Little was known about how food affected the body and the mind’s willingness and ability to learn when I was growing up. In 11th grade, I was allowed to have a coke in class to keep me awake and then fell asleep only to knock the coke on the floor. Since starting 18 Rabbits, I've searched for ways to serve our community in more direct ways than just giving money to a cause. When I...

Fame itself has never impressed me, maybe because in my career as a journalist I met so many "personalities". But when I meet someone exceedingly inspiring and generous, I have been known to get star struck – or, rather, "hero struck". It happened several years ago and again last week with Nell Newman, when we worked together shooting a video for Give Something Back and Boise Inc's Paper=Food initiative. P=F donates $1 to an area...

Sunscreens are increasingly marketing themselves as "natural", "green" or "organic" but much of these claims are misleading. We are faced with the challenge of needing to compete in this arms race of green claims, but want to do so with integrity.  In making sunscreen, it is important to consider both the impacts of the product (ingredients of product and recycle/re-usability of packaging) and manufacturing (energy use, waste, and any other environmental impacts of our operations)....

At Joie de Vivre, our mission is to create opportunities to celebrate the joy of life. Every day I get to do this through our Golden Gate Greeter program, which pairs hotel guests with local volunteers who give them a free insider’s tour of San Francisco. The tours are conducted on foot or using public transportation so there’s no separation from experiencing each neighborhood. Exploring San Francisco with a native is like hanging out with...

What would the world be like if we all made an effort to create joy for others on a daily basis? One of the things I like best about my job is that our company has an actual mission around this idea. Our mission statement is literally "To create opportunities to celebrate the joy of life." Through our philanthropy program, Joie de Vivre Gives, we create ways to give back to San Francisco that I've...

When we launched our first chocolate in December 2007 (at the Entertainment Gathering at the Getty Center in Los Angeles), we decided we wanted to engage with our first tasters by requesting their feedback. Since a lot of us have tech backgrounds, we adopted a familiar idea: we encouraged our users to help us make the chocolate they wanted, in much the same way software developers engage beta testers. We called what we were doing...