Yale School of Management - Seth Goldman '95

"From the first case study, Yale SOM awakened me to the potential that business has to shape our society in a positive way — extend economic opportunity to disadvantaged communities and protect the environment. For the next two years I used my time at Yale to gain the additional skills and contacts I needed to lead an enterprise. The school provided a supportive community of progressive thinkers where values and convictions were not something that had to be checked at the door."

Seth Goldman is president and TeaEO of Honest Tea, the company he co-founded in 1998 with Professor Barry Nalebuff of the Yale School of Management. Over the past twelve years the company has thrived with an annual compound growth rate of over 60 percent, as consumers have shifted toward healthier and more sustainable diets. In 2011, the Coca-Cola Company purchased Honest Tea, fueling further growth as Honest became the first organic and Fair Trade brand to move into the world's largest beverage distribution system. Seth continues to run the business as a stand-alone enterprise based in Bethesda, Maryland.

An entrepreneur at heart, Seth started with lemonade stands and newspaper routes as a kid, created a non-profit urban service corps, and nearly pursued a prize-winning biotechnology idea before he started Honest Tea in his kitchen in 1998. Since then, the company has initiated community-based partnerships with suppliers in India, South Africa and Argentina and has created marketing partnerships with City Year, TerraCycle and Jamis Bikes. In addition to being named one of The Better World Shopping Guide's "ten best companies on the planet based on their overall social and environmental record," Honest Tea recently received Greenopia.com's coveted 4-Leaf Rating as "the greenest beverage company" for the second year in a row.

In 2008, Seth co-founded Bethesda Green, a local sustainability initiative in Honest Tea's hometown. In its first year, the initiative helped area restaurants convert their grease waste into biodiesel, and collected over 200,000 lbs of electronic waste that would have otherwise gone to landfill. Seth also serves on the boards of the American Beverage Association, Bethesda Green, Happy Baby, and Net Impact.

Before launching Honest Tea, Seth worked at Calvert Group, managing the marketing and sales efforts for the nation's largest family of socially responsible mutual funds. His previous work includes managing a corporate initiative to combat child labor for the Calvert Foundation, directing an AmeriCorps demonstration project in Baltimore and serving as Senator Lloyd Bentsen's Deputy Press Secretary for two-and-a-half years. Before that, he worked in Beijing and Moscow. He is a graduate of Harvard College (1987) and the Yale School of Management (1995). In 2009, Seth was the recipient of Net Impact’s Member Achievement Award. He is a Henry Crown Fellow of the Aspen Institute and was named Ernst & Young's 2008 Entrepreneur of the Year Award for the Mid-Atlantic region.