This is an excerpt from the November/December issue of Tea Magazine
What could the revved pace of Silicon Valley’s high tech industry and the slow pace of tea have in common? I asked Kevin Rose, a tech industry wunderkind, and one of Google’s newest venture partners, who also happens to be a slow-tea kind of guy.
“Geeks in general, when they get into something, they like to really geek out. They like to be really deep into it and understand every single aspect of it,” said Rose when we met at Samovar Tea Lounge in San Francisco, where a number of heavyweight tech entrepreneurs and investors, including Rose, use the space as a distraction-free office. Any day of the week, you might find Rose or his counterparts from Flickr or Twitter in the back room of Samovar, whose old-growth, redwood tea bar sometimes serves as an impromptu conference table for behind-the-scenes discussions that help to turn hot ideas and virtual dreams into multi-million-dollar deals.
As with tea, it’s all about timing perhaps. “Tea is more than just throwing some hot water in a cup,” said Rose, whose lucid brown eyes and unvarnished demeanor might rival those of any Chinese tea master. “It can be about timing and temperature and region, and types of vessels that you steep it in, and there’s tradition that goes along with the different [tea]ceremonies. If you like to get into the finer details of something, [tea]lends itself to being in your arsenal of things that you’re obsessed about.”
