WellesleyWeston Magazine

SPRING 2014

Launched in 2005, WellesleyWeston Magazine is a quarterly publication tailored to Wellesley and Weston residents and edited to enrich the experience of living in two of Massachusetts' most desirable communities.

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American Jewish history; and Seth, 47, is presi- dent and "TeaEO" of Honest Tea which is now a subsidiary of Coca-Cola. Seth described his mother as "very loving, but also a bit of a taskmaster." As a child, he said, "I didn't gravitate naturally toward reading, so she enforced it. In the afternoon, I couldn't do any- thing until I had read for at least a half hour." But he looks back not with resentment, but gratitude for the way his parents pushed their children to achieve their potential and motivated them by example. "They both loved their careers," Seth said. "That was a wonderful thing to see." And they encouraged one another. "My father was a huge supporter of women and careers," Avra said. "We've heard since from all his many, many students of how inspiring it was that he had such a bal- anced, equal relationship with his spouse." At Harvard, Seth wrote his senior thesis about economic reforms in China and the Soviet Union. "It was a real treat for me to be able to understand the context and the impact of my parents' scholarly work," he said. That was reinforced when he spent the next year teaching in China and the year after in Russia. In both countries, scholars told him of their great respect for his parents. Describing himself as "more of a doer than a thinker," Seth did not go into the family business. Instead, he founded Honest Tea with Barry Nalebuff, one of his professors at the Yale School of Management. As a graduate of the Goldman dinner table, Seth said he impressed the hard-nosed Nalebuff. "If he asked a challenging question, I wasn't afraid to challenge him right back," he said. "Those dinner conversations did help prepare me well for a rigorous academic conversation." Seth came up with the idea for the product when, thirsty from jog- ging, he vainly searched store shelves for a beverage that wasn't too 64 W e l l e s l e y W e s t o n M a g a z i n e | s p r i n g 2 0 1 4 056-065_WWMa14_face2face_v3_WWM_interview 2/1/14 3:46 PM Page 64

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