Guests: Grant Gamble & Suneal Pabari of Leaderboard: The Coffee Game
Role: Co-Founders & Game Creators
Online: YouTube • Instagram • https://leaderboard.coffee
What they drink: Grant enjoys a batch brew with a side of pastry. Suneal drinks the fancy pourover on the menu.
Listen/Watch on: Spotify
Business partnerships* are hard. Think about it objectively. Two people with their own perspectives, emotions, opinions, skills, intellectual and emotional barometers, and personal lives come together to agree on a concept, the actions needed to put it into motion, and the ability to do so. All of that work comes before the whole running the business in perpetuity thing.
Grant Gamble and Suneal Pabari joined forces to launch Leaderboard: The Coffee Game. They overcame all of those start-up challenges, not to mention their active careers elsewhere because their desire to create an educational (and fun) coffee experience went beyond the identification of flavor in coffee. Leaderboard challenges multiple aspects of the coffee-drinking game player’s palate, knowledge, and experience.
The partnership begins with empathy. Chatting with Grant and Suneal, it is clear that they care about each other first, the game and business second. They emphasize being aware of the outside forces impacted on each other throughout the year and utilizing each other’s skills to create something bigger and better together than they could have alone. Their differences are strengths, not weaknesses.
Their worldwide interactive coffee game recently entered its 17th season and is ever-evolving. The players have become a de facto third partner. Grant and Suneal stay engaged with the player community and tweak and modify Leaderboard rules and gameplay based on feedback.
It all comes back to empathy—for each other, for the players, and for the coffee community, at large. Applying the lens of the parties invested in Leaderboard allows these co-founders to improve, to challenge, and to engage those of us out here learning and loving coffee on our own.
*My wife and dog would say that all partnerships have there challenges…
THE OTHER THINGS THEY DO
Grant is the founder of Culture Coffee Project—an experience-based marketing agency—and Creative Director for the World AeroPress Championship.
Suneal is the Co-Founder of the Canadian coffee subscription company, The Roaster’s Pack, as well as Matchmaker Coffee, and This Coffee Co.
KEY TAKEAWAYS FROM THE POD
Canada has a sneaky good coffee scene that has just exploded.
Respect the beverage.
Coffee education should be more than just having a good manager or boss who wants to teach you. The education component of the game is important, as is making sure it can be accessible.
Over The Top is a classic film about fathers and sons. Get those tear ducts warmed up.
Cup Tasters Championship competition is a sensory challenge specific to taste. Leaderboard: The Coffee Game expands on this by challenging competitors to reverse engineer all the information you might find on a bag of specialty coffee.
Despite their busy careers, Suneal and Grant found the time to collaborate and launch Leaderboard during the Covid-19 pandemic. They are among many who found opportunity during that era.
Grant runs on “informed vibes,” while Suneal is more analytical and calculated.
The business works because they have a mutual respect and operate with “empathy first,” especially as it relates to all the things going on in their business partner’s life.
There is a strong Canadian competition circuit.
Big geography creates unique regional engagement with coffee.
Our current chaotic on-again, off-again tariff situation has coffee businesses freaking out, and consumers worried that coffee prices will jump. Editor’s note: Don’t freak out. The price is going to go up for many reasons. Tariffs may be one, but the outsized monster climate change, is the bigger disrupter. The freaking out won’t help but plan ahead to spend more on quality coffee that is sourced ethically.
Leaderboard is still evolving. The player engagement and feedback leads to tweaks in the gameplay each season designed to keep the players learning, not to mention keep challenging them to succeed. It’s a flexible position for the founders of the game to maintain.
The game is pricey! They have created a scholarship program. You can nominate someone else or apply for yourself to be a recipient of a game box so you or they can also have the sensory and educational experience.
PARAPHRASED ADVICE
Paraphrased advice from Suneal: You can just make stuff up! Look at what has been done—especially in the past 10 years. Be inspired by it. Then, create your thing. This industry is still so new. There is a lot of room left for exploration and innovation. Look for all the problems then olve one.
Advice from Grant: Look outside the industry for inspiration, particularly design. Don’t be afraid to try something completely different, and don’t be afraid to ask for help.
WATCH THIS PODCAST ON YOUTUBE
CHARITABLE EFFORTS
Grant and Saneal suggested focusing our charitable efforts locally. Grant suggested housing and homelessness efforts, and Saneal recommended offering support to your local food bank.
We took their advice and donated to the North County Food Bank. NCFB is based in north San Diego County. It is a chapter of the larger Jacobs & Cushman San Diego Food Bank, which provides food to 400,000 hungry people every month. Last year, they distributed 63 million pounds of food. That number blew me away. For reference, that would be like 84 million 12oz bags of specialty coffee.
*On average.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
We’re keeping the theme of this episode Canada.
BRANDS WE USE & HAVE PARTNERED WITH*
Please use these links. You’ll be getting a great gear AND supporting Roast! West Coast. The links below enable us to generate some affiliate revenue. As always, we don’t partner with brands we don’t use, coffee we don’t drink, or strongly recommend.
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