
I’m trying to use the internet to trade a grain of rice all the way up to a mountain. Get caught up here.
Ladies and gentlemen, we have our next trade. And it’s… big, measured by both cash value and mass.
But first, a quick recap on the trades to date.
Trades so far
So far, I’ve made four trades:
- A grain of rice for a paid Trends.VC report
- The Trends.VC report for a grab bag of books
- The grab bag of books for a bunch of collectible items, including fossils and a signed copy of The Selfish Gene
- A dinosaur bone from the previous trade for a custom-built coffee table
The fifth trade
Last week, a trade for a set of presidential signatures fell through. The owner ghosted me and the road to Rice Mountain seemed uncertain.
But little did I know that Diana Hawk was working behind the scenes to line up a bigger trade.
Diana’s friend Salim Najjar runs a beverage company called Sound. He’s spent the past five years perfecting a line of tea-infused sparkling water drinks.
His company has been growing like mad, especially around the LA area, which is what prompted him to recently set up a new apartment there. And his new apartment happened to be missing, you guessed it… a coffee table.
Upon learning this, Diana told Salim about Rice Mountain and Ryan Thomas‘ custom coffee table offer. Salim jumped on it and emailed me this:
[I’d] like to offer 1 pallet of my companies beverage products, Sound. It’s a line of unsweetened, certified organic/non-GMO sparkling teas & waters 😊
A single pallet hold 60 24pks (1,440 units) of our sparkling tea (glass bottle) line and 104 24pks (2,496 unites) of our sparkling water (BPA-NI cans) line 😄 I’d be open and willing to mix and match the pallet with the different flavors if desired!
I was intrigued, but I had no idea how to value 2,500 cans of a high-end sparkling drink. Salim did the math for me:
Our sparkling tea line is sold at an SRP of $2.49 (pallet value of $3,585.60) and our sparkling water line is sold at an SRP of $1.99 (pallet value of $4,967.04).
Mamma mia. Yes. That’s a step in the right direction, even if we’re both using the most generous valuation (the end retail value). I called Salim — we worked out some details and locked in the trade.
Feast your eyes:

This is a bit of a gamble, of course.
The drinks are unlikely to have asymmetric value. They’ll eventually expire. And the two groups of people I imagine wanting an item like this — people hosting live events or managing offices — are still largely furloughed.
But, by God, we now have enough delicious sparkling beverages to refresh a small village. We will find that village and we will trade with them.
At the high end, this trade represents a 2.8x return on the last item and a 171.28 million times return on the grain of rice.
Let’s make a trade
So… who needs 2,496 cans of delicious sparkling water?

Email me at stew@stewfortier.com if you want to swap something for a huge-ass pallet of delicious, tea-infused sparkling water.
As a reminder, anybody who offers to help make a trade in any way will be invited to a huge opening party on Rice Mountain. Diana and Salim — you two have been added to the list.
Hope to see the rest of you there too.