Douglas Stanley Kuehn III — Doug to anyone who has watched him work a trade show floor — grew up in El Salvador during the civil war, with a father who survived a tiger shark attack at eighteen and went on to pioneer the country's first organic coffee. The near-death experiences kept stacking up: encephalitis at twenty, then an earthquake felt from the sixteenth floor. What came out the other side is a man who starts every day on one line: head up, heart in.

Doug and Joshua trace the road from a barista job inside a Corpus Christi bookstore to twenty years building a distribution business in Austin, the pivot that made it work ("let's get good at everything but the coffee"), the sale to Odeko, and the phone call to Kurt and Alden that brought him to Hollander. Along the way: the $30,000 a coffee community raised for a little boy named Milo, why the bricks of a career matter less than the mortar between them, the long-fork picture of heaven and hell, and the question men don't ask each other nearly enough — how are you really doing?