Kirzner argued in 1973 that the entrepreneur's distinguishing act is neither bearing risk nor supplying capital, but noticing — seeing an opportunity that was standing in plain view, unpriced, while everybody else walked past it. He was describing a faculty. This book describes a person exercising it.
Mokhtar Alkhanshali was a doorman in San Francisco when he worked out that Yemen — the country that gave the drink the name mocha and shipped the first commercial coffee in the world — had been forgotten by the speciality market entirely, and that nobody was buying its coffee at anything like what it was worth. So he went there, during a war, to find out whether the beans were still good and whether the farmers could be paid properly for them.
What follows is the rest of the entrepreneurial function arriving uninvited: quality grading nobody had done, logistics nobody had built, capital nobody wanted to commit, and a scramble to get a sample out of a country whose airports had closed. Eggers tells it as narrative rather than as economics, which is why it works — the theory is simply what the story is made of.
Pairs with the Alertness roast, for reasons that will be obvious by the second chapter.
