Tatiana Birgisson comes by a pioneering spirit naturally. Half Icelandic and half Venezuelan, she was born in the United States, spent her first five years in Iceland, then lived in Venezuela, Vermont (twice), and Norway (twice), before settling down in St. Louis for high school -- although she still spent summers in Venezuela, Iceland, and camping with her family in Europe.
As a result of her peripatetic childhood, she speaks three languages fluently and two more proficiently. "I wasn't allowed to speak English at home until I was 12," Birgisson says.
Today, she's majoring in economics, earning a certificate in markets and management studies, and has already started her own business selling a carbonated, fruit-and-tea beverage called Mati. She loves being an entrepreneur because, she says, "I'm much more happy when I have more control over my own actions, my own future. I can create something, fix it, and come back with a new prototype. That's really important to me."
Birgisson feels at home amid the entrepreneurial activity at Duke, beginning with where she lives -- InCube, an entrepreneurial selective living group on Central Campus. She came to InCube as a junior after transferring from Pratt to Trinity.
"I was feeling pretty lost after figuring out I was not going to be an engineer," she says. "What was I going to do with my life?" She says she wanted to start a business, so when friends told her about InCube, she signed on. She liked the "go-getter" attitude of her fellow InCubers and their goal of normalizing the entrepreneurial spirit.
Her business idea was born when she began brewing tea to drink instead of coffee. She added fruit juice and refrigerated it. Friends asked her to share, so she bottled it in glass milk bottles. After deciding to turn her beverage into a business, she was able to get Mati off the ground with the help of a grant from Duke's Innovation and Entrepreneurship Initiative and advice from two of her Markets and Management Program professors -- George Grody and Carl Nordgren.
Her current recipe includes apples, lemons, organic cane sugar, peppermint, chamomile, and black tea. She developed and evaluated several different plans for marketing it before settling on the current one: she brews the mixture in huge pots, refrigerates it in kegs, adds carbonation, then sells the kegs to small businesses and organizations.
Two local businesses, Shoeboxed and Appia, as well as the Duke Innovation and Entrepreneurship Initiative office, keep kegs of Mati in a "kegerator" for their employees. She also supplied 30 gallons of tea for a September event in Cameron Indoor Stadium to kick off the Duke Forward fund-raising campaign. And Mati is on tap in the InCube common room. "InCubers always tell me when it runs out," she says.
Birgisson says the high quality of her ingredients and the carbonation set Mati apart from regular iced tea or other cold tea drinks. "Carbonation is one of the fastest growing segments in the tea area," she says. She also hopes to sell it to bars, where patrons could drink it straight at lunch, or use it as a cocktail base in the evening.
In December, Birgisson will graduate from Duke (she needed an extra semester because of the late switch out of Pratt). Her plan? "Stay here, keep brewing, keep selling, and expand the operation."
Although she entered Duke wanting to "change the world by designing artificial organs," she says she decided to leave Pratt after two years because in engineering, "the timeline for seeing a difference from something you've created is too long. I wanted to see what I was doing and the impact I was making."
After switching her major to economics, she threw herself into learning about money, markets, and management. "When I left Pratt, I felt I had a good sense of how the world worked, but I had no idea how money traveled around the world, how it was exchanged," she says. "I was really trying to understand the money world -- how things are sold and why people buy some things but not others."
Much of her drive to succeed in business comes from two events that took place as she was beginning her college career in 2008. First, she lost hard-won summer savings in the banking crisis in Iceland -- overnight she lost three-fourths of what she had deposited and there were strict withdrawal limits for what remained. A few months later, her mother was laid off from Microsoft, a company she had joined specifically because of its stability.
"That impacts how I see the world," Birgisson says. "I started college losing [most of] my savings, and my mom losing a job that was supposed to be stable. The sense of being able to create my own livelihood and my own potential has become more and more important to me."