Elstrott spoke and introduced keynote speaker John Mackey at the 2009 Tulane Business Forum.
Elstrott was born in New Orleans in 1948. His father had a chemical engineering consulting business and his mother was a homemaker. He attended Jesuit High School and went on to study economics at LSU, earning his bachelor’s degree in 1970 and his master’s in 1972.
It was while he was working on his master’s thesis, “Economic Thought of Thomas Hobbes,” that Elstrott first started to think seriously about the concept of entrepreneurship. In studying the philosophical foundations of the discipline, Elstrott began to consider what enables a free-market economy to evolve. The answer, he decided, is the entrepreneur.
“Entrepreneurs help keep the economy innovative, growing and efficient,” Elstrott says. “And if the economy is healthy and strong, then you’ve solved one of the key problems for social stability and preserving liberty.”
Elstrott’s interest in entrepreneurship led him and his wife, Patty, whom he’d met as a senior at LSU, to the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1972 to study under the tutelage of noted scholar and philosopher Kenneth E. Boulding, a pioneer in the fields of environmental economics and peace economics.
If ever there were a place where Boulding’s unorthodox ideas—which blended free-market economics with countercultural idealism— could find a receptive audience, it was Boulder in the early 1970s. The city was home to a thriving community of hippie entrepreneurs who shared the belief that business could be a powerful tool for social change.
Elstrott, left, with his friend and colleague John Mackey, founder and co-CEO of Whole Foods Market. Mackey is the co-author of Conscious Capitalism, a new book that lays out the business philosophy he and Elstrott share.
Mo Siegel and John Hay were two of those young entrepreneurs. Patty Elstrott met the co-founders of Celestial Seasonings at a Urantia Book study group not long after she and John had arrived in Boulder. Siegel and Hay had just started the company, and when she mentioned that her husband was working on his doctoral dissertation about entrepreneurship, they told her they had to meet him.
“I was looking for entrepreneurs that were not just about making money but that were interested in changing the world for the better,” Elstrott says. “Celestial Seasonings was one of those companies.”
Elstrott began working for Celestial Seasonings in 1973 and joined the company full time in 1975 after finishing his PhD. He stayed with the company as chief financial officer for five years, a period that saw the company’s revenues climb from $250,000 to more than $25 million annually on the breakthrough success of now-iconic blends like Red Zinger and Sleepytime.
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