Today was one of those days that sounds random on paper but ends up making complete sense by the end. We visited Sibö Chocolate, had lunch at Riverside Gastropub, and sat in on a lecture about Costa Rica’s medical device industry. Three completely different businesses, but each one is asking the same question: what does it actually look like to build something that measures success by more than just profit?

Sibö was easily one of my favorite visits of the entire trip. Julio walked us through the full history of chocolate, from the Maya civilization transforming cacao into a bitter ceremonial drink, all the way to Rudolph Lindt accidentally grinding his cacao for three straight days in 1879 and discovering conching. But what stuck with me most was Sibö’s reason for existing in the first place. Costa Rica was exporting raw cacao beans and importing finished chocolate from Europe, and Julio and George wanted to keep the value of that process inside the country. They even figured out how to make their packaging from the husks of the cacao beans themselves, boiling and grinding the shells into paper. Every decision they make circles back to conservation and community, and it shows. Riverside Gastropub had a similar energy. The owner, Daniel Harris, built the restaurant on the burned-out ruins of a disco that had sat abandoned for 35 years. He kept the original floors, planted organic gardens on the property, runs a microbrewery where the spent grain goes straight to compost, and hosts local musicians and artists regularly. It is the kind of place where sustainability is not a section of the menu, it is the whole structure of how the business runs.

The medical device lecture brought a completely different scale to the same idea. Costa Rica is home to over 90 medical device companies, including 13 of the top 20 global manufacturers, and the sector now out-exports both coffee and bananas. What made that possible was not cheap labor. It was decades of investment in education, political stability, and a workforce capable of meeting the precision demands of medical manufacturing. Hearing all three of these stories in the same day made the triple bottom line feel less like a business school concept and more like something that actually works when people commit to it from the beginning.