Back to the Roots: Nikhil Arora and Alejandro Velez

In 2009, Berkeley seniors Nikhil Arora and Alejandro Velez started to geek out over something they'd heard in a lecture: you can grow a healthy crop of mushrooms on used coffee grounds. Intrigued by the business potential, the pair set aside jobs in finance and consulting and became urban farmers: salvaging leaky bags of coffee grounds, planting mushroom spawn in an Oakland warehouse, and selling their crop to local grocers. Over time, the partners realized they could help others grow food for themselves, so they stopped farming fungus and took the leap into selling tabletop grow kits, seeds, and potting soil. Since launch, Back to the Roots has become the fastest-growing organic gardening brand in the U. S., with its products sold in 10,000 stores across the country. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Guy Raz?

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• 5:11Speaker 01

  We got the contact info that day to Randy DeCarmen, who was a produce coordinator for Whole Foods. And we ended up getting a call scheduled with him.

• 5:22Speaker 02

  It was like a two-minute phone call. He's like, "Boys, what is this you guys are farming?" And we said, "Randy, we're growing mushrooms on coffee waste." He's like, "What were you farming before?" "Well, Randy, we're in college." "All right. Do you guys figure this out?" And he's kind of laughing. "How to grow mushrooms on coffee waste." He's like, "This is the coolest shit I've ever seen in produce." "Boys, figure this out. Call, text me if you need anything else." And then he hangs up.

• 5:48Guy Raz?

  That was it.

• 5:49Speaker 02

  That was it.

• 5:56Guy Raz?

  From NPR, it's How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

• 6:08Guy Raz?

  I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how two college grads headed for jobs in banking and consulting decided instead to grow mushrooms and built Back to the Roots, one of the fastest-growing organic gardening brands in the country.

• 6:28Guy Raz?

  One of my favorite things about getting to do this show is we don't just hear about the successful businesses that people built, but also about the businesses they tried to build and ultimately abandoned. Before James Dyson came up with a groundbreaking idea for a new vacuum cleaner, he was desperately trying to market a wheelbarrow that used a giant round ball instead of a wheel in the front. Before Dinah Trout launched HealthAid Kombucha, she was working on an idea to make party kits for adults, everything you'd need for a roaring 20s party or a Flintstones party. Before Rich Phillip co-founded the bed sheet company Brooklinen, he was thinking about

• 7:13Guy Raz?

  a business selling hot dogs inside hollowed-out French baguettes. And Apurva Metta, the guy who started Instacart, was initially convinced he had the perfect business idea: an online social network for lawyers, just for lawyers. I know, I know. Imagine how exciting it would be to connect with other lawyers. Anyway, you get the picture. Sometimes you need to come up with and then try one idea to get to the real idea, which is how the Home & Garden brand Back to the Roots began. Nikhil Arora and Alejandro Velez originally planned to sell mushrooms, which they grew,

• 7:57Guy Raz?

  on used coffee grounds. The idea came from a class they took together at UC Berkeley. And believe it or not, even though neither of them knew much about agriculture or farming, they managed to build a pretty successful small business around it. For several years, they would haul leaky bags of spent coffee grounds from cafes around Berkeley and Oakland to a warehouse they rented near the airport. They grow mushrooms and sell them to the local Whole Foods and a few other specialty food stores. Their guide to farming: mainly YouTube videos and trial and error. But what's truly remarkable about their business model is that even though

• 8:39Guy Raz?

  it wasn't making a ton of money, it was profitable from the very beginning. Nikhil and Alejandro, who also goes by Alex, would get paid to haul away the used coffee grounds, then they'd get paid for the mushrooms they grew on those grounds, and after that, they'd sell the nutrient-rich coffee soil that the mushrooms had grown on. But as the co-founders eventually realized, there's only so far you can go with mushrooms and coffee grounds. So eventually, they dropped the mushroom-growing business entirely and moved into the home gardening business, things like seeds and potting soil.

• 9:18Guy Raz?

  And this year, the company says it will reach $100 million in sales, all from an idea to grow mushrooms on coffee grounds. Nikhil Arora grew up in Southern California. His parents were immigrants from India. Alejandro spent his early childhood in Medellin, Colombia, where he experienced firsthand the political violence and terrifying guerrilla attacks that were happening at the time. As a young boy, he and his grandparents were briefly held hostage by the violent Colombian guerrilla group, FARC. But when he was about 11, his mother married an American serviceman, and the family moved to Michigan.

• 10:00Speaker 02

  We moved to... So I'll start off by saying, basically, when I was on the plane, it was like, you're now called Alex. They won't know how to pronounce Alejandro. So I basically, as soon as I got to Michigan, I changed my name, didn't speak a word of English, and landed in a town called Pawpaw, Michigan, a town of about 5,500 people. And I was the only Hispanic kid.

• 10:27Guy Raz?

  So you were an 11-year-old. Now named Alex.

• 10:30Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 10:30Guy Raz?

  And, uh, and put right into a public school right away?

• 10:34Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 10:35Guy Raz?

  And just like sink or swim, like you gotta start learning English, basically?

• 10:40Speaker 02

  So much so that, um, the day in which I was put in front of the class, the first day, and apparently they asked me, where is Columbia? And my teacher, Mrs. Schuman, she brought out, you know, she put me to the front of the class. I was so scared. And then she makes me point to the, the country where I'm from. And for some odd reason, my like intro is me making gun noises, like

• 11:08Speaker 02

  gorillas, gorillas. An 11 year old from Papa, Michigan, he thought I was talking about gorillas with guns in Columbia. And he's like, whoa, this kid comes from a place where gorillas have guns. That was my intro to my fifth grade class. But the culture in Papa and Midwest culture is so warm. I never felt like I was an outsider.

• 11:33Guy Raz?

  Hmm. I guess when you were 15, um, you went to, to see a doctor because you had a soccer injury and the doctor discovered a lump in your armpit, which, which turned out to be stage two Hodgkin's lymphoma. I mean, just, I can't even imagine what that must have been like for your mom. What do you remember about, about that moment and hearing that?

• 11:58Speaker 02

  When you mention it, the memory that comes to mind is when the doctor called and my mom had already gotten the news and she just turns away, hands me the phone. And I said, hey, doctor, what's going on? And he immediately says, Alex, you have cancer. And as I'm hearing those words, I'm processing my mom, take her head and start pounding it against the kitchen wall. And my immediate first question was like, well, am I going to die? And thankfully, the doctor said, no, you're not.

• 12:34Guy Raz?

  The prognosis is pretty good for, for. That particular kind of cancer, especially when you're 15, but it still meant that you had to go through months of chemotherapy, right?

• 12:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I, yeah, I went through four cycles of chemo.

• 12:49Guy Raz?

  And did you lose your hair?

• 12:50Speaker 02

  I did, yeah. I mean, I was the luckiest immigrant to have come to a town like Papa. The entire town rallied around me. So the entire basketball team shaved its head and then

• 13:03Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 13:04Speaker 02

  The entire school started shaving their head. I had another friend of mine, Mackenzie, who did prayer chains. So the entire school did prayer chains and she glued one by one and created a whole chain. And she took to the day-long chemotherapy sessions. So just a lot of love around me.

• 13:22Guy Raz?

  Hmm. All right, let's pause. And I want to move to you, Nikhil. You grew up in, in Orange County, right?

• 13:31Speaker 01

  That's right. Grew up, born in Irvine.

• 13:33Guy Raz?

  And were your parents, did they like, did they have a lot of friends in the Indian community? Also, like, people who had immigrated to the US?

• 13:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a huge part of my experience growing up was just, and I've realized this more as I've been older, just how incredible it is and the amount of, and you even think about entrepreneurship, like, to me, immigrating is the ultimate form of that, of taking risk and sacrifice in search of something better. But, you know, like, leaving all of their family, all of their friends back in India, to kind of pursue this new journey. And I think what they found in Southern California was the community of a lot of other Indian immigrants who had all done the same thing. And really, that all became family for them.

• 14:14Guy Raz?

  Did your parents have kind of, did they kind of push you in any particular direction? Your dad was an engineer. And was there any, did they have any expectations for you or push you in a particular direction?

• 14:26Speaker 01

  You know, Guy, they, I know this goes counterintuitive to a lot of the narratives, but, but they, they didn't. It wasn't like you have to be a doctor and engineer. I think they just wanted to see me and my brother working hard. Which I, you know, I think that in so many ways too, that, you know, downstream gave me, I think, in the back of my mind, the space, the confidence to keep on exploring new things, which I think that that was kind of the energy I grew up with. And I'm just grateful for them for that.

• 14:56Guy Raz?

  All right. So both you and Alejandro end up going to UC Berkeley for college. I think you started in 2005. Both of you are business administration majors. And senior year, I think that both of you sort of take a class in business ethics, which was like, Nikhil, just briefly, tell me what was the class? What was it about?

• 15:18Speaker 01

  So it was a business ethics class. Professor Alan Ross, you know, this is a lecture, what, I mean, 100, 100 plus people in this class, which is crazy. We were both in the same classes, both undergrad business majors. And like, we both remember each other in different classes, but somehow never connected, never shook hands, never said hello to each other. And one of the classes, our professor, he's talking about different ideas around sustainability. And this idea gets brought up in one sentence about how you can grow mushrooms on coffee grounds. And he went on to some other topic right after that. And I don't even remember, it was a whole series of different ideas about sustainable business practices, sustainable ideas. And Alex and I both, after class, independently

• 16:01Speaker 01

  email our professor for more information.

• 16:04Guy Raz?

  All right. So the professor says, hey, you can grow mushrooms on coffee grounds. Why was that interesting to you? Why did you think that was interesting?

• 16:11Speaker 01

  You know, I think I've asked myself that question a lot over these years. And I think for me, it was, you know, this kind of focus on sustainability and recycling. It was all the summers when my grandparents, who had this beautiful garden in a small town, would grow all their own food and hearing something about growing food. My, you know, my parents teaching me about kind of just, my dad always in my ear about recycling. And I think all of those experiences, the course of, you know, at that point, two decades, made that relevant to me at that moment. And said, that's really cool, growing food off of waste. And I think going through my mind, I was like, is there something here? This is a really cool idea.

• 16:47Guy Raz?

  And Alejandro, why were, why were you interested? I mean, when the professor said, yeah, you can grow mushrooms on coffee grounds, why did that, why did you even pause and, and reach out to the professor? What did you ask him?

• 17:00Speaker 02

  I said, hey, that sounds pretty cool. Do you have any more information? What was interesting is? It's kind of crazy, right? Coffee waste and coffee waste has been part of my, my culture. My grandparents in Columbia had traded coffee. The fact that that sounded like weird magic. Like, how do you take coffee waste and grow mushrooms on it? That's weird because I loved coffee and I've always, yeah, I'd like, I've always loved coffee, so.

• 17:27Guy Raz?

  All right, so each of you winds up emailing this professor. You do not know each other. You kind of, kind of know who the other one is, but you're, you're not friends.

• 17:39Guy Raz?

  He then sends you an email back and says, hey, there's another student who emailed me about this. And he connected you guys over email? Is that, is that your, your memory of what happened?

• 17:47Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 17:47Speaker 01

  I, I remember that same thing. He emails the both of us. And the next vivid memory I have, this was, I want to say February, Alex. It was maybe a month before spring break at that point.

• 17:59Guy Raz?

  2009.

• 18:00Speaker 01

  2009. And we met up at Alex's fraternity and we just hit it off like right away. And just started kicking around ideas and honestly, at that point, I think it could have been, it could have been anything. I think we just honestly, and this is to this day is a core of, is we had, we right away realized we just had this connections. And I think we just, we were like bouncing off each other's energy from, and to this day, we still are. But like, I remember just sitting up there and started YouTubeing videos. Like the first time we remember that, Alex, we met and we were just like started YouTubeing how to grow mushrooms and just laughing about all the crazy videos that came up on YouTube and just like trying to figure out, you know, what to do about this whole thing.

• 18:44Speaker 02

  And we start realizing we're like, um, I think we gotta grow this stuff to actually see if it works. And it was like this realization is like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We, we gotta go and get our hands dirty.

• 18:55Speaker 01

  And it was definitely like, I don't know if it was a business per se at that point, Guy, but it was like, is there a project? Is there something here? Like, man, there's so much coffee waste out there. And I think turning that into something useful was just, you know, inspiring in that moment.

• 19:09Guy Raz?

  And by the way, why are coffee grounds good for growing mushrooms?

• 19:15Speaker 01

  So, super rich in cellulose. The cellulose structure of coffee grounds mimics that of, you know, a tree on which oyster mushrooms would traditionally grow. And what's crazy, so the whole reason we started this thing off is that traditionally, mushrooms are grown on virgin trees being cut down for their logs, mainly overseas, as a substrate to grow mushrooms. And when we first heard this fact, we're like, wait, we're importing mushrooms that are grown on virgin trees being cut down just for this substrate, when you have this whole massive waste stream, millions and millions of pounds, in our local communities, and we could grow this food locally. That's what inspired this whole thing. That was crazy that people were cutting down trees to grow mushrooms

• 19:58Speaker 01

  when there was so much agricultural waste and kind of this food waste around to do it.

• 20:01Guy Raz?

  Got it.

• 20:01Speaker 01

  So, one of the ideas there was like, should we just collect all these coffee grounds and try to sell it to a mushroom farm? And finally, we're like, we should probably just try growing this ourselves, see if it even works.

• 20:11Guy Raz?

  Yeah. I mean, it's interesting, because like, growing mushrooms is not as lucrative as like mining Bitcoin, right? And I can't imagine there are many mushroom billionaires on planet Earth, but you guys were thinking, hey, this could be an interesting business?

• 20:25Speaker 02

  Well, we thought we could have three, we could have three streams of revenue off of one byproduct. And that was really intriguing.

• 20:34Guy Raz?

  Which was what?

• 20:35Speaker 02

  We could pick up the waste, so we were waste collectors.

• 20:38Guy Raz?

  Which is coffee grounds?

• 20:40Speaker 02

  Which is coffee grounds. We could sell the fresh mushrooms.

• 20:43Guy Raz?

  Yep.

• 20:44Speaker 02

  And then, third, we could sell the spent mushroom substrate, which is, once the mushrooms are done growing, they leave even more nutrients behind. So, we're like, oh, my gosh, this is a gold mine.

• 20:55Guy Raz?

  Oh, wow.

• 20:56Speaker 02

  This is so cool. Three revenue streams, zero waste on any of this. And then, I was an Excel monkey, and I pulled out Excel, and I modeled it out as Nick Hill's talking, and I said, this could be a big business. And like, that was our, off our first meeting.

• 21:11Guy Raz?

  I mean, don't get me wrong. By the way, I love mushrooms, but it doesn't sound like you guys loved mushrooms. It doesn't sound like you were like mushroom fanatics.

• 21:19Speaker 02

  Nope. Bye.

• 21:20Speaker 01

  Can't remember eating. I mean, I'm sure we had it on pizza, but that was probably.

• 21:24Guy Raz?

  Not into like sauteed wild mushrooms or anything like that. You're just, it just happened to be the thing that was mentioned that then as you looked into it, you thought, hey, you know, you can extract a lot from a mushroom.

• 21:36Speaker 01

  Yep. We both, you know, went to the library and found all the mycology books and the coming weeks we were YouTubeing every, every possible video on mushrooms and downloading every PDF we could find. And, you know, then Paul Stamets, like the mushroom guru, who wrote the handbook on growing mushrooms, we got all his books and.

• 21:53Guy Raz?

  There's a whole documentary on this guy, Paul Stamets.

• 21:56Speaker 01

  Amazing. He's brilliant.

• 21:57Speaker 02

  We cold emailed him and he, he got back to us within two hours of us cold emailing him.

• 22:02Guy Raz?

  You cold emailed Paul Stamets? But for people to know, he's got a, his whole mushroom tea company and he's got a TED Talks and mushrooms and documentaries on him. He's like the mushroom kind of.

• 22:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:12Guy Raz?

  Expert. What did you email him? Like, would you ask him?

• 22:16Speaker 01

  We were trying to grow mushrooms on coffee grounds and we were asking about spawn. And I forget if we asked him directly, Alex.

• 22:24Guy Raz?

  Spawn is like the seed, basically.

• 22:27Speaker 01

  Like seed. Exactly. Yeah. It's analogous to seed. So you need that to get started. So he donated our first spawn or seed that we needed to grow, which eventually we used for our first test buckets.

• 22:38Guy Raz?

  By the way, you're in Berkeley and you needed to, you want to do this on coffee grounds. Did you just like brew a bunch of coffee and use that?

• 22:45Speaker 02

  One local coffee shop and just said, hey, can we pick up your coffee waste?

• 22:50Speaker 01

  Yep. The first time we thought we were actually, we were like afraid, we didn't know how it was going to work. You remember walking into the first cafe and asking for their coffee ground waste and, you know, thinking it was going to be this big deal. And man, they were so happy to get it off their hands. Like, you want to go to the back and pick up that trash bag that's messy and heavy and leaking? Like, sure, go ahead. And I think we're like, oh, okay. There's definitely a lot of this back here and they don't want anything to do with it.

• 23:13Guy Raz?

  All right. So, so you get some coffee grounds. Paul Stamets mails you some mushroom spawn, mushroom seeds.

• 23:19Speaker 02

  To my fraternity.

• 23:21Guy Raz?

  Do you have fraternity house? And what, did you get a bunch of like buckets?

• 23:24Speaker 01

  Yep. White, like imagine white paint buckets. We had about 10 of them. This is right before spring break and I think finally both of us were like, all right, we just gotta do this thing and gotta try growing these things. Enough reading, enough watching videos and decided to plant them. So, you know, we went, collected a bunch of coffee grounds, brought them back to his fraternity, put this tarp down in his fraternity kitchen closet and we mix in the spawn into them, put a little top on them, poke some holes, trying to use all of our best research, you know, that we had done and, and we leave for spring break and, and we're both gone for roughly 10 days. And I will never forget this phone call because Alex, you know, gets back to his fraternity and I get this call and he's just so excited, kind of screaming.

• 24:09Speaker 01

  He's like, Nick Hill, you got it on up here, you gotta check this out. And, you know, I'm in this room with him, we look at these 10 buckets and literally nine of them are just contaminated, nothing growing, just looking really nasty after sitting for 10 days, you know, with some old coffee grounds. But one of them had this beautiful crop of pearl oyster mushrooms growing out of them. And I remember we were both just standing around this bucket and just looking at it. And, you know, Alex is like, you want to try those? I'm like, I'm not trying these. Like, you want to try them? It's like, I'm not trying these either. We're both kind of, you know, just looking at this bucket of mushrooms sitting in this dark closet.

• 24:45Guy Raz?

  So did anybody wind up actually sampling mushrooms?

• 24:48Speaker 01

  Uh, it was actually funny. That, that's speaking of, you know, never really being chefs or foodies or, you know, gourmet cooks or anything, neither one of us was trying those mushrooms, but we were like, what's the best restaurant in town? And we both had heard about this restaurant called Chez Panisse by Chef Alice Waters, who is just an absolute legend and one of the, you know, founders of this entire natural organic food movement with a restaurant right there in Berkeley.

• 25:14Guy Raz?

  Yep.

• 25:14Speaker 01

  We didn't know any of that. We just knew it was this famous restaurant in Berkeley and we ended up literally walking over this paint bucket, this one paint bucket of mushrooms, walked it over and she happened to be in the front of a restaurant, she was talking to somebody and we just walked right up to her and said, hey, Alice. I'm Nick Hill. This is Alex. We're trying to grow these mushrooms on coffee grounds. We just grew some. Would you want to try some? And you know, she got super into it and she's like, that's really cool. And come to the back with me. And she actually walked us to the back of her restaurant. To the kitchen where her head chef, this guy named Cal was, and she's like, Cal, you want to try some of these mushrooms these boys are growing? And he ends up plucking half, half of the mushrooms out of his bucket.

• 25:59Speaker 01

  And I remember he chops them up, sautees them up in the back of her restaurant and she tries them, he tries and we try them. And I remember chef Alice Waters was like, man, these are delicious.

• 26:09Guy Raz?

  Wow. She was on the show a few years ago. And, and so when you, you brought the bucket of mushrooms and she said, she kind of gave it her blessing. Did they say, yeah, we want to buy them? Or what, what was the, how did you leave it?

• 26:23Speaker 02

  No. I mean, we thought that they were going to taste like coffee waste. So we're like, they're not going to like them. So it was almost like this, okay, this is further along than we thought we'd be. Where do we go from here? So after that, we were like, oh man, now we got, we got a product here. Let's just take it to Whole Foods and we took the same day, that same bucket to the Berkeley Whole Foods store. This was at the early days where Whole Foods, you could do this all the time. You know, a lot of local growers would go to a Whole Foods store and on the spot, Whole Foods would buy it from you.

• 26:56Guy Raz?

  So you guys went to the Whole Foods Inn in Berkeley. I know that Whole Foods on Telegraph Avenue. And you, you, you like walked in and who'd you ask for?

• 27:06Speaker 02

  First produce guy we saw, his name was Sesar.

• 27:08Speaker 01

  And then we just went right up to him and said, we're trying to grow mushrooms on coffee grounds and we just grew these, check them out. And just kind of told them what we were trying to do and.

• 27:16Speaker 02

  Alice Waters loves them.

• 27:17Guy Raz?

  Now you've got the Alice Waters endorsement, even though it may not have been official, but you know, it's okay.

• 27:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. And he got fired up about it and he ended up bringing up, he brought his produce manager, I think we had a store marketing lead. But three or four people were like huddled around this little bucket of mushrooms. And you know, we were telling him all we were trying to do and got a bunch of interest and support. And we got the contact info that day to Randy DeCarmen, who was a NorCal produce coordinator for Whole Foods. And we ended up getting a call scheduled with him. Alex must've been what, a week or two later?

• 27:55Guy Raz?

  And he said, hey, tell me about what you guys are doing.

• 27:59Speaker 02

  Randy's a character. He's like, boys, it was like a two minute phone call. Boys, I'm seeing all these emails and what, what is this you guys are farming? We said, Randy, we're growing mushrooms on coffee. He's like, you hear this pause and he's like, okay. What were you farming before? Well, Randy, we're in college. Okay.

• 28:21Speaker 02

  All right. You guys figured this out? And he's kind of laughing. How to grow mushrooms on coffee. He's like, I'm gonna blow you up at Whole Foods. He's like, this is the coolest shit I've ever seen in produce. Take coffee waste, grow mushrooms, boys. Figure this out. Here's my personal cell phone number. So just call, text me if you need anything else. And then he hangs up.

• 28:38Guy Raz?

  That was it.

• 28:39Speaker 02

  That was it.

• 28:40Guy Raz?

  And no discussion about like a purchase order or pricing or anything. It was just like, this sounds cool, but, but when you figure it out, give me a call back.

• 28:48Speaker 01

  It was that. And I think at that point, I mean, we knew nothing about retail. After that phone call, we were now a couple of weeks away from graduation. And we were still meeting up all the time, talking all the time, trying to just like, what are we doing with this? And we heard about a business plan competition called Bears Breaking Boundaries, Big Ideas. It was called at Berkeley. And somehow someone told us about this, Alex, I think it was, it was a night before the deadline. Cause I remember it was an all nighter. We were up to like the end of the night submitting this thing right before the deadline. And we learned that we won.

• 29:28Guy Raz?

  No, no, no. I think we got second place, brother.

• 29:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, it felt like we won this thing. Yeah, we got $5,000 and we were on top of the world. And that is when we, I think, met up and we, I remember it's very, you know, very vividly, both of us and just kind of asking each other, like if you're in, I'm in, if I'm in, you're in, just kind of both shaking on it and, and deciding to go all in. And, you know, you fast forward actually to a graduation ceremony, thousands of thousands of kids, right? At Berkeley. And because we'd won this, this award, our chancellor brought it up and actually his commencement address. And he was like, and we have two kids who are going to be growing mushrooms after they graduate. And we, I remember the whole like auditorium, this Greek theater just starts cracking up laughing.

• 30:14Speaker 01

  And Alex and I looking at each other like, what, what are we getting ourselves into right now? Everyone thinks we're crazy, but that was, that was the start of this whole thing.

• 30:22Guy Raz?

  Huh. And just to be clear, I mean, before you got going with this mushroom project, I read that both of you had really promising jobs lined up after school ended.

• 30:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:33Guy Raz?

  Like Alejandro, I think you were going to go into banking. And Nikhil, you had, I think, a consulting job lined up. And you basically put those jobs on hold, right?

• 30:42Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 30:43Guy Raz?

  Mm-hmm. So how did your parents take the news when you told them that? Like Alejandro, when you told your mom, who like, you know, made all these sacrifices to like, leave Colombia and to get you to the US. You get to Berkeley and you've got this great offer on Wall Street. When you're like, I'm not gonna do it. Do you remember what she said?

• 31:05Speaker 02

  She was all in.

• 31:06Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 31:07Speaker 02

  She trusted me. She was all in.

• 31:08Guy Raz?

  Amazing. She wasn't like, what are you doing? Are you nuts? She was totally supportive.

• 31:13Speaker 02

  She was. She saw, and I think probably the best word is how refreshing those three months versus my summer experience in investment banking in New York. I had a really tough time. Yet I was going back and signing full time and going back to doing it again. So I think in her eyes, she saw how happy I was. And she just trusted me.

• 31:40Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 31:40Speaker 01

  Same. And guys, much as we talk about our family being really supportive, we definitely had friends who thought we were crazy. I have this one memory. I remember being on the corner of Telegraph and Duran by the Pete's Coffee there, waiting at like 9:30 or 10:00 PM after closing. And then waiting for Alex to pick me up because he was collecting coffee grounds from some other cafe. And, you know, Friday night, all of our friends are going out to a party. Like, what are you doing, Nikhil? Standing by this trash can with two trash bags. And I feel like Alex almost had an intervention at his fraternity. This, you know, everyone's just like, what are you doing, Alex? You have this job offer, a six-figure job offer. You worked your butt off for it for four years. And you're gonna give it up to do what?

• 32:22Speaker 02

  Like, what are you doing, man? You just got this job offer. You've been wanting to, I've been hearing about you wanting to do this forever. And now you're gonna start growing mushrooms. Like, what are you doing?

• 32:32Guy Raz?

  That was good advice, but that was the good advice they gave you at the time. I mean, because this was, the chances that this was gonna succeed are very, very tiny.

• 32:40Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 32:40Guy Raz?

  So you have 5,000 bucks now.

• 32:44Guy Raz?

  Some money to start. What does that do? What does that get you? What can you do with 5,000 bucks at that point? Summer of 2009. You stay in Berkeley. Everyone goes after their jobs. You guys are staying there. What do you do with 5,000 bucks?

• 32:57Speaker 02

  We got an $800 van.

• 32:59Speaker 01

  Cheapest thing we could find. That's the one that's the one run.

• 33:01Guy Raz?

  And this is going to be presumably to haul, to haul the coffee grounds, right? Because you need it.

• 33:05Speaker 02

  All the coffee waste.

• 33:06Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 33:07Speaker 02

  Those to pick up the coffee waste. We signed a lease on a 250 square foot office that was supposed to be our warehouse in which we'd cultivate the mushrooms.

• 33:20Speaker 01

  We'd wake up early in the morning, meet up at like 5:00 AM. And at that point, you know, we ended up meeting with Pete's Coffee. And they came by our spot and we pitched them what we were trying to do. And they helped. They were excited about it.

• 33:34Guy Raz?

  They said, yeah, you can have our coffee waste. And presumably they were paying somebody to remove their waste, right?

• 33:42Speaker 01

  They were. That when we started off, we weren't getting paid. That was a whole separate discussion, actually, a little bit later, as we proved ourselves. But the beginning was just like, can we be allowed to go into your back of your cafes and go, you know, pick up your coffee ground waste every morning? And Pete's Coffee was our first major kind of supply partner.

• 34:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, they had a couple, couple hundred coffee shops. And then eventually we went and said, hey, how about paying us?

• 34:09Guy Raz?

  And they said?

• 34:10Speaker 01

  Well, at that point, though, we had, we had been collecting coffee grounds for some time, for probably what? Six, eight, nine months, I think, consistently. And had proven ourselves that we were like, we were literally replacing waste management in their stores, which was a cost driver for them. And so like, we ended up negotiating a rate that was a little bit cheaper than I think what they were paying waste management. And so we really became valet waste collectors.

• 34:31Guy Raz?

  Were you taking the coffee grinds to this 250 foot, square foot office space? And like filling up buckets in that little office space?

• 34:41Speaker 02

  They'd be filled up in bags.

• 34:43Guy Raz?

  Okay.

• 34:43Speaker 02

  And that's right.

• 34:44Guy Raz?

  And you just would put it on the ground in that off, in that warehouse or the office?

• 34:48Speaker 02

  We put them on, on the racks that we, that we bought with the 5,000.

• 34:52Guy Raz?

  I got you. So you would just have racks of bags growing mushrooms? What kind of mushrooms?

• 34:59Speaker 02

  Pearl oyster mushrooms.

• 35:00Guy Raz?

  Pearl oyster mushrooms, right. And, uh, and, and how are you growing these mushrooms?

• 35:06Speaker 02

  So the process is you pick up the coffee waste, dry it, put them in the bags, add the mushroom spawn. And then you leave it in a dark room for roughly two and a half, three weeks. And then, well, mushrooms are pretty fascinating. They only grow when they think they're gonna die. So you, you, you have to immediately go from a dark room to a light room. You have to go from a dry room to a really humid room. So with those shops, mushrooms get scared and they begin to fruit. And that takes about 10 days.

• 35:38Guy Raz?

  How did you do all of that in the, in a non-climate controlled warehouse? Or 250 square foot office in Oakland?

• 35:46Speaker 02

  We bought some tarp and some humidifiers.

• 35:49Speaker 01

  Lots of duct tape.

• 35:50Guy Raz?

  Humidifiers, okay. Oh, duct tape. So you would just like, you sealed a part of the room off?

• 35:54Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 35:55Speaker 01

  We've tarped up our humidity chamber and, um, stuck a bunch of humidifiers. This is all we got started off. Fans and removed some of the ceiling tiles to create some more, you know, air exchange. It was, uh, yeah, looking back, it was crazy.

• 36:10Guy Raz?

  How did you figure out how to do this? Was it all through watching YouTube videos?

• 36:14Speaker 02

  And reaching out to experts.

• 36:16Guy Raz?

  All right. Now you've got a bunch of bags of mushrooms. At what point, I guess, I, I read it was like October of 2009, is when you finally had enough mushrooms to bring to, to Whole Foods? How many, how much did they buy?

• 36:29Speaker 02

  First invoice was 3.14 pounds.

• 36:32Guy Raz?

  So they got, they bought three pounds of your oyster mushrooms? And what did they pay you?

• 36:37Speaker 02

  $10 per pound, which was, which was pretty good price, very good price.

• 36:41Guy Raz?

  So 30 bucks and some change. And, uh, not bad for six months of work.

• 36:46Speaker 02

  Not bad at all.

• 36:47Guy Raz?

  Not bad at all.

• 36:48Speaker 02

  We were so, we were so happy. We, we drank, we drank a beer at the Berkeley Whole Foods. 5:00 AM when you, cause you have to deliver early in the morning and. So, but we had the invoice and cheers to a beer that we chugged at 5:00 a.m. after, after we sold those.

• 37:07Guy Raz?

  And, and how did they market it at the Whole Foods? Did they have like a, did it say like locally grown mushrooms and coffee grounds? Or, or did they not do that?

• 37:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, they put a little picture.

• 37:18Guy Raz?

  Oh, they put your picture up?

• 37:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, they'd really told the story. These are grown off of local coffee grounds and this has grown a mile away almost literally, you know? It was, it was awesome. The first store, they really got behind it.

• 37:28Guy Raz?

  I always buy that. Every time I go to Whole Foods, I see that I always, I always buy that. When they, I'm totally, I'm a sucker for those stories. I love it. So presumably when you sold them that those three pounds of, of mushrooms, it was with the understanding that you would sell them more, that they would, that you now had an operation and you could provide them with more. Did they say, and now we want 10 pounds a week or, or not quite yet?

• 37:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, the two things we didn't really consider. One is, well, once you sell it to a store, you've got to make sure it sells through. So the buyer sees that the product's selling through and mushrooms, the shelf life's short, so it's got to sell pretty quickly. And then the other part was that as soon as you sell out, they're going to say, we want more for that store and we want to expand you to another store.

• 38:16Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 38:16Speaker 02

  And after that first 3.14 pounds, there was about a month or two that we didn't have much more. We actually, we still hadn't consistently produced crops.

• 38:31Guy Raz?

  Cause you would basically plant some spawn and they just wouldn't grow.

• 38:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, couldn't you get Trichoderma, like which is that green fungus? That was a tough time.

• 38:41Speaker 01

  It was the most, I mean, disheartening from May through October. You know, you graduate, leave your jobs, you're riding high, and then you plant, you planted our first batches, you know, right? Late May, three weeks of anticipation, excitement, you know, we figured it out. And then now you're talking about probably mid-June, when the first crop we had planted should have been ready, nothing. And then we were planting every single day. So then you come back every night, you'd come back and just check and check and nothing, nothing. And just, you know, you look back, you're like, that was crazy. Every day waking up at five, collecting coffee grounds, planting, drying them, just to kind of see nothing.

• 39:21Guy Raz?

  When we come back in just a moment, Nikhil and Alejandro learn a critical business lesson. It's not always a good idea to take people on a tour of your fungus farm. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This from NPR.

• 39:45Guy Raz?

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• 40:29Guy Raz?

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• 41:11Guy Raz?

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• 41:56Guy Raz?

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• 42:36Guy Raz?

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• 43:21Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2009, and Nikhil and Alejandro are full-time mushroom farmers, selling whatever they can grow to Whole Foods and making extra cash by hauling away used coffee grounds. All good developments, but still, they're barely making any money.

• 43:42Speaker 02

  I mean, we were living... Off of very little, we took, I think, a hundred dollars a week each. And, you know, it took us until January, really, to get some consistent crops to Whole Foods. But the beauty about starting a sustainable business in which you're taking waste to produce something is that, yeah, the raw materials are actually not even free. You're making up money.

• 44:11Guy Raz?

  You're making money. You were paid, right, that's the brilliance of it. Because you basically, you were hauling the coffee grounds, which is what you needed to grow your mushrooms. You were paid for that, so you had cash coming in and then selling the mushrooms. So you had some cash flow, you had some money coming in.

• 44:28Speaker 01

  Yep, the spawn was really our biggest expense. We were buying spawn because we were not sophisticated enough to be able to kind of grow our own spawn and seed. But in the scheme of what we were doing, it was a very small percentage. But as we were scaling up growing mushrooms and we were starting to collect thousands and thousands of pounds of coffee grounds per week and we were growing mushrooms on them, and what's left over was this spent mushroom substrate, which at the time we kind of knew was something interesting but didn't know much about it, ended up kind of stockpiling it.

• 44:57Guy Raz?

  The substrate is, is what's left over in the, in the grounds?

• 45:01Speaker 01

  Yes, it's the mycelium or the roots of the mushrooms, so to speak.

• 45:05Guy Raz?

  Okay.

• 45:05Speaker 01

  Exactly, yeah, the white roots grown throughout all the coffee grounds, the mushrooms have fruited or grown off of it. And we were starting stockpiling this behind our warehouse. And we, I don't think I'd fully thought through what we were doing with this. And I remember actually we got an email from our landlord saying, he's like, this stuff is starting to stink. I've seen rats running through there. You got two weeks to get rid of it all. If not, I'm terminating your leasing, you guys are kicked out. And we ended up putting it on Craigslist and didn't know what else to do. And honestly, within probably 48 hours, all of it was accounted for.

• 45:39Guy Raz?

  People wanted it for what?

• 45:40Speaker 01

  Urban farms, local gardeners who, and this, we kind of learned through them that this is one of the most premium nutritious soil amendments there is, period. And mushroom mycelium, like the mycorrhizae it's called, are actually one of the most beneficial things you can add to your garden because it helps your roots uptake nutrients. So imagine adding plant food, which is like the actual nutrients, but what mushroom roots or mycorrhizae do is actually help your plants better extract whatever is in your natural, your native soil. So really good stuff for your garden.

• 46:11Guy Raz?

  So you basically had coffee grounds mixed with this. Mycelium, and that is plant food, basically. You would sprinkle that over your garden.

• 46:21Speaker 01

  Exactly. So we started selling that guy and we sold it actually in bulk. We had now the waste of waste of waste.

• 46:30Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 46:31Speaker 01

  Which was all revenues. Imagine, you know, coffee grounds, getting paid for that, growing mushrooms off of it. And then our own waste, we were selling as well. So that whole cycle sort of allowed us to bootstrap this company when we were getting started.

• 46:43Guy Raz?

  So in the first half year at least, it was just the two of you.

• 46:47Speaker 02

  Just the two of us. I mean, it was probably 15 hour days between collecting and planting and then harvesting and then demoing at night.

• 46:57Guy Raz?

  Okay, so at this point, you're selling the mushrooms at Whole Foods. And I think you're doing some farmers markets too at that time. And what kind of reaction were you getting from people? What are people saying to you?

• 47:10Speaker 02

  Two, I think, different things were happening at the same time. One, we'd always do farmers markets and anytime families came by with their kids, they would stay there for half an hour with us. They'd buy a lot more mushrooms. They'd love the story. They'd come and do tours of our farm. And they'd say, hey, can I take one of these bags home? I'll try to grow them out of my kitchen.

• 47:37Guy Raz?

  So basically, when you refer to, when you refer to your quote unquote farm, you're literally talking about a warehouse full of bags of mushrooms. It's not like a, like a fuff, like a bucolic farm with like rolling green hills.

• 47:51Speaker 02

  No, it was scary. It just looked grindy. We were next to a recording studio and an insurance agency. And it was, to our consumers from farmer's market, awesome.

• 48:08Guy Raz?

  It is awesome.

• 48:09Speaker 02

  But to a Whole Foods produce buyer, it was not awesome. And we made the mistake of, just because we were starting to get more confidence with these tours, we're like, hey, produce, you know, team, come and do a tour.

• 48:22Guy Raz?

  Oh, you invited the Whole Foods team to come and check out your operation?

• 48:25Speaker 02

  Yes, and we were so proud.

• 48:28Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 48:28Speaker 02

  And right after that, Randy calls us.

• 48:31Guy Raz?

  The Whole Foods buyer.

• 48:32Speaker 02

  And he says, guys, never do that again.

• 48:35Guy Raz?

  Why? Why?

• 48:37Speaker 02

  Because he's like,

• 48:40Guy Raz?

  The health aspect of it could turn into something we don't want to go there like just.

• 48:45Speaker 01

  It took us like, what, six months after that, we had to get certifications because Whole Foods is like, you guys need to do all these health and safety checks. That was our first big kind of regulatory lessons and

• 48:56Guy Raz?

  I'm sure.

• 48:57Speaker 01

  scaling up and selling to a major retailer.

• 48:58Guy Raz?

  So, so when, when you had to like, kind of quote unquote, professionalize it and get, get it up to code and stuff. I mean, all power to the Bay Area, but I mean, the regulatory regime in the Bay Area can be quite something for anybody who's started a business. How did, what did you have to do to get it like kosher, to make it a kosher operation, so to speak?

• 49:21Speaker 01

  We would spend hours cleaning. I mean, I remember Alex and I, like, we'd just be jamming out to music and wiping the walls every day because you want to keep it pristine because if not, you know, you can might have a competing fungus growing. So we would spend so much of our days, those days were just us mopping and scrubbing and cleaning and trying to keep this little space as pristine as we could. And, you know, Whole Foods guided us a lot.

• 49:45Guy Raz?

  They would help guide you from start to finish. All right. So now, so you've got the mushrooms, but, but then around this time, I think late 2009, you decide to kind of make kits, mushroom kits, where people could grow them themselves. First of all, I would just think that would cut into your business because now you're giving people the means of production. You know, you're not giving them your mushrooms anymore and now they can make their mushrooms. So to hell with you guys. Why do I need to buy your mushrooms? But that was not the thinking presumably. Well, the thinking was that when we had so many families come to do these tours and they could take a souvenir home, that would be at 20 bucks.

• 50:27Guy Raz?

  So that same bag would produce roughly $10 worth of product. This now became a $20 product. And that was, that was one part of it. The other part of it was people were sending us pictures by text and email.

• 50:44Speaker 02

  Of their fully grown kit. And that was impactful because you now had our consumers come back to us and they became the farmer with us.

• 50:53Speaker 01

  We didn't know this early on, but we kind of learned this through those kind of experiences. The kits weren't about the mushrooms. They were about the experience of growing and just seeing something grow and growing something yourself.

• 51:04Guy Raz?

  Okay, but to make the kits, right? And for people who aren't familiar with them today, they're like cardboard boxes and it's got branding on it and it's a printed package and there's a bag of soil that has a mushroom spawn in it and a booklet on how to grow them. Everything's in there, right? But that costs money. It costs money to finance that. So how did you, like, how were you able to launch the mushroom kits even though, I know you had some cash flow, but I can't imagine you had that much cash to work with.

• 51:32Speaker 01

  I think Alex and I, early on, tapped into every support avenue there was and that, you know, we applied to a ton of business plan competitions. We probably what got Alex a hundred something thousand dollars from different winnings. The city of Oakland was incredible and we ended, we moved from Emeryville to Oakland and got about a $25,000 redevelopment grant from them to build out our, what became our largest, you know, warehouse, 10,000 square feet in West Oakland. So, yeah.

• 52:02Guy Raz?

  And I think you even got a loan from Whole Foods, right?

• 52:05Speaker 02

  We got the local producer loan from the Northern California region.

• 52:11Guy Raz?

  And that loan was to do, what could you do? What'd you do with that loan? It's like 25,000 bucks, I read.

• 52:16Speaker 01

  One of the best uses of that grant funding, I remember we finally, this was two years or so, Alex, and two or maybe more, there was a local machinist near our West Oakland facility and he would just see us every morning for hours grinding away on this wine press, drying these coffee grounds. And he was like, I think I can make you guys an automated one and, you know, it costs significant money. It was, you know.

• 52:39Speaker 02

  11 grand.

• 52:40Speaker 01

  It was 11 grand, yeah. And he ended up building this beautiful automated thing, custom-built for us at his machine shop. And I remember vividly, the first time that we got this machine, put coffee grounds in there, it would literally take 90 minutes. We hit one button and 60 seconds later, he had perfectly dried coffee grounds at the right moisture consistency.

• 53:00Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 53:01Speaker 01

  And it was just this game-changing moment.

• 53:03Guy Raz?

  Game-changing.

• 53:04Speaker 01

  Never forget that, clicking that button.

• 53:07Guy Raz?

  I wonder, I mean, you're now a year in, right? You get to mid 2010, you've got, you've got people now working for you. How many people were you able to hire initially in that first year? Do you remember?

• 53:20Speaker 02

  Nick, I want to say we roughly had five people, all in.

• 53:25Speaker 01

  That's about right, yeah.

• 53:26Speaker 02

  And we did 250,000.

• 53:29Guy Raz?

  In year one?

• 53:30Speaker 02

  In revenue, year one.

• 53:32Guy Raz?

  So I wonder, in that first, you know, why, I mean, it would take a while, we'll get to this later, but it would take a while for you guys to actually go out and raise money. But why didn't you, why didn't you do that early on? Why didn't you go out and look for investors?

• 53:45Speaker 02

  I, we still knew we were figuring all this thing out. Like, there was a lot of moving parts. I mean, we were doing everything ourselves and we were still making a lot of mistakes. And, I mean, we would throw away stuff. Like, nobody would invest in a business like that.

• 54:02Guy Raz?

  And so it wasn't even on your radar?

• 54:03Speaker 02

  Not even in our radar. We were all focused on grants, actually. That was all our energy, because we knew that we had something that we could see and feel from customers that they're like, this is so cool. You're taking waste, you're selling the waste, you're selling fresh mushrooms that come from waste. So we felt that always, and that's why we stayed in it.

• 54:24Guy Raz?

  All right. So you guys, you're selling mushrooms, and I think by year one, you're in all the Whole Foods in Northern California.

• 54:33Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm. I mean, 500 pounds a week at 10 bucks, and 50 weeks is roughly a quarter million dollars. So that was where most of that revenue. Was coming from?

• 54:43Guy Raz?

  So your core business was raw mushrooms that people would buy and then cook?

• 54:48Speaker 02

  In 2010, our bread and butter was fresh mushrooms.

• 54:53Guy Raz?

  Okay, and also in 2011 was your bread and butter mushrooms?

• 54:57Speaker 02

  2011 got a little bit more from waste collection because we were by then picking up from roughly 40 Peets and Starbucks and local shops.

• 55:08Guy Raz?

  A week?

• 55:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, a week.

• 55:10Guy Raz?

  Because in 2011, you're basically, your customers are Whole Foods and Peets, right? Essentially?

• 55:17Speaker 01

  That's right. But we were also doing a lot of farmers markets guy at that time, too. So that was a lot of like Alex and I every weekend, Saturday and Sunday, 10 hours for years. That's all we did. And that's the mushroom kits. We sold our, when we started creating mushroom kits, we were first selling them at farmers markets and getting a great feedback, so.

• 55:37Guy Raz?

  And so, this is 2011, you've got these sort of three, let's say, legs of the stool. Soil, fresh mushrooms, mushroom kits. Was it just, were you just so busy, the two of you and your small staff, that you couldn't really figure out where this was going to go? Or at this point, did you, did the two of you start to have conversations saying, hey, you know, maybe we should kind of assess what we want to do here and where we should focus? Or was it just like, let's just keep doing it this way?

• 56:06Speaker 01

  We had gotten our mushroom kits from farmers markets, then we got them into Whole Foods. And Randy was a mentor of ours. And actually, I remember for the first time, we took this big basketball-sized bag that we were growing these mushrooms in, and we had slapped a sticker on it from FedEx. We thought it looked beautiful. We were in a meeting with Randy talking about fresh mushrooms. And at the end of the meeting, we pull out this mushroom kit, you know, with all the confidence in the world, as if it was the next iPhone, right? And we put it on the table. We're like, one more thing, Randy. What about this mushroom kit? And he looks at this bag and he literally falls out of his chair. He's like, that's the most disgusting thing I've ever seen. No one's going to buy that in my store. And he just laughed at this thing. But he was also, by that point,

• 56:51Speaker 01

  a friend, a mentor. And it wasn't a no. He was like, just go back and figure this thing out because it's cool, but this thing looks hideous. No one's going to put this on their windowsill. And it was actually the push that we needed at that time to really kind of make us focus in on the design and the user experience. We came back with what is, you know, a version of what is, what it is today and started selling that on Whole Foods. And we were for a while selling both of them, mushrooms and mushroom kits.

• 57:16Guy Raz?

  All right. So you guys have this business going, still bootstrapped. And this is a total like, I'm going to go, I'm going to take the off ramp here and go in a totally different direction for everybody. So there's a warning for everybody listening. In May to June of 2012, Alejandro, you become a contestant on the eighth season of The Bachelorette. This is not part of the narrative. This is true. I am not making this up. You leave the mushroom business to, for some time to be a contestant on The Bachelorette. I need the backstory and the front story and the middle story, please.

• 57:53Speaker 02

  Nikhil, the floor is yours.

• 57:55Speaker 01

  It was a, a friend of one of the casting directors for The Bachelorette, I think, had gotten a mushroom kit from Alex and heard about the brand through a demo at an LA Whole Foods. A lot of random things came together where they were like, oh, you should just talk to Alex. And somehow Alex got connected to The Bachelorette casting director. And, you know, they loved Alex and thought he'd be a great fit for it. And

• 58:16Guy Raz?

  They thought he'd be a great fit because aside from the fact that he's handsome and charming, that there's a great backstory there.

• 58:23Speaker 01

  He's a handsome, he's a smart, charming entrepreneur, doing cool stuff. And they thought he'd be a great, you know, a great contestant and just who he is.

• 58:34Speaker 02

  An urban mushroom farmer.

• 58:35Guy Raz?

  I got you. And, and Alejandro, did you think, hey, you know, this might be my ticket to meeting my true love?

• 58:44Speaker 02

  Twenty-three, like so many things, one of their producers was this guy named Elon. And the guy just sold you on the whole experience. And it wa- they had announced who, who the Bachelorette was, and that was Emily Maynard. She had a daughter named Ricky. So I was twenty-three, she was twenty-seven, twenty-eight with a six-year-old daughter. So it was this thing where just one thing would lead to another. And this, we kind of laughed and just said, what the heck? Let's just do it.

• 59:23Speaker 01

  It was a big decision. I remember you were basically MIA. Like, we had two phone calls allowed for the forty-five days. And it was like Alex chose me as like, you could have one person you could talk to when you're on this, because they don't want anything leaking. So, you know, you can choose somebody. So Alex chose me as this, you know, prison phone call, so to speak. And we got two phone calls over like a month and a half and checking in on the business. You know, it was a big decision, but we're like, this is a

• 59:43Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 59:44Speaker 01

  Kind of a once-in-a-lifetime thing. Like, who knows where it goes and

• 59:47Guy Raz?

  You did not make it clearly. You were not married to Emily today. So you did not, you did not make it all the way to the end.

• 59:52Speaker 02

  I did not.

• 59:52Speaker 01

  You didn't tell the final eight or nine, Alex? I remember we had a viewing party at our warehouse.

• 59:57Speaker 02

  I was the random, the random Hispanic that didn't say a word the entire time. I was so nervous, so quiet.

• 1:00:04Guy Raz?

  Did you get, did you get recognized ever? Uh, people like, hey, Alejandro, I saw you on The Bachelorette.

• 1:00:11Speaker 02

  I was so, I think I had like a one, one second of, of local fame.

• 1:00:16Speaker 01

  There was a good, there was a good year. There was, there was a lot of that, which was fun.

• 1:00:20Guy Raz?

  All right. So you, The Bachelorette ends, you're back to work.

• 1:00:24Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:00:24Guy Raz?

  Uh, and, um, and you guys are still, uh, bootstrapping. But clearly, it seems like by, by 2012, it becomes clear, I think, that the growth part of your business is, are the kits. Am I, am I right about that? The mushroom kits? Was that growing faster than, than the mushrooms themselves?

• 1:00:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, at that moment, I think we were kind of realizing they're both pretty different things we were selling. One was more this branded experience that required education and teaching people like, what is a mushroom kit? What's a grow kit? What is this? I can grow my own food at home. You know, there's a lot, there's a lot of education focused versus Selling fresh mushrooms, which was a kind of a different thing and scaling up that production. And so I think we started realizing there's, you know, we may have to choose one of these things.

• 1:01:15Speaker 02

  And it became so clear that with fresh mushrooms, we could have a local farm, sell locally, get our mushrooms into people's homes locally, or we had this other avenue in which these mushroom kits could be shipped nationwide. And it just was like, let's do the last, let's do that. And let's put all our energy on that.

• 1:01:43Guy Raz?

  When we come back in just a moment, how Alejandro and Nikhil go all in on mushroom kits, and how the decision to expand even further almost wipes them out. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This from NPR.

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• 1:03:46Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2012, and Nikhil and Alejandro have decided to focus full-time on making mushroom-growing kits for the home gardener. And they're still providing all the elements required to grow the mushrooms. But then, someone suggests that they partner with a specialty farm called Gourmet Mushrooms Incorporated, run by a guy named David Law.

• 1:04:12Speaker 01

  Brilliant, him and Chris Bailey, the two guys who run that, just brilliant people and best in class at growing fresh mushrooms. You know, it would take us decades to get to the experience these guys had. And we just hit it off also just in a relationship standpoint. And, you know, you fast-forward a few weeks, and they grew some, and we tested them out. And it was night-and-day quality. Like, I mean, yields, consistency, everything that goes around making a healthy mushroom substrate and spawn. It was just night-and-day. And I, there was, that was probably the biggest defining moment, I think, in our journey, for Alex and I both, when you realize, one, you don't have to do everything. It's okay not to be the best at everything, and it's okay to let some things go.

• 1:04:57Speaker 01

  And that was the hardest thing in life, because that was our identity.

• 1:05:00Guy Raz?

  Let me understand, when you say "let it go," You meet this guy David Law. Clearly, they know how to grow mushrooms better. So what did you do? I mean, what were you selling to him?

• 1:05:11Speaker 01

  Well, we were doing in our warehouse in Oakland of collecting the substrate, the coffee grounds, mixing of the spawn, growing the kits, packaging them. We fast forward, ended up now buy those from him as a supplier to us. So they're the ones incubating all of that. So here's this huge warehouse, 10,000 square feet. You know, we had at that point, what, 35 people, Alex? You know, we knew what that meant was that the people, the space, everything we're doing, and all of that would go away.

• 1:05:40Guy Raz?

  So you essentially get out of the farming business in, at the sort of, at the end of 2012, 2013, you start to transition out of the farming business because really, this company can grow the mushrooms, sell you the ground, whatever's left.

• 1:05:56Speaker 02

  The finished product.

• 1:05:57Guy Raz?

  The finished product. And you can then, and then this guy David, this company Gourmet Mushrooms, they can turn them into kits for you.

• 1:06:05Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's kind of crazy because, yeah, he was a competitor to us and he could have easily said, nope, I'll wait till you guys, you know, go out of business because you're not going to be able to scale it the way I can. And instead, instead, David basically looked at us and said, you guys have so much energy and you're getting people growing mushrooms. That's a good thing for me. So let me take it off your plates and you guys focus on what clearly you guys are really good at, which is getting the word about, into the world about mushrooms. And that's like the partnership right there.

• 1:06:41Guy Raz?

  And so by the middle of 2013, I have to assume you get out of the coffee hauling business. You no longer are hauling away coffee grounds for peats.

• 1:06:51Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 1:06:52Guy Raz?

  Okay. So you are out of the coffee. It's amazing. I mean, because you start this business in 2009. By 2013, you're no longer, I mean, you're two big revenue streams, fresh mushrooms and hauling coffee grounds. You're out of that business entirely. You're focused on selling mushroom kits. And what's interesting to me about that is I cannot imagine seeing a viable business there. Like, I could not imagine in 2013 saying, we're going to sell grow your own mushroom kits and turn this into a sustainable business. So what, what was giving you the indication that you could do that? I'm not trying to be.

• 1:07:29Speaker 02

  That's so harsh and I love it.

• 1:07:30Guy Raz?

  Right. I'm not trying to be harsh. I'm just, I cannot imagine saying to people, yeah, we're good. Do you want to make your mushroom?

• 1:07:37Speaker 02

  You know, you know what? The beauty about the United States is if you execute on one thing extremely well, there is a pretty large market for it. I mean, just Whole Foods alone was 500 stores that we could take this product into and running the numbers on it, you could do a couple million dollars.

• 1:08:01Guy Raz?

  Yeah. If you're in every Whole Foods in America selling mushroom kits and you're doing really well, the math suggests that you could probably do like five, maybe seven million in revenue maximum a year. So you could do a significant small business for sure, but, but that's only if you did it in Whole Foods and that would, you'd have to kill it.

• 1:08:22Speaker 02

  That's true. We'd have to sell a lot and then we'd have to expand beyond Whole Foods.

• 1:08:26Speaker 01

  You're dead on there. I think with the kits, we were starting to also realize this was 2012, I think Alex, when we did our first non-mushroom product, I want to say, I think it was with our Kickstarter for our water garden. So I think we were at that point also, we had made this decision. We had started seeing, hey, there's, there's something here, you know?

• 1:08:44Guy Raz?

  And at this point, I mean, you guys are seeing that people like to grow things at home and rather than you wind up getting some inspiration for your, your next idea from after a visit you, you take to Wisconsin and a tour of an aquaponics farm there. What's the story?

• 1:09:00Speaker 01

  Yep. It was called Growing Powers. It's huge city block sized aquaponics system. Kind of Will Allen, he won the MacArthur Award for this. He was raising tilapia. So aquaponics is raising fish and plants. All the fish waste is fertilizing the vegetables and the plants in turn were cleaning the water and taking out the, you know, the nitrogen from it. So it was a really cool closed loop system where the fish feed the plants, plants clean the water. And, you know, this is where our own curiosity about just growing food and growing things different ways was like had been peaked now. And, you know, we were obviously doing with a mushroom farm, but we were like, what else? How else people are growing? And we started like asking ourselves, like, is there a way to do what we did for mushroom farming for aquaponics and like shrink down a big mushroom farm

• 1:09:44Speaker 01

  down to this tabletop classroom experience?

• 1:09:47Guy Raz?

  And just to be clear. How did you come up with this? Because eventually this is what you would create. Basically, a fish tank with fish inside, but growing on top is like greens, like microgreens that you could eat and that were fed through the waste of the fish, which we'll get to in a sec. But how did you come up with that idea? How did that come to you?

• 1:10:08Speaker 01

  We, on the side of our mushroom kit facility, had a bunch of piping and buckets and started kind of building around and tinkering and had actually built out a really rough, again, like buckets kind of prototype of like, we had beta fish and had some, the waste from that was enough to grow herbs and microgreens that you could harvest up top. And we were talking to all the aquaponics experts. We actually, funny story, guy, we ended up reading the Steve Jobs biography and were super inspired by their design principles and cold emailed Johnny Ive from Apple on a Sunday afternoon. And he actually got back to us in like five minutes and we were able to spend a handful of sessions with him kind of mentoring us

• 1:10:48Speaker 01

  and showing him prototypes and design things. So it was an amazing experience designing this thing.

• 1:10:54Guy Raz?

  Wow. You cold emailed Johnny Ive, the guy who designed basically everything we use today. And he was like, yeah, I'll help you with your fish tank.

• 1:11:01Speaker 02

  That was insane.

• 1:11:03Speaker 01

  You know, I will say, we, this one though, we learned a lesson here with our mushroom kit. We were anxious doing this all. We were anxious because our brand, who we were, our identity, you would walk into Whole Foods and it was like, oh, it's the mushroom guys. That's who we were. Now, all of a sudden, we're experimenting with fish poop and, you know, like microgreens. And so we actually ended up on this product. We put it on Kickstarter and it was partly to raise funds for it. But really, I think it was for the two of us to try to convince ourselves, like, is there something here? And do people actually want this thing? And we put $100,000 goal up for 30 days and we ended up hitting $250,000 of pre-orders on Kickstarter and another 250K on our website in the following 30 days after close. We had almost half a million dollars of pre-orders off of like a three-minute

• 1:11:47Speaker 01

  video and a concept. And that's when I think we realized, like, this back to the roots, bigger than mushrooms, it's something else that people wanted to reconnect with food. And I think that was, that month was our proof point.

• 1:12:00Guy Raz?

  So with, with that $500,000 that you raised, that's, that's amazing. You're still bootstrapped at this point. You presumably could take that money and start production on these fish bowls or fish tanks that grow salad on top.

• 1:12:19Speaker 02

  I think that was the beauty of Kickstarter, where it was both to raise funds, but to see if anybody would buy this thing. And then if you really made a splash, retailers would eventually, it would get sent to a retailer. So Petco and Whole Foods became the launch partners.

• 1:12:37Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 1:12:38Speaker 01

  And Nordstrom.

• 1:12:39Speaker 02

  From and Nordstrom. Thank you. Yeah.

• 1:12:40Guy Raz?

  So here's a business question. You get Nordstrom, Petco, and Whole Foods putting in an order. I have to imagine the costs are going to be higher than half a million dollars. You probably make them in China, get them shipped over. I mean, there's a lot of math and a lot of like, projections that you have to get right to make this work, even if you have purchase orders, like it can all go south. So how were you able to successfully manage that?

• 1:13:07Speaker 01

  Two things, Guy. One, just on where the manufacturer, we actually manufacture them all in the US for a brand who we really try to focus on US manufacturing. And a bulk of that, probably half of that went to the tooling, which is really expensive, and the design cost and engineering costs. So yeah, most of that was there. And then for initial inventory costs. But I think the risk was almost less about the initial forecast, because you know, we had pre-orders, thousands of them from our consumers through Kickstarter. We had POs from retailers. So we knew what the demand was. But one of our biggest mistakes we made and almost put us out of business was we started feeling a lot of pressure

• 1:13:48Speaker 01

  to deliver this on a timeline that was too aggressive. And we didn't know that it was too aggressive when we put it out there on Kickstarter.

• 1:13:56Speaker 02

  We went from, I mean, the definition of zero to 100. We went from one prototype that we did a video on to 40,000 unit order. And highly discourage or do not recommend this to any entrepreneur to just go from a prototype to 40,000.

• 1:14:14Speaker 01

  And we ended up, I think, looking back, I wish we had just, you know, been transparent and confident that, hey, we're not going to hit that timeline. Like, please, you know, support us through this and be patient. But we rushed it and we put out a product, our first one, that, like, you know, we didn't test it enough. And our first pump was overheating in the unit because of the design constraints and, you know, almost was like 80% of the pumps, Alex, died within the first 30 days of the units going out on Kickstarter. And it was, it literally put us out of business almost.

• 1:14:46Guy Raz?

  So how much money did you guys lose?

• 1:14:48Speaker 02

  Oh, I mean, with 80% of those pumps broken.

• 1:14:52Speaker 01

  We caught most of them on the Kickstarter. That was the blessing of the Kickstarter. I think we caught that with those early users, the first 5, 6,000 people that got it. And we realized that. And so we had to send them all replacements and do the whole. But luckily, we were able to, before the Whole Foods and the retail orders went out, make some changes to it last minute. But if that pump had, for instance, taken two months to die and not four weeks, and so we had already produced stuff for the retailers, ooh.

• 1:15:19Speaker 02

  But I would say the economics of it changed. We had to, the pump was significantly more expensive than we thought, and the price point then became off. And we then didn't have a proposition that the company could actually make money sustainably. So we almost went out of business for the entire order. Both Kickstarter led to us still on the nationwide launch was a disaster. We had high return rates. So that was a really, that was a tough time. And during that time, we, in isolation, really improved the product and launched a 2.0 version.

• 1:16:00Guy Raz?

  So, all right, eventually you get this Aqua Farm back, or like you get it, you get it in working order. How long did that take you before you were able to say, okay, we got this under control? Was it like weeks, months?

• 1:16:17Speaker 02

  Well, by the way, I'll say I love that you called to the Aqua Farm. We actually got sued for calling to the Aqua Farm and we had to go and beg for forgiveness and they said, okay, fine, we won't make you discard all your packaging inventory, just sell it out, but you need to change your name to the Water Garden. So during that crazy messiness, we also got the seasoned assist letter at the same time.

• 1:16:38Guy Raz?

  I mean, this is the thing, at every stage, and now in 2014, you're so vulnerable, like one lawsuit, you know, because even if the lawsuit was frivolous, you could, you could have spent all your money fighting it, you know, one lawsuit, one, one mistake, one, somebody getting sick from a mushroom kit, it could have been, anything could have gone wrong, or a competitor coming in and just crushing you. It just, up to this point, I mean, obviously you guys are smart and you worked, but you guys are kind of lucky up until this point.

• 1:17:09Speaker 02

  We were one bad event from just completely going out of business, pretty much for the first six years.

• 1:17:19Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:20Speaker 01

  And I look back and maybe the rational thing would be is like, hey, it's not worth the risk. And I keep on going back to just this partnership and the two of us sticking together kind of got us through all this, these moments, you know, and man, like, you know, we were, when we finally had our own apartments and we're getting some salary, you know, we still carpool in and out every day. You pick me up at 6 a.m. and drop me off at 8 p.m. and does, you know, every day kind of reset in the morning and night and just refreshing each other's energies and kind of worked our way through it.

• 1:17:52Guy Raz?

  So, once you got the aquariums up and running and, you know, how did they sell? Did they do pretty well? Were they generating revenue?

• 1:17:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, the Water Garden, that was a really big boost for the company. And I think it first took us from just being the mushroom guys to, hey, there's something really interesting in this, you know, company called Back to the Roots.

• 1:18:11Guy Raz?

  And now you're in Petco too, which is great. You're beyond Whole Foods. You're in Petco and Nordstrom.

• 1:18:16Speaker 02

  Beyond Whole Foods, we're selling, you know, in the home department, we're selling in grocery, and now we're selling in the pet department also. At this time, Amazon was really starting to explode. So we put this item on Amazon and it became the number one selling aquarium.

• 1:18:33Speaker 02

  And stayed that way for quite some time.

• 1:18:36Guy Raz?

  You guys, I think by 2014, you done, I mean, this started in 2009. By 2014, you had generated $4.6 million in revenue. And I think you were profitable. That same year, this is, again, we're going to go off the freeway here. This is totally like out of left field. You launched a cereal brand. You've gone from mushrooms to salad on top of a fish tank to cereal now.

• 1:19:08Speaker 01

  I think what we started realizing, Guy, with this vision of ultimately what we were doing was trying to reconnect families and kids to food and where it comes from. It was all a continuum, right? Whether you're from seed and the farmer and growing it yourself, or if you're going to go and buy a prepackaged item that someone grew and cooked and packaged for you, you should still know where it's coming from. And I think being and selling at Whole Foods as well, starting to envision that coming to life through both a ready to grow line with our kits and a ready to eat line with cereal. And we'd launched snacks as well. So on our cereal, actually, was the first identity preserved, like 100% stone ground biodynamic cereal.

• 1:19:51Speaker 01

  Actually, put the ingredients, first brand put the ingredients on the front of the box. And so we're like, whether you're growing yourself, or if you're going to buy food from us, you're going to know exactly kind of where it's coming from. And yeah.

• 1:20:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'll say, we grew that. And even this, the not so crazy part of it was, we were selling to Whole Foods already nationwide.

• 1:20:12Guy Raz?

  Yeah. So you already, you already had a connection there.

• 1:20:14Speaker 02

  Yeah. And on top of that, we were working with schools nonstop with all our kits. So many teachers were our consumers. So it was natural for us to basically sell, well, let's go out to the biggest, most impactful school district in the entire country. So we went out to the New York Public School District and said, hey, as we launch and expand immediately nationwide with Whole Foods Market, let's

• 1:20:39Speaker 02

  Put this in the communities that needed the most through purchase orders that they would place. And we did that. We launched in New York Public Schools, which was 2,000 schools that started serving an organic and biodynamic cereal. It had one-fifth of the sugar with three ingredients.

• 1:20:59Guy Raz?

  Just to be clear, you did not build a factory to make the cereal, right? You worked with like a co-packer or a different manufacturer?

• 1:21:07Speaker 02

  Yep, we worked with a co-manufacturer and co-packer in making the product, yep.

• 1:21:12Guy Raz?

  In January of 2016, you raised your first round of funding. This is now, what, six years, six-plus years since you founded the company. You go for funding. Was it, was it, I have to imagine it wasn't that hard to raise money. You raised $5 million because you had a track record. Am I right about that? That it wasn't that hard?

• 1:21:33Speaker 02

  Every financing round, I would say, is hard. We did like a $2 million round from angels, from angel investors. And then, and then after that, we did a $10 million round, and that one came from Acre Ventures.

• 1:21:50Guy Raz?

  So you start to raise money. I think by, I think up to today, you've raised almost $25 million in outside investment. I think that's right, more or less, right? Something like that?

• 1:22:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, by the time this airs, it'll be 40 million.

• 1:22:06Guy Raz?

  So my question is, when did you decide that you were a gardening company? Because you started as a mushroom guys, and then the fish tank guys and the cereal guys. When did it become clear that actually, you are a gardening company? Because that's how you describe yourself now. So when, when did that kind of all gel?

• 1:22:27Speaker 02

  We had great revenue growth, really great revenue growth, but we were just not able to be profitable on the cereal and snack side at the moment. And there was no clear path unless we went and purchased our own equipment and fully vertically integrated, which would have been significant risk to the business. And on the other side, the lawn and garden business was already profitable. And what's interesting is, I think-

• 1:22:56Speaker 02

  First, being able to focus just on the lawn and garden piece of our business was like so energizing and I think we ourselves were so focused on growing within Whole Foods that we it almost crippled our ability to just take a step back and say, where are our consumers actually shopping? And we realized, wow, our consumer gardeners, they're going to the Home Depot, they're going to Lowe's, they're going to Walmart, they're going to Target, they're not necessarily going to a produce department at a Whole Foods market. And I think that ability to focus, and this is something actually Sir Johnny Ive said to us, he said,

• 1:23:40Speaker 02

  "The number one lesson I learned from Steve Jobs was focus." And his definition, Steve's definition was focus is the ability to say no to the things you really want to do. And I feel like that just singular focus on like our consumer is a gardener, they're going into home centers on the weekend to pick up their gardening stuff, that's where we need to be. And there's probably two years guy in our business that we just completely exploded from doing a lot less things.

• 1:24:10Guy Raz?

  What did you cut out? And I mean, you said you do fewer things, but you grew.

• 1:24:14Speaker 02

  Oh, we were going from Petco. Yeah, we were selling into Petco, we were selling into Whole Foods, we were selling into Nordstrom, you know, online, we were selling to local grocery stores through distributors, you and a five K he like, we just had, and it's a small team. And I think once we just realized like, gardeners are shopping.

• 1:24:35Guy Raz?

  At Home Depot.

• 1:24:36Speaker 02

  At Home Depot. The gardeners are, yeah, that's where they're going. Why are we spending all this energy and time trying to find them elsewhere? Let's go fishing where the fish are. So the difference is the Home Depot has 2,000 stores, unlike Whole Foods has maybe 400 stores. So I mean, this is an order of magnitude also of scale.

• 1:24:55Guy Raz?

  So, I mean, that was a game changer, right? When you get into Home Depot. And today, I mean, you are, you sell seeds and you sell grow kits. And you know, you still have the water gardens and raised beds and planters and windowsill planters. I have to imagine this is a growing market, right? From what I gather, it's this is like a, how big is the home, the edible gardening market?

• 1:25:28Speaker 02

  It's about $20 billion. And by the way, Scott's Miracle Grow being the category captain, they're about a $12 billion market cap company. So you've got a lot, a lot, a lot. It's a big market, a lot of, it's America's number one hobby is gardening. It's traditionally been to the older generation. The average gardener today is 59 years old. Our average gardener is 29 years old. So you do have this pretty massive gap from what the average gardener is in America to back to the roots of average gardener.

• 1:26:03Speaker 01

  But we, you know, whether it's an eight-year-old or a 68-year-old can both enjoy the brand and maybe have a smile on their faces for different reasons. But like, how do we be a spark of curiosity for a new generation? We're not telling people like grow all your own food. We don't want to solve, come here and say we're going to solve all the world's food shortages. We just want to be that spark of curiosity. And I think in so many ways, like that was just how we started this company. It was just, we were curious, but you kind of distill that all down. And we do this sometimes just as a team. And I don't know, the words that come out of it are just joy and connection.

• 1:26:33Guy Raz?

  When you think about this journey and the fact that it really began with a professor saying, hey, you know, grow mushrooms on coffee grounds. And then here you are, 12 years plus later, you know, with a business, I think that's doing.

• 1:26:51Guy Raz?

  You know, one of the tens of millions of dollars in revenue a year. How much of that do you guys attribute to luck? And how much do you attribute to how hard you worked?

• 1:27:01Speaker 01

  My grandpa was very close to. He told me all the time, it's the harder you work, the luckier you get. So, you know, every one of those moments you can look at, you know, I guess it was lucky that one out of 10 grew, but I'm glad we said, let's not just plan one bucket. Let's take the time and collect enough for 10 buckets. And I do believe it's both, but I think half of it, so much of it is staying in the game, staying in the arena for opportunities to present themselves and then being prepared to walk through them.

• 1:27:33Speaker 02

  Guy, we presented to Costco's lawn and garden department seven years in a row and got turned down every single year. They've just announced they're launching us this coming spring, spring 2022. Seven years later, same exact merchant as well. And then Walmart presented for four or so years. And then within two years, we are the fastest growing garden brand in their entire department. That took four years to even get in the door. So, Nikhil, you're spot on too, man. We've just not given up and then staying long enough to where luck catches up to you.

• 1:28:16Guy Raz?

  That's Nikhil Arora and Alejandro Velez, co-founders and co-CEOs of Back to the Roots. By the way, the company has something called a Grow One, Give One campaign, where if you post a photo of what you grew with one of their kits, they'll donate another to the school of your choice. By the end of this year, they hope to reach 130,000 kids in underfunded schools across the country.

• 1:28:41Guy Raz?

  Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. If you don't yet follow the show, please do follow wherever you get your podcasts. If you want to write to us, our email address is [email protected]. If you want to follow us on Twitter, we're at How I Built This, or mine is at Guy Raz. You can find us on Instagram, at How I Built This NPR, or me at Guy.Raz. This episode was produced by Liz Metzger and Farah Safari, with music composed by Ramtin Arablouei. It was edited by Niva Grant, with research help from Claire Murashima. Our production staff includes Casey Herman, J.C. Howard, Julia Carney, Harrison, B.J. Choi, and Elaine Coats. Our intern is Catherine Seifer. And Jeff Rogers is our executive producer. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.

• 1:29:33Guy Raz?

  This is NPR.