From Princeton dropout to CEO of TerraCycle.
What’s the great product you might ask? It’s worm poop! Why would someone in their right mind give up an Ivy League education at Princeton to pursue worm poop? Well it takes a determined individual to follow through on his/her beliefs to fulfill their dreams. Tom Szaky the founder of TerraCycle discovered the wonders of compost from a friend’s basement. Tom had the foresight to see the potential of the earthly matter after seeing how well it nourished his friend’s plants.
From there he and his co-founder Jon Beyer went off entering in one business plan contest after another trying to raise money. They won half a dozen or so, but the biggie was the 2003 Carrot Capital Business Plan contest of which offered $1 million in start-up capital. The team came out on top, but they declined the purse because they didn’t like the direction of how the Carrot Capital wanted to take the company. At times it got so bad they had to max out their credit cards to get by. They came up with the idea to go around collecting plastic bottles in recycle bins to package their nutrient rich liquid spray.
Capitalist Status Quo
The brilliant duo, not only have a waste product from the worms, but they are recycling garbage otherwise would have been sent to the landfills. The company pays 5 cents per bottle to Elementary School Fund Raisers to collect the plastic bottles. Pretty much everything is recycled from the sprayer head to the misprinted cardboard boxes, to candy and drink wrappers. They have expanded their product line from fertilizers, repellents, pots, bird feeder, rain barrels, composters, potting mix, seed starter, cleaners to handbags. Now that’s a really eco-friendly company.
Eco-Capitalism