Alejandro Velez
In 2009, Alejandro Velez had overcome a lot of obstacles to get where he was. The then senior at UC Berkeley had survived being kidnapped by terrorists while growing up in Medellín, Colombia, had beaten cancer and was just a few months away from beginning a lucrative career on Wall Street.
Then an off-hand remark by a professor changed everything. The professor brought up the fact that you could potentially grow mushrooms on coffee waste and that when the idea started to grow. After class, the finance major approached his professor and asked for more information. The professor said it was just something he had read about, but offered to put Velez in touch with another student, Nikhil Arora, who had asked him the same thing. A lifelong partnership was born. After watching a few hours of how-to videos on YouTube, Velez and Arora planted mushroom spawn in 10 buckets of used coffee grounds — one of which successfully grew mushrooms.
It wasn't the best success rate, but it was enough for both young men to give up corporate job offers and pursue their new dream of making sustainable urban farming accessible to anyone. Eight years later, company that they built around this idea, Back to the Roots, has raised millions in funding and its 18 products — from home gardening kits to organic packaged food — can be found in retailers and schools around the country.
It was of course a big risk. The young men's path to success wasn't always clear. After giving up stable career opportunities it seemed to many outside the project that the pair had bet their futures on a pipe dream. "I wish I could say we were always confident in the idea, but for the first few years so many people told us over and over that we made the wrong decision," Velez recalls. Velez says he was able to forge ahead despite the likelihood of failure thanks to all that he overcame as a child. "When you've had things in your life that pushed you to extremes that you didn't think you'll survive, you get a sense of calm that comes with moments of fear," he says.
This company gave him a purpose-driven life. Velez says he feels fortunate to have a job that gives his life meaning and drove him to get back up when it didn't feel possible. As Back to the Roots has grown, its social enterprises have grown too. Last year, the company launched a partnership with food service giant Sodexo to bring their healthy foods to K-12 schools.
Velez takes the most pride in donating the company's growing kits and their self-cleaning fish tanks that grow organic sprouts for use in the classroom. For every picture featuring a Back to the Roots product that is posted to social media, the company donates one product to an elementary school. He hopes these kits will inspire students in the same way that one professor's remark inspired him.
"If we can inspire one kid who would have never ever grown mushrooms off of waste or grown herbs off of fish poop then it's all worth it," Velez says. "Who wouldn't want to wake up knowing they've done that? That's worth getting out of bed for every single morning."
In 2009, Alejandro Velez had overcome a lot of obstacles to get where he was. The then senior at UC Berkeley had survived being kidnapped by terrorists while growing up in Medellín, Colombia, had beaten cancer and was just a few months away from beginning a lucrative career on Wall Street.
Then an off-hand remark by a professor changed everything. The professor brought up the fact that you could potentially grow mushrooms on coffee waste and that when the idea started to grow. After class, the finance major approached his professor and asked for more information. The professor said it was just something he had read about, but offered to put Velez in touch with another student, Nikhil Arora, who had asked him the same thing. A lifelong partnership was born. After watching a few hours of how-to videos on YouTube, Velez and Arora planted mushroom spawn in 10 buckets of used coffee grounds — one of which successfully grew mushrooms.
It wasn't the best success rate, but it was enough for both young men to give up corporate job offers and pursue their new dream of making sustainable urban farming accessible to anyone. Eight years later, company that they built around this idea, Back to the Roots, has raised millions in funding and its 18 products — from home gardening kits to organic packaged food — can be found in retailers and schools around the country.
It was of course a big risk. The young men's path to success wasn't always clear. After giving up stable career opportunities it seemed to many outside the project that the pair had bet their futures on a pipe dream. "I wish I could say we were always confident in the idea, but for the first few years so many people told us over and over that we made the wrong decision," Velez recalls. Velez says he was able to forge ahead despite the likelihood of failure thanks to all that he overcame as a child. "When you've had things in your life that pushed you to extremes that you didn't think you'll survive, you get a sense of calm that comes with moments of fear," he says.
This company gave him a purpose-driven life. Velez says he feels fortunate to have a job that gives his life meaning and drove him to get back up when it didn't feel possible. As Back to the Roots has grown, its social enterprises have grown too. Last year, the company launched a partnership with food service giant Sodexo to bring their healthy foods to K-12 schools.
Velez takes the most pride in donating the company's growing kits and their self-cleaning fish tanks that grow organic sprouts for use in the classroom. For every picture featuring a Back to the Roots product that is posted to social media, the company donates one product to an elementary school. He hopes these kits will inspire students in the same way that one professor's remark inspired him.
"If we can inspire one kid who would have never ever grown mushrooms off of waste or grown herbs off of fish poop then it's all worth it," Velez says. "Who wouldn't want to wake up knowing they've done that? That's worth getting out of bed for every single morning."
