On Worms and Princeton Entrepreneurship

Once upon a time, a 19-year-old Princeton student had a crazy idea: why not harvest worm poop, liquefy it, and package it in re-used soda bottles?In 2001, while visiting some friends in Montreal over the Fall Break of his freshman year, Tom Szaky watched as his friends fed scraps of food to red wiggler worms in a composting bin. And suddenly it hit him – feeding organic waste to worms and using the results as fertilizer would be a perfect business model to submit to the Princeton Business Plan Contest.And the rest is history. Szaky placed fifth in the contest, but he didn’t stop there. Soon he had emptied his savings account to invest in a worm gin, and he and his friend Jon Beyer were spending their days shoveling rotting food waste from the dining halls to deliver to the wigglers. Meanwhile, Szaky was camping out on the floor of a friend's dorm room and eating what he could find in his dining hall adventures. His venture was saved by the contributions of Suman Sinha, a venture capitalist who saw promise in Szaky and his worm gin, and 20 Nassau St. became, um, home to worms and rotting food. Or at least to their administrative affairs. (Did they tell you that when you signed the lease, Ma Chérie Boutique?)In 2003, Szaky, in that quintessential Princeton spirit, opted out of both his diploma and the $1 million Carrot Capital Business Plan Challenge grand prize in order to pursue the use of waste products as packaging.Now, just seven years later, TerraCycle has become one of the foremost eco-friendly business ventures of its time. Yup, there’s still plenty of liquefied worm poop being sold in recycled bottles ($1 million-worth sold in 2006), but Szaky, named the #1 CEO under 30 in Inc. magazine in 2006, has expanded TerraCycle to include the sale of everything from bags to office supplies to pet products, all made from garbage. In fact, Szaky has over nine million people all over the country sending their garbage to TerraCycle’s Trenton headquarters for a per-unit reimbursement.From shoveling garbage out of the dining halls (I guess the pigs went hungry in those days) to a multi-million dollar eco-friendly company, Szaky has demonstrated the real meaning of creativity in his determination to address the issue of sustainable business.And for those of you who were wondering what happens to the armies of worms that lie, crippled, on the pavement between the Dinky and Hargadon Hall, and that have magically disappeared by the next day despite their clear inability to move…well…just a guess. But I bet you won’t be so quick to step on them next time…