Tom Szaky '05 and his company TerraCycle came out on top of a competition featuring 2000 students, 750 teams and several million dollars in prize money this past weekend.
TerraCycle, the company Szaky founded as a freshman, won the grand prize in the 2003 Carrot Capital Competition, and will receive up to $1 million in venture capital.
"It's a real thrill. It's hard to describe," Szaky said yesterday from New York City, where he was interviewing with CNBC and had opened the NASDAQ stock market earlier in the morning.
"With a million bucks we can achieve profitability," he said.
TerraCycle uses an organic process to turn food waste into valuable organic soils and fertilizers. The patented process, which uses red worms, is environmentally friendlier than simply dumping food waste into landfills.
Though Szaky said the exact amount of funding had not been finalized, the company plans to build two factories with the money, one in New Jersey and one in Toronto.
It will also begin paying its management board on a limited basis, Szaky said.
Carrot Capital is a venture capital firm that provides funding to students with viable business plans, said David Geliebter, managing partner and founder.
This year's competition featured 750 teams of students who entered a plan. Twenty finalists were then chosen by a panel of judges, many of whom are seasoned executives, he said.
TerraCycle and the other finalists presented their plans on Saturday in New York in a 15-minute "shootout," Geliebter said.
"[Szaky] typifies what people are looking for in an entrepreneur in the 21st century," he said.
"Every little corpuscle in his body seems to say 'I am an entrepreneur,' " he said.
"[TerraCycle is] a business that is sensitive to the world, a green business," he added. Geliebter also praised the company's large potential market and its strong management team.
Carrot Capital will be taking an "active role" in developing TerraCycle, he said. "We'll take an equity position in the company."
Geliebter said he gave TerraCycle a "better than even" shot of flourishing.
TerraCycle operates out of an office on Nassau Street and a production site in Bordentown, N.J. It also employs 11 people, many of whom have years of business experience.
Szaky took this semester off from Princeton to focus on the business.
The company is within a month of having its first product — an organic liquid plant fertilizer — placed on store shelves in Princeton, he said.
Szaky said it was "refreshing" to learn that opportunities are available to people his age.
"The dot com crash hasn't ruined entrepreneurialism in the United States," he said.
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