INTERVIEW | Make Money Turning Trash into a $100M Business with TerraCycle Founder, Tom Szaky

Thanks for having me.

Pleasure to be here.

So this is 25 years ago that you started this.

Was this your first business ever?

No, I mean, I fell in love with entrepreneurship at a really young age.

I started, I mean, I had a pretty badass lemonade stand, but, you know, first real business was 14.

You know, I had a little web design company.

This was back like in 1999, 2000.

Internet was just starting.

So as a kid, you could code websites and get clients.

And that was sort of the beginning, you know, business for me.

And then TerraCycle, I started my freshman year of undergrad and then left.

And, you know, that's 25 years ago.

No kidding.

Did you go to school for business or entrepreneurship? Yeah.

No, I mean, I, from high school went down, the reason I got to Princeton, I went to Princeton University, hence why TerraCycle started in the Princeton area.

And it was just a general, you know, sort of undergrad, you know, what was nice there about school is you could take any classes you wanted for the first two years.

I was doing Buddhism and art, you know, economics, like just all over the place and came up with the business concept, you know, within about six months of landing there.

And by sophomore year, I just got too busy with it.

So I left school and dedicated myself full time to it.

I don't know if anybody told you this, Tom, but you can't be successful if you don't have a college degree.

I love school, don't get me wrong.

I couldn't do both well.

It got so much and I decided I had to pick one or the other because there's no way I could have done both in a high quality.

Where did the idea come from? What was the first iteration?